Sermons tagged with Anxiety

There is something so peaceful about lighting a candle, watching the flame flicker, move ever so slightly that seems to lull us into an almost meditative state. So different from the lack of peace we've experienced in our world, we come here caught up in the flow of traffic and Christmas shopping, our feet moving in the way of the world. It is exhausting. Add to that the barrage of chaos in the news or on social media that has us scared or worried, that has angered and outraged us. At times like this, we welcome Jesus into our fearful, anxious hearts. This is one of the reasons why we celebrate Advent. It is a season of expectant waiting, and we light a new candle each week. The earlier candles have burned down, now misshapen, showing our patience wearing thin, our longing growing more fierce. And so we prepare ourselves in a fresh way for the coming of our Lord Jesus in our Christmas celebrations because hope, love, joy, and peace aren't just words we find on Christmas cards. No, we find them in Christ, who is our light, the most peaceful light we could ever experience. Like we read in the book of John, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. Jesus is that light. The prophet Isaiah calls him the one who would come, that he would be the prince of peace for hearts that grieve in a world in turmoil. We are a people whose whole lives have been go with the flow, but it is Jesus who shows us how to march to the beat of God's heart, who shows us what it means to really live. So let's welcome him. We welcome you with all of your peace, Jesus. Give us your peace so that we can be peace bringers. Stop us in our tracks so that the flicker of the flame captures our attention, so that we look past the flow of the world to Jesus who says to some meaningful plans with your family. I can't wait to experience the Christmas Eve service with you guys. I can't wait for y'all to experience the Christmas Eve service. I think it's going to be a really special time for Grace. This week, we want to wrap up the four different topics that we cover in Advent as we talk about peace. Aaron opened talking about hope. I got to talk about love. Kyle taught us about joy. And now we get to focus on the peace that Jesus brings us. As I reflected on peace this week, I was reminded of a story, something that happened to me on an airplane a few years ago. And now I'll warn you, I'm going to tell this story and it's going to make me look kind of good because I do nice things. I try not to share stories about myself that shed me in a positive light because I think that's gross and self-aggrandizing. But this one just kind of makes the point pretty well. So if you'll indulge me, I'll admit some kindness to you. I was getting on a plane a couple of years ago, and I sat down, and I sat down next to this older woman. It was just two on each side and two seats on each side. And as I sat down, it will not surprise you to learn that I'm not one that introduces myself to my seatmate on my plane. I'm one who just sits down and silently stares straight ahead until the plane lands, and then I get off and go about my business. But this particular woman decided that she wanted to introduce herself to me, and so we started talking. And it didn't take very long for her to say that this was her first flight ever. And I said, oh, really? Are you nervous? And she said, yeah, I actually am pretty nervous. I struggle with anxieties. It was hard for me to even get on the plane. Have you flown before? And I said, you're in luck. Don't worry. I've flown probably hundreds of times. I will guide you through the process. I'm not going to be worried at all. As a matter of fact, this is what I told her. I said, listen, when we're flying, if something feels weird, if it feels like it shouldn't happen, if you start to get nervous, you just look at my face. And if I'm calm, you can be calm. If I'm at peace, then you can be at peace. If I'm not worried, then you don't have to be worried. If it feels amiss to you, because if you've never flown before, there's all kinds of things that can happen that can make you go, wait a second, is this safe? Is this okay? And so I told her, if you are experiencing that, just look at me. And if I'm calm, you can be calm. I said, as a matter of fact, I'm going to leave my hand right here on this armrest. And if you feel the need to reach over and grab my hand, you feel free to do that. And we'll get through this together. And she said, okay, thank you. Good. So we're sitting there, we're minding our business. The plane taxis and it goes to take off. And as it takes off, I'm already kind of have my eyes closed, dozing a little bit. It's a short flight. I was just trying to get in a quick nap. And as the plane is picking up off the ground, which if you've never experienced that before, it can feel a little turbulent, I feel her hand reach over and grab mine. And so I just give her a little squeeze and let her know everything's going to be okay. We get up into the air and we're cruising. She's good. I'm good. I'm reading a little bit. And then I close my eyes to doze again. And as I close my eyes, the plane hits a little bit of turbulence. And if you've never experienced turbulence before, it can be scary. You bounce a lot. It can make you feel sick to your stomach. And if you've never experienced it before and you're already worried about flying, that can be a really terrifying thing. And so we begin to experience a little bit of turbulence. We're bouncing around and I'm aware that she's probably freaking out a little bit. So I keep my eyes closed. I'm not dozing anymore, but I keep my eyes closed because I just kind of have a feeling she's looking at me to see if I'm calm, to see if I'm worried. And I wanted to project some peace for her. I wanted her to know this is no big deal. It's just normal turbulence. And so while I'm sitting there kind of fake snoozing, trying to offer peace to her, I just kind of do a thumbs up with my hand like this, like it's going to be, it's all right. You got nothing to worry about. And I feel her hand kind of tap mine, like, thank you. I see that. I appreciate that. And we got through the flight. We landed. She said, thank you. She went about her business. I went about mine. And it just, that principle that I took away from that as I was thinking about peace and that story this week is just this idea of, hey, listen, you just look at me. If I'm calm, you can be calm. If I'm not worried, you don't have to be worried. If I'm at peace, you can be at peace. I was thinking about that idea and how often Jesus does this for us in the Bible. It's something that we don't think about a lot. I never thought about it before this week. But then as I looked at the Bible and I went through the stories of Jesus in my mind and kind of asked that question, what are the times that Jesus looks at us? And he says, listen, look at me. If I'm not worried, you don't need to be worried. If I'm at peace, then you can be at peace. And I saw over and over again in Scripture where Jesus offers us his peace. Maybe the most glaring example, the easiest place to go to is when Jesus calms the storm. A lot of us know this story. This is a story that shows up in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, three of the four Gospels. But we're going to look at the story in Mark, chapter 4, verses 35-41, just to make sure we're all on the same page. If you have a Bible, turn there with me as I read. It says down in verse 35, This is Jesus speaking. I love the story of Jesus calming the storm. The disciples are out on a boat. They're in the Sea of Galilee. They have been there thousands of times before. They are a crew of mostly fishermen. And the wind picks up and the waves start to buffet the boat and the water starts to come into the boat in such a way that they are freaked out. And it's a big deal that they're freaked out because, again, these are seasoned fishermen. They had weathered some storms. This isn't the lady on the plane experiencing light turbulence for the first time. This is the seasoned businessman or businesswoman who flies cross country twice a week going, holy smokes, what is gonna happen? This has to be the end. They're freaking out. They're so scared that they go and they wake up Jesus who's managing to sleep through this. And they say, are you not worried? Are you not worried? Can you not see that we are perishing? And Jesus is almost annoyed with them. And I see him stretching out a hand and saying, peace, be still. And everything calms. And they marvel at who this man is and what he can do. His legend with them grows. But the part of it that I see now as I think about this idea of peace is this invitation from Jesus. They're up there on the deck freaking out. They look at Jesus. He's sleeping. And what they should have done is said, he's clearly not worried. We don't have to be. And that's Jesus' first question to them. When they wake him, he says, why do you have no faith? Don't you see me? I'm at peace. You can be at peace. I'm not worried about this storm. You don't need to be worried about the storm. I'm not anxious. You don't have to be anxious. Look at my face. If I'm calm, you can be calm. If I'm not worried, you don't have to be worried. The disciples forgot in that moment who Jesus was. Or they didn't yet realize who he was. But it's so interesting to me that Jesus challenges their faith. Just look at me. Just remember who I am. If I'm not worried, you don't need to be worried. And I realize that Jesus has this habit of calming storms in our life. He has this habit of remaining stoic, of remaining calm, of remaining unmoved in the face of turmoil. And he reminds us from the scripture, if I'm not worried, you don't have to be worried. I was reminded of the story of the adulterous woman and thought about the peace that Jesus must have given her in that moment. In the book of John, there's this famous story where Jesus is teaching in, I believe, Jerusalem, and the Pharisees, the religious leaders of the day, go and they catch a woman in the act of adultery. They drag her through the streets, and they put her down at the feet of Jesus. And they say to Jesus, the law of Moses says that she should be stoned. What do you think we should do with her? You see, they think that they have Jesus between a rock and a hard place. Because here's Jesus, this new radical teacher, who's teaching and proclaiming grace. And yet, they bring this adulterous woman in front of him. And if he says we should stone her, then he has no mercy, and the people that he's teaching will lose interest in what he's saying. If he says that we should forgive if we'll stop for just a second and think about it from her perspective. Being in the act of adultery, having men storm into the house or the room, grab her and drag her into the street. Maybe she was able to grab a sheet on the way. Maybe she wasn't. We don't know. And she knows the penalty for what she's doing. She knows who these men are. They are Pharisees. And she knows the penalty for what she's doing. It is to have big rocks dropped on her head until she dies. She knows that. She has to be at the height of fear and anxiety in her life. There is no possible way she was ever more worried or anxious than she was in this moment. And there she lands at the feet of this new radical teacher named Jesus. And for some reason, somehow, she realizes that her fate now rests in his hands. And these angry men are accusing her, and they're asking Jesus, what should we do with her? I would love to be able to go back in time and see whatever look it was that Jesus gave her. I would love to see her eyes connect with his. I would love to see his calm and tranquility transposed onto her. I would love to see the recognition on her face when she realized that she was in good hands. And Jesus responds in the midst of all this turmoil and chaos. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And one by one, the Pharisees begin to go away. And then he looks down at her and he says, is there anyone left to condemn you? And she says, no, Lord. And he says, neither do I condemn you. And it's one of my favorite stories. Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more. It's one of my favorite stories about Jesus to see this perfect balance of grace and truth in that moment. But what I've never thought about is the peace that he gave her, is the peace that he imparted onto her. When she is worried, she is anxious, she is fearful, she doesn't know if this is going to work out. And Jesus almost, you can just see him. Just look at me. If I'm calm, you can be calm. If I'm at peace, you can be at peace. If I'm not worried, then you don't need to be worried. Look at me. I've got this. These men will not harm you today. I'm going to protect you. Think about the peace and the certainty that he gave her in that moment. I think about the night that Jesus was arrested. He gets done praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. They've just finished their Passover meal. The disciples are outside with him, and the guards of Caiaphas, the high priest, come to arrest Christ. And in the scuffle, Peter takes a sword and lops off the ear of one of the guards. And Jesus stops everything and he reaches down and he picks up the ear and he places it back on the soldier. And it's almost as if he's saying, Peter, calm down. I'm not worried. This has to happen. And if I'm not anxious, then you don't have to be anxious. If I can be calm about this, you can be calm about this. Scripture tells us that Jesus was crucified, that he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, that he was quiet and that he was passive and that he was calm, that he was in perfect peace. And he's telling the disciples, if I can be at peace with this, that this is supposed to happen, then you can be too. Don't worry. It's going to be okay. What Jesus knows is that in three days he's going to conquer this death that he's about to face. He offers them perfect peace. You look at me. While everyone else in the Garden of Gethsemane, the troops are likely terrified because this Jesus figure just spoke words that knocked them all down. Now they have to get up, dust themselves off, and try to arrest this guy. The disciples are seeing their Messiah being taken, their leader being taken. Everyone around him is freaking out, and Jesus is in perfect peace. Look at me. I'm fine. You can be fine too. The last moment I would take you to is in the book of Revelation. John, at the end of his life, lifelong disciple of Christ, is whisked up to heaven for a vision and told to write down what he sees and share it with the people. And when he gets there, he's terrified. He sees God and he sees angels and he sees the span of heaven and he feels his feebleness. He feels how small he is and he's not exactly sure where he is and he's seeing angels for the first time, which are terrifying creatures, and he's kind of hunkered down in a corner, not sure what's going on. And in that moment, we see in Revelation that he feels a hand on his shoulder. And he hears a voice. And it's the voice of Jesus. And he says, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. And I have the keys to death and Hades. One of the great lines in the Bible. In this moment where John is anxious and terrified, Jesus gives him peace, puts his hand on his shoulder, lets him hear his voice, and he says, I'm here. I've got this. I'm the one that's in control of this space. You're going to be okay. He offers John his peace. And so as I thought about all these different stories, and there's more. I could do this for a lot longer. It occurred to me, this idea of look at my face. If I'm calm, you can be calm. What's happening in that moment is that Jesus is imparting peace onto us. So what we need to realize is our peace is imparted by Jesus. The peace that we're offered in Scripture, the peace that God offers to us is imparted to us by Jesus. When we look at His face and see that He is calm, we can be calm. When we look to Him and see that He is at peace, then we can feel peace. When everything around us is chaos, and everyone around us is worried and losing their mind, we can look at Jesus who is not worried, who is calm, who is a picture of perfect peace, and we can experience his peace. And in that way, our peace is imparted to us by Jesus himself. And so it made me wonder, how is Jesus able to maintain perfect peace in all these situations? How is he at so much peace in a storm where seasoned fishermen are freaking out that he is taking a nap? When he is at the epicenter of an entire body of really smart men trying to entangle him, how can he be so calm and answer so eloquently and succinctly while protecting this woman? When he is being marched to his death, how can he maintain perfect peace knowing what lies ahead of him? It's because of this. Because Jesus has true peace. And true peace is certainty that is untouched by circumstances. Peace is certainty that is untouched by circumstances. It's like Jesus knows a secret. He's unmoved by everything around him because he knows it's all going to be okay. He's not worried about the storm sinking his boat because he's the creator of the storm. He made the heavens and the earth. Without him, there is nothing is made, says the book of John. So he's not worried about the storm because he made the storm. He's not worried about getting tripped up and entangled in the law because he wrote the law. He's not worried about getting marched off to his death because he came to do just that and he knows where that ends. That ends in him conquering the death that he is about to suffer for you and for me. He came to conquer death and sin and that's how he did it. So he's at perfect peace in going through the process. He's at perfect peace in heaven when everything feels like it's at chaos at the end of times because this is what he came to do and he offers that peace to John. Jesus has a peace that is untouched by circumstance because nothing in this world can change that God is sovereign. Nothing in this world can change that God's will will be done. Nothing in this world can change that God loves you. Nothing in this world can change that God has a perfect plan and in the fullness of time he will execute it. Nothing in this world can change that for those who believe in him we can look forward to an eternity where God is with his people and where we will be with our God and where there is no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore. Because God is in control, because God has orchestrated all of time to bring about that moment, we know that there are no circumstances that can change the certainty that we have in Christ. And so we have perfect peace. Maybe this is why Paul writes about peace in the book of Philippians and points us to God in prayer so that we might have perfect peace. In Philippians, Paul writes this in chapter 4, verses 6 and 7. He says, Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understandings, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. You understand that our peace isn't just imparted by Christ, but our peace is guarded by God? As believers, we have this Christ-imparted, God-guarded peace that circumstances cannot touch. You understand that God advocates for your peace, that He wants you to feel at ease? He does not want you to be anxious. He does not want you to move through life with anxiety. He does not want you to be crippled by worry. He does not want you to be one of the ones freaking out and wondering how everything is going to be okay. And because of that, he offers you Christ-imparted and God-guarded peace so that your soul can be at rest. So we don't have to worry so much. And guys, has there ever been a year in our memories where we needed this peace more? where it feels like everyone around us is losing their mind, where we're in a culture that is rife with racial and political tension, where we're seeing riots and demonstrations and we're wondering what is going on here, where we are in a country that is more divided than ever, When will I ever get to see my loved ones? Is the vaccine really going to work? Will the economy recover? Will I be able to find a new job? Will my position still be there? We have all sorts of anxieties and worries this year. Has there ever been a time when we needed God's peace more? I know that for me, I've needed that peace this year. For me, I've worried a lot about grace. When we went into quarantine in March, we had come off of what was, while I've been here, a high point while I've been at grace. More people than we've ever seen were coming every week. We did a campaign. We were hoping to get a $1.5 million pledge. We had $1.6 million pledge. I would have never expected that. God was moving and shaking, and there was so much contagious enthusiasm here, and then we just had to stop meeting. And for a while, into doing online services like this, I would look for those numbers every week. How many people are watching online? How many screens we're on? How many downloads do we have? What's our engagement look like? Are we losing our momentum? Oh no, God, the church is gonna crumble. Everything's gonna fall apart. I think we're starting to lose people. I'm really worried and I lost sleep over what was happening at at Grace until I was gently reminded to just look at God. And over the course of the year, I saw his hand on Grace. I was so worried about giving because we're not meeting in person, and we're not telling anybody to give online, and I wouldn't dare, especially if you remember the beginning of quarantine when the economy was tanking and everything was going bad, I wouldn't dare ask for money then. So I just buttoned it up and just hoped. And God just continued to provide everything that the church needed, even so that we were able to continue to give away to other ministries who were in need. And God just reminded me over and over and over again over the course of the year, I care about grace. I've got this place. Look at me. Do I look worried? And so now, I don't even look at the numbers. Steve emails them to me every week as is our habit. I never even open it. Sorry, Steve. Because I don't care. They don't matter to me. God's got this church. We're not going anywhere. He's got big plans for us. He's chosen to sustain us. I have a certainty about grace that is untouched by circumstances because I see that God's not worried, so I'm not. He offers us this peace in our lives too. He's not worried about your kids. He's got a plan for them. He's not worried about how your family is going to make it. He's got a plan for that. He's not worried about if everything's going to be okay. He's not worried about what's it going to look like as we try to return back to normal. God isn't concerned with pandemics. He's unfazed with 2020. I promise you he's seen harder years from heaven. But I think sometimes we get so caught up in our worry and in our anxiety and in the circumstances of the day that we keep our focus down. And maybe what we need to do is slow down and let him impart his peace. Maybe this morning or wherever we are as we listen to this or watch this, what we really need to do is just slow down, look at the face of Christ, and let him impart his peace. Let him guard our hearts with perfect peace. When we will be people who will do that, who will constantly put our focus on Christ and not on circumstances, who will allow him to impart his God-guarded peace on us, we can have conversations like I got to have this week. Many of you are aware of what Jen's family is walking through, and just this last week I sat next to my father-in-law in his bed as he moves towards passing away. And I knelt next to him and I told him that it was time for me to say goodbye. And he said, oh, are you going somewhere? I said, no, John, I'm not, but you are. And he said, yeah, I am. And we shared a really sweet moment that caused me to go ugly cry for about 15 minutes on my own in the bathroom somewhere. But at the end of the conversation, I said, John, you're going to go to heaven soon. And you're going to see his parents are Porter and Bernice. You're going to see Porter and Bernice. You're going to hug them. They're going to be glad to see you. Jesus is going to be there. He's going to be glad to see you too. And John whispered in his soft and weak voice, yeah, and when I get there, there's going to be a lot of rejoicing. He's not afraid to die. He's anxious for it. He welcomes it. Because he has a peace that is untouched by circumstance. Because he knows where he's going. He's focused on the face of Christ and Christ is waiting to welcome him into perfect peace. And if there is a peace that is so strong that when someone is hours away from transitioning into the next life, they can lay in their bed at perfect peace and be certain that they are not about to be sad, but that they are about to rejoice. That's the kind of peace that we should want. And Christmas is our yearly reminder that God offers us a peace that no circumstance can touch. This year, as we celebrate Jesus, let's remember that Jesus imparts a peace on us. He imparts a certainty that circumstance can't touch, that God guards this peace. And maybe instead of being worried about all the things that we can't control anyways, what we should do is slow down and focus on the face of Christ and hear him say to us, I'm not worried. You don't have to be either. And let's all of us experience perfect peace as we finish up this year. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful for your peace. We are so grateful for the way that you guard our hearts, that you don't want us to be anxious, that you don't want us to be worried. Lord, I pray that if there are people hearing this who are anxious, who are riddled with anxiety, who are riddled with worry, who haven't felt peace and rest in a long time, God, would you give their soul rest in you? Would they hear you today saying, look at me. If I'm calm, you can be calm. Would they today accept your peace? Would they rest easy in that? God, I pray for every person who can hear my voice, that they would experience the same peace that Jesus had, a peace that is untouched by any circumstance. Father, thank you for that gift. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Advent. It means coming. And with that, a longing for something greater. With a year like this one passed, we can't help but look forward with much anticipation. Kids wait impatiently for Christmas morning to arrive. But we've all experienced that ache from waiting. Waiting for the pain to go away, waiting for that next check to arrive, for the broken heart to heal, for this season to pass because it's just too hard, or for the hospice to finally call and say, hurry now, it's time to say goodbye. Hope. From a newborn king, we've heard of how he can pull us together in unity and heal us. He is the wonderful counselor, our mighty God, the Prince of Peace. But we also know that as soon as we leave here, we will step back into our bruised and broken dark world. So we burn these candles week by week and watch them burn to build anticipation, to prepare for the coming of Jesus. The prophet Isaiah warned us about this. He said, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the land of darkness, a light has dawned. That is our hope. So we light this hope candle because our hope lies in you, Jesus. And so we say, come Lord, we need you to come soon. Because the coming of Jesus changes everything. Just be sure you remain open, you listen, because Jesus will whisper to us, there is always hope. It doesn't matter how dark the dark is, a light can still dawn. Well, good morning, Grace Raleigh. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy football weekend. Maybe it was a shopping weekend instead. And I also say welcome to the season of overeating and stretchy pants. It has officially arrived and we are welcoming it in full all arms. I'm Erin. I am one of the pastors here and I am so excited to be with you guys this morning to kick off our Christmas season. So thank you for joining us and for being here and for sticking around when you saw Nate introduce me. I do appreciate that. It seems like 2020 has left us in a place possibly looking for the comfortable or for that which is familiar. I'm not sure where you are in that, but that's kind of how I felt. And so as a staff, we began to talk about what Christmas at Grace this year could look like. And in our conversations, we said, what would it look like if we took Christmas and kind of stripped away the noise and stripped away the excess stuff and kind of shifted our focus and found that place that was comfortable and that was familiar? And what would it be like if our focus shifted to the Christmas story? And I don't know about you, but I am a sucker for a good story. A book, a cup of tea, a blanket, a couch, and a couple of uninterrupted hours is an absolute gift to me. And I will roll around in it and envelop it like nobody's business. And so, you know, you give me a book and give me the opportunity to dive into the characters, into the richness of who they are, they become kind of one. And so I, here's an example. The entire Harry Potter series, when my kids were smaller, we went from book one to book seven together. And it was a great adventure. And we loved every minute and every time we picked up those books and jumped into Hogwarts and met up with Harry and Hermione and Ron and all of their adventures. And we got to the end of book seven and the author did a phenomenal job of wrapping it all up. And I shut the book and then I looked at the book and went, now what do I do? Like it was this place of mourning because these characters had become people, had become part of our family. And now all of a sudden, I didn't have them anymore. So now what do I do? So as you can see, a good story for me is a gift. And so as we delved into this idea of the Christmas story and coming closer to the Christmas story by looking at Advent. I was beyond excited because Advent brings this place of depth and meaning to the season and it roots us into a story that we're already connected to, the story of the arrival of Jesus. And so for the next four weeks, we get to anticipate this arrival together, and we get to jump into Jesus's story and his arrival and what he fulfills in his arrival. Things like hope and joy and peace and love. We'll also look at how we choose to accept those things during this season. We'll also get the opportunity to look at the Advent wreath. And the Advent wreath has great symbolism. And I invite you to take the opportunity to look at what that symbolism is. Go to Google. Just Google Advent wreath and see what it says. But it's going to talk all about the circles and the different colors of the candles. But I want you to focus on something else as well. Because it doesn't matter if your Advent wreath is a circle. It doesn't matter if it's a straight line. It doesn't matter if your colors of your candles are pretty purples and pinks and whites. They could be white or yellow or green or whatever you happen to have had in your cabinet. What matters is the light that we get to see each time we light one of these candles. Because that light that comes from that candle represents the light of God that crashes to this deep, dark earth in the form of a sweet little baby by the name of Jesus. And so, oh, for the next four weeks, we get to roll around in the richness of this Christmas story, and we get to find places where we can connect deeper to Jesus. And so today, we are going to start with the candle of hope. And I think first I need to make a distinction for you as to a definition of hope. Because biblically, or in the Bible, there are lots of times that the word hope is used. But it can actually have two meanings. And the first one is, I hope that you get to feeling better. Or I hope that it doesn't rain today because guess what? On our calendar, we have three soccer games that we need to go watch outside. Or it could be also this hope that your kids right now, as the TV comes on and all the commercials roll through, or the catalog that comes in the mail and they start flipping through it and it's like, oh, I hope I get that this year. I hope that's underneath my Christmas tree. That hope is a wish. There's not a whole lot of, there's no guarantee of any kind of fulfillment. It's just a wish. But the second kind of hope is a hope that gets in us and it travels with us into these places of darkness, into these places of pain, into places of longing and waiting. And it becomes for us a place, a definition given that I hooked onto and can't get rid of. This is it. This hope is a confident expectation in something good in the future. Let me repeat that one. This hope is a confident expectation that something good is going to be in the future. So here's your distinction. You have the one hope that has no guarantee of fulfillment and is basically a wish. But then you have this second hope, this hope that says I can stand confident in the expectation that something good is in my future, that a good ending is possible. This is the hope that Jesus fulfills in his arrival 2,000 years ago. So as with every story, every good story, there's always a beginning, a middle, and an end. And for those of you that are writers, I understand I just simplified that to absolutely nothingness, but don't come at me. It's just the best way for me. So beginning, middle, and end, and then sometimes we need a little extra beginning. We need a little background in order to understand the beginning of the story. And so that's where we're going to start this morning as we continue this conversation of hope, is that we're going to give you a little background. And I'm going to start with the people, or God's chosen people, the Israelites. We're picking up in the back of the Old Testament. These are God's chosen people who at this point in time are living a pretty incomplete story. They have had judges around that have given them things that they need to do and ways that they can stay connected to God. And they've listened to the judges and then they've ignored the judges and they've gone about and done their own thing, and it's this cycle, and it keeps going. They keep walking further away from God, and then they'll come back, and then they walk away again. God has given them earthly king after earthly king, and then again, they're still walking away and not happy. Their kingdom is now divided, and in this I would say that the beginning of the end of the people of Israel is at hand. But this is where God begins the Christmas story. He takes this moment to actually breathe hope into the places of darkness for these weary people. And he does it through a group of people that are called the prophets. The prophet Isaiah was spoken of actually in the video earlier, and he states, the people who walk in darkness have seen a great light, and who dwell in the land of deep darkness, on them light has shone. There's that light again that we talked about, the light of God coming into the darkness. He then goes on and talks of the birth of his government and of peace Lord of hosts will do this. Oh, the words that must have rung in the ears of these weary people. It had to have been a balm to their souls. Because guess what? He just told them that their king was coming. Their true king is coming. And with him, he's bringing all of those things that they are hoping for. Things like restoration, things like peace and prosperity. He just gave them the confident expectation that something good was coming in the future. And oh, what it had to have felt like to them to have a place of hope now in their hearts, holding on to the fact that their true king, the Messiah, was coming. Now, I don't know about you, but I noticed as I read that, that Isaiah didn't mention the timeline for when this king would arrive. And I imagine he did that on purpose, but he didn't. He just said he's coming. And so the people of Israel walked into a period of waiting. And they began to wait. And wait. And wait some more. Because you see what happened is during this period, they went from being the people of Israel to divided kingdoms, to being in exile, to being scattered, and to having God go silent. And when I state that he goes silent, this isn't the kind of silent treatment that you might get when you and your spouses have had a small argument and everybody gets really quiet and you walk to your separate corners and there's no speaking in the house for maybe a couple hours or possibly a day or two. And it's just quiet, right? Well, no, no, no. This quiet, God went silent for 400 years. So that was the major silent treatment if I've ever heard of one. But just completely quiet. And so they began to continue, well, they continued to wait. But then in the middle of this waiting, God speaks again. But this time, he speaks through an angel by the name of Gabriel. And this is, in my paraphrase, how it all went about. Is that God sends the angel of Gabriel to the city of Nazareth, very specifically to a young woman by the name of Mary. And he comes to this sweet girl and says to her, you're going to have a baby. And in the process, you're going to name this baby Jesus. And he is going to be great. And he will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David. And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and his kingdom. There will be no end. The words in Mary's ears at that point. Did you hear Isaiah? She heard the words of the prophet spoken to her. It was a king. It was a king the angel told her his name was to be Jesus, she knew immediately because Jesus means Jehovah saves or the Lord's salvation. This was the Messiah. This was the promise of the confident expectation of something good in the future being fulfilled. He is coming. Remember the hope that I promised you 400 years ago? I'm delivering on that promise, and it's coming in this sweet little package of a baby, and his name is Jesus. And of course, true to his word, nine months later, the angels get to take over the heavens and to sing loudly of the announcement of Jesus and the fact that Christ the Savior has been born to hold on to. That in our places of difficulty, in our places of pain and weariness and waiting, that God is going to come to us. And he's also able to come to those places where maybe, just maybe, we've stopped believing in a good ending being possible. And I think that we actually have those places where we believe that a good ending is not possible anymore because we have somehow misplaced our hope. A.W. Tozer writes of misplaced hope as this, that misplaced hope or hope that has no guarantee of fulfillment is a false friend that comforts us for a little while with all kinds of flattery, but then leaves us to our enemies. So leaves us to our enemies. Have you all ever been there? I want to invite you into a story now to kind of give you a taste of misplaced hope. Many of you know my daughter Zoe. And for those of you that don't, Zoe is funny and she is sweet and she is kind. She is very quick-witted. She's a great friend. She loves coffee. She loves Jesus, and she loves country music. So I don't think we need to describe her any further than that. She has just finished her first semester as an intended nursing major at East Carolina University. In the middle of a pandemic, she's moved a couple of times over the course of the last couple of months, but she has completed it very successfully. Now, if you had told me a couple of years ago that that statement about my daughter was true, I would have questioned your judgment. Seriously, I would have. Because you see, Zoe suffers from, or Zoe, I shouldn't say that, Zoe has anxiety. And a few years ago, her anxiety had control of her. Somewhere towards the beginning of her high school career, we began to notice in Zoe that she made excuses as to not connect with friends. Friday night football games came. She might go for a little while, but she was home very quickly. Or she'd get invited to go someplace, and if she said yes, she was there a short time and then again came home. If not, in a lot of cases, she just said no. She was not exactly happy. And so as we sat back and kind of watched all this, we're scratching our head but then saying to ourselves, oh, well, wait a second. It's just high school. She's a freshman. She's a sophomore. It's hard. It's just hard. We also began to see some of this happen in youth group as well, where she's very connected and grace students and mission trips would come along and we'd have all this buildup, and then let's just say it took an awful lot to get Zoe onto the bus in order to go wherever it was that her group was going. And mind you, her dad went every year as well as one of the student leaders. And so we just kept watching. And in this process, though, I kept justifying all of these behaviors and saying it just is because she's a teenager. I went to what I would call my Pollyanna place, thinking it was all going to be okay. Everything's going to be fine. She's going to grow out of this, and it's going to be good. It is. It's going to be good. Well, as you can guess, my it's going to be good didn't change our reality at all. Zoe's path continued to go just where it was. And our situation never changed. So I decided that if the situation hasn't going to change there, that maybe I needed to do something different. And so I did. And this time, for those of you that know me, this is me in a nutshell, but I'm going to fix it. I'm going to help somehow. And we're going to make change here. And so I went into that mode of I hit Google and I hit books. I don't know what I'm going to help somehow, and we're going to make change here. And so I went into that mode of I hit Google and I hit books. I don't know what I'm looking for at this point, but I'm trying to find something that is an answer. And I started talking to people around me, and it was just what can I do? What kind of checklist do I have? How can I fix this? How can I help my daughter? And the thing is in all of this, the one really good thing that possibly came out of this moment was the fact that somebody said to us, hey, maybe Zoe should see a counselor. And so I went to her and I said, hey, girl, what do you think about this? She's like, sure. And so she goes, y'all, this was good. It was great. Because guess what? When she got to the counselor, there was a connection with their counselor. All was great. And we had a diagnosis. We knew what was going on. And guess what that means? If I know what's going on, because I can now fix it. Because I know what I'm battling against, right? So she was diagnosed with anxiety. And we started that whole process of giving her the tools that she needed in her toolbox on how to deal with her anxiety and what it looked like. And guess what? It worked. And lo and behold, she's reengaging with her friends. She's out on a Friday night. The world is great. Her smile has returned. And I sit back and I'm like, yes, we've got this and all is great. So let's now fast forward to Zoe's, the beginning of Zoe's senior year of high school. Where Zoe went to high school, one of the things that they do at the beginning of the senior year is a large trip. They take the entire senior class to New York City for four days of crazy fun with your friends, seeing New York, and doing all of the things. Now, I will tell you, one of the things that went through my head as we started into the beginning of the senior year, this is the thought. The thought was, if we can get Zoe on the bus to go to New York City, we have won. We have officially beaten the enemy, and we have wrangled anxiety, and we've won. Now, I spoke that to no one. It's just in the back of my head. And so as we walk into the preparations for New York, all is fabulous. And Zoe is excited. And we're doing the things that you have to do before a trip like this, especially if you're the parent of a girl. You know, you've got to have the right outfits for the different activities. We had to do all that. Had to get the right roommates. Had to do all of the things. And everything was so positive. She was so excited. And here we go. And so the night before the trip, Zoe's upstairs in her room packing. And I decide to go up and help because, of course, you know, I can help pack, right? So I go up the stairs. I open up the door. Zoe's in the middle of her floor, and there's clothes all around her, and a suitcase is open, and I'm like, I'm here to help, and she turns around, and she looks at me, and she has tears streaming down her face. And she says, Mama, I can't do this. I can't go tomorrow. And at that moment, my heart broke for her, for us, for this situation. And I collapsed onto the floor with her, and I grabbed hold of my girl, and I cried with her, and I told her how much I loved her, and that I had her, and that we would do this together. And at that moment, everything that I had went from, we got this, we've won, to, oh my heavens, now what? Hope to hopeless. Now what do we do? And my head's spinning and the questions are running around in my head. Even places like, is she going to be able to go to college next year? Like I can't even get her on. We can't get onto a bus to go to New York for four days. How is it that we're going to get to college next year? Like, the brain starts to spin off of the rails, basically. And then after this process, I began this process with God. We had lots of very interesting conversations. Things like, why? Why my girl? And the big question of, hey God, where are you in all of this? And you all, I'm so thankful that we serve such a loving and faithful father. Because he looked at me and he said, hey Aaron, I'm here. I've always been here. And I've been walking with you and your girl through this. But guess what? You, mama, you need to let go of your control. You, mama, need to invite me in and let me give real hope to this situation. And the real hope that Paul speaks of, he speaks of it in his letter to the Romans. And this is what it says. It says, not only that, but we rejoice in sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Y'all, this real hope that is sourced and supplied by God himself, it does not put us to shame. It does not tell us that we aren't good enough. It does not tell us that we can't do it. It does not tell us that we are failures. No, no, no. It's just the opposite. And so we grabbed onto this real hope for our situation. We began believing in that good future and in that good ending for Zoe. The one thing I need to clarify here, though, is that believing in the good future and believing in the good ending wasn't saying that I was believing that she was going to be cured. What it was was for me, it was a change of posture. It was a moment that I said, no longer is it about me. It's now all about you, God. It was a moment of surrender where I said, and I knew in my heart of hearts that God loves my child more than I do, and that he had her, and he had a good future planned for her. And I needed to let go of what I felt was Zoe's story. And I needed to key into the story that God was writing in her. And so maybe this was now that ECU isn't where she's going to go. Maybe she's going to go to Wake Tech for a couple of years so she gets some security and she gets some confidence. And then she'll go off to ECU to finish her nursing degree. Or maybe she's supposed to be at Campbell where her brother is in a place that's familiar and a place that feels comfortable and secure. Or maybe, or maybe, or maybe, like all of a sudden, when I let go of what I felt her story needed to be and let God write her story, the maybes became huge possibilities that anything could happen if he writes her story. And I release control. And so through all of this story and through this place of surrender and this place of saying, hey God, you've got this. I have learned a few things. The first one is that misplaced hope trusts in me, whereas real hope trusts in God. So when my hope was misplaced, it was all about what Aaron could do to fix Zoe's situation, not what God could do. We had to trust in him and who he says he was and the promises that he's given that he was never going to forsake her, that he loves her, and that he has this confident expectation in a good ending. I also learned that misplaced hope leaves you so weary, but real hope sustains. The constant trials and guilt and sleepless nights that we had in trying to figure out what was going on and worrying about the situation left us so very tired, just exhausted, but that real hope gives us what we need to move on, to be sustained. And we know now that Zoe still has struggles, and it's okay though, because she has him to hold on to in those struggles. And lastly, I learned that misplaced hope leaves you feeling hopeless. But that true, that real hope knows the end of the story. And so with Zoe's story, yes, Zoe has anxiety, but anxiety doesn't have her. It does not define who she is. It's just there. And in August of this year, she packed up her little car and she drove to Greenville and she has not looked back. And yes, as a mama, I will tell you there are times that I kind of wish maybe she would look back and say, hey, mom, I'm coming home. But you know what? It's those moments, though, too, that I can hold on to and say, hey, God, thank you. Thank you that you provided us with this confident expectation in a good future for our girl. Thank you that she's in Greenville. Thank you that she's thriving. And so I have to also say that I am so very proud of my girl. What she's walked through has not been easy. And I'm just over the moon proud. And it is a true joy to watch where she is now and to hold on to that expectation of the cool things that she's going to do in the future. So in light of all that we as a group have been through in 2020, I know in years before we could say, you know, everybody could say they've had issues with a year here or there or otherwise. But 2020, I think, has left us all feeling a bit weary. And I look back at the Jewish people who were in their place of weariness and in their place of waiting 2,000 years ago. And I wonder if that's not us now. We're all weary. We're all waiting. Waiting for a vaccine. Waiting for maybe it's something to happen good in our financial situation. Maybe it's waiting to be able to go visit loved ones again. We're waiting. We're weary. Just like the Jewish people were 2,000 years ago. And my prayer for all of us is that we get to experience the same thrill of hope that they experienced at Jesus' arrival. I want us to be that weary world that rejoices this year as we hear about the arrival of our coming King. And so, what would it take for us, Grace Raleigh, to experience that thrill of hope? What would it take for us to shift our focus and our hope from hope in us to hope in him and him alone. Will y'all pray with me? Lord, thank you. We are so beyond grateful that you loved us enough to send your son into the middle of our places of darkness and our places of weariness and our places of waiting. You love us so much that you want us to experience that thrill of hope. You want us to hold on and grab hold of this confident expectation that a good ending is possible. And we're so grateful for that. We're so, so grateful. And so, Lord, I just ask that you wrap our beautiful Grace Raleigh family in your arms and that you allow us for the next four weeks to anticipate together the arrival of your son and all that he fulfills as he comes. And Lord, we love you. And it's in your son's mighty name that we pray. Amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. We are in the second part of our series called With, where we're going through a book by a pastor named Sky Jethani. It's a book that I read back in 2013, and I've shared with you before, caused me more times than any other book to stop and put it down and get on my knees and repent and say, God, I absolutely see these things in my life and in my heart and in my motives for following you. Please eradicate them from me. I was having a conversation with someone right before church started. Actually, full disclosure, it was after church had started and half of the congregation was still out in the parking lot. Sorry, Steve, for that. That's our bad, buddy. We'll get it better next week. Join me, guys. We'll do better next week. But I was having a conversation, and they said, gosh, I'm loving this book. I've been reading it, but I see myself in all the postures. And I said, yeah, that's kind of it. If you're paying attention, you see yourself in this book as we read it. So as we get together every week, I want to go through the postures. I want to look at the different ways that we can approach God, the different motives we have for approaching him. And then the last week, look at the right motive we have for approaching him. Really, it's five weeks of discipleship, of looking at our relationship with Jesus, the one who saved us. And one of the things we said last week is we kind of asked where we were. We did a little spiritual diagnostic test, and I kind of helped us see, I think many of us, that to be a Christian is to be in a rut sometimes. It's to see other people having this flourishing relationship with Jesus, this really seemingly intimate knowledge with Jesus, and we can't seem to hit the nail on the head. We can't seem to connect the dots for ourselves. And kind of the phrase I'm using that's driving the way we're thinking about ourselves and our walks with Jesus in this series is to say, perhaps our walk with Jesus isn't what it could be because our posture before him isn't what it should be, right? And so then last week we looked at the life under God posture. The life under God posture acknowledges that the universe is big, the world is difficult, it's bigger than me, it's challenging, there's unknown pain and suffering that I can't prevent out there, but God created everything and if I can find a way to get him on my side, if I can appease God, then he'll protect me. And so it's this exchange. If I offer you obedience and you offer me protection, it's how we regain control of an uncontrollable universe. And this week, we're looking at life over God, which is really the natural conclusion of the life under God posture. If life under God says, man, the universe can't be controlled, but God can control it, so I'm going to get him on my side so that nothing bad can happen to me, then life over God is what happens when we start to learn a little bit. It's what happens when we start to get a little bit of knowledge. It's what happens when we realize that, you know what, creation is really a machine, and there are laws to the way it works. And if I can begin to understand these laws, the way the machine works, then it becomes more controllable and more predictable. This is what it looks like in years past. If we had a road trip, we might pray to God. We might go to God and say, God, protect us on this road trip. And now with a little bit of knowledge, we just check the weather app and we do the road trip when it's not going to rain. Now we're safe. We're good. In years past, a pandemic hits and we hit our knees and we pray, God, take this away from us. Now we scramble to create a vaccine. Life has shifted. So in a lot of ways, this life over God posture is a natural conclusion. It's just another way to arrest control back to ourselves and say, God, thanks for everything. We figured out your machine now, so we're going to take it from here. Now we'll be in control again. A great picture of what life over God looks like is actually this. If you go to the Smithsonian, you can see this Bible. That's Thomas Jefferson's Bible. Famously, he took the Bible and he looked at the teachings. That's in the Gospels. He looked at the teachings of Jesus that he didn't like and he simply cut them out of his Bible. It's called the Jeffersonian Bible. And I've always looked at that and thought, what audacious arrogance would it take to begin cutting passages out of the Bible that you don't agree with? But now I tend to think, at least he's honest. At least he has the guts to admit it. Because don't we all do this? That's what life over God posture is. The life over God exchanges God for best practices. As we think about life over God, that's what it is. It just simply exchanges God. It exchanges a relationship with Jesus for best practices. It exchanges a relationship with Jesus for simply the best practices that come out of his teachings. And we know what it is to distill things down to best practices, don't we? We've all done this. This is a thing that we can all fall into. When I first became a small groups pastor, I started reading all the books about small groups. And it would have been a mistake to take one book written about small groups for a church of 20,000 people and try to do a one-to-one exchange into my church of 1,000 people at the time. It would have been a big mistake to try to do that. So I didn't do everything that the author would recommend. I just took a couple things, a couple best practices that I could apply to my situation, and I would do that. And I would take a couple best practices from over here and over here and over here, and I would amalgamate the ministry that we did. Not looking at any of the books as authoritative or any of the individuals as authoritative, but giving myself the right and the license to take best practices from all these areas and then install them in my life. This is what life over God does. It looks at the Bible as just a simple group of instructions, an instruction book for life. And we extract from it the best practices like Thomas Jefferson did, and we apply those to ourselves. And then the ones that we don't like or we don't agree with or that seem too problematic or antiquated, we do away with those. And we begin to pick and choose which portions of the Bible we want to obey. We begin to pick and choose which portions of the teachings of Jesus we want to submit to. And we exchange God for best practices. Now at its worst, this posture is atheism. God's not real. He doesn't exist. The Bible clearly is a book. I'm going to take out of it the things that apply to me. There's some good ideas in there. I'll apply those. We might even feel good about ourselves for doing that, but I'm not going to take it all wholesale. At best, it's deism. God exists. He's real. He created the universe. He created this machine. But now that I have the Bible, now that I understand some of the mechanics of this machine, I can take it from here. I understand. God, thanks. I don't need you anymore. I don't need to pray to you anymore. I don't need to pursue you anymore. I don't need the actual relationship with you. I just need your principles and practices. And now that I understand how to manipulate things under my own control, I've got it from here. That's the life over God posture. And like I said, at least Thomas Jefferson was honest about what he did. We might think that this posture is a difficult one for Christians to adopt. It might be easy to believe that as believers, we wouldn't do this. Life under God, I'm going to obey him so that he watches out for me. Sure, that makes sense in the Christian life. And the other ones, from and for, if you've read ahead or as we get to those, those are easy to apply to the Christian life. But this is the posture of all non-believers. I'm going to take the authority of myself over the authority of God, and we distill him down to best practices, if anything at all. But what's important to see is that this one is sneaky too, and it works its way into our hearts and into our motives as well. And it has for the history of all believers. We can go all the way back to Moses. Sky points this out in the book, and I think it's an appropriate example. We can go all the way back to Moses to see this life over God posture. We're not going to turn our Bibles there this morning, but in Exodus chapter 17, the people of God have been wandering through the desert led by Moses for a number of years now. And they're thirsty, and they're complaining. And they're like, at least in Egypt when we were slaves, we have water. In the desert, we have nothing. What's the deal? They were upset. And so Moses goes to God on their behalf, and he says, God, your people are thirsty. What should I do? And God says, take your staff, take Aaron's staff, and go to a rock, and I want you to strike the rock in front of the people, and water's going to come out. And that's what he did. Amazingly. The miracle. He takes Aaron, his brother's staff. He goes to the rock. He strikes the rock. Water comes out. Everybody has their fill. Speaking of water, I just got thirsty. Everybody has their fill. Then, a little while later, it happens again. They start to grumble and complain again. They start to whine again. And this time, Moses is kind of sick of it. This time, Moses is kind of tired of it because here's God. God's used Moses. They've led him out of the desert. He defeated the Egyptian army in the Red Sea. God is visibly leading them every day by cloud, every night by fire. He gives them manna to eat. He feeds them in the desert every day. And yet still God's people are saying we had it better as slaves. And I think Moses is exasperated and can't believe that people find ways to continue to complain. But if we know anything about human nature, it's that if we were there in the desert, we'd be complaining too, wouldn't we? And so Moses is frustrated. And this is what happens the second time they complain. If you want to look in Numbers chapter 20, it'll be on the screen if you want to read along with me. Verse 7, before the Lord as he commanded him. So God says, go this time. I want you to speak to the rock and water's going to come out. Then Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, like they were told. And he said to them, here now you rebels, he's ticked, shall we bring water for you out of this rock? And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice and water came out abundantly and the congregation drank and their livestock drank as well. Now, the people are thirsty again. They're grumbling again. They're complaining again. God, Moses goes back to God. Your people are complaining. What do you want me to do? And God says, I want you to go to the rock. This time, I want you to speak to it and water's going to come out. And Moses says, okay. And he goes to the rock, and he assembles the people, and he says, you want some water, rebels? Which I think is probably the nice way of saying it in the Bible. And then, instead of speaking, he strikes the rock two times. God told him, I want you to speak. Moses says, no, I don't need your direction anymore. I understand this machine. I understand how it works. I have a set of best practices. The staff has worked for me in the past. It's going to work for me now. And he hits the rock twice. And God, in his goodness, allows water to come out. But Moses exhibited the life over God posture and said, no thanks. I don't need your authority. I'm not going to follow your rules. I know the staff works. I'm just going to do it this way. I've got my best practices. I figured out your machine. I know what's best now. And as a result of that sin and usurping God's will in that way, he's not allowed to enter into the promised land. It's actually one of the more tragic scenes in the Bible when Moses allows his frustration to get the better of him in this way. But he exhibited the life over God posture. Because Moses was susceptible to it, because it's been around for thousands of years, we should know by now that we are susceptible to it as well. You may have taken this posture if you've ever in your own life chosen selective morality, chosen a portion of Scripture. There's this thing that you know is wrong, but you've just decided in your life, you know what, I don't really care. I'm just going to do it. I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine this weekend. It came to light. I have a group of friends. There's about seven or eight of us. We talk every day. And it came to light that one of my friends is one of these people that will just buy a TV for a weekend knowing he's going to return it at the end of the weekend. Or he'll buy an iPad for a couple days to use it and then take it back. And I'm like, yo, I can't believe that you do this. That's stealing. And he's like, oh, come on, you guys don't take a handful of the candied pecans at the Sprouts when you're going through there? And we're all like, no, we don't. That's theft. But he does it. And when we get to the bottom of it, what he said is, I'm not hurting anybody. It doesn't really matter. And we're all like, yeah, it's stealing. And he's like, eh, I know. And as I was getting on to him for it, he said, Nate, this may be an issue for you, and you may be able to condemn me for it, but I'm pretty sure if we looked at your life, we could find a place that I was more moral than you, and we could condemn you for that. And I thought, that's a fair point. We should probably wrap this up. Right now, I don't really want to explore this any further. We all do that. We all have these places and pockets in our life where Scripture tells us who we need to be. We know from God what He wants from our character, and we just refuse to hand those things over. We choose to keep a little bit of worry because it makes us feel like we're in control. We choose the right to be unkind or to not like people, even though we know that we don't have that right as believers. We elevate other things in our life over biblical importance in our life. If we have ever had, and I think we all have, selective morality, we've exhibited this life over God posture. Sometimes this posture takes on the form of a spiritual to-do list, of moralizing our faith, of I don't need to pursue God. I don't actually need him. If you'll just give me the best practices to be a godly parent, that's what I need. And we'll do sermon series. And listen, as I read this, I told you I had to repent. As I'm reading it this time, as a pastor, I'm having to repent, realizing I skirt the line of this often. We'll do a series on how to have better relationships. And sometimes instead of simply emphasizing our need for Jesus in our life, we'll say, if you'll do these four things, you'll have a better marriage. If you'll do these three things, you'll have a better kid. If you'll do these five things, you'll be spiritually healthy. And sometimes we under-emphasize how much we need to simply pursue Jesus and over-emphasize the things that we need to do, because this is what we like in life. We love a to-do list, don't we? We love having clear steps to accomplish our goal because we can grab onto that and we can control it. And now we're in charge of that. That's life over God posture. And we distill them down to some best practices. And God, you stay over there. I've got it from here. And what I really want us to see this morning is that when we do that, when we engage in this posture, when we exchange God for best practices, we're really making three losing exchanges that cost us so very much. When we adopt this posture, we make three losing exchanges. The first one is this, we exchange wonder for arrogance. We exchange wonder for arrogance. When we once marveled at God and his creation, when we were once at awe at him and everything that he does. The power of a thunderstorm, the beauty of a sunset, the miracle of cures. Now, with a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of understanding of how the world works, we become arrogant and difficult to impress. As I was thinking through this one this week, I was reminded that just last year, I think it was, Doug Funk, our favorite church partner and effective church mascot over there, who's now got the wonderful, if you're, listen, if you've been watching online, a whole reason to come is to see Doug's new Bob Barker haircut. It's amazing. And you need to come see it in person. And when COVID lifts, touch it. Last year, Doug got prostate cancer. He comes to me and he says, yeah, and he tells me, hey, I think I've got this thing and I'm going to get some tests. And it turned out that he had prostate cancer. And your immediate response is, oh my gosh, Doug, I'm so sorry. That's terrible. You hate to hear the C word. And he immediately says, it's prostate. It's good. They've got it isolated. They're going to run some tests on me, but they're just deciding how they're going to go get it, but they're going to go get it. And you're like, okay, great. So then you pray for wisdom for the doctors. He goes in for surgery. He gets it. You see him a little while later. Doug, did it go okay? And he says, yeah, it's good. Did I get it all? Yeah, it's great. All right, great. You're back at work. Please straighten the rows for church. Like, let's be ready. Like, let's go, right? Like, okay, great. Praise God. And then you just move on. Do you see the arrogance and the lack of wonder in what God has done? 50 years ago, that's a death sentence. 50 years ago, if you get that, you don't know you have it for a long, long time, and then you die, and we don't have Doug anymore. But because the medical community has advanced so much, because God has given us such wisdom that we can unpack the wonders of his creation, we take a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of understanding and we allow it to turn into bored arrogance so that when my friend recovers from cancer, I go, that's great, praise God. Let's get back to work. What wonder have we lost when we allow cures to pass us by like that? What wonder do we lose when we don't simply walk through nature and appreciate the breeze? When the weather feels this good and all we're thinking in our heads, because we've felt weather like this before, is, is this a false fall? How long do I get to enjoy this? Can I really break out the flannels for like months or am I going to have to wear a polo again? Instead of just going, God, this feels amazing. Thank you. When we adopt a life over God posture, we exchange wonder for bored arrogance. What a terrible way to go through life. Another exchange we make when we adopt this posture is we exchange trust for anxiety. We exchange trust and peace for worry and anxiety and stress. Because in this posture, we figured out the machine, right? We figured out how life works. We figured out what we need to do to get things to go our way. And because we have this understanding and because everything becomes predictable, we begin to heap all of the pressure and responsibility for life's unpredictability onto ourselves. We take on all the pressure. Literally, the weight of the world is on our shoulders because we've said, God, I don't need you to carry that for me anymore. I understand a little bit about how the world works, so I'm going to carry that and I'm going make things go, and I'm going to make things happen. And our souls were not created or designed to carry that weight. That's why God is constantly ushering us back to him. Come to me for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden. That's why he says that we should cast all of our cares upon him and that we should lay our burdens at his feet. That's why he says in Philippians that we should present everything to God with prayer and thanksgiving and that he will guard our hearts and our minds with a peace. He and Jesus Christ will guard our hearts and minds with a peace that passes understanding. And we exchange the peace that Jesus offers us when we walk with him and we simply trust him. And we say, God, we're in the middle of a pandemic. I don't know what to do, but you're bigger than this. I'm going to walk with you and trust you and whatever happens, happens. I'm with you. And instead, we take it and we internalize it and we think of all the different things that we need to do. I can't think of a better example of trading trust for anxiety than the way that we parent now. I can remember, I mean, we've only been parents for four and a half years. But you start to learn all these things about kids. I start to read about how a one-year-old and a two-year-old brain develops, and we're like, oh my gosh, do we use enough words in the home on a daily basis? Is the TV on too long? Should we read to her more? Should she be writing now? This kid colors in the lines. What should our kid be doing right now? Look at her. She's a disaster. This is embarrassing. And then we do coloring practice and the whole thing. Like, you worry so much. And now in a pandemic, what school do we put them in? Do we switch them to in-person? Do we keep them at home? Should we erect a bubble around our house for the rest of our lives? What is it that we should do? And we assume all the responsibility for our kids. And everything that happens, we flip out. Our mind spirals into this death spiral of anxiety where we draw the worst of conclusions. And I just wonder, parents who are given to anxiety over your kids, and this is a not fair question, all right, so I'm in this with you. What's your worry to prayer ratio? Those of us that have anxiety in our life, what's our ratio of minutes of worry and stress versus minutes of prayer and giving it back over to God? With your business, with your career, with your marriage, with your relationships, with finances, with that really difficult thing in your life, all of us, what's your ratio of minutes of worry versus minutes of prayer? When we adopt this life over God posture and we take it all on our shoulders, we trade trust in Jesus for a crippling anxiety that drowns us that we were not designed to carry. And I would simply ask you, if you feel yourself anxious, which has there ever been a time where there's more reason for that than in an incredibly divided country about myriad issues in the midst of a pandemic and all sorts of uncertainty? Is there ever more of a time for anxiety than now? Conversely, is there ever more of a time to realize that that's what we're doing and offering our trust back to God than now? What are our minutes of worry versus our minutes of prayer? The last exchange that we make that's dangerous for us is we exchange seeking for doing. We exchange seeking Jesus for doing the things that he wants us to do. We exchange pursuing the Father for an eight-step program to have a better relationship with the Father. And instead of simply craving more Jesus, instead of that passage in Psalms being true of us, as the deer pants for the water, so my soul pants for you, oh God, the living God. Instead of that being true for us, we're just asking, what do I need to do? I'm reading my Bible 30 minutes a day. I'm praying 10 minutes a day. I'm leading a small group. I go to church. I tithe and I volunteer, and yet I still don't feel like I'm really connecting with Jesus. What do I need to do next? Maybe we just need to pursue Jesus. Maybe we need to do away with the spiritual to-do list and we just need to lay prostrate before the Father and say, God, I want you to show me what that looks like. Our tendency to make these to-do lists, to grasp onto control by giving ourselves bite-sized tasks that we know we can master, is so ingrained in us that I personally believe, and now this is, let me preface this. I've said this in Bible studies before. I've never said this from stage because I feel a responsibility with what I say from stage. So I'm going to say that this is a guess. This is a pastor's best guess. I would love it if you guys would talk about this guess in your small groups this week. Chew on this. Figure out what you think. You guys have interacted with Scripture, most of you, more than me. So you figure out what you think about this. But I think that this is the reason that God waited so long to give people the Ten Commandments. You ever wonder why God waited that long? Adam comes on the scene. He gives them the one commandment. Don't eat from that tree. They're like, got it. And then they ate from the tree. Why not after that, as soon as they fall, as soon as they mess up, as soon as they're out of relationship with God, why doesn't God go, okay, you blew it. Now here are the 10 rules. If you do these things, you'll be good with me. You've already blown it. I don't know what to do about you, Adam and Eve, but maybe Cain and Abel got a chance. Why didn't he give them the law then? Say, here's what I want you to do to be right with me. Why didn't he give it to Noah? Creation floundered and it failed and he hit the reset button and now it's just Noah and his family. Why didn't he give the Ten Commandments to Noah and say, here's what I want you to do. These are the rules. Let's not let what just happened. I don't want that to happen again. Here's the rules to follow to make me happy. Why didn't he give them to Noah? Why didn't he give them to Abraham? He speaks directly to Abraham. Go to the promised land. I'm going to make you the forefather of all of my children. I'm going to make you the founder of a promise. And by the way, here are the rules that you need to teach to all of your followers that are my children. Why didn't he give them to Abraham? It wasn't until we get to Moses and his children are wandering in the desert and clamoring that he finally allows Moses to come down the mountain with the two tablets and the Ten Commandments and the law. Why did he wait so long when he could have made it so clear? This is my guess. You might have your guesses. My guess is he knows our hearts. And he knows that the second we get Ten Commandments, he's giving us a spiritual to-do list. And then we do the same thing we did last week. It makes us legalistic hypocrites. It also makes us control freaks. And now we say, good God, I don't need you anymore. I don't need to pursue you. I don't need to kind of follow this wispy idea of you. I have these set rules that I can follow. I'm good. And what we do, just like last week, is we remove the relationship from a fundamentally relational thing. And now our very relationship with Jesus no longer requires a relationship because we have the rules. We have a to-do list. Have you ever been to a wedding and after the vows, each, the husband and the wife present each other with their 10 rules for marriage? You ever seen that? Here's your rules. Jen, if you'll do these things, I'll be a good husband and I'll be happy and then she gives me my rules. And then when we have this relational issue, when we're kind of at each other's throats, I don't get to go like, what's wrong? I followed your rules. I don't understand. Because rules remove relationship from a fundamentally relational thing. That's why we don't do it in our relationships. And God didn't want to do it to his either, I don't think. He gave us these to help us, but I think he knew our hearts and he knew that we would reduce a relationship to a spiritual to-do list and remove the pursuit of Jesus from our hearts. And I think we've all done this. And like I said last week, we're going to do four weeks in things we shouldn't do. And then we're going to cap it off with what a relationship with God should really look like and what should really drive us to Jesus. And I'm excited. We're supposed to wait until next week to announce this, but forget it. Sometimes I just do what I want. I'm excited. We're going to cap this series off by taking communion together for the first time since February or March. We're going to get you ready at home. We're going to find a way to do it here. But when we talk about being with God, we're going to bring him in with us and have communion together as a church. And I'm excited about that. But this week, I would simply ask you, do you see this posture in yourself? Do we have pockets of selective morality? Do we have places where we've reduced God to a to-do list and not a relationship? Have you made the exchange of wonder for arrogance, of trust for anxiety, or of seeking for doing? And will you allow God to work in your heart this week as you pursue him, to show you where this posture exists in your life, and to begin to ask yourself the question and ready your heart for what it should look like to follow Jesus. Let's do that this week and this month as we move through this process together. Pray with me. Jesus, you are good to us. You love us. You intercede for us. God, you see in us our true motives, and you're patient with us. Father, you know that we can only offer you gross. We can only offer you messed up. We can only offer you our selfishness. But would you help our hearts to learn to beat with yours? Would you create within us an earnest desire for you? Would we not make these awful exchanges and be people who wonder at you, who trust in you and who seek you? Would you work in our hearts even this week to prepare us for what it is to truly know you and follow you. God, would you be with those who are hurting this week? Would you buoy their spirits? Would you encourage them? God, would they see you even in the struggle? And for those of us who are having good times and good weeks, would we see your joy in those moments as well? Jesus, it's in your name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. I'm so excited to be with you in this way for the last time. God willing, this is the last time we will pre-record this message and show it to you this Sunday morning. Spoiler alert for those of you who haven't figured it out yet. We've been pre-recording these messages. This is Thursday morning as I'm talking, and then we release them on Sunday. That's been the best way to skin the cat since we haven't yet had the ability to live stream our services. However, next week, August the 16th, is the first time we're going to live stream our service, and I'm super excited about that. It's when we're going to resume our in-person gatherings. We're having church in our house or yours. So next week's going to look totally different. We're going to have full worship. We're going to have announcements, a sermon. It's going to feel more like a grace service. So whether you consume that here in person or at home, or I've seen people watching in the car with me up on their dash, if you consume it in that way, it's going to feel different and hopefully it will feel more like grace. And honestly, you know, that's been a tricky decision. As we approach that, there's been a lot of things to think through. What kind of precautions do we want to take as we come back? What are we going to do in here to make it safe? What are we going to ask you to do to make it safe? So if you're interested in returning next week to in-person gatherings, there's a video at the end of my sermon today that's going to tell you everything we're doing to make this safe, and it's going to also tell you some things that we're going to ask of you as you return in person. So stick around for that if you're interested in that. And I know that the decision to return to in-person gatherings and resume that is a controversial one. I know it's a difficult one. If we weren't going to do it next week, I'd have a group of people saying, hey, what are you waiting on? Let's go. We're ready for church. And by reopening next week, by resuming in-person gatherings next week, I know that there's a group of people saying, gosh, that feels foolish and irresponsible. And trust me, I wrestle with that every day. But there's two big reasons why we're choosing to resume in-person gatherings next week. And they're really this. The first one, and the prevailing one for me, is that, man, the church is a fundamentally communal institution. It's designed to be done together. Our souls need corporate worship. Our souls need fellowship. Our souls need to be around other people who love us and who love Jesus. We yearn for that. And to reduce church to what it's had to be for the past several months, to some video of worship that's prerecorded, and to me talking, to reduce church to that and to consume it in our homes, man, that is not the church that God designed. And so as soon as we can resume being together and expressing church in that way, I want to do that. I feel the impetus and the spiritual need to do that. I feel like some of us are spiritually wandering and this could draw us back in. And then on the practical level, one of the things that we realize as an elder board, and one of my prevailing thoughts is, listen, until there's a vaccine for this thing, we all have to do the math on the risks of what life looks like. We all have to decide how we want to live our life until a vaccine exists and is disseminated through our population. We're all, for the next several 12, 18 months, going to have to do this math on on what risks are worth it because it's not going away. And so it just made me realize that, man, we have a church full of people who are capable of doing that math. And so if in the equation you come out to, man, you want to resume in-person gatherings and you're going to be here next week and you're excited for that, wonderful. Can't wait to see you and wave at you from six feet away. If you are someone who you come out on that equation and you're not yet ready to take that risk and you don't know when you're gonna be, that's fine. I can't wait to see you. I'm glad we get to minister to you. I'm so glad that you're still connected to grace. But honestly, you know, it's been a stressful decision. I go to bed every night thinking about it. I wake up every morning thinking about it. I get people asking me, just about every day, are you sure we want to do this? How come we haven't done this sooner? You know, so-and-so thinks this about this. You know, so-and-so thinks we're running behind. We need to catch up. It has been a difficult decision because I can't remember a time in leadership when people have had to make more decisions with less certainty than what we have. And so it's been a difficult season. 2020 has been a difficult season. Listen, all of us, the stress isn't unique to me. All of us have faced uniquely stressful decisions. Some of you lead a business and you've had to decide how long you can keep people on. Some of you are an employee and you're not sure how much longer your position will be there. Or you've been furlough, or your salary's been reduced. We're all living under these different parameters. Man, my heart goes out. I mean, we're among them, the families who are sending children to school, and the math that all the parents are having to do. Gosh, should we do virtual? Should we do distance learning and just stay home and figure that out for families that have two parents that work? How in the world are you gonna keep all those plates in the air? And parents who have kids who are at these crucial points of their education where, man, your kid needs to learn to read and you know that you don't know how to teach phonics to your child. You know that you don't know how to teach these principles to your child. So what do we do? How do we not stunt the growth of our kids but also keep them safe? And is it reckless to send them back to preschool? Or is it more irresponsible to not get the social development that they need? How do we keep that in balance? My heart breaks for parents who have kids who are supposed to start kindergarten this year. Man, that's not what kindergarten is supposed to look like. That's a big moment, man. That's exciting. That's real big kid school. And they got to go and there's plexiglass and there's face masks and they don't leave their room and they eat right there and it's just they don't get to go to the playground. It's just not what it's supposed to be. My heart really does break for parents who are trying to do the mental math of, man, what do we do with our kids right now? And for the college freshmen who've been looking forward to this experience and it won't be what it's supposed to be. My heart breaks during this time, during 2020. Man, for those of us who struggle with anxiety or depression or loneliness, this year has been like a special kind of torture, hasn't it? Those who are given to depression, this is only making it worse. Those who are given to anxiety feel like they're swimming in it now, maybe about to drown. Every time you turn on the news or scroll through your phone, there's more bad news. There's more terrible things. There's more like, well, this kid got it over here and this whole community got it here and these terrible things have happened as a result of this. And that's just the pandemic, not to mention everything else that's going on in our culture right now. And what about those who are already alone, who already felt lonely before all the doors got shut and they couldn't go out anymore? What about people who just want a dang hug, man? This is a tough year. I've only scratched the surface on the things that all of us are walking through. I feel like this year has been uniquely distressing, uniquely depressing and anxiety-inducing. And that many of us, because we never expected that it would go this long. We never expected that we'd be in the middle of August still wondering when we'd come out of our houses. Still wondering when things are going to feel normal. For many of us, this year has been difficult in some pretty unique and impactful ways. And we may have at different points found ourselves pretty low, pretty distressed, feeling pretty beat up. That's why I felt that the story from Kings this morning was so appropriate. You might remember that we're in the middle of our series called A Time of Kings. That last week we talked about Elijah, one of the great prophets of God and his showdown with the prophets of Baal on top of Mount Carmel. And this week in 1 Kings chapter 19, so if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there, follow along with me if you can. And this week we find Elijah at what I believe to be his lowest point, his lowest moment. I believe, this is speculation, I believe that Elijah was a person who was given to depression. I believe that Elijah probably struggled with clinical depression. There's different pieces and bits of evidence in his life that he got pretty low and pretty sad pretty quick. In this passage, he's asking God to kill him. He's the point at which he doesn't even want to live his life anymore. What's happened is after he defeats the prophets of Baal and God uses him to convert a majority of Israel back to him. This is the height of life. This is the apex that Elijah could have ever accomplished. This is the best thing that a prophet could ever want. He defeats the opposing prophets. He shows them to be inept and empty. He converts all the people he's been trying to reach. This is the greatest possible victory a prophet could win. He should be on a mountaintop. And yet, as a result of his victory, Jezebel the queen promises that she's going to track down and kill Elijah. And so in chapter 19, we see Elijah run off and escape and in solitude is crying out to God. And he's telling God, I want to die. He says, I alone exist. I alone stand up for you. I'm the only one left of all the prophets, which by the way, is not true. Elijah's being dramatic here. He's being over the top. His emotions are running away with him. And if he'd stop and think about it for a minute, he would know that it's not true. But he's so worked up in his emotions that he says, I alone remain. God, please just take me. Now they seek my life too. Don't let them get to me. He is in the depths of despair and distress and depression. He's in a low moment. And to me, if we'll look at how God responds to Elijah in his low moment, we can be encouraged about how he'll respond to us and ours. So let's look at what God does and how he responds to Elijah when Elijah cries out from the depths of his soul, from the depths of depression, I just want to die, God. How does God respond to his low moment? We pick up the story in verse 5, chapter 19. This is depressed, and God sends an angel. But the angel wakes him up, says, hey, Elijah, you need to eat something. He gives him food and water. He falls back asleep. He wakes him up again. He says, listen, you need more food. You need more water. You need to eat this so it can sustain you for the journey. So he eats whatever kind of superfood God gave him in the moment, and then he travels 40 days to Horeb, the Mount of God. And so what we see in this instance, in the first part of this story, in chapter 19, when Elijah's at his lowest moment, when Elijah is distressed, that God sustains him. In Elijah's distress, the Father sustains him. And I use that word sustain because he gives Elijah what he needs, not necessarily what he wants. Elijah wants death. He's praying, God, please, can I just come to heaven now? Can my job be done? I don't want to do this anymore. Will you please take me? And God comes to him, sends an angel, but it's not an angel of death. It's not to give him what he wants. It's to give Elijah what he needs. In his distress, the father sustains him. And so with that sustenance, he goes and he travels 40 days to Horeb. And when he gets there, God sends him to a cave. And he says, I'm going to speak to you, Elijah. I have something to tell you. So I want you to go to this cave and I want you to wait. And I'm going to come to you and I'm going to speak to you. It's this, I love this moment. It's one of my favorite little moments in scripture just tucked away. Jen, my wife, it's one of her favorite moments in scripture. I've been excited to share it to you and bring it to your attention. For those who aren't aware of this story, to share it with you for the first time and for those who are to breathe fresh life into it. But I love what happens here. He goes off of his distress 40 days through the wilderness. Who knows where he's at emotionally now. He ends up in the cave and he's waiting for the voice of God. And this is what happens. We pick it up in verse 11. This is God speaking. It says, Put yourself for a moment in Elijah's shoes. He's been sent off to this place called Horeb, the Mount of the Lord. And God tells him, I want you to go and I want you to stay in this cave. I'm going to speak to you. So you're in this cave, you're tired and you're hungry and you're sad and you're depressed and you're huddled up and you're waiting for the voice of the Lord. And before the cave, it says this mighty wind blew and probably shook the cave and there was rocks coming down and trees falling outside. And you're thinking in this cave, certainly this is the Lord. Now God is going to speak to me out of this mighty wind, but the Lord is not in the wind. So you wait longer. There's an earthquake, and now it really shakes, and now the rocks really tumble, and now you start to really worry, am I safe in this cave? Surely the Lord is speaking out of the earthquake, and the Lord's not in the earthquake. Then the fire comes. And you're thinking, yeah, now God's talking to me. In the same fire that he sent down on the altar to defeat the prophets of Baal, the same fire that he spoke out of when he spoke to his servant Moses, now he's going to use that fire to speak to his servant Elijah. The Lord was not in the fire. And then there came a gentle whisper. And Elijah gathered his things and he went out to the mouth of the cave and he leaned in. And God whispered to him, Elijah, what are you doing? And some instructions follow after that. But I love this passage because we would expect the voice of God to be in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, to be loud and to be filling and to be shaking and to be awe-inspiring. But God often chooses to speak in the whisper. Because if you think about it, the whisper is intimate. It's close. Everybody hears the wind. Everybody sees the fire. Everyone feels the earthquake. That's for everybody. The whisper is for you. The whisper is just for Elijah. The whisper is only heard when we lean in, when we're close, when we're pursuing the Father. The whisper is only heard when he wraps himself up and he goes out to the Father to meet him, to hear him, to lean in and hear what he has to say. The whisper is intimate. It is caring. It's personal. And what we see is that in Elijah's distress, the Father speaks to him. At his lowest moment, when he most needs God, God shows up and he speaks to him. He speaks to him in a special way, in an intimate way. And I think that the way that the Father responds to Elijah's distress in 1 Kings 19 is such an encouraging message for us in 2020 in the midst of our distress. Because it's the same God and the same truth. And the fact is that in our distress, the Father sustains us and speaks to us. In our distress, at our lowest moment, when we feel down, when we feel beat up, when we need him most, when maybe some of us have even cried out to God and said, God, I don't even feel like this life is worth living. In those moments, our Father sustains us and he speaks to us. He did it then and he does it in 2020. And that thing about sustenance, I alluded to it earlier. God gives us what we need, not necessarily what we want. I think some of us are praying for things that we want and not looking around for the provisions that we need. I remember as COVID started, as the world changed forever back in March, you know, we have a four-year-old daughter. She's four and a half. She would point that out to us if she could. And she's in preschool. And when everything shut down in March, so did preschool. And her year got cut short. Her year got ended abruptly like many of your children's years got ended abruptly. And at the end of March, we moved into a new neighborhood. So here we are with our only child, and we're acutely aware of that. Lily has even expressed that sometimes when it's just us in the house, she gets lonely. And that's hard to hear, but that's our reality. And man, our parent hearts are really concerned because here's our four-year-old daughter. She's been pulled out of school. It's so important to us that she's around other adult figures that have some authority in her life, but she can't come to church where that happens. She can't go to school where that happens, so it's just us. It's so important to us that our isolated four-year-old daughter would have social interaction with others, that she would have to get in fights and resolve conflict, that she would have to problem solve, that she would have to learn how to not get her way and not be selfish and play what other people want to play sometimes. That's important stuff. Those things that she was learning in preschool were incredibly important to us. And now we're in the middle of this schedule where there's no more preschool. She's not around those kids. We can't go to the playground. We moved into a place that has a playground 150 yards away from us that we're so excited about, but it has yellow caution tape over it. And every time we go past it, Lily asks us, how much longer are they going to tape up the playground? She can't play there either. We can't engage in our normal summer rhythms of play dates and appointments and Bible studies. And our parents' hearts are breaking, wondering, man, she needs this interaction so bad. And without us knowing, by what I believe was just God's providence, he places us in a house on a cul-de-sac that has 10 kids under the age of 10. And do you know that between 12 o'clock and 1 o'clock in the afternoon every day, one of those kids comes and bangs on our door and asks if Lily can play. And at this point, she doesn't even ask permission. She just goes speeding past us and runs out the door and is outside until 6 or 6.30 when we call her in. Every day. Every day she's sweaty and gross and stinky. She has bug bites up and down her legs. Underneath our front porch is several wrappers of those Popeye's popsicles and beads jammed down into the crevices and the remnants of kids playing and our creaking swing getting swung too hard from half the neighborhood being on our front porch. And it's God's sustenance. I'm so grateful for those things. That God looked out for my daughter and said, I know that this is going to be a difficult time, so here, here's what you need right now. And God is sustaining you too. God has provided for you in ways this year that you may not even be aware of yet. I think sometimes we have to stop and look around and say, we may not be getting what we want, but God, how are you providing me what we need? Because I think he's still doing that. And I think that God is still whispering to us. I think that if we lean in and we listen, we can still hear the voice of God. Back in 2013, I had the opportunity to go to Israel. It was an incredible opportunity. I've been saying since I got here that I want to do a year-long study through the Bible and then take that Bible study to Israel and go on a tour together, and I still want to do that. You guys need to hold my feet to the fire about that. I would love to take people from grace over to Israel. But one of the things we did when we were in Israel is we went up on the Mount of Beatitudes where Jesus supposedly gave the Sermon on the Mount. And there's a Catholic monument built there. And so there's a little stone wall that you could go sit on. And I was in the habit, whenever we went to a different site, of finding in my Bible the events that happened in this place and reading through them and praying through them as I just kind of experienced this place. And so on the Mount of the Beatitudes, I went off in a corner by myself, and I was sitting on a stone wall, and I can remember looking down, and I was looking down into this valley, into kind of a plain and then the coast of the Sea of Galilee as this mountain, as this hill kind of spilled into it and I'm at the top of the hill and in front of me about 10 or 15 feet away, there's a tree over here and the branches of the tree are sweeping in front of me and I just remember looking down and grabbing my Bible and reading through the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus preached there in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. And as I was reading, I remember praying, Father, I want to see you today. I want to see you here. I want to experience you here. Help me to feel your presence, God. And towards the end of the sermon, Jesus says, look to the birds. Look at the birds. Some translations say, consider the birds. And when I read that phrase, I just kind of felt like, I felt this prompt to pause. I know this might sound funny to you. I know this might sound weird, but I felt it in my soul. Hey, just stop reading for a second. And so I read that phrase, look at the birds. I felt like I should stop reading. And I looked up and I had been hearing birds over there while I was sitting there, but none had come near me. And in the moment that I looked up, this one lone bird flew over and lit on a branch right in front of me, about 10 feet away, and looked me dead in the eye for five or 10 seconds. It felt like much longer than that. And then just flew away. And I have this big note in my Bible about that moment when the Lord whispered to me, and you will never convince me that he didn't bring that bird over to look me in the eye to tell me, I hear you. I'm listening to you. I'm with you. I'm right here. And he whispered to me. He whispered to me, I think, because it was intimate, because I was leaning in, because I was pursuing him. And I asked him, Lord, show me your presence. It was an earnest prayer. I didn't mean, I wasn't doing it to show off. I didn't tell anybody about it that day. I just kind of, I think this is the first time I've told anybody that story. I just kind of experienced it. And the Lord is whispering to you too. And it's really easy to get distracted by the earthquakes and by the wind and by the fire. It's really easy to think that the voice of the Lord is in all the huge things that are going on around us. But often what we need to do is quiet down those voices and get in a place where we can finally listen. Sometimes we produce the noise ourselves, don't we? We turn on the TV or we pull out our phone or we glance at the computer or we listen to the radio with every spare second so that there's no possible way that even if the Lord is whispering to us, there's no possible way we would hear it because we're drowning him out. In the meantime, we're distressed and we're depressed and we don't know what to do and we're just covering ourselves with all these other things that aren't the voice of the Lord. And if we would just stop and go to the mouth of the cave and lean into the Father and beg him to speak and listen, I think he's still whispering to us now. I don't know where you are. I don't know what this year has been like for you. I know for many of us, this has been a challenging year to say the least. I know that there are some of us who can absolutely relate to Elijah in this passage and just feel low. I want all of us to know and to be reminded that in our distress, our Father still speaks to us. He still sustains us. This week, let us look around for that sustenance and let us lean in for the whisper. Let's pray. Father, give us eyes to see what you're doing. Give us ears to hear what you're saying. For those of us who have clutter and noise, help us sweep it away and lean into you and hear you whispering to us. God, may those who need it most hear you this week, hear you today. God, give us eyes to see the ways that you're providing for us that we may not notice. Help us to see that even in our lowest moments that you are sustaining us. And to understand and appreciate the wisdom of even if we're not getting what we want, Lord, you are absolutely giving us what we need. God, I pray for those who are stressed about decisions. Give them clarity and confidence. I pray for the parents that face impossible choices in uncertain times, for the leaders that face difficult choices in uncertain times. God, be with us all as we try to listen to you. And let everything that's happening in this year and in this season point us back to our need for-person gatherings here very shortly on August the 16th. As we get prepared to do that, we know that everybody's not in the same place. Everyone doesn't have the same level of security and comfort as you go out and venture out into the world. And some of you may simply not be in a place where you're ready to gather in person, and that's all right. But if you are ready to gather in person, if that's something that you're looking forward to and you're considering doing, then I just wanted to let you know, first of all, some of the things that we're doing to make church as safe as possible for everyone who's going to come here, and then some things that we're going to ask you to do if you choose to come participate in the live services. What we're doing, first of all, is we're cleaning the whole church every week. We're sanitizing it, all the surfaces, every bit of it, 48 hours before anyone's going to be in this building on Sunday. So the very latest Friday morning, the whole building will be clean, will be spotless, will be sanitized, and will be ready to go for Sunday morning with kind of be sealed off so that nobody else is allowed in the building until it's time for services on Sunday. Another thing that we've done is we've mounted hand sanitizers at the entrance of every door to the auditorium. So that's going to be there, it's going to be ready for you. If you have to pull your own doors or grab a bulletin or anything like that, we're going to have that hand sander there ready for you, ready to go. Speaking of holding doors, our greeters are going to be at the doors leading to the outside and they're going to open those for you. So you won't have to worry about this. It doesn't have to stress you out. Our ushers are going to be holding open the auditorium doors. So you're going to be in great shape there. We've also mounted some offering boxes at the back of the auditorium. We understand that we can't pass baskets now so because of that there's going to be boxes at the back of the auditorium as you leave every Sunday you can put your offering in there you can submit your connection card whatever else you'd like to do we're going to have those at the rear of the room so that you can put the cards and the offering in there so that we don't have to pass the baskets. We're also going to take the bulletins and just go ahead and place those in your seats. So there's not going to be any need to grab those from an usher or for many people to touch the bulletin. Those are going to be in your seats on Thursday or Friday morning, and no one's going to touch them until you get there. Lastly, these services are for families. Everyone's invited. Kids Ministry isn't going to be open just yet. So all the families are invited to come and participate in the service on the 16th. To that end, our wonderful children's workers, our kids minister, Aaron, and our assistant, Julie, have put together some busy bags for small kids and specially designed sermon notes for some of the bigger kids to keep them entertained and engaged so that you can pay attention to the sermon and whatever else may be going on in the service on Sunday. That's what we're going to be doing for you. Now, here's a few things that we're going to ask you to do for us. We're saying on August the 16th that we are going to be meeting in our house or yours. So if you're choosing to meet in our house, then these are kind of our house rules. Our first house rule is that we're going to ask that everyone over the age of 10 is wearing a face mask inside the church. I know that's inconvenient. I know that's not fun. I don't want to preach to a room full of face masks. But for us, wearing a face mask is about being considerate of others. It's about making other people feel more comfortable in an environment. It's about taking the extra step to protect our brothers and sisters. It's really about doing the right thing. So we're gonna ask that everyone over the age of 10 wears a face mask just to take care of everyone and make church as safe as possible when we do return. Our second house rule is simply, hey, no touching please. We know that some of us are ready for hugs and handshakes and fist pounds and I get it. I am too. I can't wait until we can just act normal. But the deal is that not everybody who comes back is going to be comfortable giving a handshake or a hug or a fist pound or even an elbow bump or whatever else. So for the sake of not creating awkward situations, for not making someone else feel uncomfortable, we're just going to ask that while we're in church, we just keep our hands to ourselves. If some of you are married to a spouse where this might be difficult, let us know in advance. We'll send some zip ties to your house and you can lock their wrists down to their belt loops and everyone will be on their best behavior when we get to church. The third thing we're going to ask from everyone is to maintain a two-seat gap minimum between you and the next family, between your family and the next family over. We've removed every other row in the auditorium to maintain some social distancing as we sit, but we also know that with those rows is the opportunity to sit right next to each other. So we're just going to ask that if you didn't come with that person, if you haven't talked to them already about sitting with them, please don't sit right next to somebody. Please leave that two seat gap between you and the next family. Okay, this one's pretty simple. One at a time in the restroom, please. For the time being, all of our restrooms are now effectively single seaters. All right, that's what we're going to do. I know that some of our restrooms have more space than others, but just for the sake of clarity, just one person at a time, let's be respectful of that, should be pretty easy. Fifth, B-Y-O-C. Bring your own coffee. Coffee bar is not going to be open right now. Just wanted to let you know that ahead of time. So if you like a warm drink while you participate in a worship service, then feel free to bring that from home. But we're not going to be able to provide you with any of that for the time being. Lastly, we would ask that you would help us keep the lobby clear. I know that that's a disappointing one. That one bums me out. I love the lobby. Grace loves the lobby. It's a sacred and special place for us. We love to congregate and be together. It's the whole reason why we're resuming these gatherings. But we're going to ask that for now, since our lobby is also the tightest place in the church, that we would congregate outside or in the auditorium. Laugh and giggle and catch up in those places so that we can leave the lobby clear for those who simply need to pass through without worrying about being too close to someone else as they go into and out of the doors and into and out of that space. I know it's weird to come to church with all these rules and these precautions and these things that we're going to ask one another to abide by. I don't like it any more than you do, but I tell you what I really don't like. I really don't like preaching to an empty room. I really don't like experiencing church from my couch. I really don't like not getting to see any of you. So for those who are ready, we're excited to come back. I'm really, really excited for corporate worship to do that together and just to live stream it. So even if you're at home, you can worship with us from your house. I'm really looking forward to kind of re-engaging in what feels like a more normal church. And I appreciate those of you who are willing to abide by these things and take those baby steps with us as we inch back to something that feels like normal. For those who are willing, I can't wait to see you that Sunday.

Happy Easter, Grace. This is the weirdest Easter ever, isn't it? None of us have ever experienced an Easter like this before, and I don't think we ever will again. It makes me so sad because Easter is my favorite holiday. I love Easter. I love getting to see everybody. I love the energy in the lobby and in the auditorium. I love getting to hug everyone's neck and seeing how everyone is dressed and meeting children and parents and grandparents and family. It's just, it's such a great holiday. And Easter is a boisterous holiday. It's celebratory. It's exuberant. It celebrates the victory of victories. But it just doesn't feel like Easter right now. It doesn't feel like Easter at this time in our culture and in our community. We don't feel exuberant. We don't feel boisterous. We feel anxious. We feel unsure. For many of us, it's hard to see a path forward on the other side of COVID and quarantine and economic depression. To have a job right now, if you have one at all, is to have done the mental math of how long can my company continue to pay me? And once that money runs out and they have to make cuts, where do I sit in the spectrum of people in my office? We look over the cubicles and think I'm more valuable than that person. That person's probably going to have a job longer than I do. I think to be employed is to have had to have done that math. I talked to a buddy just last week who said, yeah, man, I have a job now, but I really don't know how much longer they can continue to pay me. That's a difficult stress to be in. And then I think of the people on the other side of that stress, the folks right now who own businesses, who are running companies. And I think, gosh, that's a difficult decision that they have to make. They're walking down that path as well, trying to figure out who can we keep and how long can I keep them and how long can we keep things afloat. Others are furloughed and that's fearful and that's fraught with uncertainty. We may not see a path forward there because will the job that we were relieved of be there when things go back to normal and what will normal look like? Or if you're just unemployed and you're facing the idea of trying to get a job once the economy can get turned back on, man, we're facing job loss at an unprecedented rate. The unemployment rate is close to that of the Great Depression. So a lot of us are thinking, even if I can get back into the job market, what is the competition for those jobs going to look like? These are very real stresses. These are very real fears and sources of anxiety. And then if we think about a path forward, that's uncertain too because what does it look like when we just turn the spigot back on and we can all come out of our caves and get haircuts and see each other and not wear sweatpants anymore? What does that look like? I've talked to parents that are concerned about how this is impacting their kids. I know for me, my daughter Lily is asking questions like, Dad, what is a virus? What do viruses do? There's caution tape over our neighborhood playground right now and every time we go by it, she says, it makes me so sad that the playground is closed. And she doesn't understand, and she's sad that she can't see her friends. I'm sad I can't play with my friends. And what's it going to look like when things are normal again? I think a lot of us are facing the reality that the impact of COVID and what we're walking through right now is going to be more protracted than we ever anticipated. And so the truth of it is right now we don't feel like Easter. It doesn't feel like spring. We feel a lot more like the people of Israel that Isaiah is talking to in the book of the Bible that he wrote. In the Old Testament, there's a book called Isaiah. It's one of the greatest books of prophecy ever written. It's a phenomenal book. And he's writing it to an Israelite people who are God's chosen people. They're God's children. They're his chosen ones. And they wear that like a badge of honor. And they should because God has promised them His protection. And in those promises, He's also promised them that He would grant them land, that it would be what we know of as the modern nation of Israel. That would be theirs forever. Yet in the time of Isaiah, several hundred years before Jesus comes on the scene, they do not inhabit the land of Israel. They're actually enslaved by the Babylonians. They're enslaved, they feel abandoned, they feel forgotten, and they're abused. And for many of them, they were hopeless. They're thousands of miles away from the land that was promised to them. Many of them feel abandoned by their God. God, if you're so good, if you're so real, if you're looking out for us, then why are we here? Why are we growing up as generations of slaves? They felt hopeless. They felt anxious. They were very unsure of their path forward and they didn't even know what normal could potentially look like. And so as I thought about the Easter message, I thought it was more appropriate to look at this verse in Isaiah than it was to start off with the resurrection story and the victory that it celebrates because we feel a lot more like the people in Israel or like the Israelites than we feel victorious right now. And it's to these people, these people who felt hopeless, these people who didn't see a path forward, that God gives this great chapter in Isaiah 43. I would encourage you to read the whole chapter of Isaiah 43 and see the heart and the promises of God brought forth in that chapter. But in the 19th verse, God makes this promise. He gives His children this assurance that I think is so comforting and so powerful and so wonderful that it's where I wanted to land for us this morning. And I can't speak to the posture of God during this passage. I can't speak to his emotions because the scriptures don't reveal much about it. But if you'll allow me the license to make a guess, I picture God in this passage as a good and kind and loving father. I know that when I comfort Lily, I bring her up into my lap and I bring her close to me and I tell her that everything's going to be okay and I try to, I use a calm voice and I try to reassure her and I kind of picture God collectively doing that with his children in this verse. In Isaiah 43, verse 19, God says to his children who are hurting and broken and scared and unsure. He says, behold, I am doing a new thing. Even now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it? I will make paths in the wilderness and streams in the desert. I love that verse. What a wonderful verse of comfort to his children. To bring them up onto his lap, to comfort them, to embrace them, to bring them into himself and say, I know that you feel hopeless, but I'm going to give you hope. I know that you feel forgotten, but I see you and I remember you. I know that you feel abandoned, but you're not abandoned. Even now, even though you don't see it, I'm working for you. Don't you see it now? If you look carefully, can't you see the work that I'm doing for you? Even in a very practical way, they were surrounded by thousands of miles of wilderness. There was all this uncharted territory between them and the land that God had promised to them. And God says, I will make a path through that wilderness. And even though that wilderness is surrounded by desert, I will make streams in that desert to sustain you. I love the message there in Isaiah 43, 19, where God says, hey, I'm doing a new thing. I'm going to make a path for you. I'm going to make streams in the desert. I'm going to make the impossible possible. I know you don't see a way out. I know that you feel forgotten. I know that you even feel betrayed by me, but I have not forgotten you. I remember you and I see you. And I think it's important to note that these people have every right to wonder, man, has God forgotten about us? Has God forgotten about me? He made me these promises. I've done all the right things. Is he still looking out for me? And God in Isaiah 43, 19 says, yeah, I am. I still care about you. And I heard one time that a good book or a good verse is 50% content and 50% timing. It depends on when it encounters you in your life, what's going on in your life. And that's maybe why this verse is so powerful for me because I remember when I encountered this verse and when God made a new path for me in my life. I have proof that this verse is true and that the heart of God stays true for His children. In October of 2014, and I've told this story to grace people before, so I won't belabor it, but for those of you who may not be aware of this part of my story, in October of 2014, Jen and I found out that we were pregnant. And we had struggled for many years to get pregnant. It was the prayer and the cry of our heart that God would allow us to be parents. And we had people and communities praying around us. It was an incredible movement of God and always encouraging to know that these people were looking out for us. And in October of 2014, we found out that we were pregnant. And we were exuberant. We were so happy. I can't remember joy like that. But in early December of 2014, we learned that we had miscarried. And in our life, the way that things have gone for us, that was the deepest, most profound sadness we'd ever had to walk through. I felt broken. And even though I wouldn't have admitted it at the time, I was mad at God. I felt abandoned by him. I was looking at all these other people who had kids and had families, and I would think arrogantly, why did they get a family? What have they done? I've organized my life around you, God. This isn't fair. But I was just mad at God, and I was just flailing and thrashing. And in the midst of that, I got asked to preach a sermon. I was on staff at a church, and the new year was coming, and that was typically a time when I got asked to preach. And so I got asked to preach in the beginning of January. And I wanted to be a good soldier. I wanted to do my part, and so I agreed to do it. But I didn't want to preach. I was mad at God. I don't want to get up there and start talking about his truths. And so in all that, I went to Jen, my wife, and I said, hey, I have to preach in a couple of weeks. What should I preach about? And she showed me this verse in Isaiah. She pointed it out to me in her Bible. And she said, I need you to preach on this verse. I need you to preach on a new thing because that's what I need. And I said, okay. And I wrote her a sermon. And it's the only time in my life that I can remember writing a sermon for one person where I thought, I hope the rest of you get something out of this. But for me, I just hope that this encourages my wife. And I wrote it for her. And even, can I just tell you, even as I preached it, I didn't believe it. I didn't, I didn't, I was preaching about God doing a new thing and I didn't want a new thing. I wanted my old thing back, that baby that we had. I was convinced it was a boy and his name was going to be Sam. And I didn't want a new baby, I wanted Sam. But I preached it. And I got through it. And we just kind of muddled on. But around Mother's Day of that year, we found out that we were pregnant again. It was joy of joys. And that pregnancy is what gave us Lily. This is my daughter Lily right here. This week, I taught her to ride a bike. She looks amazing in that helmet. I wish all of you could have heard her screaming and laughing and exclaiming and giggling at her ability to ride a bike. It was incredible. It was one of the gifts of this COVID time that we have that part to ourselves where she can learn. And you know, every time I look at Lily, I'm reminded that she's my new thing. She's my new path. Every time I hold on to her, every time I help her fall asleep, every time I pray for her, I remember how I felt in December of 2014, and I hold on to this new thing that God did for us. I hold on to this new path that he made for us that I would never not choose, that I'm so grateful for. Lily is my reminder that God continues to make new paths. And it may seem weird that this is what I'm talking about on Easter, that it's some obscure verse in the Old Testament, but I wanted to help you see how Lily is my reminder that God still makes new paths because I believe that Easter stands out throughout all of time as God's yearly reminder that he continues to make new paths. Isn't that what Easter is? Isn't that what the disciples stumbled upon? The story of Easter is that Jesus was crucified on Friday and he was put into a grave And as the body of our Savior went into that grave, all hopes of a future went into it with him. That grave, that tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea was a dead end. There was no paths out of there. It was it. There was hopelessness in that tomb. And as the disciples sat around quarantined, ironically, on Saturday, they had no hope. They sat in the middle of a dead end. They were anxious and unsure of a path forward, just like us and just like God's children of Israel in the nation of Babylon when Isaiah was writing. And then on Sunday, on Easter morning, Mary goes to the tomb and she hears maybe the greatest sentence that's ever been uttered in history by the angel of God who is at the tomb. And he says to her, why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen. Jesus is risen. And in that moment, what we see is that all of history turns on its axis and God has won the victory of victories. He has conquered death and hell with the resurrection of his son. He has restored us to a relationship with him. What our sin broke, that death and resurrection repaired. And because of Easter, there are no dead ends. Because of Easter, there are always new paths. Easter itself is a new path where Mary walked into that tomb feeling as if she was entering into a dead end, into a hopeless situation with no path forward. And God, in that moment, I can almost hear Him whispering, Behold, the new thing, the new path, the stream in the desert. And because of Easter every year, we're reminded death has no sting. Because of Easter, we have my favorite quote that says, for we are not given to despair, for we are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song. There is no pandemic. There is no death. There is no disease. There is no bad news. There is no tragedy that can overcome the victory and the joy of Easter. And isn't it great? Isn't it remarkable? I wish that we could be together for Easter. I wish that we could celebrate this as a family. But isn't it wonderful that in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, in the middle of isolation and global uncertainty and anxiety, God has placed this most holy and high of holidays to remind us, I still make new paths. I still do new things. You may not see a path forward, but I do. You may not know what's going to happen next, but I do. You may feel abandoned by God. You may feel let down by God. You may be looking around going, God, I've done all the right things, man. I've tried to be nice to my wife. I've tried to be nice to my kids. I've tried to support my husband. I've tried to give when I can. We try to be generous people and my life feels like it's falling apart. And where are you, God? And Easter is his reminder for us that he's right here. Can I also tell you that that message, that simple message that God still makes new paths, he still makes old things new, he still makes beauty out of ashes is why we're filming here in this place. It's why we've chosen this park, not just to make it springy for Easter, not just to remind us of the promises that nature brings in at the end of every winter, but because this park used to be a city dump. This is the park that used to be the landfill for Raleigh. This place, where I am, everything here used to be filled with trash and fire. It was undesirable. It was the last place anyone or anything wanted to end up. This place was one big dead end. And God, in His goodness, has made it beautiful again. He has literally laid new paths in this place that families walk on and enjoy. There's a playground that children play on. This has become one of the prettiest places in the whole city. And to me, it's a reminder and a symbol of the fact that God still makes new paths. So if you need a reminder, if you need some encouragement during this Easter season, come out here, walk around, look at the greenery, experience the beauty, and be reminded this Easter that even as you sit at home, even as some of us are fraught with uncertainty, even though it might feel silly to be all dressed up for Easter and still sitting on our couch, just remember, God still makes new paths. The same God that made one for Israel, that has made one for you in the past, that has made this place beautiful, will make a new path for you too. And isn't God good for placing that yearly reminder in the middle of our uncertainty? Let's pray. Father, you're good. You're good even when we don't know how. Even when we don't know how everything's going to work out. Even when it's hard to see that goodness sometimes. We know that you're good. Father, thank you for conquering death for us. Thank you for conquering tragedy for us. God, I lift up anyone who feels uncertain, anyone who feels anxious, anyone who might be saying, I don't want the old, I don't want anything new, God. I just want things to go back to the way they were. I pray that we would take solace and comfort in your word. I pray that we would take solace and feel peace from your promises. And that in the gentle way that you do it, that you would draw us into you and you would remind us that you are still the God who makes new paths. It's in your son's name we pray, who died and was risen for us on this day. Amen.