Sermons tagged with Character

This morning we really want to acquaint you with the ministries that we partner with. We want everybody to know a little bit more about what goes on behind the scenes kind of of grace because you've probably heard me say plenty of times that 10% of everything that's given goes to ministries operating outside the walls of grace. We actually have a missions committee full of people who have a heart for missions, a heart for seeing others come to know Jesus, and want to use the resources that we have to see that brought about. And their job is to find ministry partners for us to pair up with who are accomplishing the mission of God out in the world. And then they take the money that we give and we support these ministries in various ways. And it occurred to me, it's actually, we're doing this because Sarah Prince emailed me, or maybe a Facebook message. I forget how we communicate. Hey, we'll be in town. We'd love to share if we got the opportunity. And I thought, gosh, I think the church needs to know about all of the people that we partner with and what they do. And so we're going to highlight Jen Taylor. You're going to hear her story and what she does over at Refugee Hope. And then we're going to talk with the princes as well. But this is an opportunity. This is kind of a getting to know you. Let's learn who are we supporting, what are they doing, and how can we get involved, how can we pray. And so without further ado, this is Jen Taylor. She's with Refugee Hope Partners, which I think is, are you guys located outside of Raleigh as well? So we have families that have moved outside of Raleigh that we remain connected to, but our main location where we start all of our relationships with our refugee friends is actually five minutes down the street right behind the Falls of the Neuse Chick-fil-A. There's an apartment complex right there. Cool. So we're going to dive into that, but before we do, there's some folks here, even though you've been here for like your whole life, who might not know you. So tell us about your background at Grace. You grew up here. Your parents dragged you here all the time. So how was it growing up at Grace and all that stuff? Tell us about that, how long you've been involved here. Yeah, so I've been involved at Grace probably since the start of Grace. I grew up here in the youth group. I actually had Casey and Sarah as youth leaders back in the day. Like they're not getting enough attention. Exactly. But my parents were super involved. I even did, if any of y'all are back that far enough, the handbell choir. I was a part of that. Yo, we had one of those? We need to dial that back up. But yeah, so just grew up here. Had a family here. Y'all are family. And so I went away for a few years, but once I moved back to Raleigh about three years ago, it was just natural to plug right back into Grace Family and right back into the ministry here. So that's great. I'm now going to refer to you as the handbell chair. You're in charge of getting that rolling. So tell us just a broad view about Refugee Hope Partners and what they do, and then we'll kind of talk about what you do with them, and you can tell us about some of the families that you work with and things like that. So what is Refugee Hope Partners? Yes. So Refugee Hope Partners is a nonprofit right here in Raleigh. We work with over 700 different refugees from over 40, well, right under 40 different countries from around the world. Refugees come from these countries after being in refugee camps. They sign in with the UN and get placed by the U.S. government right here in North Raleigh. So they move into these apartment complex, specifically Cedar Point Apartments where we're located, and we help that transition. As refugees come in, they don't have the language that they need. They don't know the systems that are in place in America. They don't know how to read. So paperwork is a huge issue to get past. So we are there not just loving our refugee neighbors but really trying to help in everyday life build confidence, engage the community and really equip them so that they can become sustainable right here in the U.S. So we have tons of different programs that we do that through but some of them are medical, some are ESL, some are homework help. So we do tutoring for all of our kids. We have like 350 kids that we work with. So it gets to be a little bit crazy, but it's a whole lot of fun, and we do a lot of ministry. We have Bible study as well, and we share the gospel throughout. You said, I think, 40 countries are represented. What are the predominant ones? I'm sure that there's a majority there. So what are the top two or three? So we do have a very large group that comes from kind of Central Africa, the Congo, a lot of Swahili speakers. And then we also have a large group of Karenni refugees from Myanmar and Burma. That conflict is still going on. So they are 25 years deep in a refugee camp before they come here. And then we also have a lot of Middle Eastern countries represented. So a big group from Afghanistan has come recently. So we have a lot of Farsi speakers that come in as well. And as you love on them and help them and kind of help to pave a way to assimilate, I would suppose is the right word. How are you also able to point them towards Jesus? And with coming from so many different places, there's so many different faiths represented there. And I would imagine that encountering each faith has its own sets of issues and things that make it helpful and things that don't. So how do you, what do you guys do programmatically and relationally to point the refugees towards Jesus and to let them know that you're doing this because Jesus loves them and you do too. Yeah. I think the biggest thing that we do is we just love them. Jesus loved us first so that we can love them, and we love our refugee neighbors in so many ways. We are there during crises. Whenever those happen, we are right there, feet on the ground, loving them in the midst of it. And even in our programs, we don't shy away from the fact that we are a Christian organization and that we are here to love them no matter what they believe or where they come from or what their background is. That we have Bible studies that are geared towards all different groups of people. We have, even in our ESL programs, at least around Easter and Christmas, we tell the whole gospel story right there. And many of those people that are in our ESL programs come from Muslim world, Muslim background, and they're getting to hear the story of who Jesus is and how he loves us right there in our programs. That's wonderful. And what is your role now? How did you get hooked up with them? Did you start a volunteer? Was there an internship process? Or did you find them and go, that's a position that I think I might enjoy and so apply for it? And then what you started as, how has that morphed over the time that you've been with them? How long have you been with them? About three years. Okay, yeah. So when I started, I actually moved back to Raleigh and didn't know exactly what to do next. And I knew I wanted to work with refugees. So I went to talk to the executive director about volunteering. Where'd you go to school? I went to Chapel Hill. And got a degree in? Global Studies. She's using the degree, Pop. Okay, so I'm sorry. I just wanted to, so you saw that, you thought it could work, and carry on. Yeah, and I sat down for coffee, and within that coffee chat, the director said, well, we have a position for you. And so I got a job right after thinking I was going to volunteer. So it was definitely the Lord being like, you need to be here. I started out part-time doing more of the ESL program and then switched into program staff, which means that I do everything on staff. And then from there have moved into the volunteer coordinator. So I actually connect everybody that wants to volunteer. I'm the first person you see. I walk you through the whole process and all of our programs and what we do and get you connected in the programs that we have. What kind of volunteer opportunities are available? If you have 350 kids to tutor, I'd imagine you need some of those. Emil is great at high-level math, so bring him in for all your advanced students. But besides that, Zach, don't laugh so hard. That's mean, man. There's tutoring needs, I'm sure, maybe even some ESL needs, but what else? What other kind of volunteer spots are there? Yeah, so you can plug in anywhere. We have a medical ministry that helps drive families to doctor's appointments. So if you can drive a car, you can volunteer with us. We have a bridge mentorship program that literally pairs volunteers with a high school student and helps them move into those next steps of what do I do after graduation? What is my career? What could that look like? We have ESL for adults. We have a preschool, like a preschool for our three and four year olds. We have childcare during the ESL times. Anything that you would like to do, we have it and we would love to get you plugged in. And it really is any schedule as well. We run programs that are on a weekly basis, so you can plug in and really get to know people on a weekly basis. But then we also have programs that are come as you can. Show up once a month, show up once a year, that's okay. We'd love to have you be a part of our programs and really get to know the community and the refugees there. So as you think about, well, I guess I would ask you this too. I think this is relevant of every organization. What were your specific unique challenges during COVID? Because I can imagine in an apartment complex with refugees, folks who are not yet fully assimilated, that that had its own unique set of challenges. What was the biggest challenge during the heart of the pandemic? And now what are you guys thinking about as we move out of it? Definitely at the very beginning, the biggest challenge was just feeding our families and making sure that those that were unemployed were able to pay rent. That was a huge thing at the beginning of COVID and all that happened, and we were right there. Grace was with us actually donating on a weekly basis groceries for some of our families. And then as we transitioned into online school, that was a giant mess for us. I bet it was. Even just Wi-Fi and tablets, right? Even just Wi-Fi and tablets. So we were the main access for schools to help kids get computers, get internet, get connected to their teachers. We had different classrooms running all year long of if you can't get internet working or something's wrong, you come to us and we'll actually have school right there. So every morning we would be trying to sign in five different students at once to one teacher and say, no, they're here, they're attending, I promise. So just getting through that process was a big challenge. Thankfully, they're in person now and we don't have to worry about that anymore. I can't imagine what a challenge that was. I'm curious, in ministry, in my experience, you have stories or experiences that sometimes will anchor you in what you're doing. They encourage you. They kind of God-breathed into those moments, into those families, into those relationships. You see someone come to Christ. You see a family strengthened, or you see some prayers answered in a big way. And those stories kind of, they anchor you in the not so easy times. And I'm sure that you have a couple of those. So as you look back on your three years with Refugee Hope, tell us a story or two of someone that you saw come to Christ, of a family that you saw strengthened, of some prayers that you saw answered. What are your kind of anchor stories? Well, like I said, I started out in ESL. And while I was there, one of the ESL moms who comes from, she grew up in Pakistan and Afghanistan, kind of switching over those borders. That sounds like an easy background. Goodness gracious. So she and her family have moved here, and they got really connected to our ESL volunteers. And one volunteer in particular was able to share the gospel with her to the point that they do a Bible study on a weekly basis even still. And her family has moved not only from being able to speak English. She actually wants to become a nurse and wants to go back to college and get a degree. And then her family was able to, through the years of learning how to save, learning how to speak English, learning to get better jobs and fill out applications, they actually just bought a house six months ago in Nightdale and are now living on their own, sustainable, and still bring their kids back every week, at least twice a week, for violin class that we have running and to be a part of ESL and encourage the other families and moms to be a part of it. Gosh, does anyone else feel terrible about their life right now? Holy smokes, that's unbelievable. And here's what's really cool about what Jen just did. She told a story about something that someone else did. You don't think that she's had those conversations too? And she just took the spotlight that we put on her and she was like, well, this volunteer one time did this thing. That's really, really cool. As we finish up our time with you, what are we hoping for next at Refugee Hope? And what can we as individuals, not Grace as a church, but what can we as individuals do to be a part of whatever the next season of life is at Refugee Hope? Yeah, so right now we're getting, gearing up to go back to school. So one of the big things that Grace is already going to be a part of is our back-to-school drive and sale. We're actually going to equip our 350 students with all that they need for school. And so Grace can be a part of just helping supply some of the supplies, and that information will be soon to come of exactly what we are asking for. But then just prayer. Our ministry is growing continually, and we're looking at strategically how we can grow and love on our refugee neighbors, not only at Cedar Point, but all around Raleigh. So it's moving. The Lord is moving in this place, and it's really cool to see. That's awesome. I also just kind of feel compelled to say, I don't know to whom this might apply, but if you're in a position where you need workers that folks like this may be able to fill, I would imagine that you could reach out to Jen, and she could hook you up with some pretty good folks. So to whomever that might apply, I think that would be something good to keep in mind for Grace. Thank you so much for coming and sharing with us. She will be in the lobby immediately following the service, so you guys can bombard her there and we can find out more ways to get involved. And we're going to end the service with talking about a volunteer team. So if you're hearing about, like, well, Grace is involved in school supplies, and you're going to see a video here in a minute from Fox Roads, something that we did for them at Christmas, and you're like, I want to do that stuff when that's happening, you'll be able to. So we'll get to that in a minute. But before I let you go, I just want to pray for you as a church. Let's pray for her and everything that's going on at Refugee Hope. Father, gosh, we are just so encouraged by the work that you're doing just down the street from us. God, I can't imagine what it is to be a refugee. I can't imagine what it is to grow up on the border of Pakistan. I can't imagine some of the things that these people have walked through. And yet you've brought them here and they have people with them who love them. And God, we pray that they would continue to see your love in Jen and the folks that she works with and the folks who volunteer over there. Lord, if any of us are compelled to be a part of what you're doing there, I pray that you wouldn't let go of us, that your Holy Spirit would just tenaciously get after us as we get more involved in what you're doing over there and get front row seats to watch you work in the lives of these people. We pray that you would bless Jen. I know that it is fun to share success stories and it is fun to talk about what's next, but God, I also know that it is hard. And so I pray that you would be with her in those times and in those moments as well. We thank you for her, for her humble example and witness and ask that you would just encourage her and give her many, many more stories of folks who came to know you through what they're doing over there. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. who haven't been at Grace for as long and don't know who the princes are and why we get excited. So now they get to share with us and everybody can be excited together, which is great. So tell us, where'd you grow up? How'd you get to Grace? When did you realize you were in love with each other and you needed to move to Africa because this is just what God wanted you to do. So go. There's a lot of steps in one question. So I think like I was part of the, I would call it the St. Grace crowd. So Chris Sasser sort of lured me into youth ministry as a high school student. And then I felt a call to youth ministry very as like a teenager. And so he sort of nurtured that. And I interned a couple summers, and then basically we sort of always dreamed of conspiring so that once I would graduate, I would come on staff. You and Chris would... Chris and I would... Yeah, we conspired together, and that worked out. And so I used to sit between he and Karin and sort of mediate their marriage and relationship up in the old loft. In the aughts. In the early years of Grace, Chris Sasser was the student pastor here. And they were going and blowing. I mean, they were doing some really cool things. So he was doing high school, she was doing middle school, and I sat in between. And it was a dangerous place. But it was an amazing experience. But yeah, I mean, Sarah had interned as a college student as well. And then as she was at Seminary at Duke, we were also conspiring to figure out how to get her on staff. So as you're on staff, there's an attractive intern, and you're now conspiring. No, no, no, no. I brought the intern. Okay, all right. So basically we met at Fun in the Sun, the camp we used to take kids to. And she was from Lakeland, Florida, and they had a lot of pretty girls at her church. so I spent a lot of time talking to the girls at her church. You made your way over to the Lakeland crowd. Yeah. So then we moved back to Raleigh and I started working at Grace and she started seminary. I think what was a mutual attraction was we both just loved kids. We both loved ministry. I mean, we met where we were both interns, you know, loving on kids. And so that's always been a part of our life is that we just love loving on people together. We love having people in our home. And we lived, you know, five minutes from here and literally would always just have people in our home, a lot of kids, a lot of adults. And, I mean, we're just so grateful for this place. I became a pastor here. I was ordained here. We grew up a lot here. And I feel like, again, this name lives up to its name. I received so much grace in this place as we just kind of clumsily figured out what it looked like to be pastors and to love people and to be newly married. As some of these now adults can attest to on mission trips. We had some marital strife over, you know, pranks and Chris Latta. And so, yeah, we just... He was usually the center. Just strife specifically over Chris. Yeah. Usually he's in the center. Yeah, specifically. But we grew up here. It's not just your own marriage. You got other people's too now. For sure. 100%. Yeah. So we're grateful. I mean, just to sit here and to look out at so many old faces and so many new faces, it brings us so much joy. And we're just so grateful that you guys loved us while we were young. And now that we're old, that you love us from afar, it's such an incredible thing. We're the same age, I think, and we are old. What year did you guys get married? 2002. Wow. Okay. And then when did you go to Africa? So, yeah, basically I think the thing is that Grace nurtured this heart for mission because we were taking students on all these mission trips. And that was our excuse for not doing it ourselves is that we were taking Jen and we were taking Colleen. And so that's cool. We've done our part. And unfortunately, God was continuing to stir that. So she went to Uganda in 2007 with some girls who had been sort of involved with Grace. I somehow let my wife and three college girls go to northern Uganda by themselves. It's very irresponsible. I don't feel like you had a lot of choice. I don't choice. He did not. Also true. And so that was kind of a make or break moment. Either this is going to die down or this is going to get worse. And it got worse. And then she basically said, I'm going to stop working at church. And, you know, so she went to Jeff Hancock, the pastor at the time, and said, look, I'm going to stop and we need to go do something. And he had heard about this organization in Cape Town. So, hey, why don't you try them? And so the church was just unbelievably gracious to us to not only, you know, let her quit, but also just to, I mean, I took a three-month leave of absence, and they just supported that and said, cool, we'll hire someone to replace you to help the thing keep going, and go do it, go explore, and go sort of figure out what God is doing. And so it was just incredibly gracious. And so in that period of time, working with Living Hope and meeting a guy named Michael and him just sort of answering that prayer that we were having of, okay, if God, you want us to be here, what would we ever do? And so that's sort of where Ubuntu was birthed in us and then came back and told people. And I think people there advised us, you need to tell people there. You can't decide here. You must decide. You must really hear from God there. And so as we told people, everyone said, well, we hate the idea that you're going to leave, but this sounds like exactly what you should be doing. Knowing you, this is what you should do. So it was very affirming and, yeah, pushed us out the door. And what year was that? So we left in 2009, October of 2009. Okay. And my understanding is, correct me if I'm wrong, you went over there with Living Hope. And Living Hope is an organization that was founded by a pastor in Cape Town, South Africa, and initially was doing a majority of its work in the HIV community because it was, for a while, the highest case per capita in the world. And so that's where it started, and then other programs got built out of that, and now it's this whole big thing. And so you guys originally went over there partnering with them, and then at some point or another transitioned to Ubuntu. Yeah, like our 2008 time was all with them. And then in 2009, we kind of went back saying, I'm going to do, I'm going to start this Ubuntu thing eventually, and she's going to work with Living Hope and with the Methodist Church and, and, and. That's always and, and, and. Always and. Yeah, right. There's lots of ands. Yeah. I mean, I think there's been a, there's been a couple paths. I mean, Ubuntu is a path which Casey can obviously really share about what that is and even what that word means. But us as a family, we studied missionaries. I studied at Duke race and reconciliation and justice things. And we thought, let's try it out really doing this. And so we went to Cape Town the first time, lived in a cute apartment and did all the sightseeing. When we moved there, we actually moved into an impoverished community. So their apartheid has been lifted for about 20 years, but everyone is still kind of stuck in whatever community they were forcefully removed to. So in way deep in Cape Town, very south, there's a community called Ocean View, and it's mixed race people. It's colored. That's a PC term there. And so we had done work there. We'd made friends there, and we just thought, we want to try this. We actually want to live among people and try to be friends and try to be neighbors with the people that we serve. And people were like, you can't do this. People are crying. No, it's a death sentence. And we just were very stubborn. And we just wanted to give it a try. Also was serving at a Methodist church in the community. So we moved into the pastor's house. And that's really where our ministry manifesto, as I call it, was born because we showed up. I mean, someone literally, when we left, made a cake with South Africa on it. They were like, you're going to South Africa, save Africa. And we were like, okay, a little bit, we will. I mean, you just, you get this kind of hype. And so we show up in Ocean View and no one cared and no one talked to us and they were suspicious and they didn't need whatever we were selling. And so we sat alone in our house for a while and started to open the Bible and just say, okay, Jesus, this didn't happen to you. You know, when Jesus went from town to town, he had throngs of people following him, coming to his feet, touching the hem of his garment. So what are we doing wrong, Jesus? And I found myself in John 4 specifically, and it's really the woman at the well. And she doesn't want to know a religious guy, and yet at the end opens up her entire life and her soul, and then goes back to her town and converts everyone. And it's just because Jesus came to this place, and this is our ministry manifesto, look, listen, love. You know, we go to save and to conquer and to, you know, rescue all the orphans, but God really, in Jesus, showed us you just show up and you look. What's around? Who's there? What's not there? What are people feeling? You listen. You get people to open up, share their stories, share their lives, and then, if God allows, you love them. And so because God humbled us, slowly we started to make friends. Slowly people started opening up their lives to us. Slowly people started letting us in. And it's changed our lives, that humbling experience of not having the answer, of not knowing the way, of not being the saviors, and just people slowly allowing us in has changed our lives, and now these people, 11 years later, are our friends. They're our family. We do a lot of life together, and one story, I was actually thinking about while we were sitting. So Bernadette is a woman we met the first time in Living Hope. She worked for Living Hope. We did HIV support groups together. We'd go into communities. She had these groups of people, all HIV people. She was supporting them, loving them. I would just tag along. We come back. Her son, Robin, comes to the academy, becomes a part of the academy. And while he's still in high school, they're in the front yard, basically, and someone next to him is shot dead. Robin is there with a friend. The friend is shot dead by a gangster. Bernadette calls, crying, weeping, for months. Obviously a lot of grief. Robin as well. So we walk a lot of life together through this trauma, through a lot of stuff. Eventually Robin graduates from Ubuntu after he comes here to America. Now he's in Portland. He is at school. Where is he at school? Corbin University. But just recently before I came here, I was having my own crisis, struggling with how to love people, what to do, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like I can't do this anymore. Who do I call? I call Bernadette. I show up at the Ubuntu house. She now works at the Ubuntu house. She's our cook. Bernadette, I need you. I show up. I'm crying. Help me. Guide me. What do I do? She sorts me out, and she says, I tell everyone, I have this white friend, and she's my white sister, and she lives in Ocean View. She said, but Sarah, you need to be colored now, and you need to toughen up. And she prayed for me. And that's our life. Our life is not about us saving anyone. It's about neighbors. It's about friends. It's about a lot of stories that are intertwined and us finding God sometimes more than we feel like we're even helping them. Sure, sure. I like to be colored and toughen up. That's great. Casey, can you tell us about all things Ubuntu? Just how did it start? How did it germinate? What has it become? What energizes you the most now that you're 10 years in? Yeah. So Ubuntu is really, it's born out of a desire to deal with fatherlessness. So 60% of kids in South Africa grow up without a father in the home, which is a very frightening statistic because it leads to then all of the other issues that come with it, gangsterism and drug abuse and alcoholism and massive unemployment, and it keeps going. And really, Michael, it's not really my idea. Michael Jenkins had the dream and the idea, and he saw a sucker who had all the background he needed to make it happen, and I took the bait, and so we did it. But really, we work with a small group of kids who, sort of elite footballers or soccer players. And we really try to walk from really almost nine, but they enter the academy around grade six. So kind of 11 years old through the end of high school. And it's really about now we run our own school. So we register with the Department of Education. And so you go through the normal South African kind of educational system. We train four or five, six times a week. We have amazing coaches. We have a residence for about 30 of the boys who live further in town to get there every day or who live locally in their home situation. It's just not going to help them be successful. So there's about 30 kids who live in the residence. And then, yeah, and then we just spend a lot of time on their character, leadership, and spiritual formation. How do we help them become the man that will, you know, be different than what the men are in our country currently? How do we help them raise a different heart for their own community, their own family, and the nation wider? And so, yeah, in February, it was kind of like our 10th anniversary of our first training sessions. We had big celebrations. And I think what's amazing now is watching, we have this sort of first generation of graduates, of guys who finished and the things that they're doing. So in August, we'll have 17 kids now studying in the United States. One of them is here. Yeah, you got one here with you, right? So Tarek is here. So if you want to bombard Tarek to get the real stories about Casey, you can. So, I mean, poor Tarek from the age of 12, even beyond up until last year, so until he was about 20, had like one coach. He got stuck with the same guy all the way through that process, and he loves me deeply still. Is that true, Tarek? Do you love him deeply? Okay, all right. So it's amazing to not watch those guys. There's about 10 playing professionally. We have our first Olympian. So if you watch the Tokyo Olympics, hopefully Luke Fleers will play and hopefully play well. So he actually brought Tariq to trials because we had seen Luke first. But, I mean, it's been amazing. But what's really amazing is to see the two guys who are training to be teachers and Josh, who's now a policeman, and the impact that they will have. But I'm also so excited because I know that we, after 10 years of bumping around and making lots of mistakes, are infinitely better at what we do now. We have a much, much stronger team. We have all these amazing teachers and house staff and coaches that are around it. Where in those first couple years, it was like me and Mike stumbling around, wondering when the adults were going to show up and help us run this thing. And tell you what to do. Yeah. And we're like, ah. I'm wondering that here, actually, in my role. We heard. Yep. So we have this amazing team. And what's been really great is now Sarah is actually a full-time Ubuntu staff person and on the leadership team. Can you believe it? That took a long time to lure in. We're going to get to Sarah in a second. I want to hear everything that you've done because it's been a lot of different things. The last year really showed us the need to really focus on formation. We were doing it, but it was sort of on the edges of everything we did. And I think, obviously, that is her heart and what makes sense. I know that that's going to drive the next 10 years to be even more amazing and that the graduates will be even more amazing young men than we have already produced. When you say formation, you're talking about spiritual formation, spiritual health? Spiritual leadership, character formation. And what are you guys doing now to key into that specifically? So we have some programs for all of that. So spiritually, it looks like a lot of different things. A lot of it's relational. It's work that our teachers and our coaches and our staff do, especially at our residence, through relationships, just inviting them to be in a relationship with God, modeling that. We have a Bible study that our very own Casey leads at the house once a week, which is incredible and really cool. And then we have other programs that we're really excited to launch. You know, it's been kind of just a few programs spiritually. We want to get even better about that. Leadership is also something that we're really starting to do. We don't want just to expect them to be leaders, but teach them what does it mean to be a leader and that every one of them is a leader. And then character formation is actually a program that we do once a week. They have an hour that they do it. And they're learning to really know who they are and live with integrity and live with excellence. These things have to be taught, especially because of all the trauma and bad habits that some of them have faced. They really have to actually be taught these things. And so it's really exciting to now look at who we want the Ubuntu 30-year-old man to be and then intentionally and strategically create a pathway to that place. It's really exciting. That is really, really cool. And now briefly, as we are out of time, I am interested in the chronicle of all the different positions and things that you've done in your now decade in South Africa. So run us through it. And then now, I believe you just finished a book, yes? And now you're on staff with Casey. So what have you done? A lot of different things. I'll say most, a lot of pastoral stuff, really. I learned in South Africa that even if no one thinks you're a pastor, even if no one gives you a title or, you know, a cool cloak or whatever a pastor is supposed to have. We're supposed to get cloaks? Yeah, I had one. I had one back in the day here, but it's just who you are. And so, you know, people in Oceanview call me Pastor Sarah, and I don't pastor a church anymore. And I'm so thankful. I'm so honored that they call me that. So we were at the Methodist Church for a while. We've been at different churches, but we're now at a local church. We actually want our kids to now just be involved in a youth group and have that kind of stuff. So I've done a lot of things, a lot of stuff in the community, in the high schools, in the different kind of organizations of Ocean View. My book is actually about our journey with special needs because, as many of you know, our son Keller, who's now was one was diagnosed with autism mild autism and so we walked this unexpected journey where literally we googled autism after we got the diagnosis from the doctor to getting totally integrated in ocean view with the schools we got a team of therapists and experts and this really extraordinary thing happened where people just came into our house daily and changed all of our lives, most all my son. So he lost his diagnosis when he was five. And it's a miracle, but it's a miracle of community. It's a miracle of people coming into all of our lives. And it's a miracle of God saying that Keller is fearfully and wonderfully made, autism or not autism, and watching that come out. And so I finished the first draft. We're hoping to launch it next summer. It needs a lot of work. But it's really also my story of an unlikely mother, very unlikely. I didn't even know if I wanted kids. And now here I am, the mother of a special needs son. And so it's been a journey. You've got your daughters here. Are you happy that you have her? So happy. We thought she was going to be a boy. We were certain God loved us and it was going to be a boy, and now we have this incredible daughter who loves Jesus, loves acting, singing, dancing, is a leader, is kind, is this incredible person. So I don't know how he did it, but I feel like it's made me more than it's made them. And so I really want to share that story of what God has done in my life and how I found a real God in the midst of real trial. And now I'm the mother of Ubuntu. I never would have wanted to be Tarek's mom. And Tarek and I had a deep and real, even last night. There's fireworks and bourbon flowing last night, and Tarek and I are in having this deep conversation because I'm the mom. And that's what I do. And I am so humbled to be the mother of Ubuntu. Again, never would have expected it, but it's my best job I've ever had. It's the one that brings me the most joy. Best boss I've ever had. He really is. That's great. That's great. I wonder if he feels the same about his employee. Okay, Princess, thank you so much for sharing a little bit of your story. I have one more thing. Okay, let's pray. No, I'm just messing around. I just want to, I think, like, affirm and honor Grace, because, you know, like, hearing Jen share and Colleen on the video and, you know, Suzanne's work with Anastomari and stuff, it's a reflection of who Grace is. And so, you know, Suzanne and I came through the youth ministry and Beth and Bill Gentile tried to, like, ruin us at young, young ages, and they didn't. But all of that practice we then got serving people because of grace, it shaped our hearts. And now seeing kids you invested in, like Jen and Colleen, doing a really amazing work. I know that those seeds were planted by amazing parents, but we got to throw a lot of water on it for a period of time and really do something. And their reflection of that and their response to that is exactly the picture I want for Tarek and Vazumzi and Luke, that they would, through that, somehow, our feeble efforts, water something in them that when they finish, that they would change and transform South Africa. And it's a silly kind of vision we have, but I really believe it's possible. And I believe it's possible because I've seen it now in kids that I got to water the seed and that they were doing it. So today is such a perfect picture and it's such an encouraging picture for me that it really is possible that for seven feeble years of really only having one or two days a week with someone, I got to water something. And now I get, I mean, they're stuck with us all day, every day. So what does that mean I can, you know, our staff can do? And so it's such an amazing picture. But I want to honor what you've done over years and years as a church to do that. Thank you. And I would echo that and just say we really have a very strong group of folks on the missions committee who care deeply about this and are kind of the stewards of this culture that Grace has fostered through the years. And it's one of my favorite things about our church. You guys are having an event tonight here. We are. We're having an event at 7. And we're just going to share some more stories. Vazumzi Plamana, who was here actually two years ago sharing, he is now at NC State. And he actually couldn't be here because he's at his church today, and so he'll be here tonight. And so we're so excited to just share a little bit more about what God's doing. And we wanted to say thank you. Look, Listen, Love is the organization that Grace started to launch out missionaries. And so when you support Acts of Grace, sorry, Look, Listen, Love is manifesto. Acts of Grace, thank you. And that's the way that you support us so that we can keep doing what we're doing. Ubuntu is its own 501c3, but Acts of Grace just keeps us there and allows us as a family to keep doing what God has called us to do there. So we'll share more about that tonight, and we're so thankful. Wonderful. Thank you. And they'll stick around, too, to chat with after the service. Let me pray for y'all, and then we're going to suffer through Alan Morgan together, and then we'll eat some tacos. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you so much for all that you're doing in South Africa, in Ocean View, and in the ways that you are using the princes and also drawing them more near to you. God, I pray that their walk with you, that their exuberance to follow you, that their joy that they find in you would be contagious as they move in and out of circles and relationships in what they're doing in South Africa. God, we pray for Sarah in her new role, that she would thrive there. It certainly seems as though all the experiences that you've given her over the years have prepared her for this in really incredible ways. And we lift up Casey as he continues to plug away at this thing that he's done now for a long time. I pray that you would give him new and fresh excitement and motivation and that he would wake up tomorrow as excited about Ubuntu as ever. And God, we thank you for bringing them here safely, for them being able to share their story. And we pray that you would write many, many more good stories through what they're doing down there and that you would just draw these young men and these folks in the community to your son Christ through what they're doing. 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.

So this Sunday we're talking about parenting. We're in the middle of a series now called I Want a Better Life, and we're focusing on four elements of our life that I think that we would all agree that we want to improve upon. Last week we said I want a better schedule, so we talked about some biblical principles to build our schedules in such a way that we'll invest our time in ways that are beneficial, that we don't regret, that really get accomplished what we want to get accomplished with our time and with our days. Next week, we're going to say, I want a better marriage. And so we're going to look at some biblical principles around building a strong marriage, which I know that, again, no one in this service needs, but the second service is desperate for this message. So we're going to go ahead and move forward with that next week. And then the last week of the series, in the end of January, we're going to say, I want a better me and look at mental health. I've been diving into some research on that already, talking to folks, and I'm excited to share with you whatever it is I learned between now and January 26th. I think that's going to be an important Sunday. But this Sunday, we want to focus on parenthood, and I want better kids. And we all know, fundamentally, that if we want better kids, that we need to be better parents. I used to watch that show, The Nanny, or The Nanny, I don't know what it's called. The one with the lady that would like swoop in and fix your broken children, whatever show that was. And what I found when we watched that show, Super Nanny, what I found when we watched that show was it was never the kid's fault. Like you watch the previews, kids are disasters. And then the nanny would come in, she's supposed to talk to the kids. And what she would do instead is talk to the parents. And it was always the parents that needed to change the way they were approaching parenthood. And so when we say, I want better kids, what we mean is we want to be better parents. And the temptation is that when this is the topic, that for those who are not in the throes of parenthood, currently in the trenches, it's kind of for us to take a step back and say, well, maybe this one's not for me. But I would say if you don't yet have kids, then having children is like this great unknown in the future. We have no idea how it's going to go. So maybe this can help to orient you so that we have some good principles as we approach parenthood. If you're in the throes of it, hopefully you're locked in. You would readily admit, I don't know what I'm doing. I heard people, I heard multiple people in the last couple of weeks when asked, and this is not because I asked them, it just came up in conversation, when asked, you seem to have good kids, what do you do with them? They would say, we just make it up as we go along. Like to be in the throes of parenthood is to kind of not know what we're doing. We've never done this before. And then a lot of us are facing parenthood with having adult kids, kids who are out of the house. And now you have to walk through this transition of how do I support and encourage and advise them as parents without trying to be tyrannical or controlling or dictatorial to them and allow them to be the adults that God created them to be. So I hope that the principles that we talk about this morning can help us no matter where we are on the spectrum of parenthood. And when you think about being a parent and how to be a better one and where we get our information, it's true that a lot of us Google and that there's not a handbook out there. And what we as church people do and what I do is turn to the Bible. God invented parenthood. What does he have to say about it? But here's one of the little secrets of the Bible that all family pastors, senior pastors, children's pastors, and student pastors know, and parents if you're diligent, the Bible really doesn't have a lot to say about raising kids. The Bible really doesn't have a ton to say about parenthood. It's difficult to turn to a passage. If you think about marriage, you go to Ephesians 5, and it's a seminal passage on marriage. This is what marriage is all about. We don't have that for parenthood. We get bits and pieces throughout Scripture, pieces of advice or commandments or encouragements. In Deuteronomy, and this one's profound, so we're going to come back to it later in the sermon. In Deuteronomy, we're told that we need to teach the Bible to our kids. We need to write it on the walls of our house and instill it into our children. We're told several times throughout the Bible, namely in Proverbs and in Hebrews, that a loving parent disciplines their child. Proverbs tells us that we should make punishment a part of our house and a part of our culture, that punishment should be a thing that's a good idea. There's one spot, and it's interesting to me, apparently this was an issue in the early church, but it says, parents, you should not intentionally tick off your kids. So if any of you are out there just really just putting the screws on them just to watch them squirm, knock it off, all right? The Bible says to quit it. So we're not supposed to do that, but there's not a lot of, hey, this is how you raise kids according to God's standards. So as I thought about this topic, and of course my desire and belief that it's my job to approach it biblically, I just began to think through the relationships that we see in Scripture between parent and child. We don't get a lot of glimpses of parenthood in Scripture. So without an idea, sometimes you come up with an idea, I want to talk about this thing. Let me go to the Bible and see what it says about this thing or see if it confirms what I'd like to say. This time I didn't do that. I try to never do that. I just went to the Bible open-handedly. I thought through the relationships that I see in Scripture between parents and children, and I thought, I wonder if there's a theme that we can pull out. I wonder if there are principles that we can see. I wonder if there's some commonalities between them. So the first one I thought of was Abraham and Isaac. God made promises to Abraham. Those promises were going to come through his son. He gives him a son named Isaac. And when Isaac is somewhere in his adolescence, God comes to Abraham and he says, hey, I want you to offer Isaac to me on this mount that I'm going to show you three days journey away. Certainly what Abraham was expecting. It's certainly not what he would have chosen for Isaac, but that's what God asked him to do. So he takes him three days journey and he goes to offer him to the Lord and right at the last moment, the Lord intervenes. But the exercise for Abraham was to trust God's plan with Isaac. Then I thought about Moses. Comes a little later in the Bible. Moses was born as a slave in Egypt and Pharaoh was killing all of the firstborn sons of the slaves, the Hebrew people, Abraham's descendants. And so his mom hopelessly, perilously puts an infant baby in a basket and literally floats it down a river and hopes for the best. She just has to say, I have no control over this boy's life. Here we go, God. I hope that it works out. That's a picture of parenthood we get from Moses. Fast forward a little bit in the Bible, you see Hannah. Hannah's a woman married to a guy named Akina, and she wants a baby really badly. She can't have one. We've walked through that. Some of y'all have walked through that. That's a hard season of life when you want to experience parenthood, and that's being withheld from you. She's praying so intensely for a child in the temple that Eli, the priest, thinks that she's drunk and gets on to her. And she says, no, I'm not drunk. I'm just praying intensely for a child. And the Lord's good to her and blesses her with a son and she names the son Samuel. And as soon as Samuel is old enough to eat solid food, she takes him to the temple and drops him off with the priest Eli and says, here, this was a gift from God. He's not mine, he's yours. I want him to serve God with his life. That's a picture of motherhood from Hannah. Fast forward a little bit further, there's a guy named Jesse. He's got eight sons. And one day, that same kid, Samuel, shows up at Jesse's house and he says, hey, I need to see your boys. And he goes to the youngest son, David, and he says, Jesse, David's gonna be the next next king of Israel. God said so. He's going to be a man after God's own heart. And we don't know what Jesse's profession was. We know that David was watching the flock, so we can guess that it was agrarian. Maybe they had some fields and maybe a farm, maybe a couple different types of livestock. And David was doubtlessly supposed to be a part of the family business. But Samuel shows up as a representative of God and says, hey, Jesse, I've got to change the plans with David. Here's what he's going to be. He's going to be the king. Then you think about Mary in the New Testament. And God didn't waste any time with Mary. As soon as she got pregnant, an angel shows up and talks to her and says, Mary, you're pregnant with a baby boy. The boy is from God. His name is gonna be Jesus and he is the Messiah. Mary, don't make any plans for this one. I got my own plans for this one. And as if to drive the point home, when Jesus was 12 years old, his family was in Jerusalem for the holidays and they leave leave to go back to Bethlehem. And Mary and Joseph, his parents look at each other and go, where's Jesus? Is he with you? They go back and they find him in Jerusalem in the temple asking the rabbis questions, which is another way to say already teaching the rabbis. As if to drive home the point, this boy's got his own plans. God's got an agenda for this one. And so if you look at those models of family dynamics in the Bible, if you look at those models of parenting in the Bible, to me, there is a clear theme. For parents, it may be a disturbing one. It may be one that we don't want to think about. But I think that the biblical model of parenting is releasing your children to God's plan. I think the biblical model of parenting is to release your children to God's plan. What does the Bible have to say about parenting? What are the examples of parenthood that we have in Scripture? I think over and over and over again, that's why I chronicled five of them and not two of them, over and over and over again, we see this model of God's expectation of believing parents to be releasing your children to God's plan, not your own plan. And this might not seem that profound or insightful to you. It might not be much of a surprise that you show up at church and the pastor says, hey, if you want to raise kids biblically, you got to raise them according to God's plan. You got to release them to God's plan. But I think that's a much more difficult challenge than we realize at first. I think that's a more profound command than we understand. And I think that because of this. In our culture, we've kind of all agreed that stage moms and over-aggressive sports dads are not good elements of the culture, right? Like we don't, we've agreed that we don't really support that. When an overactive stage mom gets like super involved and begins to live her life through her daughter, we all agree like, come on man, knock it off. That's not fair to that kid. When a dad does that, when there's a stage dad or a sports mom or a sports dad, and he does that to his kid, we all agree like,, come on, don't do that. You're damaging that child. I read a couple years ago an autobiography by Andre Agassi. He's a professional tennis player in the 90s and the early 2000s, one of my favorite athletes growing up. He grew up in Nevada, and his dad was an over-aggressive sports dad. And when he was four years old, his dad got a ball machine and souped it up so that it could shoot balls at 90 miles an hour. I'm not making this up. And he put it on legs and stood it up at the net so it could fire balls at his four-year-old's feet. Not like easy ones where you can hit here like you're supposed to, would fire them at his feet and then yell at him to return the balls. Like, it was nuts. And he forced tennis onto his kid. He forced him to do that. And what Agassi says in his biography is it took him into his adulthood to realize that he didn't even like tennis. In fact, he hated it for everything that it represented to him. So we all agree that's not who we want to be as parents. Is the over-aggressive stage mom or the sports dad or however it works out. We don't want to do that. But here's what we need to understand. We all have a little stage parent in us. We all have a little bit of an over-aggressive sports parent in us. Because what is the sports parent doing? What is the over-aggressive helicopter parent doing when they decide that this is what my child's going to be? All they're saying is, this is what I want for my child, these are my plans for my child, and this is how I'm going to bring it about. They have the kid, they go, this is what I want for the kid, and this is how I'm going to bring it about, and they force it upon the kid. And the truth of it is, we all have some of that in us. I was just talking to some parents that recently had a child, and they made the comment that a lot of parents make. They said, you know, I thought that I understood what it meant to love a kid, but then as soon as I held them for the first time, I could not believe how much I loved them. I could not believe what it felt like to hold a kid. I could not believe that my heart had that much space for love. And when that happens, when you love somebody that profoundly, you begin to want things for them. It's a very natural part of parenthood. You want for them. You want them to be successful. You want them to be good people. You want them to make you proud. You want the best for them in life. And so without even realizing it, we by default begin to make plans for our kids. And our plans almost always include wanting our kids to be successful. And every house, every family, every little ecosystem, there's small tweaks and small differences. All of our families with all of our different last names, we all have different versions of success, but we all want our kids to be successful. And so we try to put them on a path towards success as we've defined it. We all want our kids to be happy, but each one of our families and our different ways, we define happiness according to our own ecosystem, and we drive our kids, we plan for our kids to find the happiness that we want for them or to find the goodness that we want for them. Each of our families, we have our own moral codes. We have our own set of values where we champion this value over this value in our house. In our house, the debate is which value or character trait is more valuable. One of us says that the most important thing for our children is to be kind, and the other one says the most important thing is for them to be intellectually independent. You guys can try to figure out which camp we are in on that. But we all have that. And what we do when we have kids is we push them towards our definition of success, towards our definition of happiness, towards our definition of good, and that's the plan that we make for them. And we're not, most of us know better than to be the over-aggressive, dictatorial, Andre Agassi's dad firing tennis balls at their feet. Most of us don't slide that far, but to some degree or another, we all have plans for our kids. We all have hopes and dreams for them. We all have definitions of success and happiness that we're chasing. And that's why this is so difficult. Because biblical parenthood is to release your children from your plans to God's plans. The picture of Moses' mom releasing him down the river and hoping for the best is a picture of biblical parenthood. God, I don't have control. Anyways, I'm trusting them to you. And it's not just whatever you want for them in their life is good with me, God. I release them from my definition of success to God's. I release them from my definition of happiness to God's. I release them from my definition of good to God's, which I think is a big deal because a lot of us say, and I'm not thinking of anybody's kid here now, but a lot of us say, oh yeah, so-and-so's a good kid. And when we say that, what do we mean? We tend to mean that they get good grades and don't do any dumb stuff. That's a low bar for good kid. Isn't it? Everybody's a good kid then. He's a good kid. Why? Well, he's still in school. He's managing not to fail out. Great. We release our children from our definition of those things to God's definition. We release them from our plans and hopes for their future to God's plans and hopes for their future. And it is a much more profoundly difficult thing because suddenly we're not shaping them into being replications of ourself and what we want. We are freeing them up to be who God created them to be. To be a biblical parent is to have the mindset and the understanding of God created them and one day they're going to up, and hopefully they'll come to know God. And when they do, they're going to be my brother and sister in Christ, and they're going to be an adopted son or daughter of the Creator God. And it's up to Him to decide what He wants to use these children for. And my job is to steward them until they're ready to be released. So if that's what we're supposed to do, how do we do it? I think there's two foundations for biblical parenting that I wanna share with you this morning. The first is consistently prepare. We have to consistently prepare. I think in your notes, there's a word prayerfully. I just like the word consistently better because I feel like it makes a better point. We have to consistently prepare our children. Listen, if the goal is to raise a child that is released into the wild, to walk in God's identity for them, to be the person that God created them to be, to execute the plan that God has for their life, which I believe he has a plan for everyone's life. If that's what we're supposed to do, to release them to walk in God's plan, how can they walk them. That's why I think this verse in Deuteronomy is so important. I alluded to it earlier. In Deuteronomy, at the beginning of the Hebrew people, God is saying, this is what I want your culture to look like. This is what I want my people's society to look like. And he's talking about his word and how valuable it is. And he says this, verse 18 of chapter 11, you shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. Listen, you shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in rarely try to use this stage to try to say like, hey, you need to do this. But this is an instance where Scripture gives me a foundation to say, parents, your children's spiritual health is your responsibility. Your children's discipleship is your responsibility. God set up His culture, He set up His people, and He decided it is your responsibility. God set up his culture, he set up his people, and he decided it is your responsibility to teach your kids God's word. The temptation is to say, well, I'm gonna join a good church, and the good church is gonna teach them God's word. And that's true, but here's the thing. If your kid comes to everything we offer, everything, some are extreme and they never miss a week, ever. We get them 58 weeks a year. There are 58 hours a year. 58 hours a year. That's what we have to impact your children. The best programs in the world aren't going to make a big, huge dent. 58 hours a year. If your kid is in middle school or high school, it's even less than that. We are here not to fulfill Deuteronomy 11 for you, but to echo what is happening in your home. Parents, it is our responsibility to train our kids to follow God. It is our responsibility to disciple our kids. It is our responsibility to teach them a word. And listen to me, listen. I'm sorry that this is gruff. It's not optional. We don't get to say, oh gosh, you know, that sounds like something I should do, but I just don't know God's word well enough. Listen, I'm sorry. Then figure it out. Learn it, knuckle down. We've got to. It's our responsibility. No one else can fill that void for you. If you feel inadequate to it, guess what? So does everybody else in the room, including me, but we gotta figure it out because it's on us. And I'd rather just know the truth than try to soft pedal it and make us all feel better. Listen, parents, it's our responsibility to train our kids in the word. Dads, your sons are watching you. They're watching you to learn what it is to be a godly man. They're watching you what it is to love people well. Like it or not, step into that or not, assign yourself as a role model or not, to have kids is to sign up for that. They're watching you at every stage of your life. Moms, your daughters are looking at you. They want to know what godly womanhood looks like. And they're watching you to define it for themselves. That's reality of being parents. So for grace, I want us to step into that responsibility, not shy away from it, and definitely don't say, gosh, I just don't feel adequate to it. Listen, nobody here does, but that doesn't mean that we can step away from it or shy away from it. We do our children a disservice by not stepping into that. If we want to teach our children the word, then we have to learn the word. If we want to teach our children how to follow God, then we have to follow God. If we want to teach our children how to walk in the identity that God has created for them, then we have to walk in the identity that God has created for us. That's why I say we consistently prepare, because it's a daily, hourly effort to follow God and to model that for our children. So that's what we do. And the good news is, if you're sitting here going, geez, Nate, I don't know how to do that, there's a parenting small group. We're starting it up. Harris and Aaron Winston have perfect children and made no mistakes, so we thought that they were the best ones to do it. They're the good ones to do it because when I asked both of them to think about leading something like that, both of them went like, why? We don't know what we're doing. I'm like, you're perfect then. You're perfect. Figure it out together. You can sign up for that. It's going to be Sunday afternoons. If you're in the middle of parenthood and want some help and some other people around you to help figure this out and step into the responsibility you have, that's a good way to start. We consistently prepare. And then the second foundation, I think, of biblical parenting is that we continually release. We continually release. I say continually because that release isn't just one moment. As we walk through those stories in Scripture, Abraham and Isaac, he released him to that sacrifice. Moses' mom released him. Hannah released Samuel. It's not just one moment, though. We're building towards a moment of release when we admit I have no control over this life anymore. But it's also a continual release. In every instant and in every way, at every crossroads in their life, what we're asking is, Father, how do I prepare this kid for your plan? How do I release them to what you want, not what I want? I even think about moments of discipline. I've already learned as a parent that when it comes time to discipline, when your kid is acting in ways that are shameful, I haven't seen Lily do this, but I've definitely noticed with other people's kids, that the temptation, the temptation is to begin to discipline them in such a way that doesn't embarrass you. The temptation is to grab them and to get onto them and to tell them things that you need to act in this way. And really what's going on in your heart is because when you don't act in this way, it causes me shame and I feel like a terrible parent. So I really need you to get right so that I'm not embarrassed in front of my friends. That's one reason to discipline. Another reason to discipline is, this is what I think is going to be best for you. But the best reason to discipline is to say, God, when they act that way, I see this trait in them. And I believe that it's possible that you may have instilled that trait in them because one day it's going to be a great strength. How do I fashion that strength so that they can walk in the identity that you've created for them? How do I discipline them according to your plan, not my plan? How do I advise them to go to college according to your plan, not my plan? How do I advise them to invest their high school hours according to your plan, not my plan? God, when they're old enough to pursue a career, how do I encourage them to follow your plan, not my plan? God, when they're old enough to have kids and they begin to lead their family, what can I do to pray for them and rally around them so that they follow your plan for their family, not my plan? It is a continual, perpetual release where we acknowledge these children are not our own. They are from God and we are stewards of them. So I believe if we want to follow the biblical model of parenthood, we have to consistently prepare and continually release. Because that's such a challenge, because those feel like high bars, I thought it would be helpful for us to have a prayer together. So I'm going to put a prayer on the screen. I would encourage you to write it down. I would encourage you to pray this weekly, if not daily, for yourself as you pray for your kids. But the parent's prayer simply goes like this. Father, give me the faith to see your plan for my child, the consistency to prepare them, and the courage to release them. Father, give me the faith to see your plan. Help me know. We see for our kids the next couple of days, God sees the next several decades. God, help me see a glimpse of your plan so I know I can keep them on the right track. God, give me the consistency in my own walk, in my own character, in my own discipline, in my own pursuit to be the model that they need. And give me the courage when it comes time, Father, to release them to your plan, not my own plan. Father, give me the faith to see your plan for my child, the consistency to prepare them and the courage to release them. I'm going to pray for us. I'm going to pray that prayer, and then we're going to transition into a time of communion. Father, we love you. We thank you for the gifts that you give us and our children. God, I pray specifically for those in this room who really want kids. Will you just give them some? Will you just let them experience that part of what it is to be a human? Bless them in that way, God. God, for those of us who do have the privilege of being parents, give us the faith to see your plan for them. Give us a consistency in our walk and in our devotion to prepare them for your plan. Give us the courage, Father, to release them when it comes time. Help us raise kids that are good, successful, and happy according to your definition of those things. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Happy New Year, and thank you for choosing to spend your first Sunday of the year in church here at Grace. I'm excited for this year, for all that it holds for our church and all the things that hopefully God has for us this year. I think 2020 is going to be a huge year in the life of Grace. As we launched the year, I wanted to start with a series that would be helpful for everybody. So if you're here this morning, wherever you are on the spiritual spectrum, if you're one who would say, you know what, I'm not even really sure that I'm a believer or that I want to be, but I want to try the church thing. I want to try to understand faith a little bit more. If you're here as a representative of a New Year's resolution to attend more regularly or whatever, or if you're somebody who has really highly prioritized your relationship with God for a long time, my goal for this series is that it would be practically useful for all of us, that you'd be able to take things home every week and really kind of assess, how do I implement these things in my life? I'm hopeful that this can be a very helpful series. That's why it's called I Want a Better Life. I don't think anybody, if we said like, how's your life right now? Is there anything that you want to be better? Very few of us would say like, I'm killing it. I mean, there's nothing else that I could find. Like, Kyle Tolbert's the only person I know who'd be like, nope, totally happy with everything in my life right now. This is fantastic. Kyle's our super energetic student pastor, for those who don't know. So we all want a better life, and so next week, we're going to look at, I want better kids. We're going to look at parenting. Then the week after that, I want a better marriage, which I know that there's only a couple of marriages in here that really want to be better. The rest of you are doing great. For those few, we're going to talk about wanting a better marriage. Then the last Sunday of the month, I'm really excited about, we're going to talk about, I want a better me. Mental health has come to the fore of our culture, and I think as a culture we have an increasing awareness of that. And so I want to take a week and look at mental health and what it means for a believer to be mentally healthy and how the church can accept and embrace and rally around the mental health of us individually and of the people in our lives. So I'm excited for that week. This morning, I wanted to start 2020 by talking about our schedules. So this morning is I want a better schedule. I wanted to talk about our schedules because I feel like as a culture, we are busier now than we've ever been. I feel like there are so many pulls and so many pressures and so many different things and obligations and senses of ought that pull us into things that we just give our days and our mornings and our evenings away to, that as a group of people, as a culture, a society, I think we are very likely busier than ever. I remember when I was a kid, which was in the 80s, which for me feels like a long time ago, I saw somebody tweet the other day, or I guess it was on January 1st, that we are now as far away from 2050 as we are from 1990, which is super depressing. But in the 80s, when I was growing up, man, Sundays, I just saw somebody over there doing the math like, they're very slow. I saw, in the 80s, you didn't schedule anything on Sundays. Sundays was a blackout day. There's no nothing on Sundays because Sundays was church day. I even remember growing up, you didn't have practice on Wednesday night. Nothing was scheduled on Wednesdays. That was a sacred day too. And now, man, like all gloves are off. Everything can be scheduled at any time. And people will obligate you to things so quickly. We took Lily to preschool to start that. And on orientation night, there's a large sign-up sheet that everybody just stares at you as you stare at it. And they're watching you. Where are you going to write your name? Surely you're not going to walk out of here without writing your name on something. And I thought, bad news for you guys. I'm not volunteering for anything. And I didn't. But my wife is sweet. Jen is so nice. So she signs up to be library mom, not knowing that it means like once a week she has to pick up books from the classroom and then take them to the library and then check out all the other books that the preschool now wants, which is funny because the amount of money we give the preschool every month seems like they can afford books, but what do I know? So that's what Jen does like every other day, but she loves it and she's continued to do it, but there are opportunities and things that get our time so frequently. I actually hold, I don't think that there is a busier season of life than that of parents of elementary and middle school kids. From a pastor's perspective, I get to see kind of all seasons of life and which groups of people can engage in which activities in the church. And the hardest ones to grab a hold to are parents who have kids in elementary and middle school. And it's not because they don't care about spiritual things. It's because they legit don't have time for anything. I had some of the moms in the church who have kids in that demographic. I emailed them and I said, hey, can I have your schedules? I just want to get a sense for how busy your lives are. Y'all, it was crazy. It was crazy. As I read through their schedules, literally stem to stern every day. The thing that stuck out to me most was one of the moms who has three kids put, I'm just reading her schedule every week. These are the consistent things every week. And it was all the time. And then she said, there's an asterisk, and the asterisk says, these are the activities that we can predict. There are unpredictable activities such as all these things, right? Swim meets and committee meetings and mom things and dance recitals and all the other stuff that fill up all the time. And she had a note on Friday afternoon. The schedule on Friday afternoon was from four to six o'clock, free time, nothing to do, smiley face emoji. For two hours on a Friday. That's it. That's the free time that the whole family has together. And I thought, my goodness, that's so busy. And some of us can relate to that. So listen, I'm not here this morning to demonize busyness. It's not inherently wrong to be busy. As a matter of fact, in defense of the moms that sent me their schedules, they made each of those decisions as a family. And sometimes you're just in a busy season or a season of hustle, and that's all right. So I don't want to demonize busy, but I do want us at the beginning of this year to think critically about how we assemble our schedules. How is it that we allow things to be put on our schedule? I also want to say up front that in our culture a little bit, we wear our busyness on our sleeve like a badge of honor, like being exhausted is a thing to be respected. That's stupid, right? That's all I have to say about that. That's a dumb thing. We shouldn't be proud of how busy we are. We should accept it if we choose to be busy, but it's not a thing to be admired that someone else is so busy that they can't wake up and look in the mirror and think, I feel rested. That's too busy maybe. But I think a bigger reason why we end up so busy with our time so obligated is that we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's builds a menu. Okay, we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's, the restaurant, builds a menu. Now, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know how much fast food is a part of your world. Fast food is a large part of my world. It always has been. It is near and dear to me. I'm in a weight loss bet with my dad and my sister right now, and so it is not a part of my world, but I think I'm going to lose the weight by about March, which means come April, back to Hardee's, baby. But if fast food is not a part of your world, then you don't know that in the early 2000s, Hardee's, as a restaurant, just completely forgot who they were. They did breakfast. They did biscuits. We know about biscuits. The rise and shine biscuits or whatever they are. Those are delicious. But then they said, let's get into burgers and let's do roast beef sandwiches and let's have curly fries and let's do chicken tenders and let's serve fried chicken. And how about soups? I'm pretty sure at one point there was an experimental deli counter at a Hardee's somewhere. I would have loved to have been in the boardroom just listening to these meetings where some intern says, you know, I think Arby's is making some real hay with that roast beef sandwich and curly fries. We need to get into that market share. And the rest of the really smart executives around the successful restaurant board went, yeah, sounds good. Let's do a roast beef sandwich. Let's figure it out. And they just started adding things to the menu. If you were paying attention, it was just this total hodgepodge. They did everything. I can't imagine what their inventory looked like. And then when that failed, they just went to, let's just do really ridiculous attention-grabbing commercials, and nothing worked. And the thing is with the Hardee's menu is none of the things were bad, right? Roast beef sandwich, that's good, but let's just let Arby's do it. Fried chicken, that's great. Let's leave that to Popeye's. They didn't do that. They just kept adding all the things. Anytime anybody suggested a good thing, boom, got put on the menu. And it led to disorganization, and it's not a very good restaurant. So I think that what we need to do is we need to build our schedules a little bit more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's. We need to build our schedules more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's because I think that we do what Hardee's does sometimes. Somebody suggests something that seems like a good idea, and we're like, yeah, I mean, I guess I should. We go to preschool, and there's a sign-up sheet, and everyone's staring at you, and my sense of awe is going to make me sign up for something. I can't leave here disappointing these strangers that I don't know again. Or we do the same thing with PTA, or it's time to coach ball, or it's time to be on the committee, or Nate called me and asked me to do this thing, and I really don't want to do it, but it's the pastor. I feel like I have to. So we just, when we get good ideas, we put that on the calendar, we figure it out, and we build it like Hardee's builds their menu, and maybe we need to build our schedule more like Chick-fil-A. Now, we know about Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A does one thing, chicken. That's it, chicken sandwich. And then they grilled it. And then with an act of Congress, they made it spicy. That's it. That's all they do. And you know that there's been some pretty good ideas in the boardroom at Chick-fil-A over the history of the restaurant. You know people have suggested some really good stuff. Why don't we do rotisserie chicken? No. We do chicken sandwiches. This is all we do. And the other thing I love about Chick-fil-A, if they put something on the menu and it's not working, get it out of here, man. They're ruthless about it. They really streamline what they allow there. They don't have a chicken salad sandwich anymore because they got away from the old one that was mashed down and in the warm bag and was delicious and they tried to go fancy and that didn't sell. And so now they don't have one because if it's not doing what it's supposed to do, get it out of here. They really streamline their menu. And I think that we need to build our schedules like that. So the question becomes, how do we build our schedules like Chick-fil-A builds a menu? How do we streamline it according to what's important to us, so that we don't live our life by default, so that we don't look back on the last year and go, how in the world did I invest my time? How do we do that? Well, I think that there's a biblical principle to help us, and we can find it in Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible and you want to turn there, go ahead. The words will be up on the screen in a minute. Matthew chapter 6 is the Sermon on the Mount. It's in the middle of it. It's Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. It's Jesus' first recorded public address. I love it so much that we did a whole series on the Sermon on the Mount one time. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is just dispensing wisdom and instruction for life. And in chapter 6, he says this. Verse 19, the words on the screen are going to start in verse 20 don't matter, that are temporary. And the purpose of this morning, don't invest your lives, don't invest your time, don't invest your effort and your energy and your talent and your resources in things that don't matter, but rather treasure up for yourselves, make priorities of the things that will matter for eternity, of the things that will matter after you're gone. Orchestrate your life around those things, treasure those things. And so, to me, the very obvious question in light of, in thinking about our schedules and in light of this passage and this principle is what are my treasures? What are my treasures? And normally when I do a note like this, I say, what are your treasures? It's me talking to you, but I really want you to internalize it this morning and think through what are my treasures? What are the things that are most important to me? What are my biggest priorities? And I was always told growing up, if you want to know what someone treasures, look at their bank account and look at their calendar. Look at how they invest their resources. How do we spend our time and how do we spend our money? And so if we think about time, if I were to go home with you or grab your phone and look through your calendar from 2019, what would your calendar say about what your treasures are? Because you can't fake that, right? We can say, oh, God's most important to me, my family's most important to me, or my friends, or whatever it is, my job's most important to me. We can say whatever we want is most important to us, but all we have to do is look through our appointments and the way that we spent our time, and we'll know what we really value. If we could follow each other around on the weekends, what would we learn about each other that we value? If we could see each other in the evenings during our discretionary time, that one family in the hours of 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday, what would we learn about what they value? If we were to look at our schedules and our calendars from 2019, what is it that we treasure? And so what I want us to do this morning is a little bit of homework. In your bulletin there, there's the question, what are my treasures? And there's five blanks, okay? I don't want you to fill those out here. What I'd love to invite you to do is take the bulletin home with you and prayerfully think through, God, what are the things in my life that you want to be most important to me? A better way to ask the question is, God, what are my God-ordained treasures? What would you have be important to me in 2020? How would you have me prioritize my life? I think it's a worthwhile exercise at the beginning of the year to take that home and sit down and prayerfully say, God, what do you want to be important to me? What have you placed on my heart that I need to value? And it's actually a helpful exercise. I did it this week. I just sat down and I thought, if I'm going to ask everybody to do this, I need to do this for myself. I haven't written down my priorities anywhere. I just kind of go. And a lot like Hardee's, my schedule by default just kind of happens. And so if I were to be intentional about building my schedule and listing my priorities, how would I list them? And so I'm going to share them with you this morning, not because they need to be yours and not because you need to copy my list, but just as an exercise of trying to figure out what should be important to us. And then how do we organize our life around those things? So these are my top five priorities in my life as I thought through them this week. You see, the very first thing up there is spiritual health, my relationship with God. The Bible has a lot to say about pursuing God. David writes in Psalms that as the deer pants for the water, so his soul longs after God, that that's how much we should long for God. I almost preached out of a passage where Jesus is interacting with Martha and Mary in Luke, I believe chapter 10. And in that story, Jesus is going to Martha and Mary's house. And Martha is doing what most of us would do and is scrambling around getting everything right, making sure the table's set correctly and that the napkins are folded and that the room that Jesus is never going to go in in a million years is vacuumed and that the curtains are just right. She's doing all the things that you're supposed to do. This is the Messiah, after all, and he's coming to my house. I'd like for it to look nice. And she gets upset because Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus. Mary's just sitting there soaking in Jesus's presence. And Martha thinks she's lazy and she gets on to her. Hey, you should help me. And Jesus actually defends Mary and says, Martha, Martha, you are concerned about all of these things, but only one thing matters, and Mary's figured it out. So I believe that if you're a believer, this is the one where I would say you should really write this down too as your top priority. But don't do it unless you mean it. Our spiritual health has got to be our most important thing to us. Because here's what I know about myself. I don't know what you've learned about yourself as you've pursued spiritual health over the years or as you've considered it, but for me, I'm a better everything when I'm walking with the Lord. I am more gracious with my time. I'm more magnanimous with other people. I'm more patient with inconveniences. I'm more considerate of Jen, my wife. I'm more present with Lily, my daughter. I behave better in elder meetings. I'm nicer to the staff and don't want to get out of meetings as quickly. I leave my door open a little bit more often so I can chit-chat, which is not really a thing that Nate loves to do. But when I'm walking with the Lord and he's filling me up, I become a more gracious and more kind version of myself. And I become a better husband and I become a better father and I become a better pastor and I'm walking in a sense of joy and contentment and completeness that I cannot experience away from the Father. So I would be a very strong advocate to putting as your number one priority your spiritual health. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, you're thinking things through, I would still submit to you that probably the most important thing in your life is being spiritually healthy. I think if you go down that path, it will lead you to serve the same God that I do. But I think for all of us, this is a pretty compelling top spot. Next for me is Jen. It's my wife. In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about marriage, and he says that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who gave himself up for her. So if we look at Jesus, his first priority was to God and being obedient to him, and then his next priority was the church. And husbands, that's how we are to love our wives. We're going to talk about this in a couple weeks, so I'm not going to step on that too much. But my Bible tells me that I am to sacrifice my life for my wife. I'm going to lay myself down for her, and I will, listen, I'm up here preaching this to you. She's sitting right there. She knows I don't do this all the time, all right? So let's not act like you should be like me in your marriages. No, we should work on this together, right? No, we don't want any liars up here. We're doing our best. But I know that this is how I should prioritize that. And what does it look like to prioritize these things? If we're to say that spiritual health is my number one priority, then what does it look like as far as building our schedule to do that? Well, first we have to identify the things that make us healthy. I think it's time in God's Word and time in prayer. And so for a lot of us, that might mean adjusting our schedule and going to bed a little earlier so we can get up a little earlier. Cutting out that last episode of whatever it is. Being willing to not see the end of the game, which by the way, go Titans last night. So that we can get up earlier the next day and invest in spiritual health. Maybe it means next week signing up for a small group and prioritizing that in our schedule. Maybe it means not committing to the things that are going to require our time on Sunday morning or some other time where it can be spiritually helpful to us. Maybe it means paring down some of the things in our schedule so that we can have more time for God. And if we think about prioritizing our marriages, I think anybody who's in here who's married, their spouse would be in the top at least three, okay? If that's not it, come see me. But how do we practically schedule for that? I know for us, it's going to mean me being more intentional about finding babysitters and getting out to spend time together. It's intentional about getting home for meals, not stopping by in the middle of the day if it's a full day. We can't just say that these are our priorities. We have to think practically about, okay, if those are my priorities, then how does my schedule mirror that? After Jen is my daughter Lily. I think she has to be after Jen. And if parents, if we're not careful, we'll let the kids sneak up over our spouse, won't we? But I think one of the best things I can possibly do for Lily is to love her mom in such a way that she wants what we have when she grows up. What a thing to say about your parents that they might want that. I think one of the best things for Lily is to grow up in a house where her parents love each other. And listen, we don't have a perfect life or a perfect marriage. I'm just saying that this is what Lily is supposed to see. And it's what I want to give to her. I want to love Lily so well that when guys try to date her, she knows. You're not going to love me anywhere like my dad does. Forget it. I want to love her so well that she doesn't put up with dummies when she's in high school and college. I really do. And I have her listed above the church. And I'm just going to tell you guys this right now because I want her to know as she grows up and we lead this church together that she means more to me than you guys do. I want her to know that. I want her to never think, man, my dad loved those church people, and sometimes it felt like he didn't love me as much. I don't want her to feel that. I don't want her to feel like she's taking a back seat to my job. I do want her to feel like she takes a back seat to my wife because I want her to marry a guy that does that too. And we're going to talk about this next week, but Lily's got to be on there because God's called me to disciple her and to train her in spiritual health as well. After that, for me, are my family and friends. My immediate family and my friends, I lump those together because for me, friendships are super valuable. I believe what Solomon says in Proverbs when he says, the companion of the fools will suffer harm, but the companion of the wise will become wise. I believe in the adage, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. We believe passionately that you need people in your life who love you and love Jesus and have permission to tell you the truth. And so for me, I prioritize friendships. And I prioritize them sometimes over my job because I believe that we all need safe spaces where we can be completely ourselves and completely vulnerable and still completely loved and accepted. That's a picture of godly biblical love. It keeps us sane. For me personally, I want to be your pastor for 30 years, not three years. And part of that and the help for me is having good friendships both inside and outside of the church that give me life where I can just be myself. So for me, I prioritize those. And then my job. You guys. I put it there because I think the tendency is, for any of us who have careers that we care about, is to allow that to leapfrog everything else in our life. Is to allow that to steal time from other things. And I hear often from people who are retired that one of their biggest regrets is working too much. And I don't want to say that. So on the front end, I try to constantly remind myself because it will eat me up. You guys know how it is with work. There's always more to do. There's always more to think about. There's always something else to be done. There's always the next hill to climb. There's always something urgent. There's always the phone call and always the email and always the thing to respond to. It's not going to go away just because you choose to respond to this one. The next wave is coming. So at one point or another, you have to draw a line and you have to say, these are my God-ordained treasures, and I'm not going to let this one overtake ones that it shouldn't. So we have to measure how highly we prioritize our jobs or whatever else may go there that tends to eat away at your time. So my hope is that you'll go home and you'll say, God, what are my treasures? What are my God-ordained treasures in my life? That you'll physically write them out and then ask this question, what would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? What would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? If I say these are the most important things to me in 2020, then what's it going to take to organize my life around those things? What am I going to have to give up? What am I going to have to reprioritize? Who am I going to have to willingly disappoint and say, I can't do this thing anymore because I'm going to prioritize these things? And if we ask that question, what's it going to look like if we radically reprioritize our life around these God-ordained treasures, I actually have an example of what that could look like. As I was thinking through this this week, there's a family in our church, Wynn and Elisa Dunn, and they've got two kids, one in elementary school, one in middle school. I think the daughter might be in middle school now too. I got to figure that out before they come in the second service and I offend her. But I noticed on their Facebook feed is a lot of pictures like this. I think, Lynn, we have a picture of their family. Yeah, that's them doing something involving harnesses. It seems very fun. They do stuff like this all the time, all the time. They are forever going on little family outings and vacations and retreats. As a matter of fact, listen, I don't check up on you when you don't come on Facebook, but often if I don't see them on Sunday, on Sunday afternoon or Monday, I'll see a picture of their family together somewhere. Family time is big for the Dunns. And so I called Wynn. I said, hey man, this might sound weird, but I'm doing a sermon on this. I kind of explained it to him. And I said, you guys seem to be hanging out as a family all the time. Your kids are in middle school, and they seem to still like you and want to be seen in public with you, which is a big win for Wynn. And so I asked him, like, what's your philosophy around family? Like, what led you to value it this way? And he goes, well, do you know my full story? I said, I guess I don't. And he told me that years ago, he had a really lucrative job. It was a very high-paying job, but it was a high-stress job. And it consumed him. This was in the days of Blackberries, and he was forever on it. It was ever-present. Dinners, weekends, vacations, it was always, when can you do this one more thing? When can you just take this call real quick? Can you just close this out? Can you just put out this fire? It was always a part of him. And he says it was causing a lot of stress in his marriage, particularly as they invited kids into this marriage. And now his wife is home caring for the baby and he's never present. And it was causing tension and it made things difficult. And the kids began to notice how committed he was to his phone and his job too. So much so that he told me that, I think it was about 10 years ago, they went to Busch Gardens as a family. And as he was getting out of the car, he said, you know what I'm going to do? And he took his BlackBerry out and he put it in the car and he shut the doors and he locked it. And he said, when he did that, everybody in his family started crying because we've got our dad. He's going to be present with us today. I'd love to be the ticket taker at Busch Gardens that day. What's the matter with you guys? Like no one made you come. You can go back home. But his family cried because now we get dad. And it didn't take too much longer after that until he looked at his life and he said, man, I'm prioritizing things that I just don't want to prioritize right now. And so he changed careers. He called an audible, left the very high paying job, changed careers and chose a career, chose an industry that would allow him to have more time with his family. Made an intentional choice to radically reprioritize his life around what he believed to be God-ordained treasures. He said that was nine years ago. I said, as you look back on that, do you have any regrets? Or was it just best decision you ever made? And he said, you know, I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I think about the money and what would be possible if I had it. But no, there are no regrets. I love my kids. My kids love me. I have a good family, and it's so much more valuable to me than any resources that I could have. And so I'm praying that for some of us, this is just the nudge that you needed because there have been things going on in your life and you're too busy and you're too caught up and you see things slipping away from you that are important to you. And maybe the Holy Spirit's just working in your heart right now to say, hey, why don't you let some things go? Maybe this needs to be the year that you get okay with disappointing people. Where you realize, you know what? If the stranger's disappointed in me for not doing the thing that they want me to do, I'm going to be okay. Maybe we need to step away from things. I'll even say this. I want to be your pastor before I run the business of the church. If you need to step away from church things, sorry Aaron, for your own health, do it. Claim your schedule around your priorities. And in 2020, let's make some changes and reprioritize our lives around these God-ordained treasures so that when we get to the end of this year and look back on our schedule and we look back at how we invested our time, we go, yeah, I invested these things in treasures that matter for eternity so that we had a better year this year than we did last year. So I hope you'll do that. I hope you'll take the list home. I hope you'll pray through your priorities, and I hope that you'll have the courage to reprioritize your schedule around the things that you and God agree are super important to you in 2020. All right, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, I'm going to pray over the year, too, as we kick it off together, and then I'm going to dismiss and we'll go out into the world. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you so much for you, for your presence, for your goodness, for how big and marvelous and miraculous you are, for how much you care about us, for how much you care about how we fill our time. Lord, I pray that we would be courageous in naming our priorities. I pray that we would be courageous in building our schedule around those. God, if we have to say no to some things, then give us the audacity to do that. If we need to say yes to some things, give us the discipline to do that. God, we know that decisions that we make and things that we resolve to do often falter and flutter. God, I pray that you would be with us and give us your strength to see these things through so that our lives might change in profound ways, God, if that's what you would have. Lord, I pray over this year, may all the events of this year conspire to draw every one of us closer to you. Will you overcome doubts? Will you overcome fears? Will you overcome hesitation? Will you overcome hurt? Will you speak to us in the triumphs so that we don't take credit for those? Will you speak to us in the tragedy, God, so that we don't get overly angry at those? Will you please conspire everything in our life to draw us more closely to you so that we might know what it is to walk with you? For many of us, God, make this the year where we finally break the chains of the old habits and walk in new habits. God, please bless this year and bless us as we walk in it. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

All right, well, good morning. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. But thanks for being here on this September Sunday. I'm excited to be back in the fall in two services and to be in our new series called Feast. What's going on here is that God, using Moses, carrying the Israelites out of Egypt. They were a nation of slaves. The Israelites are God's chosen people. They're living in the desert. And we see this in the first five books of the Bible. And the books of Leviticus and Numbers really kind of give us the details of God's effort to help Moses kind of construct a civilization or a society. If you think about it historically, it's about 500,000 people coming out of slavery. It's all they've ever known. Now they're an independent nation or group of people, and they're trying to figure things out. So God gives them laws and the Ten Commandments. He gives them religion. They assign a priestly class, the Levites, to set up the tabernacle and put expectations and provision around how these people are supposed to interact with their God. They install a government. Moses names elders and everybody looks out for their tribes and it works kind of like that. And one of the things that God does for this new society is he gives them six festivals or six holidays, and he says, every year I want you to celebrate these six events. And last week we talked about this idea that really what a holiday does is it stops us in the midst of our year, in the midst of our crazy life, as everything just kind of gets going and blowing and we focus on all these other things. What a holiday does is it stops us and it narrows our focus in on things that are important to us. And so to me, it's really interesting to look at the six holidays that God installed in the Old Testament for his chosen people and ask ourselves, what is it in these holidays that God wants us to remember? What is it that he wants us to celebrate? What was it that he wanted his chosen people to stop and slow down and focus on for a little while? And so as we approach the holiday this week, last week was Feast of Trumpets. It kicks off the Jewish New Year, and I had a good time. We kicked the service off with a shofar. I thought it was a really fun service. I really went home last week going, man, this fall is going to be really, really great, really, really fun. As we approach this week and the festival that God had, I wanted to go back a couple of weeks to a podcast that I was listening to. There's a guy that does podcasts. I think it's called Armchair Expert, a guy named Dax Shepard. He's an atheist. He's not a believer. It is not a church-friendly podcast. I'm not like, go listen to this and you'll be spiritually enriched. But what he does is he talks to other people and he has these actual meaningful, vulnerable, deep conversations. And I've found in my life that conversations like that, where you can just really get down to things that matter and learn about people and be honest and vulnerable with people, those kinds of conversations really kind of give me life. I like those. And so I like listening to his podcast. And he had a guy on named Danny McBride, I think. He's an actor, comedian, whatever. And they're talking, and they were talking about growing up being forced to go to church. Danny grew up in the South, I think maybe even in North Carolina. And he was forced to go to church, but he never wanted to. And so as soon as he was old enough, he quit going. And he really doesn't claim to have much of a faith now. Dax grew up, sometimes his grandparents would make him go, but he is a devout atheist now. He's very open about his atheism. But they got to talking about going to church when they were young. And then one of them made the comment when they were old enough to not have to go anymore. I think it was Dax. He was like, you know, I kind of missed it. I liked having to do something, being made to do something that I didn't want to do. And Danny said, yeah, you know what? I found that I kind of missed it too. I wonder why that is. And Dax said this thing that I thought was incredibly interesting coming from an atheist. He said, I think that there is a human need to repent, a need to make ourselves right with our Creator. There's an author named C.S. Lewis who was around in the early 1900s, World War II. He was an English professor at Oxford and was an atheist as well. But he made this intellectual journey from atheism to theism to eventually Christianity. And he wrote a book that chronicles that journey called Mere Christianity. It's a Christian classic. If you've never read it, it's absolutely worth the time. The language is a little bit tough. It's hard to understand. Sometimes you're going to have to reread passages. If you're like me, you're going to have to really reread them a lot. But eventually when you understand it, man, it is one of the best books I think ever written. And in his argument for God and explaining how he arrived at a belief in the Christian God, the first thing he does is talk about, lay out some proofs for God for himself. Not trying to convince you, and I'm not going to go through those proofs this morning, but he starts making the case for why he came to the conclusion that there has to be a God. And then after he concludes that there has to be a God, he makes a reasoned argument that he has to be a perfect God. And then he says this, and it stuck with me. I've always thought it was so interesting. He said, and since there's a God, and since he is perfect, we have no choice but to conclude that he is offended by us, that he's angry with us, because we're not perfect. And we know intrinsically that there's a God who created us and that we have displeased him in the way that we've acted because we haven't lived up to his standards. And I just think that these two different thought processes by people who were or are atheists coming to the conclusion that, you know what, and they wouldn't say it like this, but I say it like this, written on the human heart is a longing to be made right with our creator God. I think it exists in each one of us. I think if you're here this morning and you're not even a believer, somebody drug you here or you're kicking the tires, I think that you might even agree with me that there is something that wants us to be right with God, right with the universe. If you're a believer, you know this feeling very well. And it's for this need, it's to address this feeling, this thing that was written on us, this need to repent that God placed on the calendar the holiest of holidays that we now know as Yom Kippur. And that's what we're going to look at this morning. Now, Yom Kippur is what it's called in the Hebrew culture. And those words together, Yom means day and Kippur means atonement. So it's become known as the day of atonement. But Kippur can also be translated as covering, the day of covering. And so it's the day on the calendar that God provides for his people so that you can be sure, so that the Hebrew people, the Israelite people can be sure that they are right before their God. It addresses this intrinsic need within us to repent and know that we are right before our creator God. And so it's on this day that all of the sins of the priesthood, of the high priest, and of the Hebrew people are atoned for in a ceremony that we're gonna go through that occurs at the temple in Jerusalem. It's the day of atonement or the day of covering. It's the provision that God makes so that his people can be right before him. And to me, it's a remarkable day. Most of you have probably heard of it before. Most of you who pay attention to cultural things probably know that it's a Jewish holiday and it's the holiest, it's the highest of the holidays. It's celebrated so reverently that every 50 years, the day of atonement becomes a year of Jubilee. And on the 50th year, on that year of Jubilee, all debts are canceled and all land is given back to the family. It's a really important holiday in the Hebrew calendar. And on this day, everybody went to the temple. So to help us as I kind of walk us through what happened at Yom Kippur, we have to kind of have a working knowledge of the temple. So I actually found this picture that I wanted to show you. This is the temple. If you go to Jerusalem right now, in the city is a museum that I've been able to go to. And in the middle of that museum is a replica that's probably about as big as this room of ancient Israel at the time of Solomon and immediately following. And in the middle of the city is the temple complex. And this is the temple complex. And so what you see here, I just kind of want to walk us through there for a couple of things. That big building in the middle, the tallest part of it, that is the holy place and the holy of holies. We're going to talk about it in a second, but that building was basically divided in two by a curtain. The front portion of it was the holy place. The only people allowed in the holy place were Jewish priests. And then the other side of that is the holy of holies. The only person allowed there is the high priest. And then outside of that through the door, you see the inner courtyard. The only people allowed there are Jewish males. And then outside of that building and more of the space is the outer courtyard. Only Jewish people are allowed in the outer courtyard. And then this roofed area to the left of the screen, that's where the Sanhedrin met. That was like their senate. That's where the government met. All the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Zealots, their representatives would meet there and decide on things. So that's kind of, when I talk about the temple for the rest of the morning, this is what I'm talking about. And it's important for us to know that on Yom Kippur, on the Day of Atonement, the focus of all of God's people was on the temple. On the Day of Atonement, on this day, on the holiest of holidays, the focus of all of Israel, of all of God's people scattered wherever they were, was on the temple. And so what they would do is they would come from all over the country. And having been there, it's not super far. You can get there in a couple of days if you're walking from the top of the country to Jerusalem in the center or from southern Israel to Jerusalem. So everybody has the chance to come and gather in the holy city at the temple, the holy place where the presence of God is. The presence of God was said to be in the holy of holies. And so on this holiday, the highest of days, all of Israel would gather and clamor into Jerusalem. And then on the Day of Atonement, as many people as could fit into that temple complex would fit into that temple complex and wait for the priest to perform the ceremonies and the rites and the duties that went along with Yom Kippur. And the priest was also a focal point of this day. And as I learned this stuff, I'm going to walk you through kind of what that day looked like. I was fascinated by all of these things. I hope that it doesn't bore you, but for me, I'm kind of a history nerd, so as I was reading this stuff, I really, really ate it up. But the priest would come out. First of all, he would start to fast the day before. Everybody would fast the day of. Every good Hebrew would fast the day of Yom Kippur, but the priest would fast a day early, and then he would stay up all night. Members of the Sanhedrin were assigned to watch him and make sure he didn't fall asleep, because he was likely an older guy, and our population of people who are the age of what the high priest would have been know that it's kind of hard to stay awake during one of my sermons. So I can't imagine staying awake all night. So the Sanhedrin would kind of watch him and poke him and make sure he didn't fall asleep. And then after that, they would hand it off to the priestly elders and they would make sure that he would stay awake. And then very early in the morning, the ceremony would start and he would go into the temple, I would assume surrounded by thousands of people, and he was wearing his traditional priestly robes, which were laced with gold as is detailed in the book of Leviticus. And he would go behind a curtain to like a bath and he would ceremonially bathe himself, which I'm guessing wasn't awkward for them. They would have been like, yeah, I mean, he's just taking a bath. For us, that's weird. But for them, he would take a bath behind the curtain and it was fine. And then when he was done, he would put on white priestly garments specifically for Yom Kippur, for the Day of Atonement. And he would begin to perform the ceremonies and the rituals of the day. And the first one was he would go to the altar in that outer courtyard in front of the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, and he would take a bull. And he would place his hands on the head of the bull, and he would repeat this prayer of repentance because this bull was dying for the priest and for his family. This was his personal atonement and the atonement for the rest of the priesthood for all of the sins that had been committed in that year. And so he would atone for his sins, and his sins were symbolically transferred from him to the head of the bull, and that bull would die in his place and in the place of his family. It's a sacrificial system. And then the blood of the bull would drip into a bowl, and he would hold that, and that would be prepared for something in a second. Then, in this really kind of interesting ceremony, there would be two goats that were brought to the high priest. And he would take one goat, they would draw lots, which was their way of playing paper, rock, scissors. And he would decide which goat got designated as for the Lord and which goat got designated as the scapegoat. And the one that was designated for the Lord, they put a white cord around its neck. And the one that was designated as the scapegoat, they put a red cord around its neck. And then after doing that, the priest would then say a prayer. And in this prayer, the name of Jehovah was elicited. And I think it happened like eight times throughout the day. And every time the priest would say the name of Jehovah God, the entire assembly would fall on their face and worship God. And then stand back up and he would continue. to God, and then you would walk through this curtain. And this curtain I always heard about growing up separates the Holy of Holies from the holy place. And I always heard in Christian school and in Bible college that if you put a team of oxen on either side of that curtain and they pulled against one another, that they would not be able to tear that curtain. It was an impenetrable layer. And in the Holy of Holies was the Ark of the Covenant. It was a box that you weren't allowed to touch. Inside this box was the stone tablets that God gave Moses the law on and the staff of Moses. On top of this box were two golden angels. And it's thought that their wings were pointed out and their heads were bowed and that their wings were touching each other at the tips. And where they touched would create what was called the mercy seat. And it said that the very presence of God rested on that mercy seat. And there was only one person alive allowed to go in there, and that was the high priest. Because it was the very presence, the holy presence of God. And if you went in there and were impure, anything about you was imperfect and not worthy of God's presence, then you would fall dead in an instant. They were so worried about this. This was so sobering and such a concern that in the white priestly garments of the high priest, they wove bells into the hymns so that when he would move, you could hear him moving. And before he went into the Holy of Holies, they would tie a rope around his ankle so that if the bells stopped, they'd just start pulling. That's how serious it was. Can you imagine being guy number two? And they had to pull him out and be like, well, you've got to put on that robe now. That would be really scary. But that was the seriousness and the sobriety that surrounded going into the Holy of Holies. And it's only the priests that even saw the high priest enter. The Jewish males are outside. Maybe if they have a certain vantage point, they can peek in and see. But the other, the people, the throngs up on the walls and on the roofs, they can't even see him going into the Holy of Holies. And that's where the presence of God rested. And when he got in there, he would take the blood of the bull and he would sprinkle it on the mercy seat and he would sprinkle it on the curtain and he would say a prayer and that was for his family and then he would step out. And when he stepped out, he went and he took the goat that was designated as for the, and he sacrificed that goat. And this was the beginning of the atonement of the sins of the people of Israel. He would take the blood of the goat, he would pray a prayer, he would read a scripture, people would fall on their face and worship God, and then he would go back into the Holy of Holies, and he would sprinkle the blood of the goat on the mercy seat and on the curtain, and this was the atonement for the people. Then he would step back out and he would take the scapegoat. And there was a designated priest in a particular causeway of the temple. And he would send the scapegoat to that priest. And that priest would then walk that goat out of the city limits into the wilderness, traditionally 10 to 12 miles. I don't know how long this took, but I do know that if I were an ancient Hebrew person, that waiting for the goat to get to the place would be my least favorite part of Yom Kippur. I'm not a man of a lot of patience, and that's 12 miles away with an old priest. I would get pretty bummed out about that. All along the way, there was 10 stations, 10 booths where they would eat and drink and then move on. And once the scapegoat got far enough away, the priest would then sacrifice that goat. And then he would camp there overnight and not come back into the city until the morning. And it said that that scapegoat is the goat that died for the sins of the people of Israel. And it would cover over the sins of Israel. That's where we get the kippur, the covering. It would serve as the covering of the sins of Israel so that when God looked at the people of Israel, he didn't see their sin. He saw the covering. And this particular death was for sins of omission because all of these people, listen, if you're at Yom Kippur, if you've got prime seats and you're watching this, you probably have been going to temple every week and you've been doing your sacrifices every week and you've been making sure that you and God are good throughout the year. But this particular sacrifice were for the sins of omission of the people of Israel throughout the year. And we can relate to this. Those things that you didn't know were wrong until later, that thing that you've been doing for years, and then you find out like, oh my goodness, I shouldn't do that. That's not really pleasing to the Lord. I guess I should stop. Sorry, 2012. Like we know those things, or maybe those little like attitudes that show up, the little flecks of racism that we find in ourselves. And we go, oh my gosh, I can't believe that I used to think that way. These things where we've displeased the Lord and we don't even realize that we have. That's what the Day of Atonement was for, was to say, hey, everything is covered. Everything is taken care of. Once the goat had been sacrificed, there was a series of flags that would be waved by centuries all the way back to Jerusalem. And then once the word got back to the high priest, he would burn the remaining parts of the bulls and the goat that were sacrificed earlier. He would read three scriptures and say eight benedictions. He would invoke the name of the Lord and the crowd, the thousands of people would worship along with him each time. And when he was finally done, after a whole day's worth of ceremony late in the afternoon, he would ceremonially bathe one more time and put his personal clothes back on. And tradition says that he would go home and have a feast with his family to celebrate surviving that day because it was a stressful time for his family. And I do think it's interesting that after the high priest performs all of these duties on a somber holiday, the first thing he does is he goes home and he has a feast. So even on a holiday that's dedicated to fasting, there's still a feast to cap it off at the end. And so as I learned about these things this week and this process and this ceremony, I just began to think, man, what would it have been like to have been in the ancient Hebrew world? And watch this. What would it have been like to grow up with this tradition? What would it have been like to bend one of the throngs of people in the temple watching or listening or waiting and seeing the reaction of everybody else? At a time with no internet, at a time without published books, at a time where the only way you learn is through rote memorization, whatever the previous generation tells you, that's what you retain, and then you teach it to the ones who follow you. And for thousands of years, that's how it worked. What would it have been like to take in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as an ancient Hebrew person? What would it have been like to just be surrounded, to be from the countryside of Galilee and to come in and be surrounded by all these people? To have grown up and have your grandpa or your grandma explain to you every year, Grandpa, we know the bull, like we get it, we know what it means. What would it have been like when you came of age and it was your responsibility to explain it to the younger generation and keep them along? To have grown up seeing this every year, to watch the same high priest perform the same rites every year. What would it have been like to have fallen on your face? Really picture it and worship at the name of the Lord every time. How totally separate and other must the high priest would have been? Don't think about it from the perspective of the Sanhedrin looking down from their VIP seats or from the other priests who would watch the high priest and think that might be me one day and kind of peek out of the holy place and watch his back as he performed in front of the crowds. But what would it have been like to be in the crowds, to be separated and other, to even be a Hebrew woman and not even be allowed in the part where you can see the priest and all you can do is listen. How distant would the priest have felt to you? I know over the years I've gone to different Christian conferences and in Christian world there's these celebrity pastors that write books and do podcasts and have thousands of downloads and tens of thousands of people that go to their church and they feel like little celebrities and you them down there on the stage, and you're like, oh, that's so-and-so, that's so neat. I'm really glad that I'm here, and that's as close as I'll ever get to them. And I imagine that at the best, that that's how the high priest felt, is so different and so other and so separated from you. What would it have felt like to know that he was going into the Holy of Holies on your behalf? To know that in the Holy of Holies was the presence of God, and we're so fearful of the presence of God that the holiest man among us, the most righteous among us, the high priest, is fearful that he might die. He's barely qualified to walk through that curtain. I know that I could never walk through that curtain. What kind of mystery surrounded the holy of holies? What kind of separation must they have felt from the high priest who was arguing to God on their behalf, who was interceding for them, who served as their intermediary? What kind of separation must they have felt from God? What kind of fear must have surrounded what they interpreted as the presence of God? Can you get yourself into the mystery and the wonder and the pageantry of Yom Kippur and what it must have been like to take that in as an ancient Hebrew person and pass that down from generation to generation? And I ask that because I wonder what it would have felt like to be one of these people at the time of Jesus. And to be a devout Jew, to celebrate Yom Kippur every year, it's the highest, the holiest of holidays. And the temple, the focus of all God's people is on the temple, and that's where the presence of God rests, and that's where his people work, his representatives, the priests work and intercede for us and serve as intermediaries for us. What must it have been like to be sitting there and to be a devout Jew and to watch this man who claims to be the Son of God die on the cross, and the moment he dies, you can look across the valley there from the eastern side and see into the Holy of Holies and watch that veil tear from top to bottom. Which is what the Gospels tell us happened when Jesus died. That veil was torn in two. How earth-shattering must that have been for a Hebrew people who grew up believing, rightly so, that the presence of God was on the other side of that veil. Something that was different and other and we're fearful of it and we're separated from it. How earth shattering would it have been for that veil to tear as the Son of God dies on a cross. What I want us to see is that Jesus' death on the cross was the final atonement and the perfection of Yom Kippur. Jesus' death on the cross, our God sending His Son to die for us, who lived a perfect life, who died a perfect death on the cross as our eternal sacrifice, is the final atonement. They needed this atonement every year. They needed the high priest to go through it all every year. They needed all the pomp and circumstance and pageantry and majesty and mystery every year to make sure that they were right with God. And then Jesus dies on the cross outside the city as a final atonement and the perfection of Yom Kippur. And what I want us to see here is, I said that for all of history up to the point of the death of Christ that the focus of Israel had been towards the temple. Did you know that even all the synagogues built in Israel are built so that they are facing Jerusalem, facing the temple? And that all the synagogues throughout the world and whatever other nation that exists, they are built facing Israel, facing Jerusalem, facing the temple. All of the Hebrew world, their focus is on what happens at the temple. But at the death of Jesus, at the final atonement and the perfection of Yom Kippur, there is a seismic shift in focus. There is a seismic shift in the focus of God's people because the focus of God's people no longer needs to be on the temple and what happens there. There's actually several shifts in focus and I want to walk us through them very quickly. Maybe the most significant one is there is a shift in focus from the temple to the cross. All of Israel, all of God's people, all of those who would declare faith and believe in God the Father are to shift their focus from what happens at the temple to what happens on the cross. And the cross becomes our focus. That's why we don't place any priority on the temple. That's why we don't have to go there because of what happened on the cross. That's why our church doesn't face Israel. It faces the parking lot. Because the focus is on the cross. So we shift our focus, God's people, from the temple to the cross. We shift our focus from an annual sacrifice to an eternal sacrifice. The book of Hebrews tells us that in this ceremony, in Yom Kippur, that all of the sacrifices are shadows that are cast by Jesus on history. That the bull represents Jesus and the goats represent Jesus. And particularly the scapegoat that was led outside the city into the wilderness to die for the sins of the people. Jesus, thousands of years later, was led outside the city on a hillside in the wilderness to be crucified for all the sins of the people. He is the scapegoat. He is the goat that is for the Lord. He is the bull. Jesus is the perfect sacrifice. And so our focus shifts from annual temporary sacrifices to eternal ones, we're told in the book of Hebrews. Hebrews also tells us that Jesus is now our high priest. And so we switch our focus from a human priest to a holy one. We had a human priest who was fallible, who had ego to deal with, who had all the sins that we have to deal with, to a holy priest who is divine, who intercedes for us. And what I think is amazing about this priest is he's not other. He's not distant and far. He holds us and he weeps with us. And the Bible says he stands at the door and knocks and waits to come into our life. He dies for us. He serves us. He washes our feet. He walks amongst our poor. The high priest that we have doesn't sit and wait for us to come to him at a temple. Surrounded by all the other priests in the pomp and circumstance, he comes to us and he beckons that we come to him. And he offers us an intimate relationship. Not only that, but he advocates to the Father on our behalf. No longer is there this wall of separation between us and God, where the only way to approach the presence of God is to go to the priests, his intermediaries, other people who are our peers. You guys get to bypass me entirely and go right to God, which is good for you because I've got my own issues to deal with. We go right to Jesus and he advocates to the Father on behalf of us. So our focus shifts from a human priest to a holy one. Maybe most interesting to me is our focus shifts from covering to cleansing. Do you realize that in the Old Testament, all the language used to talk about us no longer being guilty of our sin is covering language, that the blood of the sacrifice covers over our sin. It makes us outwardly appear righteous as God looks at us. Even as we go back to the very first sin, the sin in the Garden of Eden by Adam and Eve. What is God's response to that sin? What does he do? He takes animal skins and he fashions them and he covers over their shame. He doesn't cleanse them. He covers it. But in the New Testament, there's a shift in language. He cleanses. He removes it from us. Because when it's just covered, it's still there. We're still sinful. If you get up on a Saturday and you go out and you work all day and you sweat in the yard and you're gross and you come in and you take off your yard clothes and you don't shower and you put on your nice going out clothes, you'll look nice, but you stink. When our sin is covered over, we are acceptable to God, but we are still sinful. And the miracle of Jesus on the cross is that he cleanses us. This is what Hebrews says. This is why the author writes this. Chapters 9 and 10 of Hebrews are really a statement on Yom Kippur. And what they're saying, what the author is saying is that whole deal was a big shadow cast by Jesus on history. It was a road sign pointing to our need for Christ. And what Hebrews 9 and 10 tells us is that Jesus is the sacrifice. He is the high priest. He is, like I said earlier, the final atonement and the perfection of Yom The Bible tells us that he removes our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. We are clean and invited to walk with the Lord. And finally, and I love this one, our focus shifts from separate to intimate. Again, take yourself back to the place where you were the Hebrew person and you're watching all of this take place and you see the very holy priest, very pompous and pious, and I'm sure he was a righteous man, but he must have felt just very separate and other. You could never even approach him. And then he would walk into a holy place and then a holy of holies and you're three layers removed from the presence of God. And it's only once a year that you go into God's presence. And it's a fearful thing and an awe-inspiring thing. And then in an instant, the veil tears. And when that veil is torn, the separation that was felt between the people and God goes away. And the very presence of God rushes out of the Holy of Holies and into the lives of those of us who would believe. And Jesus becomes our high priest who begs for intimacy with us, who wants to know you. This presence of God that feels different and other and fearful and unapproachable, now we're told he knows the very numbers of hairs on our head. We're told that he weeps with us. We're told that he touches us when we are sick. And I don't think we have an adequate appreciation for what it must have felt like to feel so removed from God and his people to immediately transition into this intimacy that we're invited in so that this God that we would die if we went into his presence undeservedly because Jesus' blood now cleanses us. Romans tells us that we call that same God Abba, Father, Daddy, or Papa. The kind of intimacy that we are invited into. And so as I looked at Yom Kippur and just kind of reflected on what it means, it became very clear to me that what Yom Kippur really is, what we're really celebrating, what God is really doing here, Yom Kippur is God's ruthless and relentless effort to remove all the barriers that exist between He and us. You see? In the Old Testament world, there was priests that existed between us and God. There was sins that existed between us and God. There was sins of omission that we didn't even know about that existed between us and God. And Yom Kippur is when he gets everybody together and he says, look, look, everyone, I am putting things in place so that there is nothing between me and my people. I'm putting things in place so that you know that I want to be with you, so there is nothing that can separate us. There are no barriers between us now. And then when he sends Jesus, who is the perfection of Yom Kippur, he removes all of the barriers and his presence rushes into the lives of those who would believe. And Yom Kippur is God's relentless and ruthless effort to remove all barriers between you and him. He wants nothing to exist between you. And knowing that we are impotent to remove those barriers ourselves, he installed a celebration once a year to tell us, hey, there's nothing between me and you. There are no barriers. There's nothing keeping you from my presence. You are welcome here. And then by sending his son the perfection of Yom Kippur, he says eternally once and for all, you are invited into my presence, so much so that I am preparing a place for you in my very presence for all eternity. And as I thought about the spirit of Yom Kippur and this God who ruthlessly removes every barrier between he and I, what I realized is I am impotent to remove the barriers that are placed between me and God, but I am very capable of putting them there. And as I reflected on myself, it occurs to me that any barriers that exist between me and God are ones that I put there. They're man-made. I built them myself. Sometimes with doubt, because I walked through that. Often with faithlessness and inconsistency. The feelings of guilt that he's ridden me of that I still cling to. Because I can't understand how he could still love me. Oftentimes it's my sin that puts a layer, puts another veil between me and God. And then I got to thinking about you as your pastor and would submit to you. If you feel like there are barriers between you and God, things preventing you from being as close with him as you would like and he would like? I think it's very likely we put those there ourselves. I think based on the heart of God, I see in Yom Kippur that any barriers that exist between us and God are ones that we built. Because he removes all the ones he can. So maybe we have doubt. But we haven't asked God to remove that. So here's what I want to do. In a few minutes, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, the band is going to be playing through a song. And I want to invite you while they play to just stay in your seat and be quiet and pray and reflect. And invite you to pray a prayer for yourself that I've been praying this week. And ask God, are there any barriers between you and I? Ask for the faith and the courage to see those. And then if he's gracious enough to point them out to you, maybe you know them right now, maybe they're blaring in the back of your mind, then pray that God would give you the courage to take the steps of faith to remove them. And so, as we pray together, I want you to have this opportunity to ask God, God, are there any barriers between me and you? Have I hung any veils in my life that need to be torn down? And give him permission to do that. Give him permission to bring down those barriers. Maybe you came today and you don't know Jesus. Maybe you wouldn't call yourself a believer. And so the barrier between you and God is faith. If you're here today and you want to become a believer, you want to accept this atonement, you want to be made right with your creator, that human desire to repent and be made right resonates with you. Then maybe today is the day that you become a child of God. To be a Christian, all you do is admit that I've sinned. I've acted in ways that have displeased my creator. And my sin has placed a barrier between God and I. And because of that, I need the death of Jesus on the cross to atone for me. It's not just cover over my sins, but cleanse them. You pray and you tell that to God. And then you say, from this point forward, I'm no longer the Lord of my life. I'm no longer the decision maker in my life. God is. And I'll do my best to do what he says. Many of us in here have been Christians for a long time, but over the years, we've allowed barriers to develop between us and God, and we don't have the intimacy with him that we want. Take a few minutes and have the courage to allow God to point those out, and have the faith to ask Him to remove those, whether they be doubt, bitterness, or sin, or habits. And on the day that the church looks at Yom Kippur, God's visible effort to remove barriers between he and I and restore the intimacy that we both long for. Take a minute and approach God for that intimacy as well. I'm gonna pray and then you guys sit and pray. And when Steve thinks it's the right time, we'll all stand and we'll finish singing together. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We are floored and humbled that you have so intentionally removed all the barriers between us and you. God, we thank you for the day of atonement for Yom Kippur and all that it represents, for all the symbolism there. I ask that we would be touched by it, that we would be moved by it. God, I ask that for those of us who came in this morning with a veil that we hung ourselves, with a barrier that we built ourselves between you and us, God, give us the faith to see it and the courage to ask you to remove it. It's in your son's name we pray.