Sermons tagged with Focus

Thanks, guys. Thanks, Jeffy. I can tell you've been paying attention. That's fantastic. That's great. I don't know if y'all noticed, that was all guys up here. We've got a new boy band at Grace, so submit the names for that band online, please. The best one we'll put in lights next week. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If I hadn't gotten to meet you, I would love to do that. Particularly, I've kind of noticed every week as we gather in person that there's some folks who moved to the area or just decided that they wanted to find a church sometime in the last year and found us online. I've had a conversation a lot where I say, hey, I'm Nate, and they go, yeah, we know. We've watched about 10 of your sermons. I'm like, oh, gosh, well, God bless you for being here. But if that's you and you come through the doors, I would love to meet you. So let's make sure we do that in a Sunday here very soon. This is the last part, as Jeff said, in our series called Greater, where we're moving through the book of Hebrews together. For context, just so that we all know, we've kind of begun each week this way. Hebrews was written, we don't know by whom, to Hellenistic Jews, Jewish people who grew up outside of Israel as practicing Jews and at some point in their life converted to Christianity. Because of that conversion, they are facing great persecution from the Romans and from the Jewish community. And the author writes the book of Hebrews to encourage them to hang in there, to persevere in their faith. And so he does this by comparing Jesus to different facets of the Hebrew faith. And that's why we've called this series Greater, because he goes to great lengths to show us how great Jesus is. And we've said it's the most soaring and lofty picture of Jesus in the Bible. And that's important because of where we arrive at today. Today, we arrive at Hebrews chapter 12, verses 1 and 2. Probably two of my favorite verses in the Bible. If you've been going here for any time, you know that I say that about a lot of verses. I don't know which ones are my favorite, but I love these two. And these two, to me, to someone who grew up as a Christian, I don't have any memories before my family was involved in church. These are two of the most life-changing verses I've ever encountered. They changed the way I went about my faith years ago. And so my hope and prayer for you this morning is, if you're familiar with these verses, if you understand them the way that I do, that this can be a good reorienting or recentering for your life and for your heart as you move throughout your weeks and your months ahead. My sincere hope and prayer is that for some of you, this might be the first time you've heard the verses looked at in this way, and that they can be similarly life-changing for you. I think they're life-changing and hope-giving. And it's important to note that they follow this long dissertation, right? 10 chapters, 11 chapters long of this lofty view of Jesus. To compel these Jewish Christians to stay in the faith, to hang in there, he paints this incredible picture of Jesus. And every week we've gone through and we've done our best to point to Jesus as well in the different comparisons. And as Jeff prayed as the great high priest, and last week we looked at him as the sacrifice. We see him as the greatest messenger. We see his law is greater than Moses' law. And we talked about how all streams in the Old Testament converge on Jesus. All hope in the New Testament remembers back to Jesus and the promises kept and anticipates the promises that he will fulfill. Everything culminates on Jesus. And last week we even talked about how everything we do as a church and as individuals and that the Bible admonishes us to do really is to point ourselves and others to Christ. So that's kind of where he's been driving to in the book of Hebrews. And then we get to chapter 12 and chapter 12 starts out with the therefore. And I've told you guys that whenever we see one of those, we have to ask, what is this therefore, therefore? And in this case, it's because the preceding chapter is Hebrews chapter 11. Hebrews chapter 11 in theological and Bible nerd circles is called the Hall of Faith. It is a who's who of the Old Testament, where the author is trying to explain to them, to this audience, really how faith works and what faith looks like and what faith does. In chapter 10, he tries to define faith. And then in chapter 11, he says, let me show you what faith does. And he just goes through these Old Testament heroes. And he says, by faith, Abraham, by faith, Moses, by faith, Rahab, by faith, David, by faith, Solomon. He just goes down the line. So it's the hall of faith. And then the end of the chapter, he's talking about all these other saints that suffered. Actually, in the first week, I referenced chapter 10 and read about some of the persecution that they were going under. And then we know that that could continue for the rest of history, right? John Wesley and John Calvin and all these other great heroes of the faith that has come, Billy Graham, that have come through the years. And so chapter 12 starts off like this, and to me, it's a verse that really resonates. I've always really loved it. He writes this. I love the imagery of that verse. There is this sense that all of the saints that came before us are in heaven. And they've run their race. And now they're watching us. They've done their part. They lived their life for better or worse with regrets or with pride. They lived their life. They played their part. They turned in their time. And now they're in heaven and they're watching us. I kind of even get the sense, if you take this verse a step further, it's not just the heroes of the faith. It's not just the hall of faith, but it's every saint that's come through the centuries. Every Christian that's lived and died and is now in heaven, you get the sense based on Hebrews 12 that they're looking down on us since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses like there is this heavenly arena and earth is the playing field. And you get this real sense from Hebrews 12, one, that it's our turn to run, right? It's our turn. It's our generation's turn. It's our turn to live our life. You know, when I was growing up, this has kind of struck me all freshly. We're going to have a son here in four or five weeks, Lord willing. And when I was growing up, my whole life was sports, man. That's all I cared about. I played sports all the time. I watched SportsCenter. I memorized the statistics. I went to school and I talked about sports. I came home and I played sports. I got done with those and I watched sports. Like that's all I care about. The measure of a man was how good you are at the sport that you chose. And I didn't understand anything beside that. Now that's antiquated and silly, but that's how I grew up. And when I was 18, 19, 20 years old, I played a little bit of soccer in college. When I was doing that, like I couldn't wait to have a son and train him in sports. And now at 40, I've moved much farther. I've moved past that. And I'm like, I don't care if this kid throws a ball. Do whatever you want to do, man. Just be comfortable with yourself. Just learn to love yourself in your own skin, and that'll be half the battle. Be good at sports if you want to be. But if he does play, and if Lily takes up sports, that's my daughter. My time is done playing. I'm not going to go play competitive soccer anymore. I did it for one season in my 30s and thought this was a huge mistake, and I will never do it again. Like I'm out, okay? I will go compete against average to below average golfers. That's the height of my competitiveness. My time is done. As a parent, you know this. When you do your thing, when you go through your adolescence, and then you're a parent and you have kids, it's their turn to run. It's your turn to watch and spectate and cheer on. And that's one of the things I love about this verse is this picture that it gives us of living our life, of running our race. It's our turn to run. From the youngest in the room to the oldest in the room, it's still our turn to run. And there is a sense that heaven is watching and cheering for us. And one of the things that I like to think, now listen, I like to think this. I don't know that it's true. I hold this with a very open hand. If I get to heaven and God says, you weren't right about that one, I'll be like, yeah, I wasn't really sure. But, and I'm not going to quote a verse to help support this, okay? I just think that this could be true. I think it's entirely possible that the people in your family who came before you are made proud and joyful by what you do here. I think it's entirely possible that my papa still smiles in heaven every Sunday morning when I get to preach. I think it's possible. I like to think that could be true because in Hebrews it talks about this great cloud of witnesses watching us from heaven. And we acknowledge that it's our turn to run our race because of that, because they're watching, because God has commissioned us to run this race. What should we do? Well, it tells us that we should throw off the sin and the weight. This translation I read from the ESV and it says that we should lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely. I think it's the NIV that phrases it like this and I kind of like this phrasing better. It says that we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. Because it's our turn to run, we should run the race that God has laid out for us. Because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, including God himself, we should run the race that he has laid out for us. And to do that, to run that race effectively, we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And I love that there's two things included there. Because as Christians, we kind of know the deal, right? We kind of know as Christians, no matter where we are in the theological knowledge spectrum, we know that when we become a Christian, we should try to not sin. I think we get it. Even if you're here, you're a brand new Christian. You're here, you wouldn't even call yourself a believer, you're spiritually curious. One of the things that you're loosely aware of about the Christian faith is, if you want to sign up for Christianity, we should try to not sin. I think we all know that, right? But here he says we should throw aside the sin that keeps us from running our race and the weight. So verse one introduces the idea that something might be prohibitive rather than sinful. It introduces the idea that something in our life might be prohibitive of running our race rather than simply sinful. A good example of this, this isn't true anymore because I'm just not in this rhythm of life, but an example of something that if you would ask, is this sin, you would say no, but is it prohibitive? Well, probably yes, is for me in years past, the NBA playoffs. When Lily was born five years ago, I was in the habit of waking up every day, and I still am. I just come down and I do it in the office. But at this point, I was in the habit of waking up every day and spending time in reading and spending time in prayer. But when we had Lily, she started waking up at like six o'clock in the morning every day. So I realized if I wanted to get that time with God, if I wanted to have my quiet time and do what I say is the most important habit that anybody can form is to wake up every day, spend time in God's word, spend time in prayer. If I wanted to do that, then I needed to get up at five. And so I got in a rhythm of waking up at five, having an hour to myself and God, and then Lily, I'd hear a little wah upstairs. I would read my Bible, I would pray, and I would read a spiritually encouraging book until I heard Lily. That was my rhythm. And then when I heard her, I'd put that down, I'd go upstairs, I'd be ready to be a dad. But when the NBA playoffs rolled around, I wanted to watch those things, man. I love the NBA playoffs. I don't care for the NBA regular season. There's 82 games. There's too many of them. It's a waste of time. Half the teams are going to make the playoffs anyways. We all know which teams are going to be at the beginning of the year. What's the point? But the playoffs are fantastic. I love watching those. The problem with the playoffs, especially in the early rounds, is there's three, four games a night. The last one will come on at 9.45 or 10.30. They're every night. So if you want to watch all the games, and I do, you would stay up, I would stay up late watching those games. And you say, is it a sin to watch the NBA playoffs? I mean, I can't point you to a Bible verse that says yes. But here's what I knew. Here's what I saw in myself season after season. I would watch these games. I would stay up late. And suddenly, I'm like getting up at five every day. Suddenly, I'm getting up when I hear Lily's voice. Suddenly, I'm out of sync in my walk with the Lord. I'm falling out of that daily discipline. Or if I could make myself wake up at five, how good do you think my prayers were after four and a half hours of sleep? Not very coherent. Not really giving God my first and my best, right? So for me, what I learned, was it a sin for me to watch the playoffs? I don't know. Was it prohibitive of me running my race? Yeah, it was. So that was a weight, something that was prohibitive, that was preventing me from being as effective in my life as possible that I had to lay aside. So what I started doing is recording the late game, then I would get up at the normal time and then just watch and then just fast forward through the breaks while I was holding and tending to Lily, which is kind of a better way to watch a game anyway, so I've kept that practice. But I love this idea of something that can be prohibitive and not simply sinful because of that. It's important that as we consider running our race and as we consider, as we calibrate our own morality for what our soul and our spirit can handle, for what's good for us and for what's not good for us, I want us to actually move away from asking a certain question. Let's stop asking, is this sin? Don't ask, is this sin? Ask instead, is this helpful? When you're thinking about allowing something in your life, or you're thinking about something in your life that you have, don't ask, is this sinful? Ask, is this helpful? I don't know about y'all. I don't know how often you talk about this. But as a pastor, I get this question pretty frequently. Is it a sin to blank? Is it a sin to binge watch Breaking Bad? Is it a sin to watch the playoffs? Is it a sin to just have maybe more drinks than I should on like a Friday when I don't have any responsibilities the next day? Is it a sin to do blank? Can I just tell you something? That's a Bush League question to ask, man. That's a little baby Christian question to ask. Is this sin? And I don't mean to be too mean about it, but really what that question implies is, what's the bare minimum I have to do to keep God happy with me? Is it a sin to do blank? Like, how does God feel about this? Are we still good if I do this? This is us admitting when we ask that question. It's us admitting, what's the least amount of effort I can put into my faith so that I'm still keeping God happy? And here's the thing. The least amount that you can put into your faith to keep God happy is to accept Christ as your Savior. And the good news is that's the only thing you can ever do to keep God happy. It's to simply believe in the sacrifice of His Son. Once you do that, you are as loved and as accepted and as approved of, and God is as proud of you as he will ever be. After that, it's simply about living in his goodness. But when we ask questions like, is it a sin if I blank? That's Bush League, man. That's small thinking. We need to ask instead, is this helpful? Is it a sin for me to stay up late and watch the NBA playoffs? Probably not. Is it helpful in my race? No, it's not. Is it a sin when I get my screen report back at the end of the week and I've looked at my phone for four and a half hours a day? I don't know. Did that help you run your race? Is it a sin to watch this particular show? It's got a little bit of nudity and a little bit of violence and a little bit of cussing, but I think it's okay. I think it's all right for me. I think I can watch that. And what I've noticed over the years is as Christians decide whether or not a show is appropriate for them to watch, that the scale of their morality operates in direct proportion to the quality of the show, right? The better the show, the more okay things get, right? Because we really want to watch it. Is it a sin to watch a show that may be borderline? I don't know. Is it helpful to you? How does your soul feel after you watch it? You feel like you need a shower after you finish watching the show? Then maybe, yeah, I mean, it's not helpful, right? I think we think about morality like people who are trying to cheat on a diet. Like if you could go over to the Olympic Village when Michael Phelps is swimming in his 11,000 different events that he does for every Olympics. He's won like nine gold medals in one Olympics, I think. If you go over there and he sits down for dinner one night knowing that he has a big race the next day, he's not looking at a steak with crab meat on top of it and some sort of cream sauce going, is it bad for me if I have this steak? No, he's thinking, is this going to help me win my race tomorrow? I don't want anything entering my body that's not going to help me accomplish my goal. We need to stop thinking like Christians trying to cheat on our diets and start thinking like athletes trying to perform in the race that God has set us about. So let us, in our moralities, stop asking, is something a sin? And start asking, is this helpful? Does this help me run my race? Now listen, this idea, this admonishment from, in this particular case, the author of Hebrews, to run our race, to let us lay aside all the weight and sin that entangles and run the race that is set before us, that's an idea that's common throughout scripture. That means live the life that God wants you to live. That means be the person that God created you to be. It said this way in this chapter, which happens to captivate me because I'm a competitive guy and this stuff resonates with me, but maybe it doesn't resonate with you. Maybe the way that Paul says it in Ephesians resonates with you more. When Paul says in Ephesians 2 verse 10 that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. This idea that the creator of the universe designed you very intentionally, created you in Christ, he purposed you, he set you down, he wound you up, he set you down, and he faced you towards some good works that he designed you to do. So go walk in those good works. Or maybe we like the imagery that we find in Timothy when Paul again explains that God is the master of the house and that we are all vessels. We're all utensils within the house and he's going to reach in the cupboard and he's going to pull out the utensils he needs to get the things done that he wants to get done. So just be ready to be a vessel. Maybe we like the way that Jesus tells us to do this. When he says that we are to be a city on a hill, or a light to the world, or the salt of the earth, maybe we prefer that imagery. Or maybe we like it when Jesus just comes out and just says it flat, straight up in the Great Commission, going to all the world and preach the gospel, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It's all the same idea, guys. It's all the same stuff. It's just repackaging to try to connect with us in different ways based on different personalities that shared it when they wrote it in the Bible. But it's all the idea of we run our race. We live our life that we've been designed to live. And this idea is not a new one to us. Again, even if this is your first view at Christianity, if you're not very familiar with it at all, one of the things you know fundamentally is that if you are going to sign up for this life, then you're committed to trying to get your act together so that you can follow God better, so that he can use you more. That is a ground level foundational understanding that all of us have of the faith. So we can add to it that we shouldn't sin and we shouldn't allow things in our life that are prohibitive from running this race. But this effort to throw off the sin and the weight that entangles and run the race that is set before us, walk in the good works that God designed us to do, be the city on the hill, make disciples of all the world, however we want to phrase it, this idea that that's what we should be doing is one that we're familiar with. So the more interesting discussion is how. How do I run my race? How do I do that? How do I throw off the sin and the weight? That's to me where the rubber meets the road because none of you came in here this morning thinking in your lives that I have nothing in my life that I need to get rid of. I have nothing that I need to add to my life. I'm doing pretty good. If you did, email me. You're the new pastor. I'm going to sit down for a few weeks and listen to you. None of us came in here thinking that. The real interesting question, especially for Christians, is how do we do it? Okay, there's some stuff in my life that doesn't need to be there. I know. How do I get rid of it? There's some things in my life I need to start doing. I know. I've been trying. How do I actually get that to take? And I think that this question resonates with us so much because for most of us, if not all of us, for all of our lives, the answer to this how, okay, how do I get rid of things so that I can run my race? The answer to that question has been white-knuckleled discipline. It has been try harder. Draw more lines. Make more declarative statements. Double down on it. Last time I tried to beat this, I failed, but I didn't do this. I didn't take this step, so this time I'm going to draw the line here, and I'm never going to cross it again. And we try to eradicate sin from our lives with white-knuckled discipline. And we could use any sin here as an example. Anyone would fit. I'm going to go with the sin that is very common now, something that a vast majority of us have dealt with, or at least a majority of us have dealt with, which is this idea that we can pull out our phones and we can look at anything we want to at any time. And a lot of times, in a lot of days, we look at things on our phone that we ought not look at. But you could pick worry. You could pick gluttony. You could pick selfishness. You could pick greed. You could pick any sin you wanted to and place it here. But by way of example, let's choose the sin of pulling out our phone and looking at stuff on there that we ought not be looking at. And maybe this has been a habit in our lives for a long time. And we hear a sermon like this and we go, yeah, I'm going to throw off that sin and that weight. I'm going to stop doing that. I don't need to do that anymore. I want to run my race. How do we do it? And this is a sin that you've tried to beat before. And you do it by white knuckle discipline. God, I swear I'm never going to do this again. We put timers on our phone. We set it aside. We call our friends. We ask for some accountability. We commit to a new regimen of quiet times. We're going to do whatever it is we have to do. This is the time I'm going to beat this sin. How'd that go for you before? If you have ever drawn those lines in your life before, then I know that you have also failed. White-knuckle discipline, maybe because we're dumb Americans, is the only thing we know to try to get better at things. But when we're talking about sin, that doesn't seem to work, does it? And when we try to white-knuckle our way to holy, what we end up doing is failing. And when we fail, one of two things happen. Either we think we are not good enough for our God or our God is not big enough for our sin, right? We read these passages that we're no longer a slave to sin. I can walk in total freedom. And we're thinking, well, it certainly feels like I'm a slave because I don't know how to stop picking up my phone and looking at stuff I'm not supposed to look at. I don't know how to not have that drink when no one's around. I don't know how to not think those thoughts when no one knows what I'm thinking. I don't know how to not gossip about people when I know I should just keep my mouth shut. I'm told I'm not a slave to sin, but it doesn't feel like it. White-knuckle discipline leaves us in this place of disillusionment where we're disillusioned with ourselves and we're disillusioned with God. So just doubling down on effort, leaving here and going, I'm going to try really hard to run this race. You will for a couple days. If you have really good discipline, you might even do it for a couple of weeks. But eventually, and you know this in your soul, you'll be right back to the same stuff that you've already been up to. So then, how do we do that? How do we run our race? How do we actually succeed in throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles? Hebrews tells us how, and it's beautiful. Hebrews chapter 12, verse 2. Here's the answer. You want to know how to throw it off? You want to know how to finally get over that sin? Look. Verse 2. You want to know how to defeat sin in your life? You want to know how to throw off the sin and the weight that prohibits you from running the race? Then listen to me. Your soul was created to and yearns to run. You want to know how to do that? Focus your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. Doesn't that make so much more sense? Focus your eyes on Christ, on the single one, on the Messiah, on whom all the streams in the Old Testament converge, on whom all the hope in the New Testament relies, on whom all the hope in the New Testament church looks forward to. Focus your eyes on Christ, your high priest sitting at the right hand of God in his majesty in heaven who's going to come back on a white horse and make everything right again, who by his death and by conquering the grave and by ascending back up to heaven has won for you redemption so that you can look forward to an eternity where there's not any more stuff that doesn't make sense, where the weeping and the crying and the pain are former things. They are not a part of reality anymore. We focus on that Jesus, and when we do that, we throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. How do we get rid of the things in our life that we don't want in our life? We focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We do what we've been doing for the past five weeks in Hebrews, coming here every week and going, hey, Jesus is a pretty big deal. And you might say, okay, that's moving, that's good. How does that actually, how does that work? Well, I think it works like this. Jesus says in the Gospels to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added unto you. And at first read, it kind of seems like God is saying, prioritize me first and I'll give you all the things you want. Focus your eyes or seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and I'll make you a billionaire if that's what you want. But that's not at all what that verse means. What I've come to understand that verse to mean over the years is when we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, that our hearts start to beat in sync with the heart of Jesus. Our heart begins to be enlarged by the things that move Jesus' heart. The things that Jesus celebrates become the things that we celebrate. The things that grieve the soul of Jesus become the things that grieve our souls. And the more we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, the more our heart beats in rhythm with God and the things that we want for others are the things that he wants for others. And the things that we want for ourselves are the things that he wants for us. And so in Hebrews, when we're told to focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith, we're being told that because as we focus on Jesus, as we fall more in love with him, as our heart begins to beat in rhythm with his heart, then our interest in the other things, our interest in the sin and the weight that so easily entangles, they simply fade. They simply go away. If you want to focus on not looking at your phone, then don't think about not looking at your phone. Think about Jesus. And what you'll find is the more you focus on him, the less interested you are in whatever's on this stupid device. We think that to throw off the sin and the weight that entangles us in our life, that we need more discipline. We don't need more discipline. We need more Jesus, man. We don't need more discipline. We don't need more strength. We don't need more American cowboys running around there trying to white-knuckle their way to holiness. We need Christians who admit that we can't do it, who know that our strength is insufficient, who have had plenty enough life lessons in however many years we've been trying to walk with the Lord to know good and darn well that we don't have the strength to will our way to holiness. That our only hope for any of this is Jesus anyways. Let me show you what happens when you focus your heart on Christ. When you focus your heart on Christ, he so fills you up that you don't have room in your heart for things that he doesn't want. When you focus your heart on Christ, you don't have to ask yourself, is it a sin to watch this particular show? You just have to ask, does my soul really want me to consume that? We're so focused on Christ that our heart is beating with us. The things that we shouldn't watch or shouldn't participate in aren't nearly as tempting anymore. If you've ever had the experience of being on a diet and really sticking with it and learning how to eat right, it's amazing to me how a month into a diet, stuff that you used to go nuts over, you're now looking at that going, oh, I know what that's going to do to me. I don't want to touch it. Just give me the salad. And six months ago, Nate would be like, salad? What's the matter with you, man? And now I'm like, I don't want to deal with all the stuff that's going to happen if I eat that big hamburger. Just give me something light. I've got things to do. The more we focus on health with Christ, the less interesting other things are to us in our life. And here's the other thing. A heart that is growing in love towards Jesus does not have space in it to grow in love for other sins. A heart that is growing more and more in love with Jesus every day, a heart that is waking up and spending time in God's word and time in prayer. A heart that is coming to church and taking in the message and singing exuberantly to God when given the opportunity. A heart that is embracing small group and talking about spiritual things in small group and finding other outlets, other things, other things to consume during the week and turning off the radio if you still have a commute, if that's a thing that exists in 2021 and just taking some quiet moments between you and God, a heart that wakes up thinking, how can I begin to pursue Jesus better today, does not have space in it for the sin and the weight that we've been carrying for years. So let us not focus on the sins that we need to eradicate. Let us focus on having hearts that are so full of Christ that there's no space for the other things in our life. And then here's what it does that I think is really, really practically valuable for us as we think about getting rid of the sin and the weight in our lives. Focusing on Jesus creates an untenable tension in our hearts. Focusing on Jesus creates an untenable tension in our hearts. Take whatever sin you want. We've been using the sin of looking at your phone, of looking at things you're not supposed to. And I'm going to skirt the line of being too liberal and casual with sin here, but if we could sit down in my office and you would come to me, whatever your deep, dark sin is, whatever the thing is that eats your lunch that makes you think that I wrote this sermon for you, that thing, whatever thing that is, if you could come to my office and sit down with me and you say, Nate, I've been struggling with this for a long time. I want it out of my life. What do I do? I would tell you, listen, take that sin, whatever it is, and set it aside and acknowledge that it has become so ingrained in you and who you are that there are parts of your psyche that you don't even know that whether it's a dopamine hit or whatever it is, that you're going to rely on that as a crutch. That's going to continue to be a sin for you. And I would even encourage you, don't think about it. Don't think about trying to stop it. Just think about more Jesus. Just focus on Christ. And if you wake up in the morning and you have a quiet time, and you focus on Jesus, and then at night you do the thing that you're not supposed to do, but you know good and well that you're going to have that quiet time in the morning, and you make yourself get up, and you make yourself have that quiet time, even though you feel like garbage for what you did the night before, and you keep doing that, eventually you will create an untenable tension in your heart where either Christ or the sin is going to win, but you can't keep straddling the fence like you've been doing. Either I'm going to keep having my quiet times and keep focusing on Jesus and keep pursuing him on a daily basis and stop doing the other things that make me feel like a hypocrite when I do this, or I'm just going to walk away from Jesus entirely and I'm going to embrace this sin. And you're here this morning because you don't want option two. You want option one. So quit worrying about the sin that we need to get rid of in our life. Start worrying about consuming more Christ, and that will naturally eradicate the other things in our life by creating an untenable tension in our heart where we say to ourselves, if I'm going to get up tomorrow and pursue Jesus, I don't want the feelings of what this thing is going to give me when I do that. So no thanks today. And if we can do this, simply focus on Christ rather than focusing on our sins, I think what we will find on the other side of that focus is a freedom that we've never had before, is a belief and a hope that we've never experienced before. There's a picture in Malachi when it says that a forgiven person skips like a calf loosed from his stall. I want you guys to run through life like that. I want you guys to run the race that your soul yearns to run, and I want you to acknowledge with me that we don't do it by white-knuckle discipline and trying harder. We don't will our way to holiness. We admit defeat. We admit that we need Jesus. We focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. And we allow his enlarging of our heart to eradicate within our heart the desire for anything but him, slowly but surely over time. That's how we deal with sin. That's how we throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that we were designed to run. So my prayer for you is that you will run it. My prayer for you, after walking through Hebrews together, is that our hearts will be so enlivened by Jesus, so impassioned for him, that we will continue our pursuit of him to the expense of everything else in our life so that as a church, as individuals, we will skip like calves loosed from our stall, that we will run the race that God created us for, that our souls yearn to run. That's what I want for you. And that's what I'm going to pray over you right now. Father, would you please help us to run our race? We, all of us, have folks in heaven who are cheering for us, who I believe are made proud by us. God, we hope that the way we live our life, that the humble decisions that we make, not the great grand things that we do, but the daily decisions to pursue you and the results that come from that. God, we hope that those would make you proud. God, give us not the strength, not the discipline, not the determination to run our race. Give us the focus. Give us the humility. Give us the passion. Give us the desire for Jesus that we need to run our race. God, if there's someone who can hear me who feels like they have a sin or a weight in their life that is just dragging them down, I pray that you would breathe that fresh air of hope into them this morning for the first time in maybe a long time that it might be possible to live life on the other side of that sin. That it might be possible to run with you without that encumbrance wrapped around their ankle. Father, would you focus us on Jesus and captivate us with who he is so much so that our hearts have no room in them for anything but him. It's in his name, our high priest, that we pray. Amen.

I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life, all over my life. I see promises in fulfillment. All over my life. All over my life. Help me remember when I'm weak. Fear may come, but fear will lead. You lead my heart to victory. You are my strength, and you always will be. I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. All over my life. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life, all over my life. See the cross, the empty grave, the evidence of your goodness. Jesus. I see your promises in fulfillment all over my life, all over my life, yeah. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life. Yeah, you're all around us. So why should I fear? The evidence is here. Why should I fear? Oh, the evidence is here. I searched the world, but it couldn't fill me. Melted deep rays, treasures of fame were never enough. Then you came along and put me back together. And every desire is now satisfied here in your love. Oh, there's nothing better than you. There's nothing better than you. Oh, there's nothing, nothing is better than you. Come on, tell them. To show you my weakness My failures and flaws Lord, you've seen them all And you still call me friend Cause the God of the mountains Is the God of the valleys There's not a place Your mercy and grace won't find me again. Oh Come on. Tell them now. Come on, choir. Oh, there's nothing better than you. Nothing. You turn bones into armies. You turn seas into highways. You're the only one who can. Somebody give a praise in this house. I don't think we're finished yet. Come on. Come on, one more can. You're the only one who can. You're the only one who can. Jesus, you're the only one. Come on, give Him one more shout of praise. When all I see is the battle, you see my victory. When all I see is the mountain, you see a mountain moon. And as I walk through the shadow, your love surrounds me. There's nothing to fear now, for I am safe with you. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees, with my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs for you. Thank you, God. God, you see the end to tell. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees. With my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs to you. And every fear I lay at your feet. I'll sing through the night. Oh God, the power of our God. You shine in the shadow. You win every battle. Nothing can stand against the power of our God. In all mighty fortunes, you go before us. Nothing can stand against the power of our God We wanted to let you know that our mission here at Grace is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people. One of the best ways to communicate with us here at Grace is through our connection cards. If you would like to speak to a pastor at Grace, if you have any prayer requests for our prayer team and our elders, or if you're not receiving our Grace Vine weekly emails, this would be a great way to fill it out and let us know. If you're watching with us online, you can click the link below and submit the connection card there. Or if you're here with us at Grace, the connection card is in the seat back pocket in front of you. Just be sure to drop it on your way out in the box next to the doors. Thanks so much for joining us this morning and we hope that this service is a blessing to you. Well, good morning, everyone. It's great to have you here at Grace Raleigh. I'd like to ask you to stand. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace, and it's great having people here in the room. It's great having people at home joining in with us. I thought that this morning we could start off with the scripture of John 3.16, that God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Come all you sinners Come find his mercy Come to the table He will satisfy Taste of his goodness Find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us. Whoever believes in Him will live forever. bring all your failures bring your addictions come lay them down at the foot of the cross Jesus is waiting there with hope in our hearts For God so loved the world praise god praise god from whom all blessings Praise Him, praise Him For the wonders of His love For God so loved the world that He gave us His one and only Son to save The power of hell forever defeated Now it is well, I'm walking in freedom Oh God so loved, God so loved the world Bring all your failures, bring your addictions. Come lay them down at the foot of the cross. Jesus is waiting. God so loved the world. Amen. God sent his son. They called him Jesus. He came to love, heal, and forgive. He lived and died. To buy my pardon. An empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow. he lives all fear is gone because i know he holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives And then one day I'll cross that river I'll fight my spine No war with me And then as death Gives way to victory I'll see the lights of glory and I'll know He lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow Because He lives All fear is gone Because I know He holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives. And life is worth the living just because He lives. Amen. Amen. All right, y'all can have a seat for a moment. Good morning, Grace Raleigh. It is fabulous to see your smiling faces in here. And welcome to those of you that have joined us online. It is a beautiful and sunny Sunday morning, Welcome to the world for this beautiful sunny weather because in two weeks, the mission committee will be here to gather all of the goodies that you choose to bring. So if you go to Grace Raleigh's events page, you will find a list of things that the mission committee is looking for for the Interfaith Food Shuttle. You will buy those. And then on either that Friday or either that, I'm sorry, that Saturday or that Sunday, you can drive through. The hours are listed on the screen. You can drive through. They will come out to your car. They will pick it up. They will bring it inside, and they will take care of it. So all you have to do is go to the grocery. And I guess these days you could even have it delivered to your house. So that is fabulous. And speaking of driving by and dropping off, if you are the parent of a 6th grader through 12th grader, today is the day you get to drive by and push them out of the car. Woo-hoo! We are so excited to announce that Grace Students is back up and running live and in person. Kyle will be here tonight in all of his fun. And we have the cool thing happening too that he's live streaming the service. So if for some reason your 6th through 12th grader can't be in the building tonight, no problem. Email Kyle, kyle at graceralee.org. And he has all the information and the links that you need to be able to be attached to the live stream and join in that way. They're now going to start into a routine of being in person one week, meeting online together the next week in person, and you get the idea. But email Kyle for any information that you guys might need. So thank you again for coming, for being a part of Grace Raleigh thisbbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody here. This is as full as the church has been since last February. That's crazy. Man, you guys, apparently, we've been going through Ecclesiastes. Y'all love depression and hopelessness. So thanks for showing up to that. You're like, I got to get out of the house now. Maybe that's what I needed to do the whole time, which is make you really, really sad. So you had to come see people. This is great. If you're still joining us at home, we're so grateful for that. This is the third part in our series called Vapor, where we're moving through the book of Ecclesiastes. We've said the whole time that we've saved the dreariest book of the Bible for the dreariest month of the year. And what's really fun is that this is the joyful sermon. This is the one, this is the good news. This is the one where we celebrate. We only did two songs up front because we want to end praising God together, and he gave us sunshine to do this. So it seems that the weather is matching the rhythm of the series, and I think that that's fantastic. In the first week, we started out and we talked about this idea of a hevel or vapor or smoke, and we concluded that Solomon would argue that a vast majority of Americans are wasting their life, right? Which means a vast majority of us are probably investing our life pursuing things that ultimately we can't grab onto or vapor or smoke. They're here one day and they're gone the next. And so that really left us with this question at the end of that week, is there a worthwhile investment of our lives? And if you have notes, you see that at the top of your notes. I think that's been a question that's been lingering in the series. Is there really a worthwhile investment of my life or is it all just a waste of time? Is everyone here just, we're all just chasing vapor? And I think that there's a good answer to that question, but last week we answered it a little bit, but we stumbled into another harsh reality. The harsh reality that even if we pursue wisdom with our life, even if we're obedient, the godliest of the godly, that does not insulate us from pain. Our godliness doesn't protect us from grief, right? And so what we learned by looking at that beautiful passage in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy. There's a time for grieving and there's a time for healing and there's a time to be hurt. There's a time to live and there's a time to die. Like we saw that passage. And what we learned is that pain is not punitive. God's not tightening the screws on us to punish us. Pain is the result of a fallen world, right? And that the harsh reality that Solomon gives us in Ecclesiastes is that no matter what we do, we're going to hurt. No matter how godly we are, there will be seasons of mourning in our life. And so that leaves us, I think, with another really difficult question. Can I ever hope for true happiness? Can I ever, on this side of eternity, grasp onto something that isn't Hevel or vapor or smoke? Can I grasp onto a joy that is immutable and unchangeable, that is resistant to circumstances in life, that even as the storms come, I can still find myself in seasons of joyfulness and contentment? Is it even possible to do those things? And I think those are the two big questions that we bring into this week. Is it possible to pursue anything that really matters? And is it possible to grab onto anything that looks like actual true contentment and joy? And the answer to those questions, I think, is yes. And Solomon answers those questions multiple times in Ecclesiastes. I think in four separate passages, he addresses those with the exact same answer. Four different times, he gives this answer, and I love this answer. I think there's so much bound up in his choice to answer the questions in this way. But like I said, he says it in four separate times. I'm going to read you two of them so that you can get a sense. They're in your notes. If you have them, they'll be on the screen if you're following along at home. But here's what he writes in Ecclesiastes, Solomon repeats this idea. That at the end of the day, what's left for us to do is enjoy our toil, enjoy our food and drink, and honor our God. The end of the book, he ends. The end of the matter is this, all has been heard, fear God and keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. We talked about that last week. And it's important that as we look through what I think is kind of this formula for contentment, that we understand that when he's talking about eating and drinking, when we see eating and drinking in the Bible, that is almost always a reference to a communal activity. Eating and drinking is inherently communal. The Bible rarely talks about eating for sustenance, right? It rarely talks about food as this way to be healthy. It always talks about food and bread and gathering around a table as a form of community. And so when he says that there's nothing for man to do except to find joy in what he does and to eat and to drink. What he means is when we look around the table, when we have our meals, if we love the people who are around us, that's good. That's a gift from God. We go out to eat, we're eating with our friends, and we look around and we have genuine affection, we enjoy these people. That's a gift from God. When you look around your table and you have family there and you love that family. Now listen, we're all parts of families. We know that love isn't just sing song and fairy tales all the time. Sometimes it's hard, but at the end of the day, if you know that I love you and you love me, then that's a gift from God. And so when he's talking about food and drink, he's really referencing community. And then when he talks about toil, enjoying your toil, I have a men's group that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6.30. Anybody can join us if you want to. Just email me. Well, the more the merrier there. And we were talking about this word toil. And to a room full of men, it means career, right? It means work. It means what's your job? But Solomon uses that word a lot more broadly than that in Ecclesiastes. And the word toil really doesn't refer to your job or your career as much as it refers to the activities that you have set aside for that day, the productivity of that day, whatever it is you're going to do. Because we have some men in the group who are retired. If it's only about work, career, then they have no shot at happiness, right? They better get back to it. But really, it's broader than that. It really means, Toyo, what do you have set for yourself today? What productivity are you going to engage in today? And then in this verse, he says that we should do good. And he defines doing good as honoring God with our life, fearing God and keeping his commandments. And it's with these understandings that I kind of arrive at this conclusion of kind of Solomon's equation for contented joy and apex happiness. And I really do think it's this. People you love plus tasks you enjoy plus honoring God equals apex happiness. Listen to me. If when you eat, if as you move through your day, you look around and the people in your life bring you joy, and when you wake up, you're looking forward to the things that you're going to do in that day. Maybe not everything, but the point of the day brings you joy. And you're honoring God with your life. If those things are true of you, then I want you to know this morning, you are apex happy. It doesn't get better than that. Sometimes our problem is just that we can't see it. But I'm telling you, man, if you wake up every day and you get to have breakfast with your family or you go out to lunch with some people at work that you enjoy or you look forward to seeing some friends at small group or something like that, if you look around at your community and you're surrounded by people you love and you look at your days and God has given you something to put your hand to that you enjoy, that gives you a sense of purpose, that helps you become who he's created you to be and use your gifts and abilities to point people to Jesus as you move throughout your days, if that's what you get to do and you're honoring God as you do those things, then listen to me, you are experiencing apex happiness in your life. And I think that we get it so messed up sometimes. We do all the things that Solomon talked about in the first two chapters, and we chase all the things. We run out there and we chase all the success and all the relationships and all the money and all the fulfillment and all the pleasure and all the stuff that's out there. When really what's true is God has already given us everything we need for joy. God has already provided in our lives everything we need for joy. And listen, if you don't have those things, if you look around, you're like, I don't like any of the people in my life right now. If you don't have a fulfillment in your job, if you're not honoring God with your life, then guess what? Those things are attainable. Those things aren't out there and forever away. Those things are attainable. They're right around you. God gives us everything we need for joy within our reach. That's why I brought this chair today. This chair here is my chair from my house. This is my chair in my living room. This chair sits in the corner of our living room, and opposite me is we have a little sectional couch. There's other people who sit in this chair sometimes, but for the most part, it's me. When I sit in this chair, I get to watch dance recitals. I get to watch Lily come in with her friends, and they sing Elsa to me. And I pretend to care about Elsa. I get to watch dumb little magic tricks. We went to some restaurant and they gave her some pot with a magnet on the bottom and there's a plant that comes out of the wand and she comes in and she does the abracadabra, the whatever, and then she pulls it out and for the 37th time, I'm amazed by this magic trick, right? I sit in this chair and Jen sits on the couch and we talk about our days. We talk about what's hard and we talk about what's fun. From this chair, when someone rings the doorbell, if I angle my head just right, I can see down the hallway to the front door and I can see the little face that's there to come play with Lily. If they're all over, I can look this way out the window and I can look at them all, all the neighborhood kids jumping on the trampoline that we got to get for her. In the mornings when I'm doing life right and I'm downstairs reading like I'm supposed to, at about 6.45, 7 o'clock, I can look up the stairs and see Lily up there and motion her down to come sit in my lap and tell me what she's going to do that day. When we have friends over, which I love to do, eventually we end up in our living room and we sit around and we talk and we giggle and we laugh. In the pandemic, I worked from this chair. I set up a little table right here and I do my Zoom calls and I argue with the elders and that's pure joy except for Chris Lata. I love working from that table. I can see all the things that bring me the most joy from this chair. And if I go out there chasing joy, if I go out there trying to track everything down, what am I going to do? Buy a new house for this chair These are from old David. If this church grows to 2,000 people and I get to feel what that feels like, do my conversations with my family and friends get any better from sitting in this chair? No, man. This is it. And sometimes it's not the chair, right? Sometimes it's the kitchen. Sometimes it's when I get to cook dinner and Jen sits on the stool and we talk about our days. Sometimes it's the mornings when Ruby and Lily are on the bed and I'm in the chair in the corner of that room and we're all talking, just enjoying our times. But here's what I know. I can go out there chasing whatever I want to chase. But my times of most profound joy come when I'm right there. They come when I'm around the people that I love the most. They come when I'm soaking in the blessings that God has given me. And this is what we need to pay attention to. Solomon tells us these are God's gifts to us. If people in your life that you love, who love you, they're God's gift to you. Drink them in. Hug them more. Tell them more that you care about them. Tell them more that you're grateful for them. Tell them more that they are a gift from God in your life. You have a thing to do every day that you like to put your hand to, whether it's raising kids or volunteering somewhere or spending time in your neighborhood or going to work or looking forward to seeing your friends or whatever it is. You have things that God has given you that make you productive, that let you feel like you are living out His intended will for you? That's His gift for you. That work, that toil, that's His gift. It's designed for you. And then if we honor God, His invitation to honor Him is His gift to us because He knows that when we live a life honoring Him, we live a life of fewer regrets. We live a life of deeper gratitude. We live a life with a deeper desire for Jesus if we'll just revel in his gifts. This helps me make sense of the Honduran children I saw at one time. For years of my life, I would go down to Honduras with some regularity to take teams down to visit a pastor named Israel Gonzalez. Israel is one of my heroes. The things that he's done for the kingdom are unbelievable. And he is based in a city in central Honduras called, called, uh, Swatopeke. He and his wife have set up a free clinic there. He has a church there. And then from that church, what they do is they organize these goodwill parties and they bring teams down and you get together hot dogs and little tchotchke gifts and you go up into the hillsides. There's mountains surrounding Ciguatapeque and you go up into the mountainside and you go to these villages and he throws these goodwill parties and he hopes that by doing this, these villages that are deeply Catholic, but Catholic in such a way that shuts them off to faith rather than turns them on to faith. And so they're lost communities. And he goes and he throws these parties, and by throwing these goodwill parties, they invite him into the community to plant a church. He's planted 14 churches that way, last I checked. And I would go on these parties. And you go up into these mountains surrounding Suwatopec into a village. And that's not derogatory. It's literally a village. Homes are built of mud and wood, makeshift roofs, one or two rooms, literally dirt poor. I've had the opportunity in my life to be in a fair amount of other countries and to see poverty on multiple continents. Honduras is just about the worst. But yet when we would go there, we would get out and there would always be these children there. And these children would have the biggest, goofiest grins on their face ever. They were so joyful, and they would laugh, and they would play, and they were happy to see you, and it never got wiped off of their face. And I always wondered, kid, how can you be so happy? Don't you know you don't have a Barbie house? Don't you know you don't have a PlayStation? Don't you know your soccer ball stinks? Those kids had it figured out, man. They had people around them who loved them. They had things to do each day that they looked forward to. And they hadn't lived enough life to carry the weight of what it is to not honor God with our choices. They were walking in apex happiness. And I carry all my American wealth down there and privilege, and I look at them and I'm jealous. Because they figured out something that we haven't. And I just think that there is this profound truth that everything that we need is right there within our grasp. We don't have to run around out there chasing vapor and Hevel. God has given us these gifts already. And in that truth, in that truth that everything we need for joy is within our grasp? We answer those two questions we started with. Is there a pursuit that's actually worth investing my life in? Yes. The people you love, the tasks that give you purpose, and honoring God. You want to live a life that matters? You want to get to the end of it and wonder if it's all vapor? Or not have to wonder that? Then invest your life in the people that you love and the tasks that God has ordained for you. Ephesians 2 says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, that we should do good works, that we should walk in them. Walk in those good works that God intended you for and honor God with the choices that you make. Those are worthwhile pursuits. You will get to the end of your life if you pursue those things and know that it was a life well lived. And he actually doubles down on this idea of pursuing relationships with other people. I don't have a lot of time to spend here on it, but again, this is a passage that I can't just skip over as we go through the book of Ecclesiastes. He doubles down on this idea of having more folks in our life when he writes this has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Solomon doesn't take a lot of time to tell you to invest in a lot of things in Ecclesiastes. If you've been reading along with us, he doesn't tell you to do a lot of stuff there. He just kind of tells you, hey, this stuff's a waste of time. You should honor God. And then he tells you how we got to that conclusion. But here he stops and makes sure you understand the value of having people in your life who love you, who you love in return. And he sets up life as this struggle, this fight, because it is a struggle and a fight to choose to honor God with our lives. It is a struggle and a fight to keep our marriages healthy. It is a struggle and a fight to direct our kids in the right way, to love our families well, to share our faith, to be evangelists in our community, and to make disciples of the people who are around us. That's hard. And Solomon says, if you try to do this alone, woe to you when you fall and you have no one to pick you up. Woe to you when addiction creeps in and there's no one you can tell. Woe to you when doubts creep into your faith and there's no one you can talk to. How hard it must be for you when your marriage gets rocky and there's no one to fight for it. If there's two, he says, you've got a fighting chance. If there's three, that's not quickly broken. We need people in our lives to fight for us. We need to fight for the people in our lives. It seems to be a big value to us. That will help us ensure that we always have people to eat and drink with that we love and enjoy. So I thought it was worth pointing out Solomon's emphasis on this. The other question that remained from the previous weeks is, can I ever hope for true happiness? Yes. Yes, because here's the thing. If the bad things in Ecclesiastes 3 are true, then so are the good ones. Last week, I read the passage and I said, listen, pain is coming for all of us. It's going to hurt. We're going to mourn. We're going to grieve. No one gets to dodge that based on our godliness. It's going to happen to all of us. We will walk through hard times, but here's the reality. If that's true, then the flip side is true. If the bad things are true, then God says we will walk through seasons where we experience the good things. Look at the good things. There is a time to be born, to plant, to heal, to build up, to laugh, to dance, to gather things together, to embrace, to keep, to sow, to speak. A time for love and a time for peace. If we're going to have to walk through hard times, there's going to be good ones too. And I just think that the blessing from Ecclesiastes is this. It hits us with some hard realities. It's stark. It's unflinching. Hey, most of us are wasting our lives. And no matter what you do to invest it well, you're going to hurt. Those are hard truths. But I've said the whole time that if we can accept them on the other side is this joy that is waiting for us. And this is the joy. The joy is, yes, there's big things going on that we can't control. But in the midst of all that stuff that we can't control, God gives us these gifts, these moments of joy, these pockets to lean into where we celebrate him, where we're grateful for him, and we acknowledge those things as gifts. And I just think that if we accept the difficult realities from this book, then we can start to look for these little pockets of joy in our life, and they will bring us such more fulfillment than if we just move through them waiting to get to the next thing. At our house, we do a thing called Breakfast Sammy Saturday, all right? I like a good breakfast sandwich. I know it's hard to tell by looking at me, but I like a good, I put butter down, I toast the bread, I do the eggs, I do some bacon, do some cheese on there, and then I put it all together on the blackstone, cut it in half, and the good egg bleeds out onto it. It's all the goodness, and then you dip your sandwich in there. It's the best. I love breakfast Sammy Saturdays. You guys are not enthusiastic enough about this. You need breakfast Sammy Saturdays in your life. Well, I'll just let you guys sign up. Come over to the house. I'll make them for you. We love it. But it's just kind of a thing that I do. I like it. I make one for Jen and Lily, and they kind of eat half of theirs. I'm more excited about it than anybody else. But then one day, Lily brought this home from preschool, and it made me cry right on the spot. That's breakfast Sammy Saturday. She drew my griddle. She put food on it. Apparently, I make pizza there. And she brought it home to me. Now, the thing about this is, it was an assignment at preschool. She was told, just make whatever you want. It's an art project. And she made breakfast Sammy Saturday. And she brought it home to me. And she said, look, Daddy. And she told me what it was. I started crying right there on the spot. I got these big old alligator tears in my eyes looking at Jen. What a cool thing. And sure, life's going to be hard. She's going to be a teenager. She's five now, so she's kind of maxed out on cuteness, and now it's just hyper sometimes. But even though I know that there's hard times ahead, even though I know she won't always appreciate things like Breakfast Sammy Saturday, I know she does now. And I know that that's a gift from my God. And I know that what Ecclesiastes says is the best thing I can possibly do is to drink deeply of that. The best thing we can possibly do is find joy in these moments that God allows. We don't know how long we'll have them. I was talking with a friend last night who's got a new infant. And he said every time he gets up with the infant in the middle of the night and holds her, that it's a privilege. Because he doesn't know when that last time's going to be. And that's the truth of it. I think that we have so many pockets of joy in our life every day. If we have people that we love, if we have something to do that we appreciate, if we're choosing to honor God with our life. And I think that because we're so busy chasing vapor, sometimes we miss these sweet little moments that can all be had right here if we're just paying enough attention. That's why I think on the other side of these realities awaits for us this profound joy. And I think that when we realize that, that when we realize that God has designed these things to bring us happiness in our life, that what's really important is if we don't believe in a God, if we're atheistic in our worldview, then that's it. The joy terminates in those moments. That's all we have. But if we are a spiritual people who believe that God designed these things and these blessings in our life to make himself evident in our life, then our joy doesn't terminate in the moment. It turns into exuberant praise. It reminds us that we have a God that designed this for us. And the other part is, and this is incredible, that the joy that we're experiencing in that moment is only a glimpse of the eternity that he's designed for us and won for us with Jesus, which is what we're going to come back and talk about next week, is how these things are glimpses to the eternity that Jesus has already won for us. So in a few minutes, the band is going to come, and we've saved two fun, exuberant songs to praise God together. And while we do that, I want to encourage you to keep those two thoughts in your head. What are the things that I can see from my chair? What are the joys that God has given me that are within my reach from places that I already have in my life? What are the things that maybe I'm missing because I'm chasing stuff that I don't need? And then let's reflect on the reality that there is coming an eternity where that's all we experience. It's no more just pockets. It's reality. And that is something for us all to celebrate. Let me pray for us. Father, you are so very good to us. You've given us so much. Lord, I pray that we would be grateful for those blessings. I pray that you would steep us in profound gratitude for the things that we have, that you would show us what we need and what we don't. God, if there is somebody here or who can hear my voice, who doesn't have people in their life that they love, God, would you bring that to them? Would you provide that community for them even here at Grace? Would you give them the courage to slip up their hand in some way, to fill out some sheet, or to send some email, or make some phone call, or some text, and help them engage with relationships that matter to them. God, if there are people who don't have something they enjoy in their days, would you give them the courage to find that? Show them how you designed them and what you created them for. God, if we are not honoring you with our lives, I pray that you would give us the courage to do that. Let us praise you exuberantly, God, for the joys that you have given us in our lives. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. Amen, amen. Thank you, Nate. Let's all stand up. guitar solo Our God, firm foundation Our rock, the only solid ground Let's lift his name. you are the only king forever you are victorious Unmatched in all your wisdom In love and justice you will reign and every knee will bow we bring our expectations our hope is anchored in your name the name of jesus Jesus you are the only king forever forevermore you are victorious We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. You are the only king forever. Mighty God, we lift you higher. You are the only king forever. Forevermore, you are the only king forever Forevermore, you are victorious. He is doing great things See what our Savior has done See how His love overcomes he has done great things. We dance in your freedom, awake and alive. Oh Jesus, our Savior, your name lifted high be faithful forever more you have done great things and I know you will do it again for your promise is yes and amen you will do great things God you do great things Oh Oh you have done great things you've done great things every captive and break every chain oh god You have done great things. You have done great things. Oh God, you guys here today. God bless. Have a great week. Thank you. Come all you weary, come all you thirsty, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Well, come all you sinners, come find His mercy. Come to the table, He will satisfy. Taste of His goodness, find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us, His one and only Son to save us. If you never believed in Him, you'll live forever. Here we go. We'll live forever. God so loved the world. Praise God. Praise God. From whom all blessings flow. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. Praise God. Praise God. Praise God. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. His amazing love. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us Whoever believes in Him Will live forever Oh, the power of hell Forever defeated Now it is well I'm walking in freedom For God so loved the world. Amen. You are here, moving in our midst. I worship you. I worship you. You are here, working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are here. Working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are way maker. Miracle worker. Promise keeper. Light in the darkness. darkness my god that is who you are Jesus. Jesus I worship you. I worship you. You're mending every heart. You are here and you are mending every heart. I worship you. I worship you. You are here and you are way maker, miracle worker, promise keeper, light're the way maker. Yeah, sing it again. Oh, that is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. Yes, even when. Come on. You never stop. You're the way maker. Oh, that is who you are. Oh, it's who you are, my Jesus. Miracle worker. That is who you are. is above depression. His name is above loneliness. Oh, His name is above disease. His name is above cancer. His name is above every other name. That is who you are. Jesus. oh i know that is who you are When darkness tries to roll over my bones When sorrow comes to pain is all I know, oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. I am not captive to the light. I'm not afraid to leave my past behind. Oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. Oh, I'm standing. There's power in your name. Power in your name. There's power that can break off every chain. There's power that can empty out a grave. There's resurrection power that can save. is Thank you. I'm standing in your love. I count on one thing. The same God that never fails will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. The same God who's never late is working you're working Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy. My heart is heavy God that never fails. Will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. This ain't God who's never late. He's working all things out. You're working all things out. Oh, yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will. For all my days. Oh, yes, I will. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all names that nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all Thank you. The name of all names. That nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise. To glorify, glorify the name of our names. That nothing can stand against. Oh yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy when my heart is heavy. All my days. Oh, yes, I will. Thank you. Come let us bow at his feet. He has done great things..

My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. This is the fourth part in our series that we've launched the year with called Things You Should Know. The idea is that as Christians or as church people, there's things that we talk about, things that get mentioned that we all kind of nod along with and seem to understand, but maybe we've never stopped to slow down or had the courage to ask the questions that we have about these things. So we wanted to take a month and just kind of look at some of the different topics that come up in church world, that come up in Christendom, but maybe we have never delved into on our own, and maybe we have some existing questions about those things. Last week, we looked at the Sabbath, and I hope that your view and framework around the Sabbath was changed and that some of you are coming off enjoying one of those yesterday or have chosen today as your Sabbath, and I hope that it goes very well for you. This morning, we want to talk about the devil. I think that there may be one other time when I have preached about Satan. It's not a fun topic. It's not fun research to do. If someone got a hold of my browser history this week, they might be really worried about Nate and all the things that I've Googled that have to do with Satan and his influence. So it's not something that we talk about a lot, but it's something that we definitely need to address. I think in church circles, we hear about Satan. We hear about the enemy. We know that he's called Lucifer. We know that he's against us. We know that he hates God. We know that he hates us. But maybe we don't know very much beyond that, beyond what's maybe been put forth in pop culture or something like that. And so I thought it would be good to take a week and focus on Satan, focus on the enemy, on who he is and what he does and really what he wants, what he wants with you and what he wants with me. The best place to do this clearly is scripture. So one of the things I did this week is I sat down and I just started keeping a list of all the places where Satan shows up in scripture or references to him are made in scripture. And I made a master list of all of those and then looked at that list and found the commonalities and tried to distill down some of the essence of what the Bible has to say about the enemy. And so I found four passages that I think sum up who Satan is in an effective way, and I wanted to look at those. And then I wanted to ask the question, okay, that's who he is. How does he accomplish his goals? So to understand who Satan is, one of the first things we want to do is look at his origin. And it's worth saying that we're not exactly positive where he came from or what he does. Now, we think that we know. We think we know where he came from. Most scholars agree, but it's important to point out, and I need to be intellectually honest and say that there's no one explicit place in Scripture where it says for sure this is where Satan came from. But our best guess is found in Ezekiel and then more pointedly in this passage in Isaiah. This is what Isaiah writes. He says, This is primarily where we get the origin story of Satan. It's believed that Satan was an angel. His name was Lucifer. That's what Odaystar means, morning star. That's what Lucifer means. And we believe that he was one of the archangels. He may have even been in charge of worship in heaven. He was a powerful angel, which means if you could see him, you would see that he was beautiful and intimidating and mighty and incredible. He looks very little like the cartoon depictions of him. And one day he told a lie to himself that he could be like God. He looked at God ruling over heaven and he said, I could do that. As a matter of fact, I could rule over you. And so he decided that he was going to lead a coup or an insurrection against God to overtake heaven. And it's believed that Satan was cast out of heaven along with a third of the angels that then became demons. And that began this war, this tension that's existed for all of time that you and I find ourselves in the middle of where Satan and God the Father war over our very souls. And it's interesting to me that the first lie that Satan believed is the lie that he told us. It's the first lie that we believed. It's the lie that we continue to believe. It's the fundamental lie of all of sin, which is, I could be like God. I don't need him. I can do this myself. I can call the shots. Isn't that what he whispered into the ear of Eve? Didn't he go down and slither up to her and say, you know, he's told you not to eat of this tree because he doesn't want you to be like him. He doesn't want you to know what he knows. He grabbed her and he said, you could do that. You could be him. You understand? If you get nothing else out of this sermon, just please understand, that's the fundamental root of all sin, is deciding, you know what? I think I could be the boss of myself. I don't really think I need his standards. I think I can figure this out on my own. That's the root of all sin. And it was the root of Satan's fall, who fell from heaven and set about for all of time, warring against the Father. And in Hebrew, actually, in the language of Hebrew, his name means accuser or adversary. He is the accuser of us. He is the adversary of God. He is opposed to God and all the things of God. And so that means he is your accuser and that he is your adversary. And the sneaky and scary part is he accuses you to you. He runs you down to you. God doesn't believe what he's saying, but you might. So he accuses you and he brings shame and guilt on your conscience and he opposes you. In the New Testament, we get a little bit clearer picture of who Satan is and what he came to do. Jesus says in the book of John, he was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he lies because lying is his native tongue. It's all he knows how to do is to lie and to deceive. And it's important that we point out that these aren't simple lies. These aren't dumb, foolish lies that anybody could see past. It's not lies like the ones in this commercial that I'm reminded of from a few years ago. I think it originally started as a Super Bowl commercial, but I'm not certain. But it makes me chuckle every time I see it. There's this dad, and he's sitting in the living room, right? And his back's against the couch, and he's got the coffee table in front of him, and there's Cheeto dust everywhere. Just this orange dust explosion. It's on the couch, it's on the floor, it's on the toys, it's everywhere. It's all over the place. And he's looking at that, and you can hear kids in the distance, and one of them, looks like about a four-year-old boy, comes running through the living room past his dad and he's got a Cheeto explosion all over himself. Face, shirt, pants, hands, the whole deal. And his dad grabs him and he points at the Cheeto explosion in the room. And he says, do you know anything about this? And the little kid goes, nope. And runs off. And I love it. I think it's great. Satan doesn't tell lies like that. He doesn't tell lies with Cheeto dust everywhere that are easy to pin on him. His lies are far more pernicious. The thing to understand about him that might make us uncomfortable and should make us uncomfortable is that if he's an angel and he's eternal, he's a lot smarter than us. He's a lot smarter than we are. He knows how to manipulate you. His lies look a lot less like, no, I don't know what's going on with the Cheeto dust, and a lot more like, who do you think you are? Why do you think you could ever do that? Why do you think they would ever listen to you? What would make you believe that they could ever believe you? What could make you think that that sort of sin was okay? How could you ever possibly justify that? You are the worst. His lies are a lot more sneaky and pernicious, I think, than we give him credit for. He's excellent at lying and at convincing us of things that aren't true. In part, and this is interesting to me, I almost pulled this thread and preached about this this week, in part because in the lies and the things that he offers us, they're a little bit true. They look like the truth. He very rarely offers us something that we don't have or that we won't get. He just offers it to us right now or just offers it to us in a package that seems more attractive. He's an incredibly effective liar. And then in Peter, we see him say something. And I think it's interesting that Peter chooses to talk about the devil. Because if there was anybody in Jesus's inner circle who wouldn't show as much concern for Satan, it had to be Peter. Peter is the guy who's talk first, think later. Peter's the guy who jumped out of the boat and walked on water. Peter's the guy that when Jesus said to his disciples, you will all betray me and leave me, Peter's the one that stepped up and said, no, I won't, never, God, I will die before I leave you. And we know that he did betray Christ in this really poignant scene. But my point is that Peter was the hard charger. He was the one out in front. He was the one that was all bluster and gusto. And even Peter, who if anybody would say, don't worry about Satan, we got Jesus, he's not a big deal. It would be Peter. But listen to what he says at the end of his life in his letter. 1 Peter 5, verse 8. Be sober-minded. Be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. He prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Listen to me. Listen to me. We don't want to think about it. We don't want to acknowledge it. But there is an active and effective and intelligent and efficient enemy of your soul who is prowling about seeking to destroy you. There is an enemy stalking around your children and around your marriage and around your husband and your wife and around your friendships and your church and your small group and the things that you hold dear, there is an enemy prowling around you seeking to destroy those things. And shame on me for not bringing that to your attention more often. It's an uncomfortable thing to talk about Satan. It's certainly not a fun thing. But based on the frequency with which he's mentioned in the Bible, it seems reasonable to think that God desperately wants us to be aware of His presence. Can I tell you for what it's worth that even as we were starting up this service this morning, things started going wrong with my microphone that have never gone wrong, not since Steve got here anyways. The Lord knows what used to go wrong with it. But things started happening and distractions were going and we came right up to the minute when we're supposed to launch the service like we really haven't in a long, long time. And I really just think it's because Satan would prefer you not think about him. He would prefer I never did this. He would prefer to continue to operate in the shadows, to continue to prowl about like a roaring lion, ever there, ever present, but never aware of him. And shame on me for not bringing him to our attention more often. But the reality is there is an incredibly effective enemy prowling around our families trying to figure out who he can pick off. So I think it behooves us to ask the question, how does he do that? How does he devour us? How does he lie to us? What's his goal? How do we know when Satan is acting in our lives? How do we know when it's just us, just our nature, just circumstance, or Satan is at play here? Well, I think that there's a really interesting conversation that Jesus actually has with Peter that sheds some light on this. And it's really made me reshape the way I think about satanic influence in our life. But towards the end of Jesus's ministry, towards the end of his life, Jesus gathers the disciples around and he tells them, hey, I've got to go to Jerusalem. They were in the northern part of Israel in Galilee. And he says, I need to go south to Jerusalem, to the hub, to where everything's going on. And when I go, they're going to arrest me and they're going to try me and they're going to kill me. And Peter, totally altruistically, with pure motives, says, well, then don't go. You don't have to go to Jerusalem. We've got a good thing going up here, man. Just stay up here and don't die. How's that? And there was no sin there. It wasn't like Peter said, Jesus, we could really monetize this miracle thing if you wanted to. Stick around a little bit. There's some hay to be made here. It doesn't say stay and do these things with us that you shouldn't do. He's not trying to convince him to not follow what he understands to be God's will. He's just trying to convince him to preserve his life. It's a good, honest, altruistic encouragement from a friend who wanted what was best for Christ. And yet, this is Jesus' response in Matthew chapter 16, get behind me, Satan. You are a hindrance to me, for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. It's always struck me that Peter didn't mean evil by his plea. Please just stay with us, Jesus, so that you don't die. That's a good, kind, loving thing to want for anybody you care about. But because his will was not the Father's will, Jesus calls him Satan. Get behind me, Satan. You're a hindrance to me, for you're not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. So it occurs to me, based on this passage, that to Jesus, satanic influence is anything that doesn't pull you towards God's will, which really opens up this wide swath for how Satan acts. Jesus, I think to him, satanic influence is anything that doesn't pull you towards God's will. It's something that pushes you away or pulls you away from God. I think what Jesus would argue is that there are no neutral forces in our life. There's not things that are blatantly bad and satanic and blatantly good and godly and then all this gray area in the middle. To Jesus, it seems rather binary. Things are either godly and pushing you towards God or they're satanic and pulling you away from him. There's no middle ground. And because in this instance, Peter was exerting influence over Jesus that wasn't pushing Jesus towards God's will, his influence was satanic in that moment. So it makes me think that his forces are at play far more often than we give him credit for. And I think where we should want to settle in is to ask the questions, okay, Satan is there. He's prowling about. He is the enemy. He is the accuser. He wants to destroy me. He wants to take me away from God. He wants to hurt God the Father by rendering me useless, by taking me away from him. How is he going to do that? How is he going to exert his influence in my life? This morning, I want to look at four big ways he does that. Now, if you're looking at the notes and what will appear on the screen, you're going to see this phrase, Satan's greatest hits. And I just got to level with you about something here, okay? A little peek behind the curtain. I don't know why I did that. I don't know why I call them Satan's greatest hits. It doesn't really fit into the sermon. I type these notes up on Thursday. I sit in my office. I think, yeah, that's good. That's going to work. And then I type it up, and then I email it to Steve, and then he makes slides. And every now and again, I get here on Sunday, and I think, why did I say it that way? But I usually just go with it because it's fine. But this morning, I looked at Satan's greatest hits. And listen, I got to tell you, if that seems dumb to you, it seems dumb to me too. But we're just going to roll with it because we put it in there on Thursday, and it's too late now, baby. So let's look at Satan's four greatest hits, how he really influences us, okay? The first one I want to look at is isolation. I think one of his greatest ploys, one of the things that he loves is isolation. Think about it. If he's a prowling lion seeking who he may devour, who do the lions devour? Well, they devour the ones that are off by themselves. They devour the ones that have wandered away from the flock. And if what he does is speak lies to us, if he's a liar and the father of lies, when are we most likely to believe them? When there's no other voices in our life to tell us that he's wrong. If Satan is whispering into our ear that we are unlovable and there's no one in our life that tells us that we are, we're far more vulnerable to believe that lie. When Satan is whispering into our ear that we're not good enough, when he's whispering into our ear that we're not worthy, when he's whispering that we shouldn't try that or that we shouldn't do that or that so-and-so doesn't like us or that they only said that nice thing to you because they're trying to get you to do this. They're only treating you that way because they're trying to manipulate you. When you begin to read the worst into everyone and everything and you're totally isolated and have no other voices in your life, how easy is it to convince you that the voice that you do hear is correct? If we play this isolation out to its ultimate end, we can talk about things like school shootings, can't we? Every time one of those things happens, it's an act of atrocious evil from the very pits of hell that somebody could walk into a school and open fire on children. But look at what they have in common. Who's perpetuating that evil? Young, isolated white dudes. Isolated guys who are either in late adolescence or are coming out of adolescence, whose story is the same. They don't have friends. They don't have people around them. And so they got radicalized by thoughts and whispers. And because they don't have a community, because they don't have anybody around them, they become more and more convinced that these lies that they're being fed are true until they act on them. And it is abhorrent evil. That evil is born out of isolation. And while I don't think anyone listening here is in danger of becoming that, it's a sobering reminder of how isolation works. And I think of why this pandemic is so very dangerous. Let me just implore you, if you've found yourself in this pandemic increasingly isolated, if you've left your small group because Zoom meetings are lame, I totally get it. Or you're missing church, or you just can't have people around you because you don't want to get sick. Whatever the reason may be, if you found yourself in COVID becoming increasingly isolated, can I just tell you in all candor that you're one of the ones he's circling? Can I encourage you to join a small group? Can I encourage you to reach out to some friends? Can I encourage you to pick up the phone today and just have a chat? Can I encourage you to find someone to say, hey, here's what I've been thinking. Can you help me make sense of this? And let's not let the enemy's lies grow in isolation. And if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm good. I'm not isolated. So far, I've made it. Great. I'm happy for you. I don't feel isolated either. Let's look for the ones who do. Let's think of our friends who might have begun to feel that way. Let's reach out to folks that might feel forgotten. If anybody is in your circle, is in your orbit, your atmosphere, can we just take some personal responsibility and make sure that they don't feel isolated? Can we yell at them as they wander away from the herd? Hey, come over here. Let's do lunch or something. Let's do like a Zoom call. Let's have a Zoom happy hour, whatever you want to do. Hey, come hang out. Can we help thwart the plans of the evil one in that way by making sure no one among us is isolated? The second thing that Satan loves to do, the second greatest hit, the secrets. Satan loves secrets, man. He loves the shadows of your life. He loves those nooks and crannies. Man, when you're hiding things, he can whisper stuff to you like, no one will ever forgive you for that. No one will ever understand those choices. No one can ever offer you grace in this situation. And then he whispers things to you like, just keep it tight. Just keep it there. You'll figure it out. You're going to defeat it. You're going to beat it. You can do it. Sure, that same sin that's been chasing you around for 10, 20, 30 years. But yeah, now's the time when you're going to draw the line in the sand and by a sheer force of will, now's the time you're going to beat it. Satan loves secret sin and he loves convincing you that no one can understand it. And he loves convincing you that you have it under control. Because here's what he knows. Secret sins are a cancer in our lives that will eventually claim it. You understand? Secret sins, those things that we do that if our friends found out about, they would not think the same of us. At least that's what we have ourselves convinced of. Those things that we have tucked away that we don't tell anyone, that we carefully monitor, that we carefully watch, that we make sure stay in the shadows and never see the light of day, those sins, Satan loves those sins because they are a cancer in your very life that will lead to it being claimed. Proverbs says it like this. He says, no man can hold hot coals against his chest and not be burned. Those secret sins, those are the ways that families are broken and that lives are destroyed. If you're dealing with one of those, you're probably sweaty right now. But if you're dealing with one of those, can I just tell you as a friend and a pastor, you're right where he wants you to be. If you have a secret sin in your life that nobody knows about, first of all, I get it. I've been there too. And anybody who tells you they haven't, 95% chance they're a liar. Everybody's dealt with those things. We all have ours. But if you continue to persist in yours, he will get you. It will get worse. It will come to light. You can choose to bring it to light or it will bring itself to light. And when it does, it will tear you down. I just want you to know because I care about you. If you're fostering a secret sin in your life, you are exactly where the enemy wants you to be. The other thing I would say is, when you do the thing that you're so very fearful of, and you allow some light to be shed into that dark corner of your life, certain that this is the end of your life, what you will find is more grace and joy and freedom there than you've ever experienced in your life. This belief that I could never shed light on what I am ashamed of because no one will think the same of me is simply not true. When we do that in a Christian community, we are met with grace and with love and with affirmation, and I want you to be met with that. And I want you to believe for the first time in a long time that this sin doesn't have to define me and it doesn't have to beat me. Shed some light on that and defeat the enemy. Disappoint him and let him slither back into his hole and find another way to get you because that's not going to work anymore. Let's claim some victory this week. If you have a secret sin in your life, I was praying for you before I came up here that you would have the courage to take the steps to shed some light on that so that we are no longer in his crosshairs. Now, you may be thinking, I'm doing great so far. I'm not isolated. I got no secret sin going on right now that I'm ashamed of. I'm an open book. And I would say, good for you. That's a healthy life, and you ought to feel that way. But I think his third greatest hit is one that's going to hit pretty close to home for a lot of us. It's simply distraction. Just distraction. Listen, Satan wants you to be as ineffective as possible. He wants to tear you away from God. If he can't tear you away from God, then he wants you to be useless in his kingdom. He doesn't want you to bring anybody one step closer to God. So how does he do that? Well, he's going to try to isolate you, but that hasn't worked. Good for you. He's going to try to get you to develop this secret sin that you can't share with other people. That hasn't worked. Good for you. Well, if I can't do those things, you know what I'll do? I'll just distract them. I'll put a dang cell phone in their hand. I'll give them a TV and a gossipy neighbor. Listen, I'm not even talking about the distraction of what if I've lived my whole life for the wrong things. I'm not even talking about the distraction of getting to the end of our life and wondering if we've invested in it properly. That's priorities. I'm talking about literal distractions, just literal nothingness that keep us from doing anything. So that maybe we think about our life and we think our life is on a good trajectory. We're doing good. We're good people. We're reading our Bible when we can. We're coming to church when we can. We're disciplining our kids or enjoying relationships with our kids the way that we should. We have good, healthy friendships in our life. And on the whole, the trajectory seems good. But on a day-to-day basis, how are we spending our days? It's Sunday. If you have an iPhone, you got a screen time report this morning. What does it say? How much time have you lost doom scrolling Twitter since November 1st? I would not like to share that with any of you, what my answer is. How much time do we lose to the algorithms that try to keep our attention? Scrolling Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. How much time do we lose to the news? That's very likely, and I'm guilty too, just an echo chamber for what we already believe. How much time do we lose to sports? When we wake up in the morning and the alarm goes off or we just simply come to and we wake up, what's the first thing we do? Is it grab our phone and invite in? What distractions do you have for me today, Satan? I am convinced that so very many of us go through our lives convinced that we're doing the right things and that we're good people. And we're right. But we allow so much of our day to be stolen from us with stuff that doesn't matter that Satan has effectively rendered us totally ineffective in God's kingdom. How often, this is for me included, do we put our head on the pillow at night, tired, because I was a good servant of the Lord today. I served him the way he wanted me to serve. And how many of us go to bed distracted and thinking about all the new distractions that await us the next day? I think distraction is Satan's number one strategy to render us ineffective. How distracted are we in our lives? How much of our daily attention do we give things that just at the end of the day don't matter and definitely don't help us build the kingdom of God? The last one I wanted us to look at this morning is division. Satan loves division. He loves to divide us. He loves to pit one against the other. Scripture is replete with God's will that his church be unified, that his people be unified, that we be of one body, of one mind, of one accord, that we march forward and have one plan. There are no limits to what a group of people who love Jesus and who love one another can do. And Satan hates that. He's terrified of it. He does everything he can to make sure that the people of God don't unify under a single banner. He wants to drive as many wedges between us as he can. He wants us to judge other people, even in our church, for stupid things that they do or say or that we take out of context. It is Satan's will that we be divided. It is Satan's will that we choose to not like other Christians. It's God's will that we be unified. This is why I think Satan loves our current political climate. I think he's just eating it up, man. I don't think politically things could be going better for Satan because all he cares about is driving a wedge between those who call Jesus Savior. And right now what we have is this culture where Christians on both sides will make judgments about other people's spiritual health based on how they vote. Christians on both sides of the aisle will hear that so-and-so voted for so-and-so and judge who they are spiritually based on a vote that they cast. With no context, with no discussion, they just assume that what I think of that side of the aisle is what you are, and what I think of that side of the aisle must be what you are. And because you voted that way, you must be ignorant, or you must not believe what I believe, or you must be swept away, or you must be convinced by the media, or you must be convinced by social media, or whatever it is. And Satan just sits back and folds his arms and is happy and grins because, look, I've set in motion this system that's going to cause division in the church. And now, within our churches, we have groups of Christians that are judging each other based on how they voted with as little information as possible. And it's the scheme of Satan. You understand that, right? He chuckles with glee when we do that. He delights when we scroll Facebook, pick and fight. When we pick up our phone and we go, look at what Sansa said. There's such a lemming. We show it to whoever's around us. Can we just do this, Grace? Can we just say not today, Satan, on that one? Not here. Not here. Can we just give each other the benefit of the doubt? When we see someone post pro something that we didn't vote for, can we just say, you know what? I know that person. I know their character. I know they're godly and that they have a thoughtful reason for voting that way, for thinking that way. And I also know that we have in common our Savior, Jesus, and my allegiance is to him. And there is nothing else. There is no other tertiary issue that could break away my allegiance to Jesus and loving other people with that same allegiance. Can we do that? Can we start to be gracious with each other, Grace? Listen, I want to be careful. I'm not saying that I've seen this happening. I'm not thinking of any particular instance in grace. What I am acknowledging is this culture that we exist in now where to pick a side is to claim so much about your life and who you are. And can I just ask that in this place, in this bubble, that we not do that? That we not let that strategy of Satan work? Can we remember that the other people of grace, the other partners of grace, the other people in our orbit who know Jesus are children of God? That they love him? That Jesus died for them? And that everything we know about them is thoughtful and good and that may be the way that they're aligned politically is too. And can we sweep that aside as a tertiary issue and focus as a primary issue on the fact that we love Jesus and our neighbors need desperately to know him? And why don't we be part of our culture that sweeps the rest of that stuff aside and quits letting Satan be so effective in that arena? There's an encouragement if we'll do this. There's an encouragement if we will seek others and not isolate ourselves and if we will not allow ourselves to be lied to. It's not just all bad news when it comes to Satan. You know, I referenced Peter earlier and I said that he tells us that we need to be sober-minded and watchful because Satan prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. But what I didn't do is read you the rest of that passage. This is the rest of this Yeah, he's against you. Yes, he's going to try to isolate you. Yes, he's going to try to get you enslaved in secret sin. Yes, he's going to try to divide us. Yes, he's going to do all those things and try to distract you. But if you'll resist him, if you'll refuse to become isolated, if you'll refuse to allow God's church, his bride, to become divided over silly things, if you'll fight off distraction in your life, if you'll have the courage to shed light on the secret sins in your life, if you will hold fast to God, then he promises you that after you have suffered for a little while, which is a kind thing for God to do to acknowledge that this is hard, resisting all of that is difficult and challenging. He says, if you do it, then the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Ephesians 6. He says, He acknowledges what we're talking about today. And he starts off this passage on putting on the armor of God, and he says, when you have stood firm, therefore, stand firm. When you've stood up, keep standing. When you've fought, keep fighting. When you're tired, keep going. And when we do that, when we persist, when we acknowledge the satanic influences in our life, and we do everything we can to resist those, the God of peace will be with us. He will guard us, protect us, and have defeated the enemy for us. We are frustrated that he continues to fight, that he continues to try to claim us, but God, we are so grateful that you have defeated the enemy for us. We are frustrated that he continues to fight, that he continues to try to claim us. But God, we know that you have won the battle. We know that for every lie he whispers in our ear, that you are blaring truths into the other one. If only we will listen. Give us the ears to hear your truth. Give us the eyes to see his lies. God, if any of us has a secret sin, would we just shed some light on that this week? Give us courage. May we be met with grace. Let us see light and believe the first time in a long time that we can be done with those things. God, if we are a part of the divisiveness in our culture and in your body, I pray that you would give us grace, patience, wisdom, and peace, that we would not be a part of that scheme. God, if anyone is isolated, bring your angels around them. Let them know that they are loved, that they are not alone. Let them know that they are seen. And God, for those of us who are distracted, would you give us the courage and the desire to be focused every day on what matters most in our lives, on the things that you've placed in our lives and the opportunities that we have to influence people towards you? We thank you for winning this war. We ask you for the strength to stand firm in it. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. Good morning, those of you here in person. Good morning online. Thank you so much for participating online. Last week was a roaring success. We were blown away by how many of you brave souls showed up and braved the elements to be here. We were thrilled with how many folks watched online. And like I said last week, this is a new season in the life of Grace. We are going to exist this way for a long while where we meet either in our home or yours. So we are grateful for the opportunity to meet. We know that God has his hand on this place, and I have just really enjoyed this morning. I'm so grateful we have our music intern Dalton Hayes with us. This is wonderful. If quarantine brings him to us, the book of Kings in the Bible. And we understand that when it was originally written, it was one big long book that got divided in two for the sake of scroll length, and now it's 1 and 2 Kings. So that's where we are. This morning, we're going to start in 2 Kings chapter 22. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and open it. If you have one at home, go ahead and open it there. I'm going to try to highlight as much of the scripture and read it together as we can, but we're going to cover a lot of stuff. We're going to be, if you want to mark your Bibles already, we're going to be in 2 Kings 22, then we're going to jump to 2 Chronicles 34, then back to 2 Kings 23. So if you need to mark things, go ahead and do that. It's always great to interact with Scripture as we go through it. This morning we arrive at who I believe is one of the most unsung heroes in all of the Bible. It's a king named Josiah. We may have heard of Josiah before. We may have even heard a sermon on Josiah before, but I would be willing to bet that many of us here and many of us online have not heard of Josiah. Maybe we've heard of him, but we don't know what he did. We don't know what his role was. And as I went through and read the accounts of Josiah, both in Kings and in Chronicles, I realized, you know, there's really no way for me to preach about Josiah in the way that I normally do. If you've been paying attention to my sermons, which I realize is a big if, most of us come for the worship, but if you've been paying attention to my sermons, you'll know that I tend to try to drive to one point. I don't like to do the three and four point sermons. I like to drive to one point, mostly because I think it's difficult to remember more points than that. I think it's more engaging to just drive to one thing and take that home with us. But as I prepared this week, I realized, man, Josiah is too big of a topic to do that with, and what happens in his life and what's left from his example is too great to boil down to one thing. And when I grew up, I don't know about you guys that grew up in church, but when I grew up going to church, it was three and four points. I mean, the pastor took the passage, he read part of the passage, and then he made a point about the passage, and then he jumped back into the passage, right? It was just this old school way of preaching. So this morning, if you'll allow me with Josiah, I'm going to go a little old school, and I'm just going to throw things out to you as we go through a story. We'll drive to one main point, but there's going to be some other things along the way that if you're a note taker, you may want to write down. We encounter Josiah in 2 Kings chapter 22. And one of the first things we learn about him, which is pretty interesting, is that he was eight years old when he assumed the throne. He was eight years old when he became the king of Israel. He's the youngest king, I think, that Israel gets. And what's interesting about Josiah is if you read Kings and Chronicles, as soon as a king is introduced, the text will immediately say one of two things. The text will immediately either say, so-and-so was righteous and did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, or so-and-so was evil and did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. Or so and so was evil and did what was right in their own eyes. And there's a lot more kings that did what was right in their own eyes and did what was right in the sight of the Lord. But when we meet Josiah, we learn right away he did what was right in the sight of the Lord. He followed the God of his father, David. So it harkens all the way back to the second king of Israel, the greatest king of Israel, and said he embraced the faith that David had. And I think this is super interesting that he does this. Because his father, Ammon, and his grandfather, Manasseh, were evil. They were idol-worshiping, evil, greedy kings. He did not come from a heritage of faith. And yet at the age of eight, when he takes over the throne, he has a heart that follows our God. And it just makes me wonder, I was curious about this this week, who is the silent voice, the unseen voice in Josiah's life that was speaking Jesus into his ear? Who was the unseen voice in his life? Who was the one whispering? Who was the uncle? Who was the aunt? Who was the nanny? Who was the teacher? That every time they had time with this future king, they said, you know who the true God is? You know who really loves you? You know who really purposed you? You know who really created you? You know who got us free from Egyptian slavery? You know who sent the flood and then restored his creation? You know who that is, right? Who was the unseen voice in this young prince's life that turned his heart towards the Father? And it just makes me appreciate the role that unseen voices have in our lives. Teachers, you might have kids in your classroom that have no other voices pointing their hearts to Jesus. You might be the unseen voice in their life. Aunts and uncles, you might have nieces and nephews that you love and for reason, their parents' hearts don't track with your heart. You might be the unseen voice that points their little hearts towards Jesus. Keep speaking that truth into their life. Keep telling them about their God. Keep telling them about their Savior. We never know who these unseen voices are in our lives, and those of you that have influence, particularly with little ones and even with adults, you never know when you might be the unseen voice that turns their heart towards Jesus and impacts the rest of their life. I can't wait to meet the person who was in Josiah's ear saying, you know who the true God is. But at the age of eight, he takes over as the king, and he turns his heart towards God. And somewhere in there, we're going to find out, we're going to jump to Chronicles 34 and get the timing of it exactly right, because the timing to me is very interesting. But somewhere in there, he looks at everything that had built up in Israel over the years. Over the many different kings in Israel, they had erected different idols, different gods, and now there existed this clutter and clamor all over the nation that were monuments to other gods, to Baal and to Asherah and to anybody else that they may have worshipped, to the golden calves that we learned about last week. So much so that these images began to clutter the temple itself. Inside and outside the temple, the one place that was supposed to be the house of God and representative of God's presence with his children in Israel. Even that was cluttered with the presence of other idols. And so Josiah, like a madman, starts to clear away all of this clutter. And in the midst of doing that in the temple, they uncovered the book of the law. They uncovered the book of the law, which was the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, written by Moses. This was the closest thing in this time in history that they had to the Bible. This was their holy text. It's our same holy text, and they found it. And I want you to look at Josiah's reaction to finding the Bible, to finding the book of the law tucked away in the temple. We're going to pick it up in 2 Kings 22, verse 11. When the king, that's Josiah, heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes. So they found it, they brought it somewhere, and then they read it to him. He said, I want you to read it to me. So they read it to him. And when he heard it, he tore his clothes. And the king commanded a bunch of people. I'm not going to read all those names in verse 12 and embarrass myself. He commanded a bunch of people. And he said in 13, go inquire of the Lord for me and for the people and for all Judah concerning the words of this book that have been found. For great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book to do according to all that is written concerning us. So in the midst of this cleanup, somebody finds the book of the law dusty and covered up with other things in the temple. They get it. News travels back to Josiah that they found it. He says, bring it to me and read it to me. And as they read the book of the law to him, he tore his clothes, which is a symbol of anguish. We're going to get to what that means a little bit later, but it's a sign of anguish. It's a sign of repentance. It's a sign of pain. He tears his clothes and he laments at what their fathers did. He said that the wrath of the Lord is kindled against us because of the sins of our fathers. He's acknowledging that over the decades, over the generations, the men and the women who had leadership in the country, who were saddled with spiritual leadership, led them off course. And now they're so far off course that he weeps at the reality of where they are. I picture it like this. I picture the book of the law, the Bible, God's word that Josiah read that day. As he's looking at it as the king, I picture it's a map of the ocean. And Josiah is supposed to be anchored over here, and they have drifted so far away that the faith of the nation is not even recognizable to David and to Abraham and to Moses. And he realizes in that moment that they've drifted so far off course, carried by the current of culture, by the shifting winds of preference and of intellect and of education and of convenience. They drifted away from who they were supposed to be and where they were supposed to be. And in the face of the law, in the face of God's word, he realizes, my goodness, we are so far from who we should be. Our fathers allowed us to drift, and God is rightly angry with us for the type of faith that we perpetuate. And it makes me realize, as I read that, that if we want to hand our children a solid faith, it must be anchored in Scripture. If we want to hand our children a solid faith, it must be anchored in Scripture. And so that's applicable to parents, it's applicable to those who lead young people, but it's applicable for us as we age, as we think about the next generation of grace. One of the things I got to see when I got here is we just had a group of girls graduate from high school, and they are all part of grace, and they're all, well, they went off to colleges, and now they're back home because, you know, COVID is a thing. But they went off for a minute together in faith, and then, and I've seen a picture of them as little girls playing soccer together at events at grace. And then yesterday was my little girl's first soccer game. And it was super fun. Everyone was terrible at it. But there's four kids on the team, including Lily, who go to Grace. And we got to take a picture with all of them yesterday. And that's the next generation of kids that's going to move through this place. And for those of us that care about God's church and care about his kingdom and care about the generations moving through this place, not just the children, but the parents of those young children and those of you moving into empty nests and people who have been through that before, each generation that follows, if we want to, if we care about handing the generations that will follow us a solid faith, it must be anchored in Scripture. And this seems like an obvious point. And I'm sure that all of you and all of you would agree with me. Sure, yeah, it must be anchored in Scripture. But do we practically do this? I'm not trying to poke too hard here. But how many of our ideas about the things going on in our culture are really us following the dictates of culture and the currents of change and the currents of intellect and the currents of education and not about anchoring ourselves in Scripture? How many of our attitudes towards homosexuality have to do with what the prevailing thought in our culture is and not what the prevailing teaching in our Scripture is? How many of our thoughts about politics have to do with the prevailing winds of culture and not anchored in Scripture? How much of the morality that we would pass on to our kids, how we discipline and what we tell them is right and wrong, is anchored in how we feel about things, is anchored in and shifted by what culture tells us should be important to us and not what Scripture tells us should be important to us. How many of us, me included, are guilty of looking at the way that culture shifts, of feeling that shift beneath our feet, and then beginning to try to bend this around what our community is telling us, rather than remaining anchored in God's Word. If we want to hand our children a faith that matters, it must be anchored in God's Word. And how can we anchor our faith in God's word if we are not students of it? Listen, I try the best I can to teach the Bible every week. It's my deep conviction that that's my responsibility, to teach you God's word, to enliven it, to make it so that you want to go home and read it on your own. But I will tell you this readily. If I'm the only Bible you're getting every week, it's going to be a shallow faith. If this is it, and then you just go from here, and you don't encounter God's word again, and we're not getting up and we're not reading it, we're not pouring over it, we're not learning it for ourselves, and we're not going back and going, what did he preach? Does that even make sense? If we're not doing that and this is all you're getting of Bible, of God's word, that's not enough. That's a paltry diet. We want to hand our children a faith that matters. It's got to be anchored in God's word. When I anchor our faith in God's Word, we have to be loving students of God's Word. But I thought that this was also interesting about Josiah. As I was studying him and I was looking at his life, some of the pieces weren't coming together all the way for me. So I flipped over to the Chronicles account of him. So if you want to flip to 2 Chronicles 34, you can. Really quickly, this is a good place for an aside. If you care about things like this, this is just kind of, here, Steve, I'm going to step this way, so get ready to move the camera. This is just an aside, okay? All right, good. Kings and Chronicles share the same stories. Kings shares the same block of time as Chronicles does. And so you may wonder, why did the Bible include two editions of the same stories with the same characters? Well, here's why. Kings was written during a time of slavery. The conclusion of both countries is that they were carried off to Assyria and Babylon as slaves. And there are generations of Hebrews being born into slavery, and their dads and their granddads are telling them, hey, you're the chosen people of God the Father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You are his chosen people. He has a special plan for you. He has land promised to you. And they're looking around going, you sure? Because I'm a slave right now. Really, it feels like that God's kind of impotent. There's a generation of people angry at God for not keeping his promises. And so Kings is written to break the hearts of a hard-hearted people and help them see it is your father's fault that you're here in the first place. It's a book of conviction. Chronicles was written to what's called the post-exilic community. Kings was written to the exilic community, the ones in slavery, but eventually they all wandered back. So if that's interesting to you, there's that. All right, I'm going to jump back into the sermon proper. So in Chronicles chapter 34, we have the account of Josiah. And I want to highlight two verses here for you. The first one is verse 3. It says this, and I thought it was interesting. Okay. If you're tracking along, he's 16 years old. For some reason at 16, he decides that he is going to pursue the religion of his father, David. That's when his heart is turned. That's when God captures his heart. And that's when he begins to pursue that faith. Four years after the internal changes begin, he begins to purge the nation of all the idols that are there. And then this happens in verse 8. Now in the 18th year of his reign, so this is now, he's 26, this is 10 years after. When he had cleansed the land and the house, he sent. Okay. I stopped there at he sent because that's where we pick up the story in Kings. The rest of that is when in his 18th year, he sent those people to the temple. They cleared out the temple. They uncovered the book of the law. And then we pick up the story in Kings. But what's so interesting to me is this. When he was 16 years old, his heart was turned towards the Lord. He began clearly to work on himself and his own understanding. As a result of his own understanding, he began to clear out the idols that existed. As a result of clearing out the idols that existed, he uncovered the word of the Lord. Do you understand? It was 10 years between a heart conviction and a deep life-changing encounter with the Lord. It was 10 years between his discovery of faith and a place where he went, oh my gosh, and tore his clothes and repented and realized what he had been doing. He waited 10 years on the voice of the Lord. Some of us get frustrated and spiritually discouraged if we have to wait one week and we don't feel the voice of the Lord. Some of us say, you know what? I'm going to do quiet times now. That's going to be a thing. I heard what Nate just said about being dedicated to Scripture. I should really do that. One of these days, I promise you I'm going to do this. I'm going to preach a sermon, and I'm going to come up here, and I'm going to say, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I'm the pastor. You should read your Bibles more. Let's pray. And that's going to be enough. That's going to be enough where all of us are going to go home and be like, yeah, that's actually a fair point. And so maybe you've decided to do that. And you go home. It's day one. You get up. You make your coffee. You sit down. You read it. Your wife says, what did you learn? You're like, stuff. Something. Josiah seems okay. All right, and the next day, what'd you learn? The next day, what'd you learn? I don't know, reading the Bible seems silly. We can't wait on the Lord three days. Josiah waited on him 10 years with all these obstacles in the way. I think another thing we can learn from the life of Josiah is to find God, remove the obstacles. To find God, move towards him. Some of us just sit passively waiting, God, why won't you speak to me? Why won't you talk to me? Why don't I seem to feel your presence and hear your voice like so-and-so does? Maybe it's because of all the junk that we have in our life, all the idols that have accumulated all over the country and even in the very temple that are covering up the book of the law. Maybe, just maybe, we should take some steps towards God. And this isn't how it works for everybody. Sometimes we take a step towards God and he comes in and he meets us right where we are. I've heard of miraculous conversions of somebody who was an alcoholic on Friday and on Saturday they weren't because they met Jesus. And that's amazing. But that's not everybody's story. Sometimes it's 10 years of pursuit before we finally go, oh, hang in there. Persevere. Pursue the Father. This is even true in the New Testament. Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son, and it's this miraculous story of the sinning son being met by the saving Father. But it wasn't until he started moving towards the Father that the Father met him. While he was still a long way off, the Father went to meet him, but when he was in that foreign country, he began to move towards the Father. If we want to pursue God, move towards him, remove idols, instead of passively wondering why we can't hear from him. I think it's worth it. But then we see, if we look back to 2 Kings chapter 23, we see the conclusion of the story of Josiah. And this is the thing that I'm most excited about. If you look at 2 Kings 23, after being convicted, after removing the idols, after finding the book of the law, and now after tearing his clothes and being fearful of the wrath of God because of the sins of the father, because of the shifting faith that they were handed, he goes on a rampage in chapter 23. It's a detailed chronicle of just everything that he removes from the country. Thing after thing after thing after thing, clutter after clutter after clutter. He strips it all down until all that's left are the things of God. And then he caps it off this way. And I think it's incredibly appropriate. I had to read this story three different times before I saw the magnitude of why it finishes here, but I think it's such a huge deal. He cleanses all of these things, and then he reinst of the moving towards, after all of the conviction, he reinstituted Passover. And I think that this is so important. The Passover hadn't been celebrated like this since the time of the judges. The kings had mucked it up so badly that this was an unrecognizable ceremony for them. But you might remember if you were here last fall, we looked at the festivals of the Hebrew people and the one that points to Jesus more than any other festival is the Passover. It's a reminder of the 10th plague in Egypt when God sent the angel of death over the nation of Egypt and he said, unless you have the blood of a spotless lamb over your doorpost, then I'm gonna take the life of your firstborn son. And in that plague, God, through the blood of the lamb, he protected his children. He took them away from slavery into freedom because of the blood of the lamb. And the whole thing is a picture of salvation. They didn't realize it, but they thought they were looking back on a time that they were saved. And Passover, every time they celebrated it, was really looking forward to a coming Messiah. You understand that? And so how he kept off his repentance is to focus on Christ. That is why I think that Josiah is a picture of repentance. We hear this word a lot in church, to repent of sin and what that means. And I talked about it before, so I won't belabor it today. But if you ever need to know what repentance actually looks like, because repentance is to be moving in one direction, stop what you're doing and move in the opposite direction. So they're moving towards deeper idolatry. He stops and he doesn't just say, we're not gonna worship those idols anymore, but he knocks away all the clutter as he pursues God and he finishes his repentance. He stops, and he doesn't just say, we're not going to worship those idols anymore, but he knocks away all the clutter as he pursues God, and he finishes his repentance. He stops his repentance. His repentance lands in a place where he's focused on Jesus. You see? This is proper repentance. Sometimes we stop short, and we forget where our focus belongs. Last week we looked at Jehu. We talked about how Jehu started all the cleansing process, but he didn't go the full measure. He wasn't the picture of repentance. Josiah is a picture of repentance, and he stops all of that by finishing, by reinstituting a ceremony that focused his eyes on Christ. Incidentally, all the clutter and all the movement and all the stuff that we need to do to find God works by focusing our eyes on Christ anyways. I was reminded as I thought about this and what proper repentance really is of Hebrews 12, 1 and 2, one of my favorite passages in the Bible. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. And this is what Josiah did. He's surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, all the kings that came before him, all the people of Israel, all of heaven looking down on his reign saying, what will you do? And he began to throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangled all the idols that would obedient to verse 2 in that chapter, which is this. How? How do we do this? By focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We can't throw off those idols ourselves. We can't do a good enough job of that on our own. We can't live perfectly enough to satisfy God, but Christ has already done that for us. So the proper end of repentance is to say, God, I'm giving you everything here, but my eyes are focused on Jesus. Josiah took the repentance. He took the obedience of the people. He focused them back on the Father, and he capped it off with Passover and focusing their eyes on Christ, which is why we continue. That's our version of Easter. When we celebrate Easter, what are we doing? We're looking back on the sacrifice that saved us, and we are anticipating a future with that Jesus. Josiah's life, 2 Kings chapter 22 and 23 and 2 Chronicles chapter 34, are a living, breathing picture of what happens in Hebrews 12, 1 and 2, of throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and running the race that is set before us by focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. That's who King Josiah was. That's an example we're following. And I hope that we will learn from him this morning and carry forward just some of those as we go through our weeks this week. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you. We are grateful for you. God, we are grateful for your conviction when it is both gentle and when it's more forceful. Father, we are grateful for your word. Make grace students of it. Give us a heart for it. Help us to love it. Give us a deeper understanding of it than we've ever had. Jesus, focus our eyes on you. Let us trust in you to remove the obstacles. Let us trust in you to draw us near the Father. Make us a church that has our eyes focused on you. God, thank you for your servant, Josiah, and the examples that we learn from him. I pray that in little ways this week, you would make us all a little bit more like him and help us focus a little bit more on you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. All right. Thank you guys for coming in person this week. Thank you for watching online this week. We will see you in whatever capacity next week. Have a great week.

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.