Sermons tagged with Generosity

All right, good morning. You guys can have a seat. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thank you for being here on this holiday weekend. As I always like to remind people who come on holiday weekend, God does love you more than the ones who are not here right now. He loves you less at the beach. It's just how it goes. So thank you so much for being here to celebrate Ministry Partner Weekend with us. This is a really special Sunday for us. We like to remind you as often as we can that 10% of everything that's given here at Grace goes to ministries going on outside the walls of Grace. And so the way that we are structured is we support three international partners and three local partners. And you're going to get to hear from most of those this morning through video or from them being up on stage. Speaking of people being up on stage, we're going to hear from Addis Jamari. Towards the end of the service, I get to talk with Suzanne Ward, who helped to start that. And we get to find out more about that ministry. But I'm also really excited this morning to have David Rodriguez with us from Faith Ministry. I got to meet, you'll have a chance to cheer. David's not that big of a deal, all right? Just messing around, David. Love you, pal. I got to meet David in October of 2017. I had started here as the senior pastor, and that was the trip that we do in our church. And so we went to Mexico, and I felt like I needed to go to Mexico because missions are important to me as well. I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about. And as soon as I met David, I thought, man, Grace would love this guy. Grace needs to see this guy. Grace needs to hear his heart for missions and what's going on down in Reynosa. And so I've been wanting to find a time to get him up here, and finally it's the time. So he's going to share with us a little bit about God's heart for the world, and then I'm going to have a chance to talk with him on our behalf to find out more about faith ministry and what's going on down there. Buenos dias. Puedo hacer esto en español, verdad? Todos hablan español. I was going to ask Nate to translate this for me. I feel more comfortable speaking in Spanish. I know you are an expert, but I'm going to give you a break today, my friend. So thank you so much. It's so good to be here, guys, with you. It's amazing. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity. And you know my name is David Rodriguez, and I'm Executive Director of Faith Ministry, whatever that means. I have no idea what that means, but I'm the Executive Director of Faith Ministry. And as I was walking here, I just saw those beautiful familiar faces, and thank you so much for coming and doing this with us. And I was talking with some of the youth that used to come to faith ministry years and years ago as students in high school, and now they're grown up and married and with kids and all of that, and that did not make me feel old at all. So thank you for doing that, but it's just a beautiful, beautiful time. I think the last time I was here at Grace, it was 2015 or something, something like that. I don't remember. Don't trust me on that, but it was a different world right then, 2015, a reckless world when they put in front of us a birthday cake and we blew on the candles and then we gave the cake away. What were we thinking? Gosh. But it was a different world right there, but it was just great to be here with us. And they asked me to share a little bit about God's heart for missions and for partnerships. And I know for a fact that it runs really deep in the DNA of church, right? Missions and programs and all of this. And I know for sure it's important for this church. I was hired in 2002 to work with faith ministry. And by the summer of 2003, I was introduced to Grace Youth, right? With 50 or 40 or 80 kids coming. and I wanted to run away right there. But I was introduced to the beautiful leadership of this church with everyone that you know from years and years ago, and I can see how much love you have for the communities. I can see how much you put into the ministry and how much you love everyone. And every time that the team came to the area, it was a fiesta, not only for the ministry right there, not only for us, for the whole town. You know, everyone got really excited about that, and it was just wonderful, wonderful to have. And then I was introduced to the adults, right, that they're a little crazier than the kids, so, but beautiful adults, and every time they come, I have tons and tons of people coming to the ministry, because they want to take pictures with you guys, and they call you family, and they call you my friends, and they call you, and they feel that you you belong to them and they belong to you. And it's just a wonderful, wonderful feeling about that. And that's how much you appreciate the partnership and we appreciate the partnership with the ministry. That's the fiesta, that's family. And that's how God sees us without putting ourselves first and our minds and our cultures and our languages and our ideas and all of that. We put it on the side and we say, you're my brother and you're my sister. Regardless of everything, we are family because we belong to Jesus. And that's it. That's the important part. That's the heart of God working through all of us. God loves us so much. That beats me because I know me, right? It's how come God loves me? I have no idea. I don't know about you and yourself, but you guys look beautiful and it looks like you behave very well. But God loves you so much. And that's the important thing, that we can give back that love because of what we receive. That's the responsibility that we have. We are, God is counting on you, by the way. God is counting on me to go out and to share that love. If you're expecting an angel that came from heaven, you know, to do the work that we are supposed to do, I have news for you. It's not coming. The closest thing that you're going to have to an angel is Nate here and me. Let me tell you, you are in troubles right there, right now, right? You look like an angel, by the way. I'll send you the invoice later. You are in troubles. There's not going to be fire from heaven in showing people the love of God. God is depending on you. God is depending on me to get involved in organizations like this, to go out and to share that love of God with the people that is in need. I witnessed firsthand the love that you guys have and how comfortable you are, how good you are in that field. But let me tell you something, this world is an expert on throwing things at us that make us, you know, discourage us from going. You name it, COVID or financial crisis, or you put the name there that discourage you to go out in the field and do this. And when I was growing up, I learned this the hard way because my dad was a principal, a director of a ministry at Bible College. And that's what they did all the time, going out and doing mission work and going in different fashions. And one of those fashions was singing. He had a choir, a group of people singing, and I thought that was fun. He's like, let me do it. You got old, good old David thinking that that was beautiful, and I wanted to join that team, go all over the place and sing and all that. I didn't count that my father was a perfectionist, and he wanted to deliver quality. So they were practicing and practicing for hours and hours because he wanted the harmonies. He wanted the first voice to match with the second voice. And then it was all of that. And it seems like he wanted me to join one of those voices. And I was singing not on first voice or second voice. I was singing on reverse because he was always speaking on me. So I became uncomfortable with that. I became like, this is not fun. I don't want to do this anymore. And I talked to him about that. It's like, I don't feel good about this. I don't want to do this anymore. And he looked at me. It's like, do you really thought that this was going to be fun? Do you really thought that this was going to be something easy? You think it's about your feelings? You think it's about you, how you feel, how comfortable you feel, how happy you feel about that. Let me tell you something. It's not about you. It's not about how you feel. It's about the responsibility that we have to share that love of God with the people that have never seen the love of God. So put your feelings on the side. We have work to do. And I keep on trying to sing. I keep on trying because this world makes and produces problems. And we know this wonderful God. this loving God that we need to share with the community. In Romans 5, 8, it speaks loud about this. God demonstrated His love while we were sinners. Christ died for us. And I keep thinking, how fun that was for the Lord. How easy that was for the Lord. And that's the question. How good He felt about dying on a cross for you and for me. I guess it was not fun. It was not comfortable. It was not easy. But He did it for you. And He did it for me. He loved us so much. He loved us so deep that He died for you and he died for me. He cleaned me. He saved me. He put me in a place that I don't deserve, but he deserves and he's in me. And now I have a big responsibility to go out there. God cares for me. God cares for the people. Let's go out. Let's get involved. Let's go out and tell the people from Raleigh, from people from Mexico, people from Africa, from people from all the way in the world that we have an awesome God. That God cares. That God loves us so much. And they need to hear this good news. There's plenty of bad news. Just turn on your TV. They don't need that anymore. They need to know about this God that you have. And that you can share those great news with everyone. Thank you for this opportunity. Thank you. It's so good to see you here tonight. I mean, today, tonight, tomorrow, yesterday. I don't know. But it's so good to see you here. And we love you and we appreciate the partnership that you have with us. And I heard that there's going to be tacos later on, so I'm going to be quiet now. Okay, let's go for tacos. So let's pray together. Lord, thank you so much for this wonderful opportunity to be here and to be with people, family. I know you love us so much, and I know you have saved us and cleaned us. And give us that desire, Lord, to go out and to share those good news with the people that needs to know that you are God and that you are your throne. This world is upside down, but you are not. Thank you for everything that you are doing for us. In your name we pray. Amen. God bless you guys. Thank you. Amen. Yeah, have a seat, my friend. David, I'm so excited that you committed to me on the way to church this morning that you'd come back and preach to us for the next two, three weeks. We're looking forward to your series on missions. You got it. People are not going to be happy in Mexico, let me tell you. Thanks so much for sharing that with us. I'd ask David just to share a little bit really about the heart of God and why God cares deeply about the ministries that we're focused on this morning. And thank you so much for doing that. A simple message of it is our job. God's counting on us to spread his love. And David's actively doing that with his staff down there. The folks that we've highlighted on video are actively spreading the love of God. We at Grace do everything that we can to actively spread the love of God. Suze is going to talk about that in a little bit. And so now what I want us to get a kind of a sense of is faith ministry and what they do and what David's role is there and moving forward what we're looking forward to next. And then ultimately, how can we partner with them in moving God's love forward and spreading the love of God to other people? And so really, if you're here this morning, what I would really encourage you to do, or if you're catching up online, I would encourage you to think through, God, how can I partner with one of these ministries? How can I do something? How can I help spread your love in a way that I'm not currently engaged in? What's the thing that I can engage in and help with? So just allow the Holy Spirit to kind of speak with you as we hear more from these folks that we partner with. So David, first of all, I got to hand it to you, pal. When I told you, you know, take about 10 minutes and share, I didn't think there was any chance in the world that was coming in under 10 minutes. I thought for sure we were going to be 15, 18 minutes. I'm just going to be sitting there and be like, well, I'm just going to interview him for two minutes. That's it. That's his time. So I'm, first of all, very impressed. Thank you. So tell us what Faith Ministry does. And let's pretend that there's people here who have never heard of Faith Ministry before and don't know what it is. Educate us on what you guys do and where you do it. Well, I thought you say 10 Mexican minutes. I was going to go for 20, right? But I said maybe, Jimen, you know, 10 minutes, actually 10 minutes. You did good. I appreciate that. Well, Faith Ministry is an organization that creates opportunities, opportunities to meet the Lord, to meet Jesus in different fashions, different ways. What we have is people that they leave their hometowns. They leave South Mexico. South Mexico has nothing for it is extreme poverty that is over there. It's beautiful areas, but it has nothing for them. They move into big cities like Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterey. But you need education to succeed. And Monterey is my hometown. It's four million people. So it's an industrial capital of Mexico. So it's hard for them to do it. So they come to the border, not because the border is beautiful. It's because they want to jump in the United States, right? It's the American dream. And they get stuck in the middle. They cannot come here. They cannot go back home. So they're stuck with nothing, nothing at all, with no hope, no things like that. And that's, I'm sorry, my phone, it's saying that he didn't understand what I say. So it's listening somehow. So, beats me. Your phone is mocking you from the audience. I know, right? That's great. It's throwing jokes. I didn't understand that. Can you repeat that? Okay. And that's what we do. We meet these people where they are, and we tell them that we have an awesome God. But it's hard to tell somebody that has no house and no food and no medical attention, and they cannot send their kids to school, that God loves you, right? And you go and say, God loves you. Jesus loves you so much. And they look at you like, really? You're making a mistake. I have never seen the love of God in my life. And that's why we begin doing things and we've been building houses and providing meals. We have three churches that we support and we provide meals for 150 people a month. And we create all these opportunities to tell them with actions, God loves you. And that's faith ministry. That's faith ministry in action with all of that. Yeah, great, great. And as I understand it, you guys kind of have, a little bit, you kind of have your summer focus, and then you have your focus during the year. So tell us about those two different focuses. And during the summer months, what do you focus on? And this is when teams go down, and this is how Grace has a relationship with faith ministry. And then during the year when teams can't come down as often, you're focused on other things locally. So tell us about your summer focus and your year-round focus. The summer looks beautiful for us. You know, for a few years it was awful with everything happening. But now every week we have a team. And that means that there's a group of people from a church organization coming our way. And we focus on that week and that church. And they come to build a house. And they come and there's nothing. And at the end of the week, there's walls and there's columns and there's a ring and there's a house for families. And we keep telling families, God is awesome. God is good. Perform miracles. And then there's a team coming and building a house for them. And that makes that team an answer to their prayers and how beautiful that is. So that's the summer. They come on a Sunday. They leave on a Friday. And the next team comes either Saturday or Sunday. and that's team after team all the summer. Let me interject real quick before the rest of the year, because one of the things that was interesting to me is to go down, and when you're there and you're helping build the house, and when I say help, I use that term very loosely, because I am no help. I lay the worst cinder block. I'm terrible at it, and I'm never going to do it again. That's what people say in Mexico about you as well. Yeah, I know. I'm probably a legend down there. There's no kidding around. There was one afternoon I worked all afternoon on a wall to get it to this high, and one of my buddies who goes here, Keith Cathcart, he's not here this morning, but he's a jerk. And he was there working as well, and he came around the corner to give me a hard time about the bad job that I was doing and saw the abject stress and terror on my face and left me alone. Can you imagine how bad the wall looked for him to leave me alone? And then when Angel, the foreman, got there later the day, he had to literally, I'm not making this up, take a sledgehammer to the wall to get it back aligned to where it needed to be. So help, the word help is very loose there. I will never attempt to help in that way again. But sorry for the digression. That doesn't count as part of your time. When you get there, usually they have the families on a bulletin board or something in the kitchen of where you're staying and kind of telling you the stories of the family. A single mom who works in an electronics factory and makes a little bit more than a dollar a day, and she's got two kids who are in school, and they're trying to figure it out. So I would love, just off the top of your head, I know I'm putting you on the spot, just an example or two of the last couple of houses that you built, who they were for, what was going on with the families. And then I think it's also important for the folks to know what qualifies you to get a house built for you by Faith Ministry. Well, we have a lot of examples. I'll tell you one that it's a lady that works for us and she injured her hand and she cannot work anymore. She's broken her hand and they have family, extended family with a mentally challenged kid with mobility issues. And for them to build a house, it's horrible. They can say for years and years and years and nothing is going to happen about that. And then there's a team coming in one week building a house for them. And you have to see their faces and their smiles and their tears saying, well, think this is a miracle for us. You know, this is something that God has given us. Years ago, I was working in Miguel de Man with many of you who work and a lady came to me and say, I need a house. And I told her, we cannot build a house anymore. Our summer is done. We have all the teams coming. We're not going to be able to build a house anymore. And she began crying. It's like, what's going on? Tell me. Why do you need a house? And I was not ready for the answer. And she looked at me and said, well, I need a house because I'm dying. I'm going to die. And I said, well, we are going to die, right, one way or another, sooner or later. She's like, no, you don't understand. I'm dying right now. I have cancer in my stomach. And I have two kids that they depend on me. And it was three kids that depended on her, the're little kids, so I'm gonna go and I'm gonna leave them with nothing. So I want a house for them to stay to go in because I'm gonna die and they're gonna thrown out of the street. I was speechless. What do you say to somebody like that? I didn't have any teams coming, everyone was already committed to a house, and it was that need, and I began telling her in the interview, oh, we have an awesome God and a mighty God and a God that makes miracles. And when I hear all of that, I say to myself, David, you and your big mouth, right? Now we're going to have to do something about it. And it was amazing to hear one of the teams calling in and say, David, we told you that we're going to build one house. And guess what? We have the money to build two houses. So you need to find me another family. And that was the miracle right there. So we built a house for her. That was the first member of the Miguel Aleman Presbyterian Church that got baptized. And she got baptized in her bed. And the pastor called me, he's like, David, she passed away, and she passed away with a smile on her face. And that's the impact that you do when you come to the community because you're sharing the love of God right there with people in extreme need. And that's great. Thank you for sharing that with us. And as I understand it, to get a house, to have a house built for you, you have to have someone representing your family who agrees to work for faith ministry. What's the time period on that? How long do they have to work with you guys? It depends. If they bring me tacos, it's a short period of time. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Right. But if they don't. Right. Those jerks. Yeah. Yes. We always ask the families to come in and work because we want them to get involved. We're not a construction company. We don't build houses for people. The house is just an excuse to share the love of God with them. But we want to tell them, if you work hard, you help, good things are going to come. So eight months, we ask them to get involved. And the first thing that they do is not building their own houses. They begin building some other people's houses. And by the time that they build their own house, they already help 10 different houses or 15 different houses by the time they build their own house. And then everyone else is going to join them and build this. And their reward is at the end of the season, they're going to to have a beautiful beautiful house not the wall is not going to be straight all the time no no right but we call it art you know it's like it's it's abstract handcrafted yeah exactly exactly so well there's so many more questions i want to ask you, David, but we are running out of time. So I would encourage you, hang around afterwards for tacos. I've even heard there's going to be an after party after the tacos at Compass Rose where we can hang out with David a little bit longer. So make a plan to stay and hang out and ask him personally what else happens during the year at Faith Ministry and most importantly, how can we get involved as individuals? I would think the biggest way to get involved as an individual 22nd through the 29th, we are taking a trip down there as a church and you can go and see faith ministry. David is really, really good on site at mixing concrete and doing all the manual labor. Very, very impressive at those things. He will be right there alongside you. David doesn't do any of that stuff. He wears khakis every day and says, good job everyone. Which is why I want to be like David. All right, David, thank you so much for your time. God bless you. We look forward to hanging out with you more afterwards. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Hey, Suze. Hey, Nate. I'm glad I don't have to follow David. I don't envy you one little bit. I'm going to do the best I can. I know you will. I know you will. So, again, we'll start off. Suze is with Addis Jamari, a ministry based in Ethiopia that you and your pal Cindy started how many years ago? Six years ago now. Wow. Yeah. Look at you. Okay, so tell us what it is and why. Well, I think it's more interesting to say why it started. You went over there, you saw some things, and then this started, and then tell us what it is. Yeah, so back in 2014, said yes to a mission trip and went to Ethiopia for the first time, and we worked in orphanages. While we were there, the level of poverty that we saw was on a level I'd never seen. But more importantly, the children that were aging out of orphanages were very young. And what happens to them when that happens? And we came home with this bird. What does happen to them when they age out of orphanages? Well, I have a 15-year-old, and that's a similar age to the girls aging out of the orphanage. And they fend for themselves. And that comes with not being educated to find jobs that can be self-sustainable. They end up having to do work that you would not want any child to have to do. Slave labor, sex trafficking, things of that nature. And so this burden was laid on our heart. Because once they age out, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but once they age out, just for our American brains, there's no government infrastructure for them anymore. They've aged out. They've just exited the government infrastructure. Now they're 15 and there's nothing to help them and there is no education. Yeah, basically they're given a small stipend, some pots and pans, maybe a pillow and a good luck. That's it. And so that burden was on our heart. We came home and we said, you know, this is not right. We can do something about this. So we went back multiple times over the next few years and just began to learn, partner alongside other ministries. And Adishamari was launched in 2016, where we first opened a home for orphaned teenage girls. And it was a safe landing place for girls that had aged out to have a loving home with people that could care for them, got them back into school, really taught them about the love of God, that they're valued and worthy. And that's how Adishamari began. Right. But now, if you work in a country long enough, you begin to understand the root issue. And some of the girls in our home had living mothers, but they just couldn't afford to care for them because of poverty. So they had to make that hard decision to relinquish their child to the orphanage, knowing they would have a better chance of getting a meal there than they would at home. So the poverty in Ethiopia, and it's the capital city. We're in Addis Ababa, which is the capital city. I always forget if it's Ababa or Adaba, and I have no confidence to say it, but the capital of Ethiopia. They're there, and these women, and sometimes women and men, sometimes it's couples. They already have children. They have another child, and they are really faced with the decision of, does this child have a better chance at a decent life if we hand them over to the government to feed them because we can inadequately care for our children? Like that's the excruciating decision that their decision point that they're coming to. And some of them are realizing their best shot is to hand them over to the orphanage. Yeah, that's right. So that's how they end up having living mothers. So we noticed and learned that some of our girls in our home had living mothers. And we had this thought, well, what if we had come alongside Zelphy's mom before Zelphy was in the government orphanage and then in our home? And we gave her tools and education and things to thrive. And that's where our family empowerment program kind of came to life, where the AJ Home combats the orphan crisis. The family empowerment program prevents it. So we want to be alongside those families, giving them the tools so they can keep their children at home. So what does the family empowerment program do? So if there's a family that's partnered up with you guys in Ethiopia, what are you providing for them? And what are you asking of them? Yeah, so when you become part of our family empowerment program, we come alongside you with education. We're teaching financial literacy, English. English is very important in Ethiopia. If you know English, you can get better jobs. You can make more money. We do economic empowerment. We're teaching them how to put business plans into practice and business management. We're doing discipleship because none of this really matters if you don't know Christ and the love of God. And then social support, medical assistance, counseling. Most of these families come from immense trauma. And so in order to really make a family whole, you have to get to that root issue of what's causing some of the rift and some of the things that are holding them back from thriving. And I think what else you guys stumbled upon, if I remember correctly, is you look at the scope of the ministry you're able to do. How many girls are you able to have in the home at once? We have six, and we do that intentionally because you can really pour into six. You get many more than that, it becomes orphanage. Yeah, when I was there, you had three. How many families are you serving through the Family Empowerment Program? We intentionally keep that small as well and only do 50 because we want to really, we'd rather pour deep than spread thin. And so we do that so we can really get to know the families. My family is different than your family and different than your family, and we all have different needs. So you really want to get to know the family on an individual basis so you can serve them best. Right. And I think it's, I don't know if you picked up on that, but when they went over, it was to care for girls aging out of orphanages. And then they realized, man, we can be so much more effective if we'll focus on families and prevent it on the front end. And even intentionally keeping it small, three to six compared with 50, and I know that they want you to do more. I know that there's opportunities to take it. You could probably take on another 50 families in the next week if you really wanted to do it. And I also think that that's a wise thing that they're doing because they're a growing organization. So staying small on purpose so we can do it well and grow with wisdom instead of just grabbing all that they can grab and then being overwhelmed and doing a bad job. So I always think highly of you guys for the pace at which you're kind of going through that. So, and I would say this, she's not going to say this. If you want to partner with Addis Jamari, you can sponsor a family. I think sponsoring a family every month is 60 bucks. That's one Chick-fil-A Coke a day. Just don't go to Chick-fil-A just like once a day. Or I went the other day. That's two meals. That's two family of four lunches. It's just two. It's so expensive over there. So just don't go to lunch at Chick-fil-A twice a month. Support Addis Jamari and you're done. It's fantastic. But that is an easy way to get involved. Suze will be at a table out there, and you can find out how to support a family for the FEP program and know that what's happening over there is really, really an effective use of God's resources to love on those families. So as we wrap up, what's next for AJ? What's on the horizon? What are you most excited about? Yeah, July's a big month. We get our second set of 50 families. We are moving FEP centers. Inflation in Ethiopia has been at a rate of 35%. And so our landlord so kindly told us recently the new cost to stay at the center. And unfortunately, we had to make a move. But with that comes great blessings. So we're moving to a new FEP center. We have 50 new families coming into our program. And we also have a new girl joining our home tomorrow. So if you guys can be praying for all of those things. What's her name? Her name is Solita. Solita. Yes, I love that name. So yeah, she comes with a really hard story. So just prayer that she will feel like God's presence from day one, that the other girls in our home will wrap their arms and love around her and that she'll just immediately feel like she's home. Good, good. Great. Well, will you join me in prayer for these ministries and for Solita? And then I think, are we closing out with worship? We're not? We're canning it? Oh yeah, I'm supposed to ask everybody to do a thing. All right, let's pray. Father, thanks so much for this morning. We lift up Solita to you and just are so grateful that it was your will to acquaint her with Addis Jamari. We pray that your hand would be on her in the transition to yet another new place with yet more new faces, but that these would be faces that reflect your love. These would be eyes that carry your acceptance and your support, and that these would be arms that are your arms wrapping wrapping around her and that when she moves out, however many years from now she does, that she would be an equipped young woman with a heart for Jesus and want to go share the love with others that she's received from the home at Addis Jamari. We pray for AJ as they move into July and all the exciting things going on. And we know that even though it is difficult to change homes, God, that your hand is in that. And I pray that they would see evidence all over the new complex that this is exactly where you want them to be as they look to move forward. Thank you for David and what he's doing in faith ministry and how you're using him to share your love with the people in Reynosa and Mago de Arman. And God, we just are so grateful for the opportunity to partner with them. I pray that we would continue to partner with these ministries boldly and cheerfully as a church, but that we would also do that as individuals as well. Show each of us how we might partner with them in what you are doing in those places around the world. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. If somebody back there could get the lights, that would be great. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thanks for being here this Sunday morning. If you're like me, this is a big Sunday. This is Master's Sunday. If you're watching online, I'm not supposed to wear this because the design does something weird to the camera and it makes it difficult to watch. But I'm not sorry because it's Master's Sunday. So this is what we get. This is also the seventh part of our series in Lent, where we've been looking at different character traits or ideas that we kind of pull out of the Lenten season and the story of the gospel. It's going to culminate next week with Easter, when we're going to observe some baptisms, baptizing people on Easter is literally one of the oldest, if not the oldest church tradition in all of church. The very early church would only baptize on Easter because it is in and of itself a picture of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. So next week, we have four baptisms right now that we're planning to do, which I'm thrilled about. If any of you feel like you want to be a part of that service as well, if you want to take the step to be baptized and you've never done that before, and the Lord may be tugging on your heart a little bit, get in touch with me this week. It's not too late. We would love for you to be a part of that celebration next week as we celebrate Easter together. This week, we're focused on the topic of generosity. And whenever, in church circles, many of you know this, whenever you mention generosity or the topic this week is going to be generosity, that's code for this is the money sermon, right? This is the giving sermon. Don't bring your friends. I'm going to ask you guys for money, so bring them next week when we talk about other stuff. Don't bring them this week because I don't want to make anybody uncomfortable. But this week is a sermon about generosity, but it is not about that. It's not about strictly financial generosity. And as a matter of fact, I've been saying all along that it's been really great to be able to read the devotionals of others as we kind of approach these topics each week, except for this week. This week was terrible because last week after I finished my sermon, it's just kind of how it goes. Sisyphus pushes the rock up the hill. I write a sermon every week. So I'm driving home from church going, okay, what's next week's topic? How do I want to approach it? That kind of thing. And I'm thinking about generosity and I get this idea. Yeah, that's how we should approach it. That's how we should talk about it. I'm going to explain it in this way and think about it in this way. And I'm feeling good about myself for being very clever, for thinking about generosity in a new, more expanded way. And then I sit down Monday and I open up the devotionals and Doug Bergeson, who was a jerk, he wrote this. Actually, speaking of generosity, no kidding around, Doug and Debbie are in the, I call it the COVID baby room. There's the youngest baby room where my son is. And then there's, and then you graduate into the COVID baby room. These children were born in the midst of the pandemic and have never seen a human face besides their parents. And when you drop them off in that room, they're terrified. They have no idea what's going on. They just have to be gradually weaned through crying and tears. And Doug and Debbie are locked into a mortal combat right now with four of these kids, right? So just talk about generosity. They don't have to do that. They're just doing it because they love the young families that they serve. They love the church and whatever. So it's very generous. Doug is the opposite of a jerk sometimes. Anyways, I opened up the devotional on Monday, authored by Doug. And lo and behold, it's the exact idea that I think I'm so clever for coming up with, which clearly if Doug can also come up with it, not that clever. And so I opened it up to read it and I'm like, golly, this is exactly kind of the same idea that I wanted to communicate. So if you would like like a three minute version of this sermon with fewer jokes, then just read the devotional on Monday and tune me out right now. You'll be fine. But I wanted to approach it this way, and I was happy with the way that Doug approached it, because I think we're often so overly reductive of generosity, that when we think of generosity, particularly in church terms, particularly when the Bible espouses it or encourages it, I think that we think of it in terms of financial giving, of material generosity. And because we do that, what I want to propose to you today is actually the possibility that generosity is the most underrated character trait in the Bible. I think that I would argue with you that generosity, being a person who's generous, is maybe the most underrated character trait in the Bible. Now, the Bible encourages a lot of character traits. We are to be humble, and we are to be kind, and we are to be loving, and we are to be gentle, and we are to try to be lowly, and we are to be forgiving, and we are to be just. And there's a lot of things that the Bible would have us seek to be or that the Spirit would seek to shape us into, and amongst those is generosity. So I'm not saying that generosity is the most important character trait in the Bible, but I am saying that I think it might be the most underrated character trait in the Bible. And in that way, generosity is very similar to Waffle House. Now here's the thing, and it's something that I've noticed over the years about our North Raleigh crowd, and I've wanted to say something. I wasn't sure when it was appropriate, but I'm going to put it to you today. You guys don't eat at Waffle House enough, right? This church has a Waffle House deficiency, and it's high time that we address it. What are you, too good? Waffle House is delicious. And when we think of Waffle House, we think of waffles, which of course we do. They named their home after that particular dish. We think of the waffles, and the waffles are great. I like to get mine crispy, which means leave it in there a little bit longer. A Cajun waffle, blacken it up a little bit. You can get it with chocolate chips, which are miniature and delicious. And if you go during the right season, you can get them with peanut butter chips. Yeah, they're very good. They're very good. What you cannot do is get them with fresh fruit, all right? They don't do fresh fruit at Waffle House. You go to First Watch for that stuff, all right? Fancy pants? We're not doing it. We might have some apple butter somewhere. That's it in terms of fresh fruit. But it's more than just waffles. You don't want waffles? They got a sausage melt that's amazing. Wheat toast, melted American cheese, sausage patty, grilled onions, unbelievable. My wife likes the BLT there. It's not as good as the one you're going to get at Merritt's over in Chapel Hill, but it's cheaper, and the person who serves it to you is more friendly, and it's great. Unless the person serving it to you is on the back end of an overnight shift, if you get somebody at about 7.35 in the a.m., just don't talk to that person. They've had a harder night than you, all right? Otherwise, the service is amazing. The lunch is good. You can even get dinner there. They have T-bone steaks at Waffle House. I've never had one. I respect steak too much to order one from Waffle House, but you can get one there if you want one. And I think that Waffle House is often overly reduced to just waffles when they have so much more to offer. It's delicious. In the same way, we become so overly reductive of generosity, relegating it to financial giving, that we don't think of all the other ways in which we are called to be generous that I would contend are often more difficult than simple financial generosity. And as we've gone through these different topics in this series, I've said, you know, the Bible has a lot to say about this particular topic. But for generosity, I wanted to kind of give us an overview of what does the Bible have to say about this. So I'm going to go through four different passages that will be up on the screen for you to read along with me. But we're kind of just going to rapid fire through these. So in Psalm, Psalm 112, the psalmist writes, good will come to those who are generous and lend freely, who conduct their affairs with justice. In Proverbs, it's written, one person gives freely, yet gains even more. Another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty. A generous person will prosper. Whoever refreshes others will be refreshed. And then in the New Testament, Luke writes, And finally, I would remind you of the verse that finished up what Kelsey read for us at the beginning of the sermon today. The last verse to God. There's a lot there about generosity. And as we started in Psalms, it zeroes in on financial generosity, the kind that we go to first when we think of someone who is a generous person. It says you should lend freely and you will receive freely. But it very quickly begins to expand it beyond that. It says conduct your affairs with justice. So that's not necessarily money. Now we're talking about offer justice generally to those around you. And then we get into Proverbs and it says a generous person will prosper. Whoever refreshes will be refreshed. So now we're starting to expand our understanding of generosity beyond simply the materials that we give one another, but in ways that we can refresh others. God says he will refresh us. And then it's interesting to me in Luke that this verse that's famous, that's often misused, often by other Christians trying to demean other Christians, or even by people outside the church trying to demean people within the church, judge not lest ye be judged, or judge not or you will also be judged. But it's followed with other character traits that don't condemn or you will be condemned, don't forgive or you won't be forgiven. It's other character traits, and it ends with be fair in your measurements, be generous in how you assess other people and other things. And it basically says, for with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. So as generous as you are towards other people in your judgment, God will be generous to you. As generous as you are with your forgiveness, God will be forgiving to you. As generous as you are with your condemnation, God will be generous with his condemnation towards you. And so we're expanding the view of generosity. And then finally, in Corinthians, there's this kind of wonderful, almost formula there. And I hesitate to use that word because I really don't like it when we reduce scripture to this formulaic approach so that if I do these things, God will give me these things. But in this instance, there does seem to be a cause and effect flow through the passage where he writes, Paul writes, that you will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion. And through your generosity, through us, your generosity will result in thanksgiving. It's this idea that God says, I have blessed you in every way so that because of that blessing, you will be generous to others in every way. And because you are generous to others in every way, they will turn in thanks to me. They will be grateful to me. It will point them towards me. It's how God's generosity cyclically works to point other people back towards him, which we'll see more clearly in just a second. But what I want to contend with you this morning is we can only live out the truths of these scriptures if we expand our view of generosity. We can only live out the truth of the scriptures of what is said in these four passages and really throughout scripture and in particular in Corinthians where other people will glorify God because of us if we expand our view of what generosity could possibly be. Because there's so many more ways to be generous than simply financially. We can be generous in our judgment of others, in how we assess others. Some of us are very quick to judge. We see somebody driving a particular kind of car or wearing a particular type of clothes, or we learn the way that someone might have voted in the last election, and we are very quick to judge them and make all sorts of assessments about who they are. We can be more generous in our judgment of others. We can be more generous in our forgiveness that we offer towards others. We can be more generous in the grace that we offer towards people. We can be more generous in the way that we determine who we're going to spend our time with. We can be generous with our time. We can be generous with our attention. We can be generous in conversation. There are so many ways beyond financially to be generous people. And the more I thought about it, the more I reflected on the opportunities that we have for generosity and the generosity of some others that I've experienced in my life, the more I thought that, you know, generosity might be the greatest apologetic. Somebody being generous might be the greatest apologetic. Now, if any pastor has ever couched a note that he's made, it's me, because I just put might there in the middle of it. I'm not saying it definitely is. I'm just saying it could possibly be the greatest apologetic. And in this sense, an apologetic is a defense of the faith. It's an argument for the faith. And I tend to think that acts of generosity and all the different forms that they take can serve long-term to be far more winsome than any theological argument, than any scientific argument that we have crafted, that simply being generous to someone over time, letting other people see you be generous to everyone in your orbit and everyone in your sphere, can over time be more winsome towards Christ, can point people towards Jesus more than any argument that you could ever craft, could point people to Jesus more than even inviting them to church, could point people to Jesus more than challenging them. Hey, if you were to die today, do you know how you would spend eternity? And it's not that I don't want us to be having those conversations. Those conversations are good and we need to be sharing Christ with our neighbors. As a matter of fact, one of the goals of grace moving forward is that we would see God bring more people to faith through the people of grace so that we might celebrate that conversion. We want very much for more people to come to faith as a result of the ministries of this church. And the reason I'm saying that is because I think generosity can be such a big part of that. I think generosity can point us to Jesus in ways that almost nothing else can. Think of the instances in your life when someone has been generous to you. Maybe you know what it is to be someone who feels like they're on the fringe. Maybe you know what it is to be someone who feels like they are always kind of getting an unfair shake from other people. That with you, people tend to judge a book by its cover. And maybe people have treated you unfairly in your life. Maybe people have made assumptions about you because of where you come from or what you drive or what your story is or what your job is. Or just the way that you like to present yourself that may not be indicative of the whole person. It may just be a thing that you enjoy doing. And if you're one of those people that often gets misjudged by others, then you probably also have in your life someone who has just loved you and accepted you for who you are and has refused to judge you like other people do. Who has just heard you out. Who has given you the space to be yourself. Who has met you where you are and loved you there. And isn't that person's love and acceptance of you a far greater argument for Christ than anything else that could happen in your life? I think that generosity is a remarkable apologetic because we remember acts of generosity. When I was about 14 years old, I was coming out of eighth grade, going into ninth grade. I'm not sure how old you are when that happens. I went to Costa Rica on my very first mission trip. And we were building a, I think we were building a house for a university president of a Christian college down there, which you can imagine how useful eighth grade Nate was on a Costa Rican construction site. I'm certain that the workers were very glad that I was there. I know in Mexico, when we go and build walls, they usually have to, not usually, all the time, have to come back and correct all the mistakes that I've made to the point where I'm like, you know what? I'm just not going to do that anymore. I'm just going to mix stuff. I'm going to hand it to Jeffy. Jeff's going to do the blocks. I'm just going to stand here like a dum-dum because I have nothing to contribute to what's happening here. So I can't imagine the detriment that eighth grade Nate was to actually getting anything done in Costa Rica. But my parents paid the thousand dollars. I went down there like everybody else, and I was on a mission trip, and it was a really formative trip. And on the last night that we were there, we did like a little dinner or banquet or whatever it was, and there was one guy. He was, to me, an older man at the time. He was probably mid-40s, so like really close to my current age. And I don't know if you've ever experienced this on a mission trip, but when you go and there's a language barrier, which for me, I knew no Spanish at all at that time. So there was a huge language barrier between me and him. And you can't really communicate, but if you've been on a mission trip and you're kind of wired like me, then you understand that there is the universal language of joking around. There's a universal language of throwing stuff at each other, of stealing each other's tools and messing with each other all week long. And he was right there with us. He was jumping in and he and I had kind of bonded over that. And we seemed to have a similar spirit and enjoy one another. And so on the last night that we were there, he commented on my t-shirt. It was a United States soccer t-shirt. And he commented on it that he liked it. It was new. It was made by Nike in eighth grade. This is a big deal. But he said that he liked it and I wanted to be generous. So I went back to the room. I changed into another t-shirt and I walked out and I handed him this t-shirt. And I just wanted him to take it as a gift. And that man took off his shirt in the middle of the party, put on my T-shirt, folded up his shirt and gave it to me. Now his shirt was this knit pink long-sleeved polo shirt. It had some country club emblem right here that was not Costa Rican. Somehow or another, he had acquired this shirt. But if you've traveled overseas to third world countries, you know a lot of the folks that you interact with, they don't have a lot. By our standards, they have almost nothing. He was wearing one of what I am sure was one of the very few collared shirts that he had to that party that night because everybody was dressed nice. And some snot-nosed kid that was useless on the job site all week gave him a shirt. And so he wanted to return that generosity with his generosity and he gave me a shirt that mattered to him a lot more than some dumb U.S. soccer shirt could have ever mattered to me. And 30 years later, I remember that. And I remember seeing the love of Jesus in his eyes as he did it. Which is why I'm certain that generosity makes an impression. And it's why I think that it might be the single greatest apologetic, and it might make the single biggest difference in times when we're not sure how else to reach people. I said that we could also be generous with our time. This last week, I got an email from one of our families. I'm going to brag on our student pastor, Kyle, a little bit. I got an email from one of the families and the whole email was to tell us, was to tell me that the subject of it was, Kyle's a good dude. Yeah. Yeah. You got no disagreements with me there. They said that he came to our middle school daughter's softball double header. That's a boring sentence to say. I'm not trying to crud on middle school girls or boys, but middle school sports stink, all right? So if you are there and you're not a parent or a grandparent, holy smokes, you're a special human. And listen, they said he stayed for both of them, the whole first game and the second game. And he stayed afterwards for cake. Are you kidding me? I was a student pastor for years. You know what I'd do? I'd get there at the end of the first game. Hey, good job. I saw that bat you had. I was really sorry you didn't get a hit. But, oh, man, you were close. And then as soon as the next game started, I'd be like, okay, well, you know, it's... I put in my time. Kyle stayed for the whole doubleheader and then he stayed for cake. And it made such an impression on the family that they emailed me to say, hey, we got a heck of a guy here. And we do. And she's going to remember that. That she has a student pastor that cares about her that much, that he's going to stay for all those things. And you can remember acts of generosity in your life too. Maybe we know somebody that has access to something that's kind of fun that not everybody has access to, a beach house or a lake house or a box at some sort of sporting event or venue. And you watch them give that out to people who might not otherwise be able to afford it or use it or have access to that over the years. And you're awed by that. I remember watching my father-in-law use his lake house like that weekend after weekend after weekend for the college kids that lived in the area and would come in and want to be pulled by the boat. We've seen people be generous in those ways. And it makes an impression on us, whether it's generosity in conversation or in time or in assessment of one another or in actual material wealth or in opportunity, they make an impression on us. And that impression is important because God's generosity points us to others and then in turn points them back to God. God's generosity points us to others. Christians are generous because God has been generous to us. One of my favorite passages is in the book of John. It says, We know that while we were still sinners that Christ died for us, and that's what love is. We know that while we were very far from God that he pursued us. We know that we have never done anything that will make him love us any less. We know that we are his beloved sons and daughters. And because he lavishes that generous love on us, the more we focus on it, the more aware of it we are, the more we reflect on how generous our father has been with us, the more we are inspired to go and be generous to other people. And if I'm really being honest with you, the most generous people I know, some of whom are in this room, are always people who love God a lot. The most generous people that I know are almost always people who have this very deep walk with God and seem to understand things about God that I don't fully understand. And I'll tell you this too, growing up in an environment, in a church environment in the 80s and 90s where I was told the godliest people are the ones who know the most theology, the godliest people are the ones who can quote the most verses to you, the godliest people are the ones who can win every argument? No. The godliest people are the most generous people. I know jerks who can win lots of arguments. I don't know anybody who's generous with everything they have who doesn't have a faith that I want to seek to emulate. And so when someone is generous to us and we say, why are you doing that? Why are you giving me that? Why are you spending that on me? Why are you investing that in me? Their answer inevitably is because God gave it to me. And then that points us back to God, which is how we bring about the reality of that Corinthians passage. God says, I've blessed you. I've enriched you in every way that you might enrich others in every way so that they might give thanksgiving to me for who I am. Do you see how that works? Someone is generous to you individually. You say, why are you doing this? This is too much. And they go, because I love God and God loves you and I want to do this for you. And then they turn and they praise God for placing you in their life and seek to desire to be generous like they have just been the recipient of. This works corporately as well. When we give to church or we sacrifice for an institution, we do something together and the outside world goes, wow, how'd you guys do that? Why'd you do that? Well, because God loves us, so we do this. And they go, well, that's pretty great. I want to find out more about your God too. I just, I don't want us to reduce generosity to simple financial giving anymore. And as a matter of fact, I would say that financial generosity might just be the easiest kind, especially for those of us with resources. I want to be gentle and careful here, but I also know my audience and I know the neighborhoods that we live in. Sometimes financial generosity is the easiest kind. And I know this because I've bought someone's groceries before because I didn't want to wait for them to go to their car and get their debit card. They said their debit card was in their car. They were fumbling around. And I said, I'm happy to get it. They said, oh, thank you so much. And I wanted to tell them, like, it's just because you're slow. It's not. I'm impatient. It's $20. I'll pay $20 to be in my car right now. I'm tired of watching you fumble with your wallet. Sometimes it's very easy when we have plenty to appear generous and cut a check. Now sometimes that's a real challenge, and that is genuine generosity. But sometimes that's the gateway to actual generosity. These people that we have on the corners, many of us are going to pass them on the way home. It's easy to hang a 20 out the window. It's incredibly generous to stop our plans in our day and get out of our car and talk to them and go have a meal with them. That's generosity. It's easy to donate to a cause. It's harder to go sit with the people to whom that cause ministers. It's easier to give out of plenty and hold back the stuff that we don't have as much of, but I would argue with you, and listen, this is not a sermon trying to denigrate giving. We ought to do that. But sometimes that's the simplest form of it. And what I want to encourage us to be is a people who are generous in spirit, who are generous across the board, who give of all of the resources that we have, who don't relegate it to the easiest ones. Whatever the easiest thing is for us to give, let's not just start there and be done, but let's be generous people. Because I bet, as I've been talking about generosity and the different forms that it takes, that you've thought of people in your life who have been generous to you. People who have been kind to you in their assessment of you or in their time or of their resources. And you're grateful that they are in your life. If you, like me, if you think of people in your life who you consider generous, you are grateful that they are in your life. You're grateful to God that he has placed them in your life. And because of that, you're pointed back to God. So here's the encouragement to us, Grace. Let's go be the kind of person that other people are grateful for. And when we do that, you'll be the kind of person that points people to Jesus. Go from here and be generous in spirit. Go be the kind of person that people are grateful to have in their life. And if you do that over time, you will leave a wake of people who have been pointed to Jesus because you entered into their life. I've mentioned many times that challenging teaching from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount when he said, let your light shine before others so that they might see your good works and glorify the Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that as we move into and out of the lives of other people, that they will be focused more on the Father, more on Jesus because of our simple presence in their life. And as I've reflected this week, that's always seemed like such a challenge to me. But maybe the key to obedience there is being someone who is generous in spirit. So that as we sow those seeds of generosity in the lives of others, we will become the kind of person that they are grateful that God has placed in their life. And in turn, they will be pointed to Jesus. So go from here and be the kind of people that other people are grateful for. And what you'll find is you've just become the kind of person who constantly points people towards the Father. Let's pray. God, we love you. We thank you for being generous to us, for giving us your son whom we did not deserve, for continuing to offer your forgiveness that often, God, we trample on. Lord, I pray that you would remind us, even this morning, of all the ways that you were generous to us, that you would remind us even today of all the people you have placed in our life to model that generosity for us. And God, I pray that we would be people who are acutely aware of the blessings that we have so that we might in turn offer those to others. Lord, make us conduits of your generosity so that we are the kind of people that point people back towards you. It's in Jesus' name that we ask these things. Amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking Him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. And it's been really refreshing for me to go through this Lenten season with you guys as a church. So I said at the beginning of the series in the first sermon that really I hoped that the Lord would move in your heart and in your lives through the devotionals that we're doing during the week, through our own prayer, through our own discipline of fasting, through the worship, and through what other people are coming and sharing in the services, which Kirk, thanks for that story about it as well. I love the background of that song, and it makes it all the more rich when we sing it. So I hope that you've been ministered to in ways other than just the sermon as we've gone through this series together. This week, if you read your devotionals, you know that we were focused on prayer. And so in preparation for the sermon this week, obviously I'm thinking about the topic of prayer. And just a little bit about me when I have to prepare a sermon. Before Lent, we did Colossians. I would do series like Colossians just every time to know it for the rest of my career if I could. Because when you prepare a sermon by opening up the Bible and reading a chapter and going, all right, God, what do you have for grace in this chapter? That is way easier than just talk about prayer, buddy. Like it's such a huge topic. It's really difficult to decide where to land and how to approach it and what passage will we use and where are we going to kind of spring out of in the Bible. I'd much rather just open a passage and preach the passage. When you give me a topic, it's kind of a hassle. So I've had this rattling around in my head for a while. What do we need to say about prayer? What does grace need to hear about prayer? And as I was thinking about this discipline of prayer, and whenever the discipline of prayer comes up, I always feel inadequate. I always kind of wince a little bit because I never feel like I do it enough. And you might be asking yourself, how much is enough prayer? Well, I would say probably just a little bit more. Whatever you're doing, just a little bit more is probably good. So I never feel great about prayer. And then my mind went to the other things in Scripture that we are told to do that sometimes we fall short of. Because I was thinking about the instruction in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. And that's kind of like a mindset of prayer, an ongoing daily conversation with God all the time. And I've never quite mastered that, right? And then there's plenty of things in Scripture that I've never quite mastered, if we're going to be generous with that phrase. That I've just never gotten down. There's a prayer that David prays where he says, search me, oh God, show me where there's sin in my life so that I can repent of it. I was joking with somebody last week. I have never prayed that prayer. Like I've never needed to like, oh God, just if you could just show me where I'm wrong, I don't see anything. Search my heart, make it apparent. Like God, I'm good. Please don't do that., I'm good. We've got a lot of lessons before we get there. And there's a lot of things in Scripture that we're told to be that if we're being honest as believers that we know we fall short of. I mentioned a verse last week, Philippians 4, 8, whatsoever things are right and noble and faithful and trustworthy and are a good report, think on these things and don't let our minds think about things that are not those. Well, I don't know how to keep my mind focused on the things of God to that degree. I just haven't figured that one out yet. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that if our right hand causes us to sin, that we should cut it off so it can't do that anymore. If our eyes cause us to sin, we should gouge them out. And like, we're not doing that. We don't take it that seriously. I haven't gotten to that level of repentance yet. We see in scripture that we're to be people of prayer. We see in scripture that we are to delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord. We see in scripture that we are to go off and plant ourself near God, like a tree planted by streams of water, that we are to forsake everything else and seek out wisdom. We're told to be generous people, to give of our time and our talents and our treasures. We're told that our kingdom is not our kingdom, that it's God's kingdom. We're told that when someone strikes us that we should turn the other cheek and that vengeance is mine, says the Lord. That doesn't belong to us. We're told that if someone asks us to walk a mile with them that we should go an extra mile. That if someone asks us for our shirt we should offer our jacket as well. When you are a student of Scripture and you read the things that are peppered throughout the Bible that we're supposed to do, you can only come to one logical conclusion, I think, which is it is literally impossible to be everything that we are called to be. It is literally impossible to be and do everything that as believers we are called to be and do. We're leading a marriage small group right now. And one of the things we're talking about in that small group is that this marital love, that commitment is meant to reflect God's love. It's a picture. The way that we love our spouses in this sacrificial, self-giving love is designed by God to be a picture of his love for us. Our marriages are miniature gospels. They're pictures of the gospel. Your marriage needs to be so good that people look at it and go, man, what do they have? We're not there yet. Jesus tells us that when other people see our good works, that they should glorify our Father who is in heaven. That when we are believers, that when other people just watch you, when you just enter into and out of their presence and they just get to experience you a little bit, they go, man, I want whatever God that person has. And I bring all those things up because if I mention those things and you feel inadequate, if I mention those things and remind you of what Scripture teaches and you think to yourself, I'm really not doing great there. Look around. You have company. Everyone here feels that way. As a matter of fact, if anybody didn't feel that way, I read off all, I just listed off just a fraction of the things that we're supposed to do as believers. And you're sitting there going, I mean, I feel like I'm nailing it so far. Like, what else you got? You come preach, all right? Like, you come do this. I want to listen to you. We're all missing it. There is no possible way to be and do all that we are called to be and do except unless we have Jesus. And maybe that's why Jesus told the disciples in John 15 what he told them. The passage that Mike just read to us. I'll bring our attention to it again. John 15, verse 4. Abide in me and I in you as a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. Listen. For apart from me you can do nothing. For apart from Christ you can do nothing. All the things, all the big long list of things that we feel like we're supposed to be able to do as Christians, be a good husband, be a good wife, disciple our children, raise them up well, be kind and gracious and compassionate people, enter into the public sphere with grace and generosity and don't make jerks of ourselves on Facebook. Enter into political discussions with humility and with honor, like to be who we need to be, to be generous of our time, to be generous with our spirit, to be generous with our finances, to be and do the things that we know we need to be and do is impossible without Christ. Without Christ fueling those things. And some of us, I would be willing to bet, if we feel like we have a spiritual life at all right now, came in here on fumes. And I just wonder if it's because we're trying to do and be all the things and we're not abiding in Christ. Because Christ says, abide in me and I in you and you'll do fine. You can do all the things. You'll bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the things. Just focus on me and the things will happen. But I think some of us get so focused on the things that we forget about Jesus and we just come in here on fumes wondering why things aren't working out for us, wondering why we don't seem to be living the spiritual life that we feel like we could or should live. And Jesus is very clear. Apart from me, without abiding in me, you can do nothing. And so the question becomes, well, what does it mean to abide in Christ? And we've talked about this before. And certainly we can experience the presence of Jesus in myriad ways. I believe that he's with us in the service. I believe that he speaks to us out of our word. I believe that out of his word, I believe that we find Jesus in service to him. That when we do the work that he does, that he is found there. Jesus says, whatever we do to the least of these, we do unto him. So when we help those who cannot help themselves, we find Jesus there. But I would still contend that the primary way to abide in Christ, to meet with him, to experience his presence, is in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, I would contend with you that that begins in earnest prayer. And I believe that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we're told that as Jesus goes back up into heaven, where he is now waiting for us, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. So when we pray, Jesus is in God's ear going, here's what they really need. Here's what they really mean. Here's what I think about this person. I died for this person. I love this person. I'm covering over this person. He's sitting next to God, interceding for you. We're also told in Romans that the Holy Spirit translates our prayers to the Father in groanings that are too deep for words. Because we don't even know what to pray for. We don't even know how to pray as we ought. We don't know what to ask God for. And so the Holy Spirit listens to our prayers and says, Father, here's what he needs. Here's what he means. And Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. So if we want to meet with Jesus, if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to pursue his presence, if we want to experience his spirit, then the first place we go is prayer because Jesus and his spirit and God the Father are waiting for us in prayer. So as soon as we kneel, as soon as we close our eyes, as soon as we begin to speak to him, dear heavenly Father, we enter into the presence of God. We enter into a divine space where the spirit and the son wait for us. It's part of the stillness that we talked about last week, that God creates a stillness so that he might meet us in it. So if you're going to ask me, how do we abide in Christ? Well, we begin with prayer. And I don't just think that that's true because of where Christ is positioned in heaven. I think it's true because of the practice and the pattern that we see in Jesus during his life. If we look at the life of Christ, here is, he was fully man and fully God. So here is a man who certainly has a relationship with his father, who certainly is abiding in God. Of course, he knew how to do that. Of course, he was with God in his service. Of course, he was with God as Jesus would reflect on his word. Of course, all the other ways he was with God and connected to the Father, but Jesus, even though he was as connected to God as anyone has ever been, even though he knew better how to abide in the Father than anyone has ever known, he still went off regularly to pray. We see time after time after time where Jesus does ministry and then he goes off to a quiet place and he gets up early in the morning and he goes off to pray. We see him pray in intense moments in his life. Before he begins his ministry, he goes out into the desert to fast and to what? To pray for 40 days. He sets up the model for the Lenten fast that we're observing now. The night he was crucified or the night that he was arrested, he goes to the garden of Gethsemane and he prays. Before he leaves, before he gets arrested and he sets in motion the series of events that are going to lead to his arrest and to his crucifixion, he sits down with the disciples in this same discourse where he's talking to them about I am the vine, you are the branches, John chapter 15, two chapters over in John 17, we see what I think is the greatest prayer in all of Scripture is Jesus' high priestly prayer that he prays over the disciples and the ones that they would reach in the future. So he prays for you and for me in John 17. Before Jesus commissions them to do their work, what does he do? He goes and he covers it in prayer. And so if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to be connected to the Father, if we want to be filled by, if we want to be connected with the Spirit, if we want to be able to hear the Spirit, the first place we go is prayer. It has to begin and end there. And I thought, no wonder we struggle so much with all the other things that we're supposed to do, because we're not blanketing them in prayer. We're not doing this fundamental thing, or at least I'm not. And not only did I just kind of think about this myself, but sometimes on a big topic like this, I'll go back and I'll read the old dead guys and I'll say, what did they say about prayer? C.S. Lewis and Charles Spurgeon and John Piper, who he's not, John Piper is still alive, praise Jesus. Tim Keller and C.S. Lewis. I'll go read guys that I go to so often, these pastors and theologians and scholars that I go to, and I'll say, what do they say about prayer? Maybe that will spark something in me. And what they said to a man over and over and over again is, you need to do it more. You need to do it more. You need to cover everything in prayer. You need to be a people of prayer. How could we possibly seek to take on the eternal, to do and be all the things we're supposed to do and be without prayer? One guy even wrote, Charles Spurgeon, he wrote that a pastor that is not spending two hours a day in prayer over his people is shortchanging them and they deserve better. And I'd just like to tell you, I'm doing three, baby, so you guys are good. No, I'm sorry. I'm not praying for you guys two hours a day. I read stories about that, about people who manage to do stuff like that, like pre-screens, and I'm jealous of them. But the overwhelming sense that I got from the people that I read was that we just need to do it more. And as I read scripture and think about what scripture has to say about prayer and how Jesus models prayer and how Paul, with almost every letter that he writes, accompanies that letter with a specific prayer that he prays for the church. I became convinced that we need to do it more. We need to go to the Father more. And one of the primary reasons to do that is that prayer in and of itself is an admission of inadequacy. Prayer is an admission of inadequacy. When we go to God and we pray, whether we realize it or not, what we are doing is agreeing with him that we can never do and be all the things we think we need to do and be. We are agreeing with him that we are inadequate for those tasks. When we pray and we kneel, which is why, by the way, I think it's a helpful posture to kneel before the Father. If you can, if your knees will let you and your back's good with it, I would highly encourage you to kneel down, get on your knees when you pray. Because it puts you in this posture of submission and of inadequacy. And when we go to God and we ask for things, or we present things to him, it is a tacit admission that we are inadequate for those things. When I kneel beside Lily's bed and I pray for her at night, which I don't do every night, but some nights I sneak in there, and it's one of the great privileges of fatherhood is to be able to kneel beside your sleeping children and pray for them. Some of you have grown children. You don't get to do that anymore, and you miss it. So while we have them, parents with children, let's do that. But when I kneel beside her bed and I think of all the things that I want for her, I pray, one of the things I pray for her almost daily is that she would know God soon and love him well. And that she would know him better than I do. And that she would teach me things about him. When I kneel beside her bed and I pray for that, it's an admission that God, I'm totally inadequate to be the dad she needs me to be. It's totally impossible for me to do that. And it's a reminder that I try way too hard to do it all on my own most of the time. When we get on our knees and we pray for our marriage, God, restore it. God, protect it. God, help us here. God, give us direction there. It's a tacit admission that we're not enough for that. And so when we bow our head and we pray to the Father and we invite him into these areas in our life, into all the places that we need to do and be, and into all the things that we get concerned about, that we care deeply about, when we invite him into those spaces, it is a tacit admission, God, I'm not big enough for this. It's a tacit admission of the first point of this sermon. It is impossible to live the life that you've called me to live without you. So I'm abiding in you. I'm calling on you. I need you for these things. And the more I began to think about this and the necessity of prayer, this occurred to me and I wanted to share it with you, that prayer is to spiritual work what food is to physical work. If you decided randomly to fast, let's say that you had a bunch of yard work you wanted to do that weekend. I mean, I've got to do it at my house. My yard looks a mess. It looks terrible. I haven't touched my grass or anything all winter long, and all of a sudden everything's blooming at once, and I desperately need to get out there, except it's just a soggy mess back there. Anyways, there's a lot of work to do, and you've got to pour the mulch, and you've got to edge, and you've got to trim, and you've got to do all the things. Well, let's say that you decided to get out in your yard, and you decided to do that, or spring cleaning, or whatever it is you do this time of year. But on that same weekend that you decided you were going to do that, you thought, you know what else I'm going to do? I'm going to not eat. Let's just, let's see how this goes. And you haven't eaten since Thursday night and Saturday afternoon, you're out there trying to spread mulch and you can't do it. You've got a headache. You can't focus. You're spreading mulch in the middle of the ground, in the middle of the yard because you're delirious. Like you're not, you can't do it. Is it any wonder why you would struggle to do manual labor if you haven't fueled yourself with food so that you might have the energy and the strength to do it? Well, how come when we start to fail and falter in life and we're spreading mulch in the middle of wherever the heck and because we're just delirious and we are not plugged into God, why don't we stop and pray and admit, how did I ever think I was going to be a good parent without prayer? How did I ever think I was going to be able to navigate my career and all the things I'm supposed to do without prayer? It just, it's made me wonder this week how, why I don't spend closer to two hours a day in prayer over this church. Who am I that I think that being a pastor is so easy that I don't hit the ground every morning when I wake up overwhelmed with the responsibility and offer it to God in prayer? Who are we in our parenthood that we just wake up and shuttle the kids here and shuttle the kids there and don't stop as often as we can to pray for them and to pray for who they're going to become? Who are we in our marriages to think that we can just go through the years and just tie days into weeks into months into years and decades without covering over our marriage and prayer and somehow hoping that it turns out to be this thing that honors God in the way that it's supposed to be? How do we undertake the things that we undertake in our life and we don't absolutely saturate them with prayer and then get surprised when they're not going the way that they should? How can we expect to do things of eternal import without praying. Without covering it in prayer. I heard one pastor, and it stuck with me, so maybe it'll stick with you too, who said, never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. Never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. If you can't cover it in prayer, then maybe we just shouldn't start it. Maybe we just shouldn't do that thing. And I think one of the things that we do with prayer is we kind of treat it like it's optional. Like one day when I'm a better Christian, I'll pray more. Like when I really double down on this life and I really mean it and I set those things aside and as I get older, one day I'm going to pray more. I'm going to pray about that thing more. We'll get moved to do this or that or the other thing, but we treat prayer as if it's this discipline to be gotten later, like it's a diet. Like, I know I should be on one, but I also like cinnamon rolls, so I'm not in this moment on a diet. I know I should pray, but I also like to not be praying, so in this moment, I'm not going to pray, and we treat it like it's optional. And when we treat it like it's optional, I think prayer gets relegated to inflection points and to crises in our life. Something goes really, really wrong. Our marriage feels broken and we're not sure if it's going to work. And so we hit the ground and we pray and say, God, please rescue this. That's good that we're doing that, but how much better could our marriage be if every day we pray that God would protect it? Why wait until it's a mess to fall on our knees and pray about it? Often we relegate prayer to crisis points that could have been prevented if we would have just prayed about them regularly. Why fall on our knees and pray about this huge decision that we have to make in our career when every day we could be getting on our knees and say, Father, my career is your career. Whatever you would have me do, please just make it clear to me. What if we prayed that prayer every day for five years? How much more prepared would our heart be? How much more in tune with Jesus would we be when different opportunities came up? Our kid starts making bad decisions, gets in trouble, whatever the case. And so in desperation, we go to God in prayer, and we should. But are we going to him daily, lifting up that child, asking for wisdom and guidance and grace as we raise them? It made me sad to think about in my own life how, yes, I pray regularly and I try to lift up the church regularly and I try to pray for my family regularly, but what are all the things in my life that I don't pray about until they're a pain point, until it's a big decision or until it's a crisis or until it's a big huge need that I could have been praying for all along. So as we think about prayer this week as a church, let us follow the practices and patterns of Jesus. Do it regularly. Abide in him through prayer. Know that he waits on us in there. Let us not begin things that we have not covered over in prayer. Let us realize that if we feel spiritually famished, if we feel spiritually exhausted, maybe it's because we have not been giving ourselves the fuel of prayer and meeting Jesus there where he waits on us. And let us not, as we close, think optional what God has rendered as essential. Let us not treat prayer as optional when God has told us it is just as essential to your soul as food is to your body. And so, as we go, how much should we pray? Just a little bit more than we are. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we love you so much. And I, for one, am sorry for my patterns of prayer. For sometimes how little I entrust to you or how irregularly I will come to you. God, I'm sorry that there are things in my life that I allow to come to crisis or pain or inflection points. And then and only then do I bring them to you in prayer. God, let us be people of prayer. Let us be people who know your presence well, who are constantly drawn there, who learn how to pray without ceasing. God, for those of us here who may not pray very often or very regularly, let us do that this week and find you in those spaces. Let our souls be revived by seeking your presence in that way. God, make this church, make our grace partners people of prayer. In Jesus' name, amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now now, be still, and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. I'm reading from Matthew chapter 4, verses 1 through 4. Then Jesus was led by is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. We are starting our new series this morning called Lent, A Holy Pause, and I have been very excited for this Sunday and for this series. Excited since about this time last year. So excited that this week on Tuesday, Jen and Lily and I fly to Disney World to spend a few days down there. We're very excited about that. And some folks in the church know that that's what we're doing. And so this morning I've gotten a lot of like, are you excited? And I'm like, yeah, I'm so excited. And they're like, yeah, Disney World is going to be great. I'm like, oh, I'm talking about today. Like, I'm excited for this series. I'm excited to launch this out today. And I don't know how you guys work, but when I have something that's big on the horizon, it's kind of all I think about and focus on. And then I get on the other side and the dust clears and I'm like, okay, now what's next? So this afternoon, I'll be excited about Disney. But right now, I'm excited about this series. And I would tell you that this series really started, the idea of it started last year at Lent. Last year at Lent in a staff meeting as the Sunday before Ash Wednesday was approaching, which is the beginning of Lent, we said in a staff meeting, hey, we should observe Lent this year. We should try to like, let's challenge the church to fast and do that this year. And I thought, oh, that sounds like a good idea. That's something that we haven't done at least since I've been here. So that's a good idea. Let's do that. And they're like, well, it needs to happen quick. So Nate, let's make a video. I'm like, all right. So we made plans for me to show up the next day and do a video that we were going to email out and challenge the church to fast because like Wednesday was the next day and we had to start. And I showed up that day and when on video days, I shower and I do my hair and I shave. So I have to look good for them. On non-video or meeting days, I just wear sweats and like a hat, you know, like it's very professional over there on a random Tuesday. And so I showed up not dressed for a video. And at the time, our worship pastor, Steve, was like, what are you doing? And I said, we're not doing a video today. He said, okay, why? And I was like, I don't want to do this half measured. I don't want to do it quick. If we're going to observe Lent as a church, I want us to mean it. And so we started thinking through how we wanted to approach this series. And so what I get to share with you this morning, and I guess this is why I'm so excited to do it, is really the result of a year's worth of reflection and prayer and learning and discussion. And I feel like I get to kind of introduce that and share that with you this morning. I would say this too about what I'm going to share with you this morning. This morning really technically is not a sermon, okay? In a sermon, I think you open up the Bible, you read it, you talk about what it says. The point of a sermon is for us to open up Scripture and let it speak to us. And so this morning, I don't have any verses. I will refer back to the ones that Carter just read for us, but this is really more of a message from me to my church. And I'm thinking of it as we approach the series almost like an epilogue to set it up so that we understand what it is that we're doing and why we're observing Lent in this way and what our hopes are for it as we move through the series. You're probably also wondering why I have random things up here with me. This is a stack of Bibles. This makes coffee. This is the coolest thing that you'll ever see in your life. This is an ashtray boot lamp because of course it is. This lamp down here still works. This is a boot and then this is a horse and it's my favorite thing that I own. Incidentally, it's Jen's least favorite thing that I own. But I have these things in my office. And I have them in my office because they're from portions of my family. And they all mean something to me. This stack of Bibles I've referenced before, this is my papa's Bible. And this is my dad's Bible from the 70s. And this is my Bible from high school and college. And I have a preaching Bible. It's in my office right now. But these sit just above my computer screen every day. And every time I look at these Bibles, I'm reminded of the spiritual heritage that came before me. I'm reminded that part of my papa's story was that he was not a believer, was that his daughter, my mom, accepted Christ at the age of eight and drug her parents to church, and they became believers because of the ministry at that church to children. And my papa is a guy who was very imperfect, Typical 60s dude in the South. Racist, probably abusive, and all those things. But God reached him and changed him. So by the time I got to know him, he was one of the most gentle, charismatic spirits I have ever met, to know Don was to love him. But God got a hold of him as an adult and changed him. And then my dad grew up in a broken home. The only reason that my dad knew that he was really loved by a man in his life is because his granddad stepped into the void and loved him and made him feel loved and appreciated. This is my great-grandfather's. This belonged to the man that made my dad feel loved. And so, yeah, it's awesome because it's a lamp and an ashtray with a boot, for sure. I would have it if it didn't belong to him. But because it does and did, it makes it all the more special. And it's important to me to see these things. This is my mama's coffee maker. This is what she used to make coffee in growing up. And in the waning years of her life, I would go over every other Monday to her house. There were Mama Mondays. I had special mugs made. And we would just talk for an hour, hour and a half, two hours. And she, I've spoken about her before. You know, she was never out front, never outspoken, always just loving quietly, but lived a life of tremendous import and impact because of the way she quietly served God. And there are other things too. There's a lamp that my late father-in-law built for me, that if I went to the store looking for lamps, I would not choose this one, but he made it for me, so it's in my office, and it's the first thing I turn on every Sunday morning. I have something cross-stitched, an old gospel hymn about fathers and sons that my dad got from my mom when he became a dad for me, and he gave that to me with tears in his eyes when we had John. That's in my office. And I keep all of these things in my office because they remind me the shoulders that I stand on. That's in my office. And I keep all of these things in my office because they remind me the shoulders that I stand on. They remind me that I didn't just float into grace out of a vacuum, that I come from somewhere. And that a lot of the reason that I know scripture, a lot of the reason why I can prepare a sermon in the length of time that I prepare a sermon is not because I'm not studying scripture and learning new things, but it's because I've been learning scripture my whole life. Why have I been learning scripture my whole life? Well, because he got saved when he was an adult and he committed himself to it. And then his great grandfather loved him and kept him in church and he committed himself to it, and he taught me the Bible, and then I stayed locked in in high school and college and learned those things. I'm here because I stand on shoulders, and we all stand on shoulders. We have previous generations that poured into us, and we're better off for it. And we're foolish and ignorant and prideful if we can't acknowledge that some of the comforts and successes that we have in our life, the blessings that we have in our life, we have because we stand on shoulders. Because we are tethered to previous generations. And I bring this up because it's not just true of me personally and you personally, but it's true of church. Grace Raleigh stands on shoulders. We come from a rich, deep spiritual heritage that goes all the way back to millennia, to 33 AD. And you could argue even before that, that as a church in 2022, any church, we must acknowledge and recognize that there are relics all around us. There are family heirlooms all around us that remind us that we stand on shoulders too. And see, I think this is important for us as Grace Raleigh to think about because we're an independent church. We're non-denominational. And I think that there are great benefits to that in our congregation, in our partnership. We have Catholics and Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists and Christian Missionary Alliance and Pentecostals and Church of God and people who are very far from God and have absolutely no spiritual heritage whatsoever. And then this is it. And we're just all here in a melting pot of backgrounds. And it's really wonderful and diverse, and I think that that's a positive thing for us. It's also positive to me that no one who doesn't sit in our fellowship every week can tell us what to do. There's not some office in Rocky Mount that can dictate to us who we can hire and where we can go. There's no one who can tell us what we can and cannot believe who does not sit amongst us each week. And I think that is tremendously valuable and I'm happy about that. But I think that one of the potential downsides of being an independent church is that we can sometimes float along week to week, month to month, year to year, untethered to the traditions that came before us and forgetful of the shoulders that we stand on. Neglectful of the traditions and the heritage and the writing and the theology and the hymns and the blessings and the liturgies and the prayers that served the church for generations before Grace Raleigh ever showed up, for millennia before we ever showed up. And that when we do this, we make a great mistake to just rely on our wisdom and our new things and our fresh perspectives without relying on the wisdom that has been passed down to us through the centuries by forgetting the shoulders that we stand on and never reaching back to look at where we came from and consider how to implement and acknowledge that in our worship. And churches actually commit this sin a lot. I've seen plenty of times over my life and my church career, churches that make the mistake of throwing out the old in favor of the new. In church world, young families are the sweet spot, man. That's what you want. If your church is growing in young families, then your church is growing. If your church isn't growing in young families, then it is slowly dying. That's just how it goes. And so what churches do to reach young families and to feel vibrant and to feel like they're growing is they tailor things to the sensibilities of young families. They tailor the worship to what the younger generation wants. The sermons are about topics that apply to the younger generation. The sanctuary is set up in a way that will apply, that will appeal to the newest generation. And sometimes in all of that change and in the forgetting of the old, a brave, a brave older person from a previous generation will raise their hand and say, can we just maybe like do a hymn? Can we, can we decorate in this way? Can we put this up? Can we, I would love to hear sermons out of this. I would love to hear sermons about this. Do we have to, every year, do we have to do a parenting sermon? Like I'm done with that season of my life, right? And so usually I've seen that older generation will be met with something to the effect of, it's not about you anymore. It's about reaching them. So tithe, pray, lead, but also pipe down. Because we're not here for you. We're reaching young generations and that's what you need to be excited about. And I've seen it happen over and over again. And I think it's a great sin of the church. I think it's incredibly foolish for a young pastor, for young leadership to take a church and to set the older generation off to the side and say, we need your finances, we need your support, but we really don't value your wisdom and we definitely don't value your preferences. So if you could just kind of pipe down, we're going to move on. And we end up sacrificing the wisdom of the old on the enthusiasm of the new. And we forget about the generations that came before us. And it's just a constant, what's the next song? What's the cool way to do a sermon? What kind of stupid lights do we need to make it feel more awesome in here? And we just keep moving down the road of what's most relevant, and we forget about the generations that came before us. And God forbid that grace ever become a place where we don't value the wisdom of the generations who have preceded us. If you are of a generation that has preceded me, and you feel disregarded in this space, and you feel like we don't listen to to you or that you are not important to us, I hope that you will please tell me that. Because the last thing I want to do is get involved in that pattern of sacrificing the wisdom of the old in sake of reaching the new. Because here's the other thing. If you listen to the generations that came before you, you're going to reach anybody with a heart. You're going to reach anybody that Jesus is trying to reach. You'll be more effective in ministry than if you just cater a dog and pony show to the sensibilities that are the freshest and the newest. So my hope here at Grace is that we would not do that. The way that I phrased that this morning is let not the enthusiasm for the new cause us to forget the wisdom of the old. And I think in the way that we form a service, in the way that we worship, in the way that we approach even designing a Sunday morning, that we have done that. I'm guilty of that. And I realized that slowly over the course of the year. That for centuries, there were whole liturgies and some of you come from backgrounds with more liturgical services where you stand and you read. If the word of God is being read, then you stand and you read it together where the service will end with a prayer or a benediction, or there'll be a portion of the catechism that's read at different parts. And it ties us back to the shoulders that we stand on in the generations that came before us. And there's good, rich, deep wisdom that we find there. And we haven't really incorporated that in what we do. And in doing so, we've just kind of floated along untethered to the generations that came before us, which is really a shame because in grace, as I enumerated a little while ago, we have so many different rich traditions that have so much to offer in our space and in our worship that we simply disregard for the way that we are comfortable, for the way that we've always done it, or for whatever my sensibilities might be as we construct a worship service. And we disregard the centuries of church history and the rich faith and tradition and hymns and prayers and blessings that they have left for us. And I believe that there's something beautiful in these traditions. And I want to be intentional as well as the staff and the elders as we move forward. I want to be more intentional about reaching back, about including those blessings. I want to get us to a place, I'm not going to do it this morning, okay? We're going to ease into this as a church together, but I want to get us to a place where we're willing and look forward to standing and reading something together, standing and reading scripture together, or a short blessing together, or something like that. I want it to be more a part of our worship because when we do that, it tethers us to the shoulders that we stand on and it reminds us that we are not independent, that we do not exist in a vacuum, that the blessing and that the things that we have now are because of where we come from and we ought to acknowledge that and we find a depth and a richness there that I believe will bless our souls. So because we desire to embrace and acknowledge our rich spiritual heritage, we are observing Lent. Because we want to tether ourselves to those who came before us, because we want to acknowledge that we sit on deep wells of wisdom, we are going to very intentionally observe Lent as a church. And we're going to do this for reasons that I'm going to talk about in a second, but also because of the way that it does tether us. Lent, how many of you, let me pause and just ask this, how many of you grew up in a tradition that observed Lent and you have regularly observed Lent in your life? Okay. That's not me. That's not me. Baptists don't think we need to observe anything except for baptisms and tithing. So we didn't observe Lent. And it's always been kind of mysterious for me. So even in the last year, I wanted to wrap my head around, okay, if we're going to observe this in a serious way, let me understand it a little bit. So for some of you, this will be a refresher. For some of you, it's new information. But when basically put or defined, Lent is a 40-day fast designed to focus our hearts on Jesus and prepare them for the miracle of Easter. That's what Lent is. It's a 40-day fast designed to focus our hearts on Jesus and to prepare them for the miracle of Easter. That's why this series is subtitled as A Holy Pause. Because especially now, as the world opens back up and our schedules begin to be filled up again, we're as busy as ever. We're going and we're going and we're going. And many of us, some of us have the luxury to get up and sip a coffee and sit down and have a nice, easy morning. But most of us are shot out of our bed like a cannon because we have things that are screaming for our attention. And we just, we go and we go and we go, and then we fall down exhausted at the end of the day. And then we get up and we go and we go and we go. And we're busy and we're busy and we're busy. And it's good for us as humans because we were designed to do it, to just stop and pause and breathe and reflect. Similarly, as a church, we can get harried and hurried, so focused on the pandemic and should we or should we not wear masks and what are the decisions that we need to make about that and we've got a worship pastor to hire and what are we going to do this ministry and that ministry? And we're planning this thing and we're moving and we're doing this. And we've got this objective coming up and how our finance is doing. And have we found a building yet? And there's all kinds of things that consume those who are in church during the week. And it's as good for us as well as a church to just stop and pause and focus our hearts on Christ and ask the Spirit to move in our individual and collective hearts as we prepare for Easter. So a big part of this series is inviting you into a space where we just pause and we worship and we listen and we pray and we fast. And it tethers us to these previous generations because Lent first shows up at about 300 AD. It's the first time it was written about by the church fathers and intentionally followed. No doubt it was happening before that as well. It just got actualized around 300 AD. And they chose a 40-day fast because they wanted to model it after Jesus' 40-day fast in the desert before he began his earthly ministry. That's why we had Carter read that particular passage, because the 40-day fast from Lent is modeled after Jesus's 40-day fast, which incidentally, for those of you that care about these kinds of things, the number 40 is incredibly significant in Scripture. I learned, somebody even texted me yesterday, and I did not know this, three separate times in Moses's life, he fasted for 40 days, either in preparation to something or in response to something. We know that the flood, the rains lasted for 40 days and 40 nights. We know that the Jews wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. We know all of these things. And then Jesus fasted for 40 days as he was tempted in the wilderness. So I can't pretend to know what 40 means. I just know it's a significant biblical number. And so when the early church saints chose a length of the fast, they chose 40 days. They realized that it's pretty untenable to fast for 40 days for most mortals. So they started making these weird rules. You can eat fish on this day and Friday, like have a goat if you want. I don't know all the different meat rules, but there's different ones, right? And then they said, you know, we need to, we can't do this all the time. This is getting old. We need to be able to take a break. We need to be able to break fast. So first, some traditions picked two days, and it made Lent last eight weeks. And they're like, that's too long. Let's do it shorter than that. So let's just take one day and make it last six weeks. So Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is this Wednesday, March the 2nd, and it ends on Easter. And technically, you're allowed to break your fast, whatever you're fasting from, on Sundays. Although some church fathers say, essentially, suck it up. All right, don't do that. That's cheating. But that's up to you to decide, depending on what it is you give up, if anything. But that's why it's a 40-day fast that lasts six weeks, if you're trying to do the math in your head. You get to take Sundays off. But that's what we're going to do as a church. And everyone's going to be invited as we do this. Everyone's going to be invited and challenged to fast from something. And I'm not going to talk about fasting too much because the whole sermon is about fasting next week. So I'll simply say this, that the purpose of a fast is to abstain from something in your life that you use and desire regularly so that when you are abstaining from it and something is triggered and you know that, oh, I wish I could have that thing, you take your desire for that thing and you turn it to Christ. It's a pause where you stop and you go, let me take this desire and turn that desire to my Savior and ask the Holy Spirit to speak to me and work with me during this season. It is an intentional foregoing of something. And if we fast and we just grit our teeth and bear through it and we just think about how much we want food and just don't eat food and we get to the end of the day and be like, eh, I won, that's not really the point. The point is to take the desire of food and let it turn your eyes on Jesus. That's the point, okay? But it doesn't have to be food. It could be wine or bourbon or social media or TV or screens or whatever it is. But I would invite you to consider fasting from something. I would also invite you, if you didn't already, to grab the devotional booklet that we have out in the lobby. I'm really excited about those because we began to ask people to write on certain topics back in the fall, and we have compiled them, and they're available to you for free. Carly over here has done them at great effort and really, really put in a lot of time, worked a lot of overtime to get those things done. The people at the printers know her by name. And we are very grateful to her, and we're grateful to those who wrote. But it begins, you can grab one now. The intention is to begin it this Wednesday, and then there's a devotion every weekday all the way up to Easter. And the way that the series works is each week there's a topic. This upcoming week is fasting. And so every week as we look at the topic that's associated with Lent, we're asking the question, how does this point me to Jesus? How does fasting point me to Jesus? The next week is stillness. So we say, how does stillness point me to Christ? How does forgiveness, how does generosity, how does sin and forgiveness point me to Jesus? And so that's the question we'll come back and answer every week. And so the devotionals are written so that you'll read about that topic as we prepare our hearts for that Sunday. And what I really love is it's over 30 different folks from the church who have written these things. So it's not just my voice. It's not just the staff's voice. But it's the collective voice of the collective wisdom of the church that gets to speak into everybody every day. So I hope that you'll take one of those devotionals and that you'll follow through with it as we move through the season. And I would really invite you to take the next two days and prayerfully consider whether or not you want to do this. Ecclesiastes tells us that it's better to not even make a vow to God in the first place than to make one and then break it. So I would encourage you, don't walk out of a service with an incredibly compelling message and decide, yeah, I'm definitely going to do this thing, and then get into week two and peter out and nothing ever happens. But prayerfully consider if this is something you want to commit yourself to. Prayerfully consider if it is what you might fast from. And then share that with somebody. Maybe it's the person who knows your next step of obedience. And prayerfully consider reading the devotion every day and partaking in the same wisdom that the rest of the church partners are taking in that day. And let's be mutually encouraged by that. I would challenge you to consider participating in Lent this year for those reasons. And I will also say this. For this series in particular, and I honestly hope that this happens more and more, but for this series in particular, I would love it if we could decentralize the sermon. In church life, as you kind of go through the rhythms of church, the sermon is really kind of the main attraction of the Sunday morning. It's kind of the worship can be really good and the sermon's really bad and we'll say it was okay. But really, it's kind of sometimes all about the sermon. And I don't love that at all. I never do. I think that gives these words too much weight. And frankly, it gives me too much weight. I've got plenty, as it is. We need to decentralize the sermon and not look to it to encourage us spiritually as much as all the other elements around us. So for this series in particular, I hope and I pray and have been fervently praying that Jesus moves in your heart, that he does something in your heart, that this is a time of spiritual renewal for us as individuals and for us as a church, and that it happens by simply slowing down and pausing and inviting Jesus into our life and into our thoughts and into our habits for this six-week period leading into Easter so that when we get to Easter, it might be one of the more worshipful, holy, wonderful Easters that we've ever experienced. And I'm talking about sermons in this context because let's let our daily devotional move the needle on our spiritual health. Let's look to that to inspire and enliven us. Let's come expectant of good worship, which it really was this morning as we sung full-throated and mostly maskless. It was really a great and joyful sound in here. But let's come expectant, expecting to be moved by worship. Let's expect God to move in the daily habit of having our devotion. Let's expect God to move in the uncomfortable discipline of fasting, and let's allow the sermon to simply be a supplement to those things, but not the thing that moves us. Let's let God's Spirit move in us through all the other myriad ways that he is trying to speak to us and get our attention as we move through this series together. And let us as a church invite Jesus to speak to us as we turn our attention to him daily. Let us consider how he might move us, how he might grow us, how he might call us back to him. And let us expect that as we move through this season as a church that it will be a profound time of spiritual renewal and restoration for us. And let's look forward to moving out of this season and celebrating a wonderful and holy Easter together as we give God the next six weeks to prepare our hearts for that. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to sing a song, and then as an added element at the end, we're going to have the chair of our board, Brad Gwynn, he's going to come up and share a closing prayer for us as we go into the Lenten season. So let me pray. Father, you are good to us. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for loving grace. Thank you for blessing this place. Lord, we turn our hearts to you collectively and expectantly, eagerly asking you to speak, eagerly asking you to move, eagerly asking you to heal what is broken and what is hurt. Inspire us, God, to serve you, to love you, to be moved by you, to hear from you. God, I just pray that these next six weeks as a church, seven weeks as a church, are just some of the most special in memory. Not because of what's said or what's done, but just simply because of how you move. We invite you into this space to do that, to draw us near to you. We invite you into our hearts to draw us near to you. And God, I just ask that you would do amazing, unexpected things in our hearts and in our lives as we observe Lent like so many of your faithful bodies and churches that came before us. It's in your son's name we pray all these things. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this cold February morning on Super Bowl Sunday. I hope everybody's got fun plans, or if you don't care about the Super Bowl at all, I hope you have a nice dinner planned for yourself. This is the third part in our series going through the book of Colossians. And this week, as we approach it, I wanted to approach the text with this kind of idea in mind. We're going to be in Colossians chapter 2 and then on through chapter 3 in some different portions of it. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. And then if you're at home, please turn there. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. I would also call your attention to the bulletin. The bulletin looks a little bit different this week. There's no place for you to take notes. So note takers, you're going to have to get creative. Instead, I've put a prayer on the bulletin that we're going to pray at the end of the service together. You'll pray silently as I pray it aloud. And by the time we get there, hopefully the prayer makes a lot more sense and is meaningful and is something that you will carry home with you. But we'll talk more about that at the end of the service. If you're watching online, this bulletin is attached to the grace find that you should have received this week. So you can download that if you want to, or you can just email someone on staff and we'll be happy to send it over to you if you find it helpful and want to pray it throughout your week. But as we approach the text this week, I wanted to start here. I'm not sure if any of you have ever tried to eat healthy, okay? By the looks of most of us, this has been an effort at least at some portion of our life, but there have been a lot of times in my life when I have decided that I'm going to begin to eat with some wisdom. I'm going to start to eat well. I'm a person who's had a lot of day one workouts, and I've had a lot of day one diets. Okay, there's more in my future. Maybe tomorrow. Who knows? Not today. It's Super Bowl Sunday. This is not the day to start a diet, but tomorrow is fresh and hope springs eternal. But whenever I decide that I'm going to eat well, right? I'm going to eat responsibly, which is like a rabbit. Whenever I decide I'm going to do that, I feel like I am a person who is at war with myself. I feel like I am two separate people. I am one person who wants to eat well, and I am another person who just loves food so much that he's angered by me who wants to eat well. Because I love food. I don't know about your relationship with food. Mine is probably not healthy. If I know that I'm going to have a certain dinner that night or that we're going somewhere like a restaurant or something like that, I already know what I'm getting and I wake up thinking about it. Like I look forward to it throughout the day. That's how much I love food. For the Super Bowl tonight, we're going to have pigs in a blanket. I'm going to dip them in spicy mustard. I'm going to eat more than I should. I'm already excited about it, okay? That's just how I am about food. So when I decide that I want to eat well, it's really difficult for me. And I don't know about you, but I have certain stumbling blocks. It's pretty easy for me to eat well around the house. I kind of do a good job not snacking when I'm not supposed to. I don't drink the soda and stuff when I'm not supposed to. I drink black coffee and water, and that's pretty much it during the day. That's not very challenging. But what is challenging is when I'm trying to eat well, and my sweet wife on a Friday or Saturday will say, you want to go Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do, okay? I always want to go to Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit. That answer is never no, okay? You ask me, Nate, do you want a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. But you just had three. I don't care. You're offering me one. I want another biscuit. I like biscuits in the morning. So that's tough, all right? The other time it's tough is when I go out to eat. Because I'll go out to eat. I'll go to places that I like, and they have food there that I like. And one of the places I think of is Piper's. I go to Piper's because I meet people there for lunch with a lot of regularity. That's kind of my default spot. And they have salads, like I see them on the menu, right? They got grilled chicken and some fruit or some whatever, some balsamic whatever, less delicious thing that they have there. And I know that I need to order it. And I have girded my loins. I'm ready for this choice. And I go in there and I don't even look at the meat. I look at just the salads. I don't look at the other things. But see, here's the thing. This Piper's has one of the best Reuben's in the city. They really do. It's delicious. And that's what I want, right? I want the Reuben. And I've been thinking all day about how I shouldn't have the Reuben. And I've made the decision, I'm going to get the salad. I'm going to eat the thing that I don't want. But then it's like Satan's working against me or God's just giving me a special grace and telling me it's okay. I'm not sure which sign. And the table next to me will receive a piping hot, crispy toasted Reuben. As I'm sitting there trying to muster up the discipline to order my salad. And I look at that Reuben and I look at those fries and I look at that ketchup and the waitress says, what do you have? That! I want that Reuben. I did not want a salad. And I cave, right? So for me to be on a diet is for me to live at war with myself. I bring that up because I think that you'll know that this is true. Those of you who have been a Christian for any amount of time, to be a Christian is to be at war with yourself. To be a Christian, to be a believer, is to know the good you ought to do and yet still struggle to do it. I even think, and this is a sad reality, it should not be the case, and hopefully God can deliver us from this, and hopefully this sermon moves the needle on this a little bit, but I even think that to be a believer is to be constantly disappointed with how spiritually mature you are and how spiritually mature you think you should be by now. Because we know the good things we're supposed to do. We know the kindness we're supposed to show. We know the greed we're not supposed to have and the pride that we're supposed to iron out. And we know all the different things and our hidden sins and the stuff that we look at and whatever it is, the stuff that we consume. We know what we're not supposed to do and we know what we are supposed to do. And we try like heck to be that person, but we are a person who feels at war with ourself because there is the person within us who wants to eat right and there is the person within us who really loves a good Reuben, whatever that might be for you. And they exist at war with each other. I am convinced that to be a believer means to live in a state of tension within yourself of who you know you should be, of who you know God created you to be, of who you know God designed you to be, and yet not being able to walk in that. There's a verse that's super challenging for me where Paul tells us that we should live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And I don't know about you, but I don't get to the end of too many days, much less weeks, where I look back on that week and I go, yeah, this week I was obedient to that verse. And if we're honest as Christians, it gets tiring to know that that's true. It gets exhausting to constantly fall short. Paul actually describes this tension in one of my favorite passages. It's one of the most human things to me that's written in the Bible, particularly by Paul in Romans chapter 7. In Romans chapter 7, Paul writes specifically about this tension in the Christian life when, in my inner being, but I see in my members another regenerated person as God has rescued my heart and claimed it and one day will whisk me up to heaven. He's given me eternal life and I'm living as a new creature that we're going to talk about more in a minute. I feel in this inner being a desire to live the righteous life that God has called me to live. And yet, also in my body, is a desire to revert back to my old self. It is a desire to revert to who I am without Jesus. It is a desire to indulge the flesh. It is a desire for the things that I used to consume that I know I don't need to consume anymore. That exists within us. And then he exclaims at the end of it, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Who will finally give me victory? How will I finally live the life that I'm supposed to live? And so that's where we arrive this morning. In Colossians, is this age-old question that all Christians face, that Francis Schaeffer, an author in the 20th century, framed up in a book entitled, How Should We Then Live? Meaning, in light of the gospel, in light of what we talked about in week one, the picture of Jesus that Paul paints for the Colossians, remember, they're facing pressure from within and without to go back to rules and aestheticism and to be legalistic and add on more rules than what is necessary so that they can live a righteous life, and then pressure from the more liberal part of their community to say none of the rules matter, how we live doesn't matter at all. You have total grace to do whatever it is you want to do. And so Paul, to that pressure, paints a picture of Christ as the apex of history and the apex of hope, as the connection point and nexus between the spiritual realm and the physical realm, how he is the creator God over everything, this majestic picture of Christ. And so the question becomes, how do we live in light of that picture? How do we live in light of the gospel? I am saved. I am a new creature. God has breathed new life into me. I am no longer a slave to sin, as Paul describes in Romans, but now I have this option to move forward with the power of Christ and the Holy Spirit in me and to live a life worthy of the calling that I have received. Now, how do I do it? How do I do it? That's the question that we come to in Colossians. And it should be a question that matters to each and every Christian. Father, how do I live a life worthy of the calling that I've received? How do I grow into spiritual maturity? What do I do practically? How do I live the Christian life? And it's an important question because it dictates how we pursue God. And to this question, I think we often answer it in the same way that we're trained to answer any other question in our life about how we get better at a particular thing. If you want to get better at exercising, what do you need? You need more discipline. You need to wake up. You need to do it. You need to be more disciplined in the way you pursue exercise. If you want to eat better, what do you need to do? You need to be more disciplined. You want to do better at time management. You need more discipline in time management. You want to be more focused. You want to be more productive. You want whatever it is, however it is, you want to grow and be better. What is the fundamental requirement of that pursuit of better? It's discipline. We need to do better. We need to come up with structures and systems that we follow, and I'm going to white knuckle my way to success here. And the most disciplined people within our field, they achieve the most success. The most disciplined people at the gym look the best in a t-shirt. The most disciplined people, when they go out to eat, they have the healthiest hearts. Like discipline is the root to how we accomplish success. And so, because that's true, and so very many areas of our life, even though we could philosophically talk about whether or not that's true, because we think that's true in so many areas of our life, we also just by default apply that to our spiritual life. If I want to be more godly, then I need to be more disciplined. I'm going to set up more rules, more regulations. I'm going to get up at this time. I'm going to do these things. I'm going to be the type of person that is defined by these things. We focus on our behavior and our self-discipline. And I think when we are faced with the question of how do I then live? How do I become the Christian that God has created and designed me to be? I think that in our culture, our default answer is to attempt to white-knuckle discipline our way to godliness. And here's what Paul says about that knee-jerk reaction that all perish as they are used, according to human precepts and teachings. Listen, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom and promoting self- we be the people that God asks us to be? And their response, it seems, at least initially, was white-knuckle discipline, aestheticism, following the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more God loves you. It's a very simple exchange. That's what legalism says. And so they're just going to be try-hards. They're just going to be do-betters. That's just what they're going to do. And to help them try really hard, they set up all these rules and parameters around their life. And they say, whoever can follow these rules the best is the greatest Christian. But Paul says, that's fine. Set up your rules. Have all your standards. Set the boundaries really far away from the actual boundary. He says, but all those rules and all that, the way that it looks, the way that you're living, just dotting all the T's and crossing all the I's and really, really, really having these policies in life that keep you on the straight and narrow. Paul says, yeah, those have the appearance of wisdom. And I would add in our vernacular, godliness, but they do nothing. They do nothing to stop the indulgence of the flesh that is the reason for the sinning that we need the rules for. For instance, let's say that what you struggle with is pride. Okay, I'm having to make some assumptions here because I don't have the struggle, but if you do, let's say that something that you struggle with is pride and you go, you know what, God, I gotta get rid of this. I gotta be better. I'm gonna be better at being more humble. I'm gonna try to push out my pride. And so we take intentional steps. Maybe we're people who will maybe kind of fish for compliments sometime, or maybe we'll ask people what they thought about something. And really all we want them to do is tell them that we did a good job or that we're good at this or that we're good at that. And there's ways, if you're a prideful person, there are ways to go through your life and get the people in your life to affirm you. And if you are this person, you're exhausting, okay? I've exhausted others. I say that as a friend. That's not a good road to walk. But let's say that you're a prideful person, and so you need other people to affirm you all the time and the things that you're good at, but you realize in light of the gospel and in light of God's word that pride is not good, and so we need to iron this out of our life. So we go, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm not going to ask other people for compliments. I'm not going to ask other people to affirm me. I'm not going to seek my value in other places. And then once you get really good at that and you haven't done that in a couple of weeks and you still feel good about yourself, then what do you do? Boy, I am proud of myself for not needing other people to tell me I'm good. Now we're taking pride in a new thing. What Paul says is there is this part of our flesh that is going to manifest negative things in our life, pride, greed, selfishness, lust, whatever it is. And we can put parameters around those things, but they're going to leak out somewhere. You can follow whatever rules you want to follow. You can white knuckle yourself into some good discipline. I've seen some people who can keep themselves on the straight and narrow for years, but those negative traits that exist within you, those things are going to leak out somewhere else. And I know this because I've met a lot of people who can follow the rules really well, and they're jerks. It's just their flesh leaking out in other ways. So what Paul says is we cannot white knuckle our way to godliness. Discipline, self-control, more rules, more standards. Those do not get us to spiritual maturity. Those do not put us in a place where we can live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. That's not the answer. In chapter 3, thankfully, I believe that he gives us the answer. And I think it's a refreshing one. Because when we try to get to godliness by white-knuckle discipline, just I'm going to be a try-hard, I'm going to be a do-better, what happens is not good. Because if you have ever in your life decided, yeah, I'm going to be a better Christian, and I'm going to do it by taking these steps. I'm going to do it by instilling these standards in my life. I'm going to do it by my own effort and me trying hard. And maybe we pray a prayer, God, I am never going to do this again. God, I am always going to do this moving forward. God, I swear that that will never be a part of my life again. And we make these big promises and we make these big claims. And listen, we mean them. But here's what I know about you. If you've ever promised God that you will never or that you will always, then you have failed. That's what I know about you. If we ever have promised God, I will never do blank. I will always do blank, we have failed in those promises because we can't keep those commitments, because we're broken. Because of Romans 7, the things that I do not want to do, I do, because it's part of our nature to fail in that way. And because that's true, after we make up our mind enough times that God, I'm never going to, or God, I'm always going to, and then we fail, we get to a place where either we just feel like this broken, wretched Christian, and we're thinking, God, I'll never be good enough for you. I don't think I'll ever be good enough for you. Just please let me be saved. Just please let me just hang on until I get to the end of my life. Please usher me into heaven. I know I'll never be who I'm supposed to be. I know that I can't pursue those things, but please just accept me as I am. And we kind of just live this broken down, hopeless Christian life where we feel like we're limping our way to heaven. Or worse than that, we try so hard and we fail so many times that we get so tired of trying that we can't find it within ourselves to do it anymore. And then we conclude, God, your word says that I'm a new creature. Your word says that you will help me. Your word says that you will empower me. And yet I fail over and over and over again. So I can only conclude that you don't keep your word. And then we just wander away from the faith and we give up on God because righteousness is too hard because we've only ever tried it by ourself and we've never invited God in in the way that he needs to be invited in, and our white-knuckle disciplining to try to be better and more godly to pursue the faith that we want so earnestly ends up costing us our faith. So that's not the way. We find the way in Colossians 3. And I would sum it up like this. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving, by focusing on who we are rather than how we behave. And here's what I mean. In this chapter, we're going to see this idea introduced here by Paul, but introduced in plenty of other places by Paul in the New Testament, of the old and the new. The old you and the new you. The old you is who you were without Jesus. The new you is who you are with Jesus. The old you, the Bible says, was a slave to sin. I had no choice but to do things that displeased God. I had no chance at all. But the new you infused with Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit does have the chance every day when you wake up to walk that day according to the life that God has called you to. We have a chance when we wake up to live today in honoring God and actually finish the day living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day. We've got a chance. There's a new us. And the new us desperately wants to please God. And so this is what Paul says about old self and new self in Colossians chapter three. This is what he says about being versus behaving. Look at Colossians chapter three, verses five through eight first. Put to death, Paul says, therefore, what is earthly in you? Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, and covetousness, which is idol rules. But here's what we need to do. We need to put to death these things, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, covetousness, anger, slander, all these things. And at first, it sounds like that's a little bit in tension with what he just said. He said, if you want to be godly, if you want to be who God created you to be, it's not about following the rules. It has an appearance of wisdom, but that's not really helping any indulgence of the flesh. And then the very next chapter over, he's saying, put to death these things, which feels like rules and standards that he's giving us, except he's not giving us behaviors. He's telling us to put things to death. Remember how I said that if you follow rules, if you're trying to break yourself of pridefulness and you put rules around your pridefulness and then it just leaks out and into another area of your life. Jesus is, Paul is acknowledging that. See, it's not about trying to follow the rules because those unhealthy things just leak into other portions of your life. It's about actually putting the pride to death. It's about actually putting greed and lust to death in your heart so that in your heart there is no place for them to dwell. And if there is no place for them to dwell, then they will not produce the behaviors that you're trying so desperately to control. So the first thing is to acknowledge that we don't need to put parameters around our old self. We need to put our old self to death. And we do this by focusing on being. How do we put those things to death? This is what Paul says in Colossians 3. I'm going to read verses 12 through 17. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you. So you also must forgive. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body, and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, we live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? In the phrasing of Hebrews 12, verse 1, What the world do I live the life that you want me to live? I think what Jesus would say is, look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Jesus, what rules should I follow in this new life that you've called me to? How do I run the race that you've set before me? Jesus says, just look at me. Just keep your eyes on Christ. This is actually in complete harmony with Romans 12 that tells us that we should run the race and that we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles us by, in verse 2, focusing your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. So how do we live the life that God calls us to live? We daily make ourselves aware of Christ's love for us. We daily make ourselves aware of what God has done for us. If we will daily reflect on the fact that Jesus in heavenly form condescended and took on flesh and lived amongst us for 33 years and put up with everything that we have to offer and continues to walk with us and continues to love us and continues to sit at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you as an individual, leans into God's ears and says, she's good. She's with me. She loves you, Father. I died for her. If we will let that reality wash over us daily, how could we not put to death the pride that exists in us by walking in humility at the love of God that we receive? If we are struggling with anger towards other people and frustration and impatience, how is it possible to spend a portion of your day every day focusing on the reality of God's patience with you? Focusing on the reality that as many times as you've said, God, I will never, or God, I will always, and then you failed, that God has been right there to help you clean up the mess every time. How can we not grow in forgiveness of others when we constantly remind ourselves of how forgiven we are? How can we not grow in patience to others when we constantly are focused on the patience that God has to us? If we will focus on God's overwhelming grace, that he died for us while we were still sinners, that he pursues us while we run away from him, that even though we fail him over and over again, he continues to love us with a reckless love, that God loves us while we were unlovely, that God sees us fully and knows us completely and still loves us unconditionally. If we let those things wash over us every day, how could we not look at other people and be more loving and patient towards them in light of how loving and patient God is towards us? Do you understand that these things that we clothe ourself with in Colossians 12 through 17 necessarily put to death our old self that Paul tells us to rid ourself of. So if we want to get rid of malice, what do we do? We focus on Christ. If we want to get rid of pride, do we put parameters around our pride? No, we focus on Jesus and who he is and realize that we have no right to our pride. If we want to be more gracious people, what do we do? We focus on Jesus' grace to us. Say, Jesus, how in the world do I live the life that you call me to live? Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And Jesus says, focus on me. Focus on me. So I would tell you, if you are a Christian who lives at war with yourself, you do not have a discipline issue, you have a focus issue. If you are someone who struggles with greed, you don't have a greed issue. You have a focus issue. If we try to be more godly and more pleasing to him by focusing on the behaviors that we need to do better, we will fail over and over and over again. But if we can put our focus on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith and let his grace and goodness and mercy and love wash over us daily, then those things will necessarily put to death the very root of the behaviors that we do not like. So again, if we are struggling in our walk with God, we do not have a discipline issue. We do not have a sin issue. We have a focus issue. We need to focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We need to pursue him more with more urgency. We need to let the truths of how he loves us wash over us more. And those will necessarily put to death the elements of our character that we do not like, that produce the behaviors that we do not want to do. You can think of it this way. Our old self cannot survive where our new self thrives. Our problem is we have a new self and we have an old self and we feed them both the same amount of food. We give in to them both equally. And so they both just exist in this tension and if we ever want to put to death our old self, then our new self has to thrive. And our new self thrives by clothing ourselves in the characteristics of Christ and we clothe ourselves in those characteristics by focusing him and daily letting his goodness wash over us. So it's very simple. How should we then live? How do we get to the end of a single day? Living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day? By focusing our eyes on Jesus on that day. By looking at him that day. And letting everything else fade away and take care of itself. Because it's that simple, and because that's what we need to do, I wrote a prayer for us as a church. In a few minutes, I'm going to read it and pray it over us as a church and invite you to read it along with me. If you find it helpful, I would love to invite you to put this prayer somewhere where you can see it, where this is a thing that you will pray daily. Put it on your desk, or in your car, or on your mirror. If this is helpful to you, I would encourage you to pray this every day until it's not helpful to you, until the principles of this prayer are so ingrained in you that it is part of your daily prayer. But if we want to live a life as Christians that we are called to live, then I am convinced that this needs to be a fundamental prayer that we focus on very regularly. Not necessarily the words that I've chosen here, but the ethos and the attitude and the posture that's presented in this prayer and the acknowledgments of the truths that are in this prayer that are from Colossians chapter three and other portions of scripture as we seek to live the life that God calls us to live. So I'm gonna pray this over us and invite you to pray it along with me. Father, I know I am your child and that in you I am a new creation. Though I know this, I struggle to believe it. Because I struggle to believe, I struggle to walk as you would have me walk. So Father, help me learn to walk in this new self. As I put on the new self, I ask that you would help me see others through your eyes and so clothe me in your compassion. Help me regard others as your beloved children as you clothe me in your kindness. Remind me of the way you love me when I am unlovely in order that I might humbly love others in the way I am loved. Remind me today, Father, of who I am in you. As you clothe me in these things, let them put to death in me the remnants of my old self. Let your humility drive out my impatience, my anger, and my pride. Let your compassion and kindness suffocate my jealous and selfish heart. Let the way you see me overshadow and obscure the way I see myself. Help's name, Father. Amen.