Sermons tagged with Impact

I told Steve this week I wanted the full dance party intro for the sermon, so we are in a good spot. Speaking of being in good spots, before I just launch into the sermon, I just kind of felt compelled to say this. I think one of the things about church that a lot of us would agree that's tough sometimes is that when you show up, you kind of smile and people say, how you doing? And you say, good. And sometimes we mean it and sometimes we don't. And so sometimes church feels like a place where it's not okay to not be okay. And so I just wanted to tell you as your pastor, there's nothing going on with me. It's just, I feel like I need a vacation for about three weeks. Jen and Lily are sick. They're at home. I kind of feel like the weather does today. Just a little tired, just a little run down. I was praying that God would give me energy for this morning that I don't have. And so like, I'm just telling you that I've had better days. There's nothing wrong with Nate. I just would rather be at home in sweatpants right now. I'm being totally honest with you. So if you're there too, and it was a struggle to get here this morning, I just want you to know that I'm with you. And if you're listening online or watching online because you stayed in those sweatpants, I'm jealous. So here's what I want to do. I was reminded as we were singing, and I heard your voices singing out. It was one of my favorite things to do is listening to you guys, my church, sing to God. I was reminded that we're a group of people, mostly care about our spiritual health and are here for what the Lord might have to say to us this morning. That's why we've gathered. So let's pray that that would be good, and then I'll launch into the stuff that I have prepared for you. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for getting us out of bed. Lord, for those who didn't get out of bed this morning but are catching up later, thank you for that time of rest for them that need it so much. God, we just pray that you would tune us into your word and your will. We pray that you would give us energy that we might lack. We pray that you would give us the ability to tune out things that may be distracting right now, and that for a little while this morning, we would hear from you. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen. Okay. I don't normally do this, but I want you to raise your hand. Raise your hand, and I'm not going to ask you to quote it, although that would be super fun. Raise your hand if you think you know what the verse Jeremiah 29 11 says. If you think you know that, okay? It's so funny from my perspective. There's a bunch of people doing this, right? And nobody doing this. That's fine. That's fine. That's a pretty well-known verse, right? It's from the Old Testament, the book of Jeremiah. It says, for I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. Actually, it says declares. It's a big deal. I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans to prosper you, not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future. And we like to glom onto that verse. We like to claim that verse. We like to go, oh gosh, it's so good to know that my God has a plan for me. And that's for the most part fun. But that verse is not for you. That verse is one of, I think, the most misapplied verses in Scripture, and it's one of the most misapplied verses in church. We look at that, for I know the plans God has for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you, not to harm you. Plans to give you hope in the future. And we go, oh, God has a plan for me. This is great. Except that that's not what that verse means. With that verse, who Jeremiah is talking to is the nation of Israel. And they're in slavery. They're cast out. And they don't feel like their God's looking out for them anymore. And he says to them, listen, I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you. I'm going to bring you out of this and into a time of prospering again. It's a promise to the nation of Israel. And really it has, it's multi-layers to this promise, but it's really a messianic promise. One day I'm going to send my son Jesus and he's going to rescue everyone back to me. And then there's going to be a new heaven and a new earth, and one day I'm going to prosper you. I'm not going to harm you. That's what that verse means. It doesn't mean, Harris is sitting in the front row, okay? Harris is my buddy. It does not mean that God has plans for you, Harris, to prosper you and not to harm you. It does not mean that. That's a promise to the nation of Israel. And if I'm breaking your heart right now, because you love that verse and it brings you comfort, I don't want to rob that comfort of you. Is it revelatory of God's character? Yes. Do I think that God has a plan for you? Yes, I do. But what I want to do this morning is give you a better verse than that to show you that he has a plan. And I want to offer you some sympathy because I think that we glom onto that verse. We grab that verse and we go, yes, this is good. This brings me peace and joy. I think it's such a well-known verse because we want to know that God has a plan for us. We want to know that in the midst of life, in the midst of all the chaos, in the midst of all the things that we can't control, that somehow, somewhere, there is a divine God who is orchestrating all of these situations and that they will work out. We need to know. We need the peace of knowing that everything's not just happening at random, that someone is orchestrating all of these events. We need that peace. And so we grab that verse and we go, yes, God has a plan for me. This is great news. And people have done this for all of history. This is a question that we've asked for all of history. Why am I here and what am I here for? How did I get here and what am I supposed to do when I get here? As a matter of fact, if you remember freshman philosophy in college, one of the things you learn is that all of philosophy boils down to those three questions of origin, purpose, and destiny. How did I get here? What am I supposed to do? And where am I going? And so it's natural if you're a believer and you've been exposed to scripture that you would see a verse like that put up on a wall somewhere or included in a devotional somewhere and that you would attach onto it and go, yes, this is great. God has a plan for me because this answers some of the basic questions of human existence. How did I get here? And what am I here for? That's why I think the book of Ephesians is so good for us to study right now. Because the whole purpose of Ephesians is to tell us our identity and our purpose. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians, and the purpose of Ephesians, the overarching purpose, based on the research that I did and the guides that I read, is to give us our identity and our purpose. It's to answer those questions for you. It's to begin to answer the question, God, do you really have a plan for me? Is there really someone to make sense of all the things that are happening in life right now? God, what is my, who am I and what is my purpose? Where did I come from and what am I here for? The book of Ephesians, scholars believe, was written to answer this question. It's also important to note, as I got into learning more about the book of Ephesians, it's important to note that this letter, this is, first of all, it's written by a guy named Paul. Paul's probably the most influential Christian to ever live. Paul wrote two-thirds of the New Testament. There was different churches all over Asia Minor gathering in the cities, and he would write them letters to encourage them in particular. And those became known as Paul's letters. If you want to sound really fancy in your small group, you can refer to them as Pauline epistles. And everyone will go, whoa, you're really smart. So these epistles, these letters that were written by Paul, are written to churches. And here's the thing that's really important. I just, as an aside, I just want to encourage you to do this. These letters that Paul wrote, Romans and 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, that big chunk in the New Testament, when they arrived at a church, someone would get up in front of the church after the student pastor did the announcements and made fun of the senior pastor that's been going on for thousands of years. They would get up and they would say, this is a letter from Paul. And they would read it. And they wouldn't just read chapter one. They wouldn't just parse out one of the little phrases and spend the Sunday on that. They would read the whole thing, start to finish. These letters are intended to be read from start to finish. Paul did not write this with chapters. Chapters got added hundreds of years later, thousands of years later. We didn't do that. Or he didn't do that. We put those there. It was intended to be read from start to finish. So I would encourage you, as we go through the book of Ephesians, Kyle has made a reading plan for us that's going to take us through the book two times if you read every day. But I would encourage you at some point in the next now five weeks to take some time. It won't take you but 30 or 45 minutes, or if you're Doug Bergeson, about an hour and a half to really sound out the words. To sit down and read it from start to finish. Sit down at some point or another and read the whole book from start to finish. And there you'll start to see the nuances and the points and really the overarching themes of the book of Ephesians come out. So that would be my challenge to you during this series, is to sit down and read it from start to finish and see what comes out to you. It's perfectly fine, like we're going to do this morning, to camp out in one verse, but it's important that we get the whole theme. The other thing I would say as we launch into our series in Ephesians, as I now step into it, Patrick did a great job last week of starting us in chapter one. There's no way I can do all of chapter two this week. If you love the book of Ephesians and you know chapter two well, I'm going to tell you this right up front. You're going to be disappointed today, okay? I'm not going to get to the theological thing that you want me to get to. It's just, there's so much there. I can't cover it all. So I have to invest our time in this one place this morning, but you guys need to invest your time in learning the rest of it on your own. Six weeks isn't enough time to cover all the theology in Ephesians. But that's why Paul wrote Ephesians. And he wrote it, we think, to the church in Ephesus, but really it was to all the churches surrounding the ancient city of Ephesus. And it just kind of found its home base in Ephesus. And so it became the book of Ephesians, but really it's a general letter to the churches to tell us our identity and our purpose, to give us the answers to those questions we've been asking for all of time. That's why he wrote it. And if that's why he wrote it, to tell us who we are and why we're here. Really to answer that question, another way to think about this is if you were to say, God, what's your will for my life? What would you have me do? Some of us are in our 20s and we've got our life in front of us and we're going, God, what do you want me to do? Some of us have lived life and we're kind of midlife and we're kind of going, God, have I been doing what you want me to do? And am I going to do now what you want me to do? Some of us have moved into a season of life that's different. You find yourself as empty nesters or adult children or you have grandchildren and you feel like maybe part of life has run its course and now we're going, now, Father, what would you have me do? We ask this question over and over again in our life. Father, what is your will for us? What do you want me to do? This verse answers that question. This verse is the better version, I think, of Jeremiah 29, 11. It's in chapter 2, verse 10. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. It follows a discourse that's showing you how you get saved. If you need to know, if your question is, how do I get saved? What do I need to do? Ephesians 2, 8, and 9 are the most succinct explanation of salvation you can find in the Bible. And it starts off, we're dead in our trespasses. God loves us. He gives us salvation by grace through faith. That not of yourself is a gift of God, not of works, so that no man can boast. So if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, God's will for you is that you would become a believer. Once you are a believer, God's will for you is revealed in verse 10. And it says this, for we, the church, the Christians, those that call God their Father and Jesus their Savior, for we are His workmanship. His there is God. For we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. You want to know what God's will is for your life? You want to know who you are and why you're here? This is it. You are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you may walk in them. I love this verse. As I was studying personally a couple of years ago, I came across this verse. I had never noticed it before. I had always paid attention to all the other very worthwhile things in Ephesians chapter two. And for whatever reason, when I sat down to read this verse on that day years ago, it leapt off the page. And this is one of those that I've been waiting for the opportunity to preach for a couple of years. And now that it's finally here, I'm going to pitch a dud. But we're going to do our best to make this verse matter to everybody because I love it so much. And the first thing we see is that we are God's workmanship. He created us. And just that sentence right there, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, just that phrase has so much in it. The first thing we see, the first thing that I would note is that that gives us our position in creation. I try to say as often as I can and make this point as often as I can because I think it's a salient one that the Bible starts with a very intentional sentence. In the beginning, God created. And if you were to ask, why does it start that way? You could say, well, that's the beginning of the story and that's fair. But I think there's more more going on there. When we see in the beginning God created, when we see in chapter 2, verse 10, that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, that immediately tells us our position in creation. God is the creator, and we are the created. God is the creator, and we are the creation. And I would submit to you that all discord with God, all sin, all disunity, even all lack of joy and happiness can be traced back to our misunderstanding this fundamental relationship. All discord we experience with God, if he is the creator and we are the created, then all discord that we experience is because in our lives we went, no thanks, I'm here. You see, all unhappiness that we experience, all sin can be boiled down to us going, I don't accept the fundamental order of creation and I want to elevate myself to my authority in my own life. Wasn't this the sin of Eve in the garden? For those unfamiliar, the Bible starts with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. There's one rule, don't eat of that tree. And Satan comes up and sidles up next to Eve and he says, don't you want to eat of that tree? And I don't know if she rejects it or not, but he says, you know that God doesn't want you to eat of that tree because if you eat of it, you will become like him. And Eve went, oh, I want to be like him. And she became God in her own life. And that's how sin entered the world. And for us in our lives, when we experience any discord at all, the root of it is we have forgotten our fundamental position in creation. If you don't think that's true, read the book of Job and tell me what God is saying to Job in chapters 38, 39, and 40. He's saying, Job, you've forgotten your place. I'm the creator. You're the creation. So that sentence gives us our position in creation. It also gives us our purpose. It lets us know that because God created us, that he can now imbue us with purpose. Because he made us, he decides what we're for and what we're to be used for. That's not up to us to decide. We don't have to figure that out. We just have to ask God what it is. It also gives us our purpose. And then another thing that we see, I think, is that God takes pride in his creation. This last week, we finally launched our new website. Okay, our new website is up and running, graceralee.org. If you have a chance to go check it out today on mobile or on your desktop or whatever, go look at it. I think it's phenomenal. I think a guy named Hugh Butler did it for us. I think he did a phenomenal job. When you go look at it, I think you're gonna be really proud of your church. That website looks way better than us. That's what I would say, okay? You're going to go, oh man, this is such a good first impression. It's a really good website. And as we were designing it, the designer, a guy named Hugh, we were meeting with him. And I told him, I said, listen, man, you're more creative than me. You're way better at this than I could ever be. I don't want my preferences or what I'm asking you to do to limit your creativity in any way. I don't want the instructions that I give you to feel like they're limiting. I want your creation to have full reign. And actually what I told him is, I want you to be so proud of this website that it's the one you use to show to future clients to get their business. Like, you do whatever you want, just make it awesome. And after he got into designing it a little bit, he said, hey man, would you mind if I put my name down at the bottom of it? If I said that the website was made by HBCO, the name of his company? I said, no, absolutely, go ahead. Because I want him to be proud of what he did. And if you go to the website and you scroll to the bottom of the front page, you'll see website created by HBCO because he's proud of what he created. When you make something, you're proud of it. You guys know this. When you make something in your wood shop, when you put something back together, you show your wife, you show people, you take pictures of it, you text it to your buddies. Look what I did. When you put together, ladies, when you design something new, when you buy a new outfit, Jen does this all the time. I think that's creation. You've created a new outfit for Lily. She brings it home and then I have to go, that's the cutest thing ever. It's just, it's way cuter than the other 20 I've seen this year. Like, that's what you have to say. Like, when we create something, we want people to notice it. We take pride in that. That's what God does with his creation. He takes pride in you. Listen, this sounds flippant. It's not. God didn't make any duds, okay? God didn't create the good ones on Monday morning when he was fresh and then like Friday afternoon just spit out Jeff Lemons. Like that's not how that works. Yeah, whatever, this will be okay. God doesn't make any duds. He doesn't run out of energy. He created you. He is proud of you. He takes pride in his creation. And so in this very first sentence in Ephesians 2, verse 10, we see some huge themes. In this first statement, we see our position in creation, our purpose in creation, and His pride in creation. From the very beginning, it tells us our identity. If you were to ask, who am I? How did I get here? You are from God. If you are a believer, you are his child. It's his will that you would come into his family. And because of that, he's imbued you with purpose and he takes great pride in you. That one sentence at the very beginning, we see our position in creation, our purpose in that creation and his pride in his creation. And then once that's established, God made us. What did he make us for? Well, the very next sentence answers that question. He created us for good works that we might walk in them. I love the idea of this sentence. We don't have to figure out, God, what's your will for me? His will for you is that you would walk in the good works that he created for you. You have to think, God, what am I supposed to do with my life? Well, you're supposed to walk in the good works that he created for you. It's super simple. We don't have to figure this out. We don't have to divine anything or read the tea leaves. We just have to say that we were created to walk in the good works that he made for us, that he predetermined for us. That's our job. That's what we have to do. And it's at this point that I think we can kind of read this in two different ways. And the two ways to receive this passage, to kind of process it, I think, are kind of, you get the two pendulum swings in my marriage. Okay, Jen's not here this morning because Lily has neon green snot coming out of her nose, but if she were here, she would nod her head in agreement. There's me, when I see this, I'm an egomaniac. So when I read that I was created for good works beforehand, that I should walk in them, I go, that's right. I have a lot of talents to offer you, God. Where would you like me to be in your church? Like, yes, this makes sense to me. How would you like to use me? And I feel this grand sense of purpose and design and calling. Now, I'm humbled by that, and that's silly, and God doesn't need me at all. There's a story in the Old Testament where God talks through a donkey, and my dad likes to remind me often, if God can speak through a donkey, then he can speak through you. So don't get a big head, and that's not the word that he uses. He uses the King James version for that particular. But some of us read this, and because we're more maybe confident people, I don't know the best way to say it. Maybe it's just we're jerks. We go, yeah, okay, God, you've given me some gifts. How do I use them for you? But I think most of us process this like my wife does, who tend to think, I don't really have anything to offer. There can't possibly be a lot of good works that matter. My good works in comparison to others are really small. Certainly this verse applies to other people that are going to make a larger impact than me. And I think a lot of us tend to disqualify ourselves from passages like this. Other people were created for the good works. Other people should walk in those. That's really not for me. And I would just humbly submit to you, if that's how you feel, that that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says everyone, we, all Christians, if you're a believer, if you know Jesus, then God created you for good works, that you should walk in them, and those good works matter. And I would further submit to you, if you feel like someone who's on the fringe, who couldn't possibly be used in meaningful ways by God, that he couldn't possibly really have a plan for you, then I would point out to you that the people that God uses over and over and over again, generation after generation in scripture, are the exact people who would feel like you do right now if they were told, God has big plans for you. David would have never believed that. the youngest of eight sons watching the sheep on the hillside. Moses would have never believed that, a shepherd of 40 years out in the desert. Rahab would have never believed that, a prostitute in a forgotten city of Jericho. So if that's how you feel this morning, you're in good company. So these good works are for everyone. And if we want to know what are our good works, what can I do? How do I know this to be true? How do I begin to apply myself? I would make these points because I think we find our good works rooted in these truths. I would make these two points. First, everyone matters to someone. Everyone matters to someone. There are people in your life that if you said something nice to them, it would lift them up. If you said something harsh to them, it would tear them down. There are people in your life, whether you know it or not, who are watching you to determine how they should act in certain situations. There are people in your job, at your workplace, and you might not even know this, but they might know that you go to church. And when something happens in the company, when an email goes out, when a meeting happens, when someone goes long or someone says something snide, there are people who are looking at you to determine how a Christian reacts. Everybody matters to somebody. And everybody excels at something. Everyone is good at something. You might not feel like you're good at something, but I'm telling you, everyone is good at something. These last two years, I've gone to Mexico. I've been to Mexico three years in a row, but the last two years, there's been a guy come on the trip named Jacob Gutierrez. Jacob is the son of one of our great grace partners, and their family comes down every year. And Jacob's 24 years old, and he struggles with Down syndrome. And so when Jacob is there, there are some things that he feels like he can't do. There are some ways that he feels like he can't contribute like everyone else. There are some things that he feels like, man, I don't excel at that. But two years in a row, we've sat around the circle at the end of the night. If you've been on a mission trip, you know the circle, man. It's the same circle everywhere on every continent. You work all day, you get to the end of the day, you sit around because you're Christians and you sing songs and then somebody shares the devotion and then you ask the question, all right, what happened today? What did you see today? Let's talk about today. Let's kind of decompress, okay? And so I've seen two years in a row with Jacob in that circle, somebody say, man, I've learned so much from Jacob being here. And I learned it too. And as I watched him interact with everybody this week, I saw a guy with unfailing sweetness and kindness to other people. I saw a guy who never ever acted like he was in a conversation he didn't want to be in. Who never acted like he didn't have time for somebody. Who was never not interested in what somebody was saying. I saw a guy who, if you asked him to stay up all night talking to you, he would, about nothing. I saw a guy that loved people really well. And two years in a row, I'm not making this up, this isn't speaker embellishment, I'm telling you the truth. Two years in a row, I've come home with this indelible impression and thought, man, I need to be more like Jacob. Everybody matters to someone and everybody excels at something. So even if you think, gosh, I'm not sure that I have anything to offer in the kingdom of God. Yes, you do. There are people watching you and there are things that you are good at. We all have our comfort zone. So the question becomes, not do I have good works, but Father, what are my good works? What are my good works? What have you purposed me to do? What do you want me to do? I think a good way to answer that question is to start with, who are the people that I matter to, and what are the things that I feel like I'm okay at? What are the things that I feel like I excel at? You could say, what are the things that people affirm in you? You could say, what are the things that you're passionate about? What are the things that tick you off that make you want to make a change? But I think the most reasonable question for all of us to ask this morning, our Father, what are my good works? What have you designed me and purposed me to do? What am I gifted to do? What am I purposed to do? And there's an answer for everybody. So I would tell you this as your pastor, or if you're visiting as just a guy, that if you were to ask me, what's God's will for my life? I would ask you, I don't know. What are your good works? What has he designed you to do? And this is a layered question because sometimes this means for all of life. This means overarching call on life. My good work, I feel right now, is to be a pastor. And I think that that's gonna be a lifelong call. I hope that it is, that that's my good work. And so sometimes when we ask that, we're asking for this big overarching question. And sometimes God gives us that answer and sometimes he doesn't yet. So the more pertinent question is, God, what are my good works right now? What would you have me do right now? Father, I'm content if I don't get the five-year answer. I'm content if you don't give me the 10-year plan. God, what would you have me do right now? What are my good works right now? And then we ask that question. Say, Father, what are my good works and how do I walk in them? What have you designed me to do and how do I walk in them? And I'm grateful at Grace that we have examples of people all over the place who are walking in their good works. I think of Cindy Hayes. She's right here. Everyone look at her. She's right there in the third row. She's super embarrassed right now. Yeah, she's the best. If you're friends with Cindy, ask her about the nickname that she got in Mexico. I will not say it, Cindy. I will not say it, but you should ask her because it's funny. For about nine or 10 years, Cindy has served on our personnel committee. Cindy has a background in HR. She's been doing that her whole career. She's sharp and smart and has kept us legal and has told me many times since I got here, Nate, you cannot do that. That is illegal. Like you will, you'll take the church down in flames with you if you do that. Do not do that. And behind the scenes has protected us and guided us and seen us through hirings and seen us through dismissals and seen us through policy changes. And she did that for about nine or 10 years and just recently stepped off. So I wanted us first to pause and say thank you to Cindy for doing that for us. But I would tell you that for that period of time in her life, that was her good work to walk in. She was doing what God designed her to do. And it probably didn't feel like that to her. It probably didn't feel, she wouldn't have said at the beginning of those nine years, this is my good work and I'm gonna walk in it, Lord. That's probably not what she would have said, but that's what she did. That was her unique talent that she had to offer to God's kingdom and she built a church that way. I watched while we were in Mexico this last week, a guy came with us named Nate, and he's a carpenter. And we went down, and Nate had, he had his wrist was hurt. It was taped up. I think he was faking it to get out of work, but really milking it for some sympathy. But he couldn't pick up things on the job site, and so they told him, man, you can't come to the job site. But back at where we were staying, there was supposedly a wood shop that was filled with clutter and filth and trash and little bits of wood and sawdust and tools that were disassembled and in disrepair. And it was a totally useless space. And Nate decided that that week, what he was going to do is turn that into a usable wood shop for those folks. And by the time he left, that space looked like a professional wood shop. He built shelves. He sorted wood. He threw things away. He assembled tools. He lined it up. He showed the guys how to use the different tools. He told them this was dangerous. You need to sell it as fast as you can. Don't do this. And by the time he left, that place looked like a professional wood shop. And what I know for sure is he had some help. He had some dummies like me carrying wood and going, where do I put it? But we added no talent to the equation. So what I know is that if Nate had not gone, that would not have gotten done. And so that week, that was his good work to walk in. And I really do think that life is just as simple as, Father, what are my good works? And how can I walk in them? And can I share with you what happens when we'll do this for a lifetime? If you'll be a person who will just ask God faithfully, what are my good works? And how do I walk in them? My mom all passed away some years ago. I'm Southern, so I have a mom all. And for the last year of her life, I had the privilege of meeting with her every other Monday to have coffee with her. And as we would meet and spend time together, I learned about who she was. She was a woman, she had an older sister named Ann. My grandma's name was Linda. And Linda was convinced that Ann was more talented than her. She sang in like the school plays. She was prettier than her. All the boys paid attention to Ann and none of the boys paid attention to Linda. My papa actually met her by hitting on Ann. Ann said she was taken and he said, do you have a sister? And she goes, yeah. She's working down the street. So he goes down the street, and they dance together. And he said the first time he felt her in his arms, he knew that this was the one, which is just great because they were together for their whole life. She always felt like kind of the fading flower, the one in the background. She felt overshadowed by her sister. She never wanted to be in the spotlight. My grandfather, Don, had a huge personality. He would fill a room. Everybody loved him, and she was always playing the supporting role to him. Her children, some of them, had a big personality. She was always playing the supporting role to them. She didn't come to know the Lord until later in life. She started having babies at 19. She had four kids. And then somewhere in her late 20s, early 30s, she came to know the Lord because one of her children started going to the local church. And she never thought she had anything to offer. This little, she's tiny, diminutive woman. But she just loved the people that were in front of her. And even though she was never in public, even though she never had the spotlight, one time I remember she felt like her good work was to take a group of teenagers to Peru. The church was taking a mission trip to Peru. She was in her 60s, and she was like, yeah, I'll take them. And she just went. Everybody was shocked. What in the world? So when I did her funeral, even though she was a woman who never had any spotlight, who never felt like she had anything to offer, there was 400 people there. There was a whole section of young families that were representatives of the girls in Peru that she took, who years later said, we want to come honor Miss Linda. She worked at First Union at the time as a bank teller for years. She hadn't been there for 15 years. There's a whole section of people that she worked with who said, we want to honor Miss Linda. There's people coming out of the woodwork saying, we want to honor this woman because she loved us well. And her family, we had no idea that she was this loved. And it made an indelible impact on me. And to me, that's the evidence of a life lived. Saying, Father, what is my good work? And how do I walk in it? And that's what I want you to do too. We don't have to know, God, what's your will for me? What are the plans that you have for me for forever? He might tell us that, he might not. But if we want to know God's will for our life, it begins with that question. What are the good works that you created me for and how can I begin to walk in them? If you need a jump start on these good works, we have sheets in your seats to volunteer here at Grace. And I want to be very careful with this. I did not preach this sermon to get you to volunteer here, okay? I didn't do that. If your vision for what are the good works that I have to walk in is ushering, then you need better vision, man. You need a bigger view than that. Don't laugh too hard, slide guy. It's bigger than that too. It's a bigger vision than that. I'm not talking about how we can all volunteer here, but I will say if you've been coming here, particularly if you started within the last 12 months and you're not plugged in yet to a service team, this is a great way to get plugged in, a great way to get your foot in the door. And if you're asking the question, what are my good works? And you're not sure, a great start is to begin to volunteer somewhere. The last church that I attended without getting paid to show up was a church called Greystone back home. And when I went, I just wanted to get plugged in. And so I said, I don't know what my good works are here, Father, but I'm going to start ushering. I signed up to do that. That led to helping with the students. That led to a small group. That led to a staff position. We never know what's going to happen. But I want you to be people who walk in the good works that God created for you. If you need help getting started with those, we have the service sheets in your seats. The things that are highlighted in red are things that we need particularly right now. I would also mention that not listed on the sheet is a missions team that you can join. So if you're interested in doing that, you can just write that at the bottom. But if you're not plugged in yet or you have questions about that, fill that out. And in a few minutes, Kyle's gonna come up and pray for us and we're gonna do the offering. You can drop that in the basket when it comes by or especially if you're watching online, you can go to our super great website and go to gracerother.org slash service teams and we have a form there that you can fill out. But let us be people who ask God, Father, what are my good works and how do I walk in them? Let's pray. Father, we love you. You're good to us. You watch out for us. You care for us. Father, we know that you have a plan for us. I pray that you would give us the faith to believe that, the courage to ask what our good works are and the obedience to walk in them. God, I pray if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, that they would come to know you. Lord, I also pray for anybody here that may just be feeling a little tired, a little run down. Would you energize them? Would you let them know today in some way that speaks directly to their heart that you care about them? Father, would you use us in incredible ways to build your kingdom and serve your purpose? It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

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

Good morning, I'm Doug Bergeson. Wait, wait, you've got to be kidding me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it just a few months ago when Kyle Tolbert, our youth pastor, came up here to speak? And before he uttered a word, before a single word, good or bad, was out of his mouth, you were applauding him. What do I get? I'll tell you what I get. I get bubkis, nada, nothing. Let me tell you something. It's not lost on us, those of us who are asked to speak in the middle of July, but never ever at Christmas time, and for sure not at Easter. It's not lost on us that we're not on God's A-team. We get it. We're not stupid. So given that, it might be nice if you tried to be a little bit more encouraging and supportive. So let's try this again. I would not have done that. You know, the Bible's very clear that we're to test and approve what we hear, to be discerning about what's being taught, not just to accept it willy-nilly. And here you all are already clapping for me, and you haven't the faintest idea what I'm going to say. Come on, people, you're better than that. Anyways, hopefully it's obvious that I'm just goofing around, as I'm not only thrilled to be here, but I feel immense privilege to be sharing this morning. And just for the record, far from expecting applause, my desperate and sincere prayer and hope is that God will make what I say clear and useful to you all. I'm really excited about this new sermon series that we're starting. In the past, when I've been asked to speak, I've always kind of hemmed and hawed, wanted to think about it. But when Nate called me this time and explained that the new series was going to be on the obscure heroes of the Bible, I was, for some strange reason, I was enthused, and I immediately jumped at the chance. A big part of it might be that it's just different than the norm, and different is sometimes really good. Mix it up a little bit, move off the beaten path. But more than simply serving as a nice change of pace, there's a much more consequential reason for studying these obscure heroes. They have a lot to teach us. Now, there are plenty of times when I wish the Bible was easier to understand and didn't avoid so many questions that I'd like answers to. Wish that it explained a whole bunch of things better. A little less ambiguity and mystery would sometimes be nice. But in response to that wish, I've heard it said that God, whose Spirit inspired every word written, must have included what He thought was important, what He thought we needed to know. So rather than worrying about the stuff that wasn't included, we'd be much better served paying attention to the things and those people and those events that God did include in his word to us. And that brings us back to our sermon series. God saw fit to tell us about these characters and their stories. And for that reason, we are not going to ignore or gloss over or relegate these heroes to a footnote any longer. Instead, we're going to exploit them for all their worth and see what they can teach us, what they can reveal to us, how they might strengthen and encourage us. The Apostle Paul said it this way, for everything that was written in the past, even obscure heroes that maybe we've never heard of, was written to teach us so that through endurance and the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. As I said, I was surprisingly enthused when Nate called me. Not only was I pumped for the series, but one name immediately popped into my head and I knew that was my guy. That was who I was going to talk about, Gamaliel, the great Pharisee and teacher of the law, and what he wisely concluded when confronted by the incredible boldness and defiance of Peter and the other disciples in the earliest times of the Christian movement. Now, how many of you have heard of Gamaliel? You don't have to raise your hands. You know, just wink or smile as I look around the room. Nothing but a sea of blank, expressionless faces. That's perfect. But before we get to Gamaliel, I need to set the table a bit for you, provide the backdrop to help explain why what he does, what he acknowledges is so valuable to me, that his was the first name in all the Bible that popped into my head. In other words, I need to make sure that we're on the same page with respect to one significant foundational point in order for us to see why Gamaliel, who himself is not even a believer in Jesus Christ, is a hero for us today. The key foundational point is to identify the overarching story of the Bible. Some of you are probably going, oh, sheesh, we're not going to be out of here until Tuesday. Not to worry, not to worry. It's not that daunting a task. In a nutshell, the opening chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, reveal that God's loving intent was to provide all that we, His creations, need. Our job, our part of the bargain, is to trust that He is both able and willing to do that on our behalf, and for us to resist the temptation to want to decide for ourselves what's best. The rest of the Bible is just a long and involved telling of our incredible struggle to trust in God rather than ourselves, as well as the remarkable lengths God goes to to make it possible for us ultimately to place our full and abiding confidence in Him. Now, most of you are probably familiar with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The garden was a fantastic place. Those two have a great life. It's a really sweet setup. There's only one rule, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now, growing up in church, I didn't fully understand the significance of the boundary God established for humankind. My general sense was, you know, God likes rules. He's kind of a stickler about rules. And Adam and Eve got in pretty big trouble because they broke one of them. Well, as I've later come to understand, what actually happened was a much bigger deal than simply breaking a rule. What actually happened struck at the very heart of God's intent for creation. In allowing them to eat from any tree but the one, God was establishing the critical boundary for Adam and Eve and for every human since. God was saying, if you want to enjoy all of the good of my creation and live in my kingdom, you have to trust that I and I alone know what's best for you. And even more than that, you have to trust that I'm both able and willing to provide it to you. And so the questions that's faced Adam and Eve, as well as you and me, is do you believe that? Are you convinced that God knows what's best for you and that He is intent on providing it at all times and in all circumstances? When Eve first faced that question, the fate of all humanity hung in the balance. And what did she decide? Well, it turns out Eve wasn't completely convinced that God could be trusted. And she decided and felt the need to trust in someone else. Eve, that's who she decided to trust. She just trusted in herself instead. And now the serpent was cunning and planted the seed in Eve's mind that although God was certainly able to provide what was best for her, He wasn't willing but was holding something back. The serpent said, come on, Eve, you won't die. God's only worried that if you eat that fruit, you'll be like Him and be able to decide for yourself what's best, then you'll be your own God. And that has been humankind's struggle ever since. In the last book of the Bible, Revelation, it wasn't a question of God was willing to provide for his people, but if he was even able. Written at a time when Christ followers were just undergoing terrific persecution, with their very lives at stake, the facts on the ground were so difficult and so dire that only a nut job would conclude that somehow God was still in control and still in charge. And into that terrifically difficult and stressful situation, the Apostle John shared a vision of being transported up to the throne room of heaven where God sort of pulls back the curtain for a second just to show what's really going on behind the scenes. The message, no matter how things look from your perspective, I am God and there is no other. I have your back now and I have it for all eternity. Nothing can ever separate you from my loving care. Your faith and trust are well placed. God is asking each of us, do you believe, are you completely convinced that I'm both able and willing to provide the very best for you? That's the central question running throughout the entire Bible, and it's the central question of our human existence. But our struggle, our temptation, is to say in all different ways, well, God, to tell you the truth, in this particular area of my life, or in this particular relationship, or in this circumstance at this particular time, I'd like to have a say. I'd rather decide for myself what's best for me, what will make me most content, most comfortable, most safe, most fulfilled, most affirmed, most successful, most happy. After all, wouldn't I know better than anyone else what's in my best interest? That's exactly what Eve did. That's exactly what I do. And that is the root of all sin, a failure to trust in God's promise. We're just not entirely convinced, not enough to give up complete control. A famous passage from Proverbs that many of you probably know by heart is, trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight. But that's not easy. Our world and our culture constantly bombard us from every conceivable angle with arguments that God, even if he does exist, is neither able or willing to provide what's best for us. That life demands we take charge and we're better off when we do. Non-stop appeals to be our own little lords of our own little lives. Now we're going to do a little audience participation here for just a minute. I'd like you all to close your eyes. Alan, keep your eyes closed. Okay. Imagine that you're on the seventh floor of an office building. You are alone, and it's dark. An electrical short circuit has knocked out the lights and started an intense fire, which has engulfed the entire floor and will soon breach the room you're in. The smoke coming in under the door and through the vents is overwhelming, forcing you to drop to your knees. Your eyes are burning and you're beginning to cough uncontrollably. You can open your eyes now. Suddenly, off to your right, you hear a violent pounding on the outside of the far wall. Then the blade of an axe comes crashing through and soon the shape of a firefighter appears in the opening and he shouts, come on, follow me, I'll get you out. Wouldn't he be surprised if you yelled back, oh, thanks, buddy. I'm good. I got this. Of course, no one would do that. No one trapped and on the brink of perishing would respond that way. We would not only listen to the firefighter's commands, we would literally cling to him. We would follow his every word because we implicitly trust him. Not only does he know what he's doing, but he went to great lengths to find and rescue us. And it's plain as day that we desperately need his help. My illustration borders on the ludicrous because we'd never do that. Yet that's what we say to God all the time. I'm good. I got this. Now maybe some of us hear this illustration and say, that's not me. I'm good at trusting. My faith is rock solid. Maybe that's true, at least on the surface. But even for those of us who trust God fully in most areas of our lives, I bet that there are little nooks and crannies. I appreciated you using that earlier. Little pockets where we don't. A relationship, a decision, a priority, a behavior, perhaps, for which we're not convinced God's preferred course of action serves us best. So we plot the course by our own wisdom. We decide for ourselves what's best. And when we do that, we forfeit some portion of the abundant life that God so desperately wants for us. Sadly, doubting God's promises, not being fully convinced that he is both able and willing to provide the best for me in all of life's situations, happens far more than I even recognize. The decision to trust in my own judgment is typically very subtle. So subtle, in fact, that I don't even realize that I'm doing it much of the time. I'll share an example from my own life, but first I have to give you some context. Twenty-six years ago, we moved down here from New Jersey. I quit a really good job on Wall Street. We sold our dream house that we only lived in for two years. We left our beautiful little town and all our friends. We had a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a newborn. We moved for a lot of reasons, but chief among them was my concern that it was all too consuming and that only over time does the true cost of that kind of investment in one's career become apparent? And by that point, it's often too late. The damage has been done. I believe back then, as I still do today, that wherever your treasure is, wherever you invest most of your time, your energy, your ambition, that's where your heart will ultimately be found. And I knew that for me, I couldn't keep doing that job in that city for very long without it, for all practical purposes, becoming my treasure and stealing my heart. Okay, so we did everything they tell you not to do all at the same time. Moved to a different part of the country, changed careers, sold houses, bought houses, had another baby. Deb had just turned 33, and I was 35. The plan was that I would invest our modest nest egg in the financial markets to support our new downsized life, and we'd live happily ever after. Now, fast forward 15 years. I'm meeting Jeff Hancock, who is Grace's teaching pastor at Carolina Ale House. I think it was on a Wednesday afternoon because that's when they had their specials. It's true. Jeff and I had a relationship built largely on a strong and abiding shared love of beer and for the places that happen to serve beer. Is there any stronger foundation for a friendship? Nevertheless, that was ours. So we'd get together every so often. And that particular afternoon, as soon as I sat down, Jeff asked if there was something wrong. And I started weeping and began to share with him how I was in the midst of suffering what for me was a breathtaking financial loss in the futures market. How I couldn't sleep, how it had stolen all of my joy, how it affected all of my personal interactions, including my most cherished ones with my wife and kids. Excuse me. With the child in college and two in high school, how it jeopardized everything Deb and I had planned. That loss was wreaking havoc in my life. Now, I shared with Jeff that afternoon that, yes, I was obviously sad to have lost so much of our nest egg at such a critical time. Yes, I was sorry for my stubbornness, my stupidity. Yes, I was sorry for my arrogance not to respect the markets. All that was true. Yet the reason I was weeping, what most undid me, was what the loss revealed about where I placed my trust. How it betrayed the fact that much of my confidence, my security, and my hope was wrapped up in our little nest egg, and that the notion that I trusted God was clearly not true, if not a bald-faced lie. And that is what makes it so tricky, because a lot of the time our struggles to trust are in those gray areas, things which in and of themselves don't strike us being all that bad or sinful. Nevertheless, we are not doing what God is asking us to do, to trust him with everything and in every situation. We simply aren't convinced that his way is always the best way. In answer to his question, do you believe that I am both able and willing to provide all that you need, we are saying no, not always. In the example I just shared from my own life, my answer was clearly no, I'm not completely convinced. In addition to trusting you, I would like my nest egg back. When we worry about things, even very serious things, we are wrestling with the question, will I trust God with my crisis? Is He capable to handle it on my behalf? Once again, our worrying says no, as it reveals that we're simply not convinced that God can handle the situation, or at least not to our satisfaction. According to the Bible, worry is the opposite of trust. When we choose not to forgive someone, contrary to God's clear desire and instruction, what are we doing? In not so many words, we are saying, I don't believe that God knows what's best for me. What about how we spend our money? I like to think that I include God in those discussions. But what I really do is only involve him in the discussion about the small portion that I might realistically earmark for charity. Concerning the other much bigger chunk, the 80, 90, or 95%, I say, wait just a second, God. Stay in your lane, buddy. I gave you some. This over here is for me to decide what to do. Scripture encourages us to confess our sins to one another, even and perhaps especially the deepest, darkest, and most shameful ones. My immediate response is to say, no, thank you, over my dead body. No way can that possibly be in my best interest. We're encouraged as believers to always be prepared to share why our hope is in Jesus Christ. I don't do it. I don't want to offend this person or turn them off. I don't want to be thought a weirdo or a creep. I'm a confident person generally. I'll share my opinion on almost any topic with almost anyone. But for some strange reason, I don't trust that God will have my back if I share my faith. God says be thankful at all times and in all circumstances. But I don't want to always be thankful, and there just so happens to be things in my life that I'm not thankful for. Yet having a spirit of appreciation and thankfulness is one command of God's that I've come to acknowledge clearly leads to joy and abundant life. I think of the people I know who are most pleasant and encouraging to be around, the ones that are most nutritious for me. Almost without exception, there are people who live life in a spirit of thanksgiving. The old saying is true, it's not happy people who are thankful, it's thankful people who are happy. Ironically, even knowing this, there are still times when I choose to defy God's good intent for my life and instead choose the way of the woe-is-me, self-pitting grumpus. Now, I could go on and on, but if each of us took a deep dive into our motivations for doing some things and not others, for worrying about things over which we have little control, for habitually engaging in certain behaviors or responding in certain ways, for placing so much importance on what others think, we would understand more clearly that, at least in those instances, we're not fully convinced that God always has our best interests at heart or that His way is always best, that He is completely trustworthy in all of life's circumstances, that He is intent on giving us life to the full, the life that is truly life, if only we would trust. And that, at long last, brings us to our hero, Gamaliel. What he offers is a simple proof, evidence to bolster our conviction that the God we worship deserves our full confidence and trust. I've never been a fan of belief for belief's sake. Don't care how sincere it might be. In other words, if I'm going to believe that God always has my best interest at heart and is able and willing to provide it to me, I want it to be true. More than that, I need to be convinced that it's true if I'm ever going to fully trust in it. Otherwise, as we've seen this morning, I'm going to succumb to the temptation to lean on my own wisdom and judgment. This is where the battle lines are drawn and the war for my trust is waged. And this is where Gamaliel's cool logic and reasoning come through in the clutch. Now let's go to the story in the book of Acts and jump into the action. Our story takes place in Jerusalem, not long after the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. The Christian church is in its infancy and growing rapidly. The Jewish establishment is nervous and on edge. The disciples, Peter and John, have just healed a beggar who had been crippled from birth. Everyone was amazed, and when Peter saw their reaction, he said, men of Israel, why does this surprise you? Why do you stare at us as if it's by our own power or godliness that we had made this man walk? You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this. By faith in the name of Jesus, the man you see and know was made strong. It is in Jesus' name and the faith that comes through him that has given this complete healing to him, as you can all see. While they were still speaking, the Jewish leaders, none too pleased with Peter and John's message, arrested them and threw them in jail for the night. The next day, they were brought before their rulers and elders and teachers of the law who questioned them about the healing. By what power or what name did you do this? And Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, replied, Let me interrupt our story for just a second to point out what remarkable change can happen in the hearts and minds of ordinary men and women when convinced of God's truth and imbued with His Spirit. Just a short time ago, these same disciples were the gang that couldn't shoot straight, timid and wavering, untrusting, unreliable, and unconvinced. Now look, there's hope for all of us. Now back to our story. The Jewish leaders were astonished by the courage of Peter and John, especially when they realized they were ordinary unschooled guys and weren't sure what to do as they had to admit that the healing was a fantastic, outstanding miracle which they couldn't deny. And they couldn't really punish them because everybody was running around praising God because of that miracle. So they issued some threats and ordered Peter and John not to speak about this Jesus. However, even after the imprisonment and threats, the disciples continued to preach, teach, and heal until the high priest and his associates could not stand it any longer and arrested them again. But that night, an angel of the Lord opened the doors of the jail in order the disciples to go back to the temple and tell the people the full message of this new life. When all the rulers assembled the next morning and sent for Peter and John, they were surprised to learn that although the jail was locked and secure, nobody was inside. The Bible says they were puzzled by this. I love the understatement. I bet they were puzzled when they later learned that the men were back in the temple court preaching and teaching. They went and got them, but not by force for fear of what the people might do. The high priest again questioned them, and now reading from Acts 5, 28 through 39. This is the high priest. We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, he said. Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man's blood. Peter and John and the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him. When they heard this, they were furious and wanted to put them to death. But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law who was honored by all the people, stood up in the Sanhedrin and ordered that the men be put outside for a little while. Then he addressed them, men of Israel, consider carefully what you intend to do to these men. Some time ago, Thudas appeared, claiming to be someone, and about 400 men rallied to him. He was killed, and all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing. After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too wasailed, and the apostles were let go. And now here, for you all this morning, is the $64,000 question of the day. If Gamaliel, the wisest and most esteemed teacher of the day, could be here with us this morning, is there any doubt that he would conclude if their purpose is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men. You will only find yourselves fighting against God. Well, it hasn't been stopped. There has been nothing like it in all of human history. No other power or movement or belief system has come close. Down through all the centuries, across every people group and culture on earth, and reaching the furthest corners of our planet, God has been on the move, faithful to all his promises. The prophet Isaiah wrote about God's faithfulness this way. and my thoughts than your thoughts. As the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth. It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. And that's why Gamaliel is a hero to me. His wisdom and insight remind me again that God is true to his word always and is going to do what he promised to do. If I'm going to trust God completely and not rely on my own wisdom, but surrender control in all areas of my life, not just some of them, I need that assurance. Our God is both able and willing to provide all that we need. My hope and prayer for all of us this morning is that the words of the Apostle Paul might be our words. I know whom I have believed, and I'm convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day. Thank you. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for loving us. Thank you for all these people who carved out time on a hot Sunday morning to come to know you better and to worship you. Lord, thank you for pursuing us. Obviously, forgive us for all the times that we are trust wavers. We're simply not convinced that you're completely trustworthy in all of life's situations. Thank you for the hope that you give us through your son. And it's his name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, First Service. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. It's so good to see all of you. Thanks for being here on this May Sunday, on the last Sunday of our regular schedule. Next Sunday for Memorial Day weekend, we're going to go to our summer schedule and have one service that meets at 10 o'clock through the summer, and then we'll kick in two services again after Labor Day when things pick back up in September. So I'm kind of looking forward to the one big family feel that we can afford ourselves over the summer and the things that that's going to provide for us. So I'm excited about that. So again, next Sunday, 10 o'clock, if you get here at the 9.30 time, then we'll just hang out with you until the service starts. And my feelings won't be hurt if you leave 30 minutes early. Like right when the sermon starts, you just bolt because that's been your hour. That's fine. But that's going to be our summer schedule. I'm excited about that. This morning is the second part in our series about the Holy Spirit called The Forgotten God, because we talk a lot about God the Father. We learn a lot about God the Son. But in some church circles, in a lot of church circles, we often forget about the Holy Spirit. And so we wanted to take four weeks and slow down and focus our energy and our effort and our intellect on the Holy Spirit and what he does for us and what his ministry is to us. So last week, we started off by looking at this absurd statement that Jesus makes in John chapter 16, when he tells the disciples, and by extension us, hey, it's better for you that I go, that you don't have my physical presence next to you all the time, because if I don't go, then you will not receive the helper or the comforter that we know as the Holy Spirit. And that feels absurd, because we talked about, man, how much different would life be if we had Jesus right next to us all the time? But then we went through the reasons that that's true. And what we discovered is that it's better to have the Spirit because the Spirit is omnipresent and with us all the time. If I want to be in the presence of the Spirit and the Spirit is at your house, I don't have to convince Him to come to my house. He's in me. We are the temples of the Spirit. So He's with us all the time. And then we realize that the role or the job of the Spirit is to continue the ministry of Jesus, both through us in the form of spiritual gifts that we're going to talk about this morning, and to us as He grows us and sanctifies us. It takes us through the process of becoming more like God in character. That's his ministry to us. That's the roles of the Spirit that we're going to talk about next week. And then the last week, we're going to answer a really difficult question. How do we synthesize what we've learned about the Spirit with what we've experienced of the Spirit? Because sometimes those aren't the same things. But this week, we're looking at the spiritual gifts, how the Holy Spirit continues the ministry of Jesus through us. To do that, I want us to think about the idea of this word privilege, okay? And I don't mean privilege in the politically charged, like CNN, Fox way, where individuals may or may not be more than others. I don't mean that. I mean it in just the good old-fashioned way of, man, what a privilege this is to be doing this thing. When I think about privilege, I thought about a couple of weeks ago, somebody in the church, one of our great grace partners, who is now incidentally my favorite grace partner, emailed me and said, hey man, I've got four tickets to the Champions Club at PNC Arena for the Carolina Hurricanes' last home game. If they win this game, we may go to the playoffs. They're probably going to clinch the playoffs at this game. Would you like to come and bring some staff members? Yes, I would. I would love to. I don't care what sport is playing. When you say Champions Club with free buffet, I'm there. It can be women's field hockey. I'm in. Let's go. Right? So I went. We brought a couple other folks with us. And we get there. And you walk through the arena. Well, first of all, you park like right outside the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks. This is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in. You're walking through the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks, this is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in, you're walking through the arena, and then you get to this part where they have a concierge like behind these booths, and they're very important. And you give them like blood and urine and social security, and then they let you in, right? They let you in. And then once you're in, it's carpeted, and there's fireplaces and mahogany, and it is swanky, man. And then they have these buffets of food, so you don't have to pay $12 for the Cruddy Stadium Burger. Like, you get the buffet right there. And then all the ice cream and cookies that you can eat. They give you little tickets to go to the bar and get you a drink if that's what you want to do. You can, like, float out of there on Coke if you want to. It's amazing, right? And then you sit down. You get your food, and you go, and you sit down. And you're in these plush leather seats as you look at the ice and then the other peasants that don't get to sit where you get to sit. And this really ruined me. I don't think I can ever watch a hockey game with poor people again. But it was just an incredible experience, right? And, like, towards the end of the game, the team that they needed to lose lost, and the Hurricanes were winning, and then they scored another goal to kind of cinch the game, and the whole crowd knows, oh my goodness, we're going to the playoffs. I haven't been to the playoffs in a long time, so the place is going nuts, and it was super fun, and it was a really kind of electric atmosphere to be in. And the whole time, I thought, my goodness, I don't deserve this. This is too nice for me. You know, there's a proverb where Solomon says, if the king invites you to dinner, don't look at the food. Like, don't get used to that. That's going to suck you in. Like, don't get used to that. Keep your eye on what you can afford for yourself. And the whole time, I'm trying to remember this proverb, don't get used to this because you're one of those people, right? You don't deserve to be here. And then I thought, man, there are other people who love the Hurricanes so much that this would be a huge deal for them to be able to be a part of this excitement. And I'm not a Hurricanes fan. I mean, I watched the playoff games. I cheered for them. But I went to the gift shop that night and thought, I should get something And then I looked at like the $26 hat and I thought, I don't want this $26 worth. I want this about $12 worth. So then I left. So like, I'm not even a fan, but I get to be here, part of this electricity. And I realized, man, what a privilege this is. Because a privilege is something that you haven't earned and you don't deserve, but you get to experience anyways. You get invited into this experience anyways. And you guys have had different privileges in your life. We could probably all tell stories about times when we got to do a thing or meet a person or be in a conversation or have an experience that we kind of looked around and thought, gosh, I don't deserve to be here. This is really incredible. So as we think about this idea of privilege, life has some pretty great privileges. I think of parenthood. Parenthood's a phenomenal privilege, isn't it? We have a three-year-old daughter named Lily. And daily I'm reminded of the privilege that it is to be her parent. Like I'm the one that gets to watch her. Like right now we're learning to go to the bathroom the right way. And so she's celebrating and she gets her M&Ms and she's figuring that out on her own. And like we get to celebrate that with her and be happy with her as she does that. We're the ones that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, we get to comfort her. We're the ones that when she's scared, she runs to. When she gets here for the second service, she's going to see me and yell, Dad, and she's going to run to me, and it's going to be really fun. And what a great privilege it is to be the recipient of those hugs. And if you're a parent, then you know that parenthood is one of life's great privileges. Well, I want to submit to you this morning this idea that ministry is one of life's great privileges. Ministry, being involved in the building of the church, is one of life's great privileges. And here's what I mean. Jesus spent three years on this earth. He could have come into adulthood, lived a perfect life, died on the cross for us and go to heaven, but he spent three extra years on this earth, I am convinced, to train the disciples to do ministry, to build the church, to leave to them the keys to the kingdom and say, this is my kingdom on earth. It is your responsibility to grow it and nourish it and grow others and love people towards me. And then the disciples trained the next generation, and then they changed the generation after that. And it got passed on down as this holy responsibility, a holy mantle that we carry until each living generation of Christians, it becomes our responsibility to carry the mantle of ministry. That's why Peter says in his letters at the end of the New Testament that we, Christians, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then Peter tells you that you are a part of a holy priesthood, that you are a chosen nation, that you are cut from the same quarry as Abraham and David and Moses, and that it is your responsibility to carry on the ministry of Jesus. And when I talk about ministry this morning, it's an important thing to understand. I don't mean something that's organized. I don't mean vocational ministry, going pro and getting paid to be a Christian. I don't mean it like that. I don't mean something that's organized where you have to volunteer for something. I don't mean structured ministry. When I think of ministry, I think true ministry is simply loving others towards Jesus. When I say that we get invited into ministry by Jesus, when we get called to holy priesthood, when we get told that we are the torchbearers to carry on the legacy of the church, all I mean is nothing structured. All I mean is simply loving others towards Jesus. That's how we talk about ministry at Grace. That's what that means. And I believe it to be one of the great privileges in life for several reasons. One reason is this is God, the creator of the universe, who created you and knows the number of hairs on your head, who knows everything that's ever happened, and he is chiefly concerned with his kingdom and bringing other people into his kingdom and into a knowledge of him. That's his chief concern. That's what he wants. That's the whole reason you're left on this earth after you become a Christian is to bring as many people to heaven with you as you go, to love as many people towards Jesus with you as you possibly can on your way to spend eternity with God. That's the reason that we are here. And in ministry, Jesus has invited you in to participate in that plan. He's given you a front row seat to the most important thing happening in the universe. And here's the deal. He's going to get it done. The church is going to grow. And I hate to say it this way because I don't want to be overly flippant about it, but the church is going to grow with or without you. The church doesn't need your talent. Church doesn't need your money. Church doesn't need your intelligence. God doesn't need your ability. He's going to grow up with or without you. He's definitely going to grow up with or without me. But he's invited us in to participate in what he's doing. And that, to me, is amazing. He's invited us in to be conduits of the love that he shows us. He shows us a perfect love that is boundless, that is reckless, that knows nothing that can stop it. Nothing can take us away from that love. He offers that love to us and he invites us to be conduits of that love as we show it to other people. And I believe ministry to be one of life's great privileges because one of our biggest fears in life is to live a life that doesn't matter, right? One of our biggest fears in life, what all people do and what I've experienced in my friends and in my parents and in people that I've seen hit the back nine of life. I don't know how you define that. I don't want to throw out a decade and make anybody feel old. So people who begin to think about their legacy once they get through their really productive years, what do they always begin to think about? What's my legacy? What am I going to leave behind? What kind of difference has my life made? We want to know that we matter, and ministry ensures that our life matters. There's this great quote. I heard it from D.L. Moody, but it's attributed to a bunch of different people. But he said, one of the most tragic things in life you'll see is for someone to spend their entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. Ministry insulates us against that. It makes us matter. It's an offer from God. Here's something that you can invest your life in that will matter for all of eternity. Here's a way to ensure that when you die one day and you look back on your life, you can be sure that you're sure that you're sure that it mattered that you invested your life well because he's invited you into the process of loving other people towards him. And I think that this promise, this insurance that our life will matter is incredibly important and maybe increasingly so in a world that lurches for ways to matter in all kinds of ways and screams out to everyone paying attention, we just want to matter. Jen and I were in New York City this last week, and it was very fun. It was pretty much an eating vacation. I walked about 11 miles a day and gained four pounds, so I don't know how I managed to do that, but it was fun. And one of the things we noticed everywhere we went, and as girls, I don't mean to pick on girls, but it was girls. It was girls posing for Instagram pictures. Everywhere. Like every tourist site that we went to, Central Park, we went to this thing called the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and everywhere we went, there was a couple of girls who were dressed nicer than everybody else there, had on the makeup and the hair and the fake eyelashes and the whole deal, and they're posing. They got their friend taking pictures of them. And they're posing like for all of these candids, you know, like that kind of thing, you know, and they're kind of like doing their hair. And Jen and I just started like, we laugh at it. We find them and we're just sitting over there going in this hilarious. But after a while, it started to break my heart because you know what those girls are saying? I want to matter. I'm going to post this somewhere. Will you please tell me that I'm pretty? This is how I gain my sense of worth. Will you please tell me that I matter? And we all do that in one way or another. We all preen to matter in one way or another. We all lurch for significance in one way or another. And ministry says, here, here's a way to ensure that your life matters and that it matters for all eternity. And I think intuitively we know that ministry is one of life's great privileges. I talked to Jen, who a lot of you guys don't know this, but Jen for her entire adult life has poured into groups of young girls, middle school, high school age girls. And I asked her, what brings you joy? What have been your privileges as you've done ministry? And we talked about one of her close friends, this girl named Elizabeth. When Jen got out of college, she began to teach fifth grade. And when those fifth grade girls graduated from elementary school and moved into middle school, Jen started a Bible study for them, and they would meet in her classroom early one day. And one of those girls was named Elizabeth. And Jen's gotten to watch Elizabeth grow into a young woman who loves the Lord, into a young woman who leads her own Bible studies and her own discipleship groups and pours into young women on her own. And she tells those young girls who have never met Jen some of the things that Jen shared with her. And so now there's multi-generational love and wisdom going on because Jen had the opportunity to pour her life into those girls. And she still gets texts from them and calls from them. And she still gets to celebrate with them. And she still gets to mourn with them. And when you minister to people and when you love on people, you get invited into these situations that feel like such a privilege, like, my goodness, I don't deserve to be here. This is incredible. We know experientially that when we minister, when God uses us in the life of others, we come alive. That's why I think it's one of God's great privileges that he offers us to be in ministry. The deal with ministry, however, once we become Christians and God says, okay, go grow the church, is that we're grossly unqualified to grow the church. We are grossly and radically unqualified to do ministry because ministry requires supernatural power. Someone has to realize that they're a sinner, that they need Jesus, and then come to Jesus and repent. Ministry is hard. Sometimes ministry requires saying the exact right word at the exact right time. Sometimes loving on people requires you to say challenging things to them that are really difficult and awkward and uncomfortable to say. Sometimes it means that you have to apply grace to them and not say the thing that you want to say because they need more time to develop on your own. Sometimes ministry means discerning between spirits so we really know what's going on here. Sometimes it means being able to explain the Bible in ways that are really difficult or difficult concepts that we're not sure what they actually mean. Ministry is difficult. Ministry works kind of like your first job. For most of us, we went to college, and after we went to college, we got our job. And at college, what'd they tell you they were doing? We're preparing you to go into the workforce. We're preparing you for your job. And then you get to your job, which is most of the time outside of your major, and you begin to work, and you realize oh my gosh, they did not prepare me for the workforce. I got to figure this out. And you do on-the-job training, right? Spiritual gifts that the Spirit gives us so that we can do ministry are God's on-the-job training. This is why we have spiritual gifts. God has called each of us to minister. He's invited us into and bestowed upon us the privilege of ministry, and he's acknowledging that we are grossly inept for this ministry, kind of like me finishing that sentence. We don't have what it takes sometimes, right? And so God acknowledges you don't have the expertise you need to do the job I want you to do. So here, through the Spirit, is a gift to make you more effective at ministry. And this is where we get the spiritual gifts. Now, the spiritual gifts we see at different places in the Bible. There's four or five places in the New Testament where they pop up. There's two really definitive lists, kind of more authoritative lists that we see in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12. And in your notes there, I've listed out some of the gifts that I found in those passages. In 1 Corinthians 12, we have a longer list. We have wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous power, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation, apostleship, teaching, and administration. And then in Romans 12, we have some of those and then some extras, right? And so those are the lists of the gifts. And I would say this about the spiritual gifts that God gives to us. These are not exhaustive lists. I don't think that Paul's intention when he begins to write the spiritual gifts, who's the guy that wrote these books, I don't think his intention was to make an exhaustive list of the gifts. I don't think he was trying to list all of them for you. I think he's more giving you categories of what they could be. I think it's possible that there's more gifts outside of what's mentioned here. I don't think either list is definitive. I've seen places where guys try or girls try to make one list more authoritative than the other, and I don't think that it's fair to do that. My personal view is that there's no exhaustive list in the New Testament of what the gifts are. But these are what he gives us, and he gives us these gifts, the Spirit does, so that we can continue the ministry of Jesus. And now every time you talk about spiritual gifts, you really have two questions. There's really two questions that come up in the church. If this is your first time hearing about the spiritual gifts, then maybe you're already forming these questions. If not, then you know how to anticipate these questions. What are they? Like, what are the gifts? What do they mean? How do we define them? And which one's mine? Right? That's what we want to know. We want to know how do we define these gifts and which one are mine? Which one's mine? Well, to answer those questions first, how do we define these gifts? How do we explain them? Some of these are pretty self-explanatory, okay? When it says the gift of serving, you are smart adults, most of you. You don't need me to explain to you what that is. It would be patronizing to do it. The gift of hospitality, what's that? You don't need me to explain that to you. You know. And I don't think it would be a very wise investment of our time to go down the list of gifts and tell you how to define them. You're pretty smart. You can figure it out. If you don't, Google's the thing. There are some, however, that are more confusing. Usually people want to know about the gift of tongues. That's one that we've heard. People speak in sometimes known languages, sometimes languages that we don't know that sound like utterances. What's the deal with those? How do we figure those out? And then we also want to know about this gift of prophecy. What's that mean? What are prophets? Do we still have them? How does that work? And so because I don't have time in this sermon to talk about those, and because that's really not the point of this sermon, what I'm going to do this week, sometime this week, is I'm just going to write up my thoughts on what the gift of tongues is and what the gift of prophecy is and how those work. And I would invite you, if you look through these lists or you can think of others that you've always had questions about that you'd like to know more about, write that on your connection card and put that in the offering when it comes by or email me and I'll add those into what I write up. Now, please, you can mention them to me in the lobby afterwards, but I'm just telling you on Sundays I forget everything. So if you mention it to me, I'll go, yeah, that sounds great. And then it will not be written up. Okay, so email me or put it on the connection card and I'll give some more detail to those this week. That's how we're going to address how do we define the gifts. But then the other question is, what's mine, right? What's my gift? And we like this question because it's about us. This kind of feels like the personality test that we like to click on on Facebook, right? This is like, which friend are you? Are you Ross or Rachel or maybe Chandler? Like, what color is your personality? Like, what's your spirit animal? And we don't tell anybody. Like, we take the test and it says, do you want to publish to Facebook? Lord, no, I don't want to publish to Facebook. I don't know why. I don't want anybody to know that I actually spent 15 minutes doing this and learned that I was a horse. Like, that's not what we want to do. And so when we see spiritual gifts, we approach it the same way. Ooh, which one am I? And we actually did this, a church that I used to work at, we did a series on the Holy Spirit. And whenever you do a series on the Holy Spirit, you do a sermon on the spiritual gifts as part of the deal. And we covered it like that. And at the time I was younger in ministry and my job, what was assigned to me was to find a test that everybody could take so that we could send you to a website and you could take a test and then you would know how best to serve at that church. And it all felt just very self-serving and kind of ridiculous. And the truth of it is, when I got online to look for these tests, they were all stupid. There were none of them good. They were all ridiculous. I ended up calling them spiritual preference tests. What do you want to do? Everybody comes out with the gift of teaching, right? It's silly. And it was self-serving because the gifts are not about serving the local church. It's about serving the big C church. That's what they're for. And the more I looked at it and the more I examined the passages, the more I realized Paul's goal here is not to help you figure out which one you are. It's the reason why we spent 20 minutes on the introduction of ministry as an incredible privilege and the last 10 minutes on spiritual gifts when the sermon's supposed to be about spiritual gifts. Because guess what? It's not really about the spiritual gifts. If you look at the passages where he's talking about them, in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, in both passages, the context around the spiritual gifts is, hey, we are a body. We are the church, and we have a job. Incidentally, it's why at Grace we have partners, not members, because we believe that we are a part of the body and that we are partnering together for ministry, for the purpose of loving other people towards Jesus. And in both chapters where he talks about the gifts, Paul is saying we are part of a body and we have a job and we are to build the kingdom of God through the church. And everybody has a part to play. Everybody's been invited in. Everybody is a part of the royal priesthood. And to some people, he gives the gift of serving and to others, hospitality, and to others, contributing, and to others, teaching, and to others, leading, and to others, mercy, which is my gift, and to others, compassion, which is another one of my strong suits, right? That's what he gives people. And the whole point of it is so that we can build the church together. The point is not which gift do I have? The point is you have the gift of ministry. That's the point. In fact, following this in 1 Corinthians 12, he talks about all the gifts at length. There's two different sections where he mentions them. He says, but those are the gifts and those are great and you should desire those. But then he finishes 1 Corinthians 12 this way. He says, and I will show you a still more excellent way. And then he opens up with the famous love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal. And he goes through and he lists the gifts. If I have prophecy, if I can teach, if I can do all these things, but I have not love, then my life doesn't matter. And it is not the point. The gifts are not the point. The point is loving on others. And then he goes into the love passage and defines it. Love is patient and is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It keeps no record of wrongs. And then in the end, it says it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things. Love never fails. The whole point of him going through the gifts is him showing you that you've been invited into the privilege of ministry, gifted to do the ministry of loving on other people, which is the whole point anyways. I feel like we always miss the point when we approach the spiritual gifts because we go, what do they mean and which one's mine? And that's not the point of any of the passages where they're mentioned. The point is that we're called into ministry to go love on other people. I do still think it's important to know what our gift is, but if you really want to know what your gift is, don't go take a test. That's a waste of time. You'd have more fun figuring out which animal you are. If you really want to know what your spiritual gift is, then go love other people. And what you'll find is that your gift is what others affirm in you as you love them. Don't worry about what your gift is. What's my gift? Am I serving? Am I compassionate? Am I hospitality? Am I teaching? Am I leadership? Don't worry about that. Just go love people. The people that are in your life, go love them towards Jesus. That's your ministry. Go love them towards Jesus. And as you love them towards Jesus, they will affirm in you what your gift is. I can only share with you my own path through that realization. As far back as I can remember doing ministry, I was invited to teach in different settings. Nothing big or extravagant. I mean, I've shown up to a lot of 6 a.m. FCA's where there's 20 kids who don't care. I've talked to a lot of youth groups. I've done youth group retreats with like 18 kids in North Georgia woods. Like I've showed up to a lot of places to teach, but I kept getting invited to teach. And people would affirm in me, hey, that was effective. You were good at that. And I began to suspect that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. But honestly, I'm so uncomfortable with that. It took me a long time to maybe kind of admit that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. Now, some of you are sitting in here and you're going, dude, this is super boring. This is not your gift. And you may be right. We may find that out together as we go down in flames of glory here in a couple of years. Who knows? But enough people began to say, hey, that was effective. Hey, you're good at that. Hey, I appreciate that. But at some point or another, I quit fighting against it and just acknowledged, I think maybe my gift is teaching. And that's what I need to do. But you don't need to worry about what your gift is on the front end. Just get busy loving people towards God. And they will affirm in you whatever your gift is. And that's how you'll identify it. And what I want us to see as we think about the spiritual gifts and how often we miss it and go, oh, what's mine? How do I do this? What do they mean? How do we talk about them? We miss the point. When we think about spiritual gifts at Grace, I want us to think about them in this way. Spiritual gifts are an affirmation of and an invitation into the privilege of ministry. If we believe ministry to be one of the great privileges in life, to be invited into the lives of others, to be able to be the person that they call on when they mourn, to be the person that they call when they don't understand something, to be the person that gets to celebrate with them when they get pregnant or when their kid does something great or when they get a promotion. If we want to be invited into people's lives in that way, if we want to love on people in that way, if we want our life to matter, to know for certain that it's going to matter and that what we're going to do will ring for all of eternity, then we believe that ministry is a privilege. And we understand that the gift that the Spirit gives us to be more effective at that ministry is an affirmation of the fact that we are saved, that he calls us his child, and that we are to be used in that ministry, and it is an invitation into one of life's great privileges. So here's what I want you to do this morning in light of the spiritual gifts. I want to ask you, what's your ministry? Not organized, not structured, your ministry is not the coffee bar. Now that's a way to love on people, but let's not reduce your life to that. The people who serve the coffee are lovely, wonderful people. They are far more capable of other things besides brewing coffee. On some Sundays, they're not very capable of brewing coffee. Am I right? Not today. Today it's good. That's right, baby. What is your ministry? Meaning, who has God called you to love? Who is it that God has placed in your life that you are to love towards him? Sometimes it's structured. It's your small group. It's the kids that you volunteer to lead and to watch. It's the students that you pour into. It's the other people on your board or on your committee. Sometimes it's unstructured. It's the people at work. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your tennis team. It's the folks you hang out with. But I think this morning the question is not, what is my gift? But it's a realization of, man, I have been invited into one of the great privileges of life. And as I'm invited into that privilege of loving others, God, who have you assigned to me to love? And in that way, we are all ministers. And if you're not sure who that is, then my encouragement to you this week is to just beg the Spirit to show you. Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? And as you get busy loving other people towards Jesus, they will affirm in you whatever your gifting is, and you can lean into that more and more and experience the joy in being exactly who you were created to be. All right. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue with the service. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for your spirit. Thank you for the gift of ministry, for the gift of being conduits of your love to other people. Lord, I pray that we would get to, all of us, experience the incredible privilege that it is to be used by you. To know that you're using us in a way that makes our life matter. To know that you're using us in a way that when we get to the end of our days, we will look back and know and get to say like Paul did, that we were poured out like a drink offering. Father, I pray that you would show us who to love, that you would give us the courage to love them well, that you would gift us exactly how we need to to love them effectively, that we would be comfortable with whatever shape that love takes based on how you've wired and gifted us. God, I pray that Grace Raleigh would be a place where other people feel loved. I pray for those who go on from this place to different areas, God, that they would love people there as well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. Happy Easter to you. My name is Nate. I'm the lead pastor here. It's great to see everybody in their bright Easter colors. My wife picked this shirt out for me. She told me that she was going to get the dry cleaning done because there was that pretty Easter colored shirt in the dry cleaning to be done. And I said, oh, which one was that? And she described it by saying, oh, it's the nice one that you got a couple of years ago. It was too big for you then. I think it'll fit you now. And as I buttoned it up this morning, I thought, dang it, if she's not right. So here I am. Listen, this is the 11th part of our series in John. We've been moving through John together. We've been timing it up to arrive at this sermon on this Sunday because this is Easter, man. This is the best day of the year. It really is. This is my favorite day of the year. This is the day where Jesus wins everything for all of eternity. This is the day when the disciples find an empty tomb, and what it means is that Jesus conquered death, and what it means is that we have a way to be reconciled with our Creator God for all of eternity. It is the victory of victories. It is absolutely, as Christians, what we claim, what we stake our hope on, and what we hold fast to no matter what. And Easter celebrates that day. So it is like the Super Bowl of Sundays to be able to preach to you on Easter. This is my third Easter that I've gotten to spend with you at Grace. And back in the fall, I knew that we were going to be going through John in the spring. And so I was reading through John in part in preparation for this series. And I arrived at a story in John chapter 20 about doubting Thomas. Some of you probably know the story. Thomas was a disciple of Jesus who, when he heard that Jesus had resurrected from the dead, he said, I don't really believe that. And then Jesus appears to him and he gives Thomas the proof that he needs to show him that he's actually Jesus and that he's actually risen from the dead. And I thought, man, what a great thing to be able to share on Easter how Jesus responds in the face of our doubts. And so that's what we prepared for, and that's what I prepared for, and that's what I had in mind as we approached Easter, and we mapped out the series, and I knew what all 12 weeks were going to be. And a couple of weeks ago, we made a video, and we showed it in here, and we said, hey, on Easter Sunday, Nate's going to preach about Doubting Thomas and how Jesus responds in the face of our doubts, and it's going to be great, and you should invite people. And that's been the plan. We even, we put it on Facebook and then Steve told me, Steve's our worship pastor, who they did great. Steve told me, hey, we boosted it on Facebook. I don't even know what that is. But I've been boosted on Facebook. I'm kind of a big deal now. I mean, some of you may even be here because we boosted it. And if you did, you're going to be bummed out because I'm not preaching what I told you I was going to preach. Last night at about 10.30, I'm not making this up, I saw a tweet of all things, and I knew that I had to do a different message. My wife is out of town. She's at home with her family, and you'll find out why in a second. And I was going to bed. I grabbed Ruby, Jen's dog that I don't like, and I went to take Ruby outside as just the final hassle of the day to let her go to the bathroom. And while I'm outside, I grab my phone. And my buddy, who I used to work with, a guy named Heath, had tweeted this out. And I saw it in the morning, but I really just kind of passed over it. But for some reason, it was at the top of my Twitter feed, and I saw it. And this is what it says. It says, Holy Saturday, silence, sadness, sorrow. At some point in our lives, we all go through a season of this day. Darkness surrounds us. Nothing is happening. Hope seems lost. Today is the best reminder that the silence of God does not equal the absence of God. Sunday's coming. And as I read that and reflected on what's going on in my own life, I knew that I could not trot out here this morning and preach to you about how Jesus responds to our doubts. Which is a shame because I had a nice alliterated point at the end. It was very pastory. It said, in the face of our doubts, Jesus responds with patience, pursuit, and provision. And I was really happy about that. Isn't that fancy? But I knew as I read that, I can't, on Easter, that because my life feels like a Saturday right now. At Grace, we're real. We're authentic. We're honest. I feel like it's part of our secret sauce. I feel like it's what makes us us. And as a pastor, it's what makes me me, that we tell the truth and we go from our gut. And I felt like to preach what I had planned to preach would be dishonest with you this morning because my life feels a little bit like a Saturday and I need Easter this year. I don't know if you've ever thought about the disciples' perspective on Saturday, but we've been going through Holy Week. And in Holy Week, Jesus on Palm Sunday enters into Jerusalem and sets in motion some mechanisms that are going to ultimately lead to his crucifixion. And he knows to his resurrection the following Sunday. And each day during that week over history has been given a name like Ash Wednesday or Maundy Thursday or Good Friday. And Saturday is called Holy Saturday. And I don't know if you've ever thought about Saturday from the perspective of the disciples. But the disciples were men who had walked with Jesus every day. They woke up every morning with him. They listened to him. They followed him. They loved him. They left their jobs for him. They left their lives for him. They put everything on hold for Jesus. The Bible tells us that Jesus says that foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. So they followed Jesus even though they were basically couch surfing for three years because they believed so much in what he was doing. And over the course of those three years, they came to love that man and respect that man and want to mimic and emulate that man. And they had high hopes for that man. And on Friday, it all came crashing down. On Friday, they watched that man put up on the cross and get crucified. And we talked about that last week. They watched their hopes and dreams die on that cross. And I imagine on Friday, though there was sadness, there was also shock, not really knowing what to do, trying to process what had happened. But on Saturday, the disciples are sitting in a room with the door locked because they're fearful of the authorities that they're going to come in and get them and arrest them. And so they're sitting there with the door locked in sorrow and in silence, not knowing what to do. And it feels very much like their God let them down. It feels very much like God is not present. We had hoped in him, we had believed in him, and now he's dead and we don't know what to do. And they look to each other for hope and there was none there. And what the disciples don't know is what we know is that the next day they're going to find an empty tomb and that Sunday is coming. But on Saturday, they didn't know that there was hope for Sunday. On Saturday, it's just death. And on Saturday, death wins. And on Saturday, evil wins and despair wins and sorrow wins on Saturday. Because that's where they are. And that's what they know. And Saturday is sorrowful. It's solemn. And it's silent. And as I thought about that, and thought about how much my life feels like Saturday right now, and thought about how much I need Easter right now, I thought I can in good conscience roll out there and talk about doubts tomorrow morning. My life feels like Saturday right now because three weeks ago, they found a mass on my father-in-law's pancreas. My father-in-law is a man named John. I love John a lot. I have a deep and abiding respect for John. I've said this to some people and I mean it. He has, to me, character that looks more similar to Jesus than anybody I've ever met. There are times in my life when I don't know what to do, and I think, I wonder what John would do. And I try to emulate that. Jen loves her daddy very much. They're very close. Lily calls him Papa. That's what I called my Papa. And so it's been a tough three weeks. Three weeks ago, they found a mass, and then it's just a series of appointments and different things, and you don't get the answers that you want. If you've walked through it before, you know it's painfully slow. And then yesterday, on Saturday, we find out that it's stage three. The Internet doesn't have a lot of good things to say about people with stage three pancreatic cancer. And so it's sad, and it's hard, and we're hopeful. On Monday morning, he meets with one of the best pancreatic surgeons in the world who has devoted his whole life to eradicating cancer from the pancreas. If anybody can help him, it's this guy. And so we hope in that, and we're happy about that. And I was on the phone with his wife, Terry, yesterday, telling her, listen, we don't know anything for sure yet, so we cling to hope. But it's hard. And I'm texting with Jen yesterday because she's down there with her family. How you doing? How's it going? And she just says, it's really hard. My daddy's really hurt. He's not really himself. He doesn't have any energy. And for three weeks, we've been doing a lot of praying, but we don't feel a lot of answers. And so my life feels like a Saturday. God, where are you on this one? He's a good man. It doesn't feel like it's the time. And here's the thing. You have your Saturdays too. You've walked through some Saturdays, haven't you? You've walked through some times in your life that were hard, where it felt dark, where you looked around and you said, where's Jesus here? And you didn't know where the hope was going to come from. You've sat in some Saturdays. Some of you are in them right now. And Saturdays don't all look like loss. I know since I've been here for two years, I've walked with some people. I've watched some people in the church walk through Saturdays. We've walked through the stories of miscarriages together. That's a Saturday. That Saturday's happened in my life before. There are people here who have lost spouses far too soon and walked through that Saturday. One of our very special partners lost his 58-year-old brother a couple of weeks ago out of nowhere. That's a Saturday. Our old pastor lost his son this year. That's a Saturday. Those are Saturdays. And they come in other ways too. I had breakfast with somebody on Monday of this week. And he said, man, my life has just been really hard since about December. I really need to hear from God and I can't. I don't know where he is and I don't know what's going on and I don't know how this is going to get better. It's kind of hard to cling to hope right now. And I wish that I'd had my mind wrapped around this sermon when I met with him because I could have just said, dude, it's Saturday. It's Saturday. And sometimes it's sin that brings it on, right? I was prepared. Sometimes it's not just things that happen around us. Sometimes we bring on our own Saturday, if we're honest. Sometimes our life feels so dark because of the things that we've allowed into it, because of the addictions that we walk with, because of the private shames that we hold close to us, because of the things in our life that are in the dark corners of our life that we don't want to shed light on, that feel like they're owning us and feel like they're eating our lunch. And what we really feel like is we're hopeless in this situation. And I see the freedom that other people walk in, but I don't think I'll ever walk in that. I don't think I'll ever be a whole person. I don't think I'll ever experience the happiness and the freedom that the Bible talks about because I don't believe if you were to ask me, can I overcome this sin, you would say, I don't think so. That's a Saturday. And so last night, at about 1045, I realized, I got to talk about Saturdays, man. Because here's the thing. The disciples had a Saturday too. And they got up on Sunday and they went to the tomb. Actually, it was Mary. And she was expecting to go in and find the corpse and dress the corpse of Jesus with some perfumes and some oil and maybe pray over it. And she found an empty tomb there. Jesus wasn't there. But there was an angel there who looks at her and says one of the greatest lines in the Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, for he is risen. What are you doing here, Mary? Jesus isn't here. He's alive. And she rushes back and she finds the disciples locked in that room in sorrow and silence. And she tells them and they run to the tomb to see it for themselves. Peter and John run out there. And in John's account, he makes sure to tell you, we started out neck and neck, but I dusted that old man. I beat him to the tomb. I had plenty of time to look around and get my bearings. And when they get there, they find that the tomb is empty and that Jesus has conquered death. And that's Sunday. And they realized for all of eternity, Jesus has taken the sting out of death. Jesus has given us eternal life. Jesus has beaten all the things that would seek to take us down. It's why Paul can write in Corinthians, why he can quote the Old Testament and say, oh death, where is your sting? Where are your shackles? You have no power over us anymore, death, because Jesus rose on Sunday. Because on Sunday, the tomb was empty. Because Jesus overcame it and gave us victory and gave us hope. A hope that we can cling to. A hope that Paul says in Romans 5 will not put us to shame. Jesus won eternal victory on Sunday. And the sadness that was Saturday became the joy of Sunday because Jesus has conquered the grave and conquered hell and conquered sin and death and he's delivered that victory to you for all of eternity. All you have to do is believe that he did it. And then death can't touch us anymore. And then sorrow can't touch us anymore. And I knew that I had to preach about this and I knew that I had to tell you this story and I knew that I had to tell you about Saturday going into Sunday because here's what Sunday means. You understand? Here's what Easter means. Easter reminds us every year that Jesus always comes through. He always comes through. Without Easter, the internet tells me and my family that we have a 12% chance at happiness. Easter says, I've already beaten it. You've got 100% chance of joy. Without Easter, there's no hope. But Easter tells us that Jesus always comes through, that he never fails and that he never lets us down. And here's what I know. Because of Easter, because that tomb was empty, and because Jesus conquered death and delivered eternal life to all of us, including John, here's what I know, that because of Easter, he's going to come through for John too. It may be in the form of giving him some more years. He may get to watch Lily grow up a little bit longer. It may be in the form of taking him to heaven where he will wait, but make no mistake about it, John's going to hold Lily some more. And he's going to hug Terry some more. That's the victory of Easter. That's what today means. And if you're on a Saturday, today is a reminder that Jesus always comes through. Jesus always wins. And even if you can't see how he's going to come through, I will just tell you that he will. Either in this life or the next, he's going to come through. Either now or in eternity, you place your faith in him and he's going to come through. And now I don't have a 12% chance of happiness. I have a 100% chance at joy. And so does Jen, and so does Terry, and so does her sister Lauren. Because 2,000 years ago, Jesus beat cancer. And he beat sadness, and he beat tragedy, and he beat heartache, and he beat your Saturday too. That's what Easter is. Last night, when I decided I was going to be the least prepared pastor on Easter Sunday in America, I made a pot of coffee because I was tired. And I went outside and was just thinking and drinking the coffee. And I looked up and it was cloudy, but on the other side of some clouds I could tell the moon was there. And I knew that on the other side of those clouds was the light of the moon. And I kept my eye on it, and wouldn't you know it, in a couple of minutes the clouds parted, and it was a full moon, and it was bright. And it was like this little reminder from God. It's Saturday now, and it's dark, But that's my sun shining on that moon. And in the morning, it's going to be bright. Because in the morning, it's Easter. In the morning, it's Sunday. And on Sunday, we're reminded that I always win. And it may feel like night in our lives sometimes. We may feel the darkness of Saturday in our lives sometimes. If you do, look to that moon that's reflecting the light that God created and know that whether we know it or not, whether we understand it or not, in a way that we might not be able to predict, that Sunday is coming and the sun will shine again. And 2,000 years ago, Jesus won a victory for us over all the things that would seek to darken our days. And that's what we celebrate on Easter. Pope John Paul said, we do not give way to despair. We are the Easter people. And hallelujah is our song. So no matter how dark it gets, Christians, we sing because we know that Sunday is coming. No matter how silent God seems, Christians, we listen because we know that God will speak. No matter how sad we are on Saturday, Christians, we know that Sunday is coming and Jesus always comes through. And that's why Easter is the greatest day of the year, because it reminds us that Jesus has come through for us in more ways than we can possibly imagine. So I'm gonna pray for you. And my prayer is that you have a good Easter. And my prayer is that if you're in a Saturday, that you will know that because of Easter, you can know that Sunday is coming and Jesus is gonna come through for you too. Let's pray. Father, you're good. You're good to us. More than we deserve, more generously than we deserve, you love us in ways that we don't deserve. You are good. We thank you so much for Easter. We thank you for what it means and for what it represents, for the hope that you won when you conquered sin and death, when you came roaring like a lion out of there, giving us hope for all of eternity. Father, I pray that those of us who feel like we are in a Saturday would take solace in Easter, that we would cling to the hope of Sunday, that we would cling to the hope of you. Let us believe, God, that you've won this victory already, that it's yours. Let us celebrate Easter in the hope that it brings well. Let us reflect on you as we do it. Be with those who are sorrowful, God. Let them hold on just a little longer until your light shines. We thank you for Easter. In Jesus' name, amen.