Sermons tagged with Integrity

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

It's good to see all of you this Sunday. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. I appreciate you being here on this December Sunday as we continue to gear up for Christmas together. I'm really excited about what we have in store for you, not only for Jingle Jam, but also for our Christmas Eve service. This is our series called Joy. Kyle, our student pastor, opened up the series talking about the joy of the light, of knowing Jesus and of sharing that light with others. Last week, I talked with you about the joy of forgiveness, and I really hope, my sincere prayer is and was, that God used that to bring about maybe some reconciliation in your life and in some of your relationships. I hope that you found that to be a helpful way to think about forgiveness. This morning, I want to talk about the joy of gratitude, the joy that we get when we can be people who are thankful, who are grateful people. The Bible has a lot to say about gratitude in the same way that it has a lot to say about forgiveness as it encourages us to forgive over and over and over again. The Bible encourages us to be grateful many, many times in many ways in many different places. In the Old Testament, David tells us that we are to enter God's courts with thanksgiving in our hearts, that we enter his gates with praise. And so it's kind of gratitude is the posture through which we approach the Lord. In the New Testament, we're told over and over again to be thankful in all things, be thankful always, pray without ceasing, and be grateful for everything. Everyone tells us that. As Jesus tells us how to pray in the Lord's Prayer, He models for us a daily gratitude, thanking God for the blessings that we have in our life. We're even told by at least three different authors in the New Testament to be grateful when life is hard, to be grateful when we are in struggles, to consider it pure joy when we endure trials. So the Bible has a lot to say about gratitude. And I think it's because gratitude is one of the more underrated things or character traits that we could have. Fostering a spirit or a heart or a character of gratitude, I think, is something that we forget to do, but it's underrated in its power and efficacy in our life. And I hope today, as we leave, as you guys go back out into your week, that you have a new appreciation for what it means to be grateful and to have a grateful heart. To do that, I want to first talk about a picture of ingratitude, what the opposite of gratitude looks like. So last week I was doing my weekly Sunday tradition, particularly in the fall, which is to kind of go home and collapse. My whole week, the rhythms of a pastor kind of build up to the sermon. You're stressed about the sermon all day. I hope it doesn't suck and that people aren't disappointed who brought their friends and the whole deal. And I hope this honors God. And I hope that I'm not an apostate and the whole deal. And so you just kind of, you focus on the sermon all week and then I give it and I go home and I'm like, ugh. And I just kind of want to shut down for a while. And so in the fall, it's perfect because I get to watch TV. And so last week I'm watching football and the four o'clock game comes on. It's the Chiefs and the Patriots. And something incredibly interesting happened at halftime of this Patriots game. Now, for those who don't know, you may not know who the Patriots are. You may not be, that's football, by the way. You may not be into football, and that's all right. You don't have to know football to appreciate what I'm about to say. I'm going to kind of lay some groundwork for you, all right? So for those who don't know, the Patriots have had what I think is the best 20-year run of any sports team in the history of sports teams. I'm not talking about the best 20-year run in the last 20 years. I'm talking about besides maybe the 1920s Yankees have had the best 20-year run of any team in the history of teams. It's been amazing. It's been absolutely historic. I went back and counted. In the last 20 years, the Patriots have made it to the Super Bowl nine times. They've played in almost half of the Super Bowls. The other years, they came almost just one game short almost every year. To be a Patriots fan is to over and over and over again get to cheer for a winner. It's an incredible privilege to be a Patriots fan. I know this because I'm a Falcons fan. Okay? It is not a privilege to be a Falcons fan. I'm from Atlanta, and statistically speaking, if you combine all of the seasons without a championship, so you take in Atlanta at one point, that was four seasons in one year, hockey, baseball, basketball, and football going consecutively without a championship. Atlanta is the losingest city in the country. And that's statistics. That's not hyperbole. I have longed to be a Patriots fan. I wish that I could celebrate that sort of success. During those 20 years, they've been to nine Super Bowls. They've won six of them. There's only one other franchise that's won six Super Bowls, and they would even trade their last 20 years for the Patriots' last 20 years. They have the best coach to ever coach a sport. They have the best quarterback to ever play the game, and that pains me to say because Peyton Manning's my favorite football player of all time, but Tom Brady, man, you can't argue with rings. To be a Patriots fan has been an incredible privilege for the past 20 years. Yet, on Sunday, the Patriots are playing, playing the Chiefs, and the Patriots this year are having a good season, not a great season. There's some rumblings in their fan base that they may not be as good as they once were. It's looking like they may not win the Super Bowl this year. And at halftime, the Patriots are running into the locker room down two scores, 21 to seven. And as they're running into the locker room at Gillette Stadium, do you know what those Patriots fans did? Booed. They booed them. Can you believe this? After one bad half of football, and it wasn't even that bad, they booed them. They let them know loudly and clearly, you stink and we're dissatisfied and we deserve more from you. And I sat on my couch in shocked disbelief and I thought, and I'm sorry, you bunch of entitled jerks. Do you have any idea what I would do for the last 20 years that you've just gotten to enjoy as Patriots fan? If you're a 10-year-old Patriots fan, you just figure that they win the Super Bowl. That's just what happens. It's your birthright. Do you know what I would do to trade places with you? Try being a Falcons fan for like a season, you jerks. Like, it made me mad. They were so entitled. And as I thought about that, and listen, we have some Patriots fans at the church. They're lovely people. Steve, our worship pastor, he's kind of a Patriots fan. He's not really a sports guy, but if he were, he claims to be a Patriots. From everything I can tell, he seems to be a great guy. And so I'm not trying to run down all Patriots fans, but the ones in that stadium that day, my goodness, the entitlement on them. And I sat on my couch and I was kind of stewing and calling the names in my head and couldn't get over the audacity of it, texting my friends, did y'all see that? But of course, as I sat there, anytime you cast blame on somebody else, my mind begins to go, well, am I guilty of the same thing? And I realized we all are. We're all of us in that way, this pains me to say, we're all in that way Patriots fans. We all act like that because they were simply entitled. And to be entitled is to be forgetful of the past and desirous of the future. To be entitled is to forget everything that got us here, is to forget all the blessings and all the things I've enjoyed up to this moment, and then to not be aware or cognizant in this moment and just desire us of the future. And isn't that what they were? As they're in the stands and they're watching this one singular bad half of football, totally forgetting the last 20 years that they've had, that they've gotten to enjoy being a fan like nobody else on the face of the planet. In that moment that they booed and expressed their displeasure, aren't they simply forgetting all the things that they've enjoyed up to that point and only thinking about what they want in the future? Haven't they forgotten their past and become desirous of the future? And isn't this what we do? Haven't in our lives, all of us, at different points, been entitled jerks? If you don't think you have, look at your kids at Christmas. Come on, your kids expect stuff, right? They're not like hoping that maybe they get a present. They gave you a list in September. My three-year-old already has this figured out. Everything she saw over the course of the list, can you make sure and tell Santa that that's a thing that I want? Our kids grow up entitled. Entitlement says, I deserve this. It's my birthright. This is something that I've earned. You should give it to me. I don't have to be grateful for it because I deserve this anyways. That's what entitlement is. If our kids aren't enough to help us realize that this is a path that we are all on, how long does it take you and your life right now to get tired of the new shiny thing? How many weeks or months after that promotion, you finally get the job, you finally get the promotion, you finally get the thing, you get the position that you wanted, you've closed the sale that you've wanted, you're so happy about it, praise God, this is great. How many weeks does it take you to resent those coworkers too? How long does it take you to think, I wonder what's next? How long does it take you to forget what got you there and be desirous of what's ahead? How long does it take for the new car to become the one that you want to sell? How long does it take after we buy a new house to put the Zillow app back on our phone and just see what's out there? How about this? How long did it take you after you got married and all the happiness and all the pomp and circumstance around that day to have an evening where you looked across the living room and you thought to yourself, I could have done better than this. For Jen, it was about three days. How long does it take us to be dissatisfied with the blessings that we have, to forget our past, to be totally lost to the present and be desirous of the future and in our own way be booing our life because of a simple bad half? To be shaking our fist at God and saying, God, why do I have to deal with this? Why do I have to go through this? Why can't I have that thing with no mind at all to everything that he's already given us? How long does it take us to become entitled? And the problem with entitlement is it's the antithesis of gratitude. If the Bible tells us to be grateful, to be thankful, to give thanks in all things and at all times and in all circumstances, if that's a characteristic that we're supposed to embody, then we should acknowledge that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. It's the exact opposite of gratitude. And we should also acknowledge that there is a natural drift towards it. You haven't all been entitled jerks because just in your soul you're a bunch of jerks and we're a bunch of brats. It's all us. We're all that way. Gratitude is something you have to choose on purpose. We don't naturally drift towards gratitude. We naturally drift towards, I deserve, I earn, this belongs to me. We naturally drift towards being forgetful of our past and desirous of what's in the future with no mind to what's going on in the present. That's a natural drift that we have. I don't think, and I'm not here this morning so that anybody feels badly about it. I'm just here so that we will acknowledge it and understand that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. Because entitlement says, I deserve this. And gratitude actually confesses something. I learned this in my research from an Irish monk, and I thought it was a good way to think about gratitude. Gratitude is a confession. To be grateful for something confesses that this is a gift that I do not deserve. Gratitude says, this thing that I have in my life, this person, this relationship, this material possession, this house, this opportunity, this skill set, this location in time and in space and in geography, all the things in my life, gratitude acknowledges this is a gift that I do not deserve. To go back to our original illustration, those Patriots fans have not done anything to win those Super Bowls. Nothing. They've not done anything that any other fan base hasn't done. They just have the luxury of being born in New England and getting to cheer for Patriots. And good for them. But it's a gift that they got that they did not deserve. Being a Falcons fan is a punishment that I've received that I do not deserve. God and I are still working that out. But to be truly grateful for something is to confess, this is a gift that I've received that I do not deserve. If you feel like you deserve it, if you feel like you've earned it, then you can't be grateful for the thing. If you're a salesperson and you go out and you slay the dragon and you get the big commission check that comes from slaying the dragon, you don't walk into your boss's office and go, thank you so much for this check. This is such a sweet thing for you to do. No, it was negotiated. You earned that. You deserve that. The gratitude comes in when we reflect on the skills and abilities that got that deal done, and we thank God for blessing us with those. But gratitude has to confess that the thing that I'm grateful for is a gift that I do not deserve. The other thing that gratitude does that I think is so very powerful is it anchors us in the present as we remember the past. Gratitude anchors us in the present as we remember the past. We're not fast-forwarding ahead. We're not looking to the next thing. We're not anxious or desirous about the future. We haven't forgotten the past. We're reflective on the past, the moments that conspired to bring us here. We're anchored in the present, and we remember the past. The best example of this I've seen that I think of often is, I call him my Uncle Edwin. He's really Jen's Uncle Edwin. Jen's dad, John, has a twin sister named Mary. She married a guy named Edwin, and they live in Dothan, Alabama. If you didn't follow that, Jen's aunt and uncle live in Alabama. And every Thanksgiving, we go down to Dothan, Alabama, and we have Thanksgiving with the Morrises. Jen's family, the Vincennes, go down with the Morrises, and we get together and we have Thanksgiving. And Edwin and Mary have three daughters that are about our age, and they have kids now too, and it's just a really great, sweet time. It's one of the great gifts in my life to have been grafted into that family. I'm very grateful for that. And when we go to Thanksgiving, we have the meal. It's a big, good meal. It's one of the best ones I have of the year. There's still an adult table and a kid's table. The parents sit at one table, and the average age of the kid's table now is like 36, but it's still the kid's table. And we have way more fun at the kid's table. There's always much more laughter going on as we swap stories and catch up and reflect on old ones and things like that. And at one point or another, I've caught Edwin doing this several times. He comes into, he leaves the adult table to have his cup of coffee or a camera or dessert or something, and he'll stand off in the corner. He's not trying to be noticed. He's not trying to speak. He's not trying to get anyone's attention. And he'll look at what's happening in his kitchen, And he'll just grin from ear to ear. And sometimes I'll watch him kind of wipe away a tear. And I've never spoken with him about those moments. But I know that Edwin is a man that loves God very much. And I'm certain that in those moments, he's standing there and he's just soaking in what he considers to be one of the great blessings in his life, of the family that he has. He's anchored in the present and he's thankful for the past. And in that moment, he's grateful, acknowledging this family is a gift that I did not earn. And it's tempting to jump ahead. It's tempting to be desirous of the future. It's tempting to be anxious about what could happen. And there's different times and different seasons of life with the Morrises that he could have jumped ahead. During one of those Thanksgivings, he had a daughter that was going to vet school who dropped out to go to art school, which no parent wants to hear. Now, fast forward that, and it worked out really well for her. Another time, he had a daughter who was dating a guy that he was actively praying against every day. Not in a funny way, even though it is funny, but in a very serious, concerned dad kind of way. And God answered those prayers too. But in that moment, when he's standing there, grinning from ear to ear, grateful for what's going on in front of him, he's not anxious about the future. He hasn't forgotten the moments that have got him there. He's anchored in the present, and he's grateful for God's gifts. But more than those things, more than humbling us so that we acknowledge that things in our life are gifts, more than simply anchoring us in the present and helping us reflect on and be grateful for the past, I think there's something far more powerful that gratitude does. And I think we see that in a story tucked away in one of the gospels, in Luke chapter 17. If you have a Bible, turn to Luke chapter 17. I'm going to start in verse 11, and verses 16 through 19 will be up here on the screen. I want to read it for you. On the way to Jerusalem, he was passing between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by 10 leopards, talking about Jesus, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices saying, Jesus, master, have mercy on us. Okay. So I want to say something very, very clear right here. He's going through Samaria. There's racial tension going on. The racial tension going on there. There's a whole separate set of issues that we could talk about. But there's 10 lepers. And in the ancient world, leprosy was the death knell. It was the death knell. It was the worst possible disease that you could get. It was the worst possible diagnosis that you can receive. If you received leprosy, it was contagious, so you were ostracized. You had to go live in a colony with a bunch of other depressed people who were losing their skin and their limbs and their digits all at once and just marching towards death together. It was a really, really difficult diagnosis. And so there's 10 lepers, and they cry out to Jesus. And look what they cry. They say, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. So what do all 10 of them already know? That's Jesus. He's the Son of God and he has the power to heal us, right? They already are acknowledging that that's Jesus and we believe he's the Son of God. They've admitted that. Then Jesus answered, were not 10 cleansed? Where's everybody else? Didn't I heal 10 of you? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? Look at this, this is so powerful. And he said to him, rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well. Let's not miss what's happening in this story as we reflect on gratitude together. These 10 lepers looked at him and they said, Jesus, Master, we believe in you. We believe that you are who you say you are. We believe that you have the power to heal. Will you please heal us? He says, yeah, go and show yourself to the priest and you'll be healed. And so they run off to go to the priest and on their way, they are healed. And as they are healed, we can only assume. Now, we don't know. There's not a lot of details. This is conjecture. But something happened in the minds of nine of them that they didn't think it was important to go back and thank Jesus for what he did. I like to think that their minds immediately became desirous of the future. They became desirous about who they were going to tell and what they were going to do and who they were going to see and all the next things that they wanted to do in light of this healing. Maybe in their head, they went, gosh, that Jesus is a great guy. And they went on and they did their thing. But what they didn't do is express gratitude. What they acted like was that they were entitled, was that they somehow deserved that healing. Jesus is the Savior of the world. He's the Son of God. He has the power to heal. He sees us. He should heal me. He owes this to me. That's what God does. God heals, so heal me. Thanks, great, and then they move on. Only one of them was so moved by his experience with Jesus that he went back to him and he said, thank you. Thank you for healing me. And in that moment, we see gratitude. We see an acknowledgement. This gift of healing is a gift that you gave me that I did not deserve. Thank you. And Jesus' response is fascinating to me. After he notes what the others did, he said, your sins are forgiven. Your faith has made you well. That dude just got saved. You understand that? We call it getting saved when someone is returned to harmony with God. Our souls were created to be in harmony with our creator God. They were designed to be in union with him. Our sin breaks that union. It is forever broken. There is no way to restore us into that union. So God sent his son to die on a cross so that we wouldn't have to, so that by placing our faith in him, we can be restored into union with our creator God. Your soul longs and clamors and claws for harmony with your creator God. That's what it does. If you're here this morning and there is an unease in your soul, if you're not a believer yet, but there is something that you just can't seem to wrap your mind around, if you've clawed for happiness in your life and then gotten there and found that it was empty, it's because your soul was designed to claw for harmony with our Creator God. And Jesus restored the soul of that leper. Gave him what his soul really longs for. And why did he do it? Because the leper was grateful. Don't you see? It wasn't enough to just go, hey, you're Jesus and you can heal me if you want to. Thanks, see you later. No, the leper came back and was grateful. Thank you for what you've done. And Jesus says, your faith, he doesn't say gratitude. He says faith because the faith is implicit in the gratitude. To be truly grateful, you have to admit, you've done something that I couldn't do for myself. Thank you, Jesus. Your faith has made you well. I'm worried as I read this story that we don't understand that gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God. Gratitude is the gateway to harmony with God. Don't you see that these nine lepers did what so many of us do, particularly in the South, just give mental assent, acknowledge, you're Jesus, you're the Son of God, and if you want to, you can do these things for me, but it never goes beyond that. They had the beginnings of faith, but they weren't truly grateful for who Jesus was and what he did. And because of that, they never received the actual blessing that Jesus came to give them. He didn't go through Samaria that day to heal people of leprosy. If he did, we would have seen him healing a lot more people. He walked through Samaria that day to bring some souls back into harmony with God. He walked into Samaria that day to save people. And the only one that got saved was the one that expressed gratitude for what he did. And I worry about how many of us can sometimes be like the lepers. And once we receive the blessing from God, once we receive the taste of Jesus, once we receive a little bit of the blessing, we go, thanks, that's good. And we don't stick around for the true blessing that God has for us because we're entitled. I don't want us to miss the power of gratitude. This guy didn't have to pray the sinner's prayer. He didn't have to have everything figured out. He didn't have to understand the ins and outs of the New Testament. He was from the priest that Jesus sent him to go see wasn't even a Jewish priest. It was a hybrid religion. He didn't even understand what it meant to have faith or to be a believer. He was simply grateful to Jesus for what he did. And to Jesus, that was enough. Your faith has made you well. We cannot miss the power of gratitude. It's a gateway to harmony with God. And I really think that what happens when we're grateful is that all paths lead to God. I think gratitude always leads to God, which in turn always leads to joy. I think gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God, is a guaranteed pathway to joy. That if we can begin to express gratitude in our lives for anything at all, that what that will ultimately bring us to is gratitude. It doesn't take me very long to do that in my life. If I look at the things I'm grateful for in my life, I look at Jen and I look at Lily. It doesn't take me very long to end up thanking God for those things and to find joy and harmony with God. If you look at the things in your life, it doesn't take you very long to think of the things that you're grateful for and find a path that leads us back to God. I think it actually kind of works like this. As I was thinking about it this week, I thought of this map that I remember seeing online. If we can put it up there. This is a map of all of the streams and rivers in the United States and how they all lead to the ocean. Every last one of them. You can pick any tendril that you want to and at one point or another, it's going to end up in the ocean. A brook is going to lead to a stream, is going to lead to a creek, is going to lead to a river, is going to lead to a bigger river, is going to lead to a basin, is going to lead to an ocean. And I think that gratitude works the same way. Even if you think about the things in your life that you think you've done, the accomplishments that you think you've made, the businesses that you think you've built, the children that you think you've raised, who gave you the gifts and abilities to do those things? Who decided in his sovereignty that you were going to be born in the United States in a first world and even have the opportunity to exercise those gifts? Who decided that you weren't going to be born in the slums of Delhi and instead were going to be born here? God did. Our very gifts, our very location, our friends, all of our blessings are a result of God's goodness in our life. That's why I think that all gratitude is simply a path that leads us back to God, that leads us to joy. That's why I think that the Bible tells us over and over again to be grateful in all things, even in the hard things. I think that even if Christmas is difficult, because for some of us, Christmas is a reminder of loss. If we want to find a path to gratitude, even in the midst of a Christmas that reminds us of loss in our life, that loss hurts so much because there were times that were so sweet. And we become grateful for those times. And we see God working in them. And it serves as a pathway that ultimately leads us back to God where our souls will find harmony with Him and we will find joy. Gratitude is incredibly powerful because it is a gateway to harmony with our creator. All paths of gratitude lead to him. And I am convinced that once we are in harmony with our God, once we are grateful to him, all those pathways lead to joy. So let's go and let's be grateful together. Let's be anchored in the present, remembering the past, and be grateful to our God for the things that He has done in our lives. Let's pray. Father, we love You. We truly are grateful to You. We're grateful for the memories that we have. We're grateful for the scars that we bear and the lessons that we learned as a result of those instances. God, we're thankful for all the different blessings that you've placed in our life, for the relationships, for the possessions that bring us joy, for the places that make us feel safe or cozy or happy. God, we're so grateful for all of those. We're thankful for the means to earn those things, to make the sale, to close the deal, to figure out the account. We're grateful for the discipline to go to work and to learn more and to sharpen our sword. We're grateful that you built us all with our gifts that allow us to go out and serve you and enjoy the blessings that you've given us. God, may we actively fight against entitlement. May we be people who acknowledge every day that the things in our life are gifts from you that we have not earned and acknowledge that in your goodness, you've given them to us anyways. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

This is the, I don't know, the fourth or fifth part of our series called Obscure Heroes. We've been looking at people that exist in kind of the nooks and crannies of the Bible. We all know of some of the main characters, some of the heavy hitters, some of the more prominent players in the Bible that we see, some of the more prominent people through history. One of them is David. We know King David, right? We've heard of him, and we actually spent a couple summers ago, my first summer here, we went through the life of David for 11 weeks. It was one of the more fun series I've ever gotten to do. And we know about Moses, we know about Paul, we know about Abraham, but there's other people tucked away in some of the corners of the Bible that give us incredible examples. And their stories are in there for good reasons. And so this week, the hero that we're looking at is actually my namesake, Nathan the prophet. I double-checked with my parents. I was named after Nathan. Just so you know, the name Nathan means gift from God. So I'm just throwing that out there. But if my aunts and uncles taught me anything at Christmases growing up, it's that not all gifts are good. So you guys can just figure out if I'm good or not. But we're looking at Nathan in a conversation that he has with David in 2 Samuel chapter 12. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's one in the seat in front of you, and we'll be looking through that story. To understand what's going on with the conversation with Nathan and David, we have to know what David did. We have to know what's leading into this moment. David was the king of Israel. He was the second king of Israel. The first king was a guy named Saul, but God said some terrible words. He said, I regret making Saul king. And he took the kingdom away from Saul, and he handed it to David. And David, God said himself, was a man after God's own heart. We know about David. There's prophecies that when the Messiah comes, Jesus, that one day he's going to sit on the throne of David. The flag that flies over Israel now bears the star of David. He's the greatest king that Israel has ever seen. But David's human. And like a lot of us, like all of us, he messed up. And he had a lot of mess ups over the years, but this was the worst one, and God in his sovereignty chose to chronicle it in the Bible so that we could see it. So David had been king for a little while, and it says that it was in the spring when kings are off to war. And a lot of people like to make the point that David was in a place that he shouldn't be. Whatever was going on, he probably should have been on the battlefield with his men, leading them into war. And instead, he decided he was going to sit this season out, and he stayed at home. Maybe he was holding out for more money, I'm not sure. But he stayed back at the palace while his men are off to war. And one day, he decides to go out on the rooftop in the evening. And from what I understand, I've done a little bit of research about this, from what I understand, that was kind of like bath time in the ancient world, and that the baths were on the roof, and that it was kind of common practice to not go out there. If you could see on other people's roofs, kind of give people their privacy or whatever. And David chose to go out on his roof to see what he could see. And he knew very well what he could see. There's a woman named Bathsheba who lived next door to him apparently, and he saw her bathing on the roof. Now Bathsheba was the wife of a guy named Uriah the Hittite. Uriah was a bad dude. I don't know the rank, but Uriah is what is called in the Bible one of David's mighty men. Uriah was part of David's SEAL Team 6. He was a bad joker. And this means that David had fought many wars with him, many battles with him. I would be willing to bet that David and Uriah knew each other personally. You don't live next door to the king if he doesn't know who you are, especially if you're in his army. And Bathsheba was married to Uriah, but David was the king. And we know what men in power do. Often, when they're not being responsible, they take what they want. And he wanted Bathsheba. So he sent, he told the guys that worked for him, I don't know, go over there and get Bathsheba for me. Brought Bathsheba over to his quarters, and then he did what men like that do, and they slept together. And he sends her home. Well, word gets back to David somehow. We don't know how. Maybe they're talking. I don't know. Word gets back to David that Bathsheba is pregnant. And so David, you can just see the wheels turning. And it's so human to see this part of David. The actions that he takes, you can see the wheels turning in his head. Oh, shoot. She's pregnant. I have to cover this up. People can't find out about this. I have to make sure this doesn't get out. Because David, man, he's writing psalms. He's singing songs to the Lord. He plays the harp sometimes. He's a spiritual guy. Part of his leadership is established on his moral purity, his moral excellence. So he can't let word get out that behind the scenes he's not what he seems he is. So he starts scrambling, how am I going to cover this up and make Uriah not mad at me? So he hatches a plane and says, I know. He calls Uriah back from the front lines, back from the battlefield. He welcomes him in and he gives him this speech about how great he is and I just value you so much. And because I value you so much, because you're such a loyal servant, I wanted to just give you a night with your, resting at home with your wife, enjoy yourself. We'll send you out to bat on the next day. Very clear what he wants to have happen there. Wants Uriah to go in, spend the night with Bathsheba, leave the next day, and in nine months he thinks that's his kid. The problem is Uriah was so, he had so much integrity that he said, I cannot in good conscience sleep under a roof in a soft bed while my men are on the battlefield sleeping under the stars. So thank you, David. I appreciate this means so much to me, but I'm going to sleep outside. And he slept on the front stoop of his house. So the whole neighborhood knew. Uriah didn't go in there. He didn't see Bathsheba. And then he's about to head back to the front lines the next day. And the wheels turn with David again. He's like, okay, well, plan B. So he writes a letter to his general, Joab, seals it, gives it to Uriah to deliver to Joab. Uriah is so loyal that David didn't even think that he might peek in there to see what this letter said, because if he did, things would have changed. The letter told Joab, tomorrow in battle against the Philistines, I want you to put Uriah in the front lines, which was not typical of the mighty men. You put meat shields in the front lines. You put new people there. You don't put Uriah there, okay? He waits and he cleans up the mess. But he put them in the front lines. He says, then I want you to advance into the Philistine army. And when you give your signal, I want you to withdraw so that they surround him and kill him. Joab was a good soldier. He was a good general. He was trusted by David. So the next day, that's what they did. The army advanced with Uriah in the center, and then they withdrew. I would love to have seen Uriah. I bet Uriah fought the fight, man. But they withdrew, and they murdered him on King David's instruction. When news of Uriah's death gets back to Jerusalem, David, finishing out the plan, totally despicably, plays the part of the grieving king and the magnanimous husband and says, Bathsheba, you poor widow that has no one to provide for you. I will care for you. I will make you my wife, presumably in honor of my friend Uriah. And the sin is covered over. Now, that is a despicable thing that David did. And maybe a month's time, a couple weeks' time, David became a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer. One of, I think, the worst sins recorded in the Bible. And then he covers over it. And that's it. And I would have to imagine, I don't know for sure, I don't know this for sure, okay? This is just, sometimes I walk over here when I'm just making wild guesses and I have nothing to base this on. So pretend I'm talking from right here. David, he wrote most of the Psalms. I would be willing to bet in the time between he sinned with Bathsheba and the time to the story we're about to cover that he didn't do muchm writing. I would be willing to bet he felt pretty distant from his God during that time. I would be willing to bet he woke up most days thinking about how profoundly that act had changed his life, trying to get over it, trying to find a way to look himself in the mirror. I can't imagine how heavily that weighed on him. Maybe it didn't. And if that's the case, I can't imagine all the other stuff he had to do up to that moment to get a conscience that wasn't seared by that, or hurt by that, rather. But in Samuel 12, we see a conversation that Nathan has with David about this sin. Nathan was a prophet. Prophets, we understand in the Old Testament, they're not charged with telling the future. That's a very small percentage of what they do. When we think prophet, we think somebody that tells us what's going to happen at the end of times. And really, a prophet is someone with their ear to God and their mouth to the people. They're listening to God, and then they're telling the truth to the people even when it's hard, and that's what Nathan had to do. He was tasked by God to go and confront David about his sin. So he goes into David humbly, and he tells him a story. He says, David, in your kingdom, there's a rich man. He's got a ton of sheep on a ton of hills. He's got everything he could possibly want. His neighbor was poor. His family had one sheep. And because they only had one sheep, they couldn't bring themselves to slaughter it. It actually became like the family pet. They would bring it in and use it for milk and use it for wool, and they would feed it from their own table. They loved this sheep like a family member. And one day, an unexpected visitor came to see the rich man. And it's important that we understand that in this culture, hospitality is a huge deal. Someone comes to your house, you cook some stuff, you get it ready, like you show them a good time. You want to be hospitable. So it is incumbent upon the rich man to feed his guests. And the rich man, for whatever reason, he's cheap, he must have drove a Nissan Leaf, he decides to go next door and take his neighbor's lamb and murder it and feed that to their guests. And then Nathan says, what should be done to this man? And Scripture tells us in 2 Samuel 12 that it says that David was enraged. And he says, this man surely deserves to die. He should pay back what he took fourfold. And Nathan says, that's interesting, David, because that man is you and the poor man is Uriah, and that's what you did. And then he proceeds to detail to David from God exactly what the punishment for this action is going to be, including losing the child that is a result of this sin. And David responds, and he could have responded in a bunch of different ways. He could have said, get out of here. He could have had Nathan killed. He could have covered it up again. He could have been rebellious. He could have been defiant. But David says, I have sinned against the Lord. And he immediately repents. Now, as a side note, I've long thought that what made David a man after God's own heart is not the lack of sin in his life, is not the perfect moral life that he lived, but it's his repentance and sorrow in the face of sin. Because he went back to Psalm writing after this, most pointedly Psalm 52 as a result of this sin. And we see his brokenness there. And I think that's why David was a man after God's own heart. But I want us to understand as Nathan goes in and confronts David exactly what's at stake when he does this. Think about if you would do this. If you're the prophet in ancient Israel and the king has sinned in this way and God has tasked you with being the one that confronts him about it. Because you're not the only one that knows. All the servants that were around that day, they know. They know good and well what happened. They absolutely know what's going on. But none of them told David, did they? None of them for a second told David, hey, but you probably don't want to do that. Hey, David, wait. You can't do that to Uriah. David, don't send that letter to Joab. They could have, but they didn't. And we can call them cowards for not doing it, but maybe we should call them smart because they can get killed for saying something like that. This is the king, man. There's not a justice system. He's the justice system. I would love to be there when God tells Nathan, hey, I need you to go do this thing. If I were that Nathan, I'd be like, you got to find another guy, man. That does not sound like a good prospect. He could lose his life for this. At the very least, he could lose his position. Think about it. This is his career. This is what he does. This is the empire that he's built. He is so good. I mean, from a human perspective, he's so good at being a prophet, at being a spiritual leader, that he has risen above all the other spiritual leaders in a very spiritual nation to be the advisor to the king, to be the prophet that's allowed in Israel, in Jerusalem, into the palace. He's the guy. And to do this, at the very least, if it doesn't throw away his life, it throws away his career. He might have nothing after this. And I've even thought if I were Nathan, I could make a pretty good argument to justify not doing this. Right? How hard is that? Wouldn't you just have to say, well, you know, I mean, if you had friends around and you say, hey, I felt like God's asking me to do this. I don't know what I should do. Couldn't you convince your friends if you said, listen, my concern is I'm happy to do it. I'm happy to go confront David. But my concern is if I do that, he's going to shut me out. He's not going to listen to me anymore. David doesn't have any other spiritual voices in his life. I'm his pastor. I'm his spiritual leader. He doesn't have anybody else in his life that he's listening to, and he's in a bad place right now. He needs people in his life influencing him towards God. And if I go in and I say something, he's going to shut me out and push me away, and there's not going to be anybody influencing David, and he's just going to run amok with whatever he wants to do. So it is better for the kingdom if I keep my mouth shut and maintain my influence with David? Who's going to tell me I'm wrong? But Nathan doesn't do any of that. He hears the instruction from the Lord, and he goes in, and he confronts him. And he did it. He had to have done it believing this is going to cost him his position. It could cost him his life. It's going to cost him his influence. It's going to cost him everything that he has with David. It's going to cost him his friendship with David and all the perks that come along with it. But what I think is remarkable about Nathan, and the reason that he's the hero today, is that Nathan was somebody who decided that he loved David more than he loved David's friendship. Nathan was someone who had decided that he loved David more than he loved David's friendship. He cared so much for David that he could not bear to see him go down this path. That he loved him enough to jerk him out of it, to hold a mirror up to himself and say, dude, this is you. You've got to stop it. Knowing full well this could cost him his friendship. He loved David more than he loved David's friendship. The easy application for us is that we need to be like Nathan. The people that are in our life that we love and care about, we need to love them more than we love our friendship with them. We need to be willing to say the hard things to them if it's the right thing, even if we don't know what it's going to cost us. And for some of us, this is the right application today. Some of us hate confrontation. Some of you would rather peel your skin off of your body and run away from that lump on the ground than actually confront your friend about sin in their life. That's a super difficult thing. And so for some of us today, we need the application of, man, you need to be like Nathan. We need to love the people in our life more than we love our friendship with them. For some of us, that's a very good application. But I think that there's a better application today. I think the better application is that we need to invite Nathans into our life. Not just like me for lunch and golf, but we need to actually invite Nathans into our life to hold us accountable for things. People who embody the verse. It's in Proverbs. Profuse are the kisses of an enemy. Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Our friends, the people who really love you, are willing to hurt you when it's the right thing. We need people in our lives who are willing to hurt us when it's the right thing. Do you know who wrote that verse, by the way? Solomon. Do you know Bathsheba was his mother? That his older sibling died as a result of his father's sin? That his spiritual heritage was a result of Nathan having the guts to go and confront his dad? And then years later, Solomon writes, faithful are the wounds of a friend. You don't think that carries some special impact? And here's why we need Nathans in our life. Nathans are life-changing. People who confront us, who are willing to tell us the truth, who are willing to love us more than they love their friendship with us, they change our lives. I remember when I was 20 or 21 years old, I worked at a summer camp called Look Up Lodge in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. There was a camp director there. He's still there named Greg Boone. Greg is to this day one of the most formative spiritual influences I have in my life. I saw him when I was 17 years old as a camper in the summer that changed my life. I walked in. I sat down. I'd heard things about him. I didn't know who this guy was. He walks out on the stage barefoot. That was his thing. It's Traveler's Rest, South Carolina, man. You can do what you want. So he walks out on the stage barefoot, and I still remember the first words that came out of his mouth over 20 years ago. And so when I had an opportunity to go on staff there, I wanted to work for that guy. I wanted to learn from him. I wanted to be around him. What he thought of me and my still relatively adolescent brain was hugely important to me. And it was the second summer that I was working there, learning from Greg and some of the other people. And time was tight during the summer. You worked 11 weeks. You didn't get any time off. When you got time off, it was like 24 or 36 hours, and you had to be back by a certain time for the meeting because we were kicking off camp. It was really serious, and that's fine. That's the way it should have been. But I had a little girlfriend running around in Charlotte that I wanted to go see, right? And so we get one of these windows where we get some time, and I'm like, I'm out of here. I'm going to go to Charlotte. I'm going to go see somebody. And I went over there, and we hung out. And the next day, I had to come back, and I had to be back at camp at 1030. I still remember. And I was rolling in late. It was like 1045, 11 o'clock. And I come walking into camp. I come walking into the meeting. I'm in the back of the room. Everybody's turning around, seeing me. They're kind of snickering. I'm kind of grinning like, you know, sit down. No big deal. It was a dumb meeting anyways. It was the same thing every week. Like, I get the drill. I've been doing this for two summers. I sit down. We kind of giggle. Meeting picks back up. Whatever. So then at the end of the meeting, I'm leaving, and I hear Greg say, hey, Nate, let me talk to you for a minute. Shoot. And I know the song and dance, right? Like, getting in trouble is not a new thing for me. So I'm like, I know the drill. Like, I'm really sorry. I was late. I shouldn't have been late. You're right. I'm the worst. Like, I know. I'm sorry. You're right. Like, I'm wrong. You're smart. I'm stupid. I get it. My bad. Like, I get it. I know how to do this. And I was ready for that. But he sits me down, and he says, Nate, let me ask you a question. If before this weekend, I would have gone around to all the staff members, there's about 20 of us, and said, hey, somebody's probably going to be late to our Monday meeting. Who do you think it's going to be? He said, how many staff members would have said you? And I said, I mean, probably all of them. He said, yeah. And you know that about yourself. He said, listen to me, son. You don't start taking things seriously and taking your ministry seriously and taking yourself seriously, you're never going to amount to anything. You're probably going to get hired by some church because they'll like you, but you're just going to bounce around from place to place and you're never going to make an impact for the kingdom. You need to get it together. Understand? And I said, yes, sir. And I went up to our dorm and cried for 45 minutes. It broke me down, man. It was hard to hear. But I remember it verbatim 20 years later. The conversation changed my life. It changed how I thought about things. Because Greg loved me enough to tell me the truth about myself. And it hurt. At the end of the summer, we didn't leave it there. We had a nice make-up conversation. But he meant what he said, and he was right. Nathans change our life. It's one of the reasons I've always said that we changed our mission statement to connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people. And I always say when I'm talking about being connected to people, that we need people in our life who love us, who love Jesus, and who have permission to tell us the truth about ourselves. I think we all need that. And if you've been here for any time, you've heard me say that. We need people in our life who love us, who love Jesus, and who tell us the truth about ourselves. Have permission. We've invited them in to do this. Because if somebody loves us and loves Jesus, we might not have invited them in to call us out on our sin. And that's not for everybody to do, okay? That's a relational thing that's earned. If I don't know you very well and you come up to me after the service and be like, you know, I'm glad you preached that sermon. I've got a couple things I've noticed about you. You can keep it, okay? That's an earned thing. That's a relational thing. So we need permission. Now, if they love you and they have permission, but they don't love Jesus, I'm not saying that they're bad people, that their advice wouldn't even be good. But what I am saying is, if their advice isn't godly, biblical advice that's going to line up with God's priorities for you in your life, then it's not the best advice possible. So they need to love Jesus. And if they just love Jesus and love permission but don't love you, maybe give it a minute, all right? Let them come around and invite them in. We have to do those things. And we have to give people permission to do this. And the way that David responded, he gave Nathan permission. He responded by saying, I have sinned against the Lord. But what if David had nobody in his life that could have gone to him? What if nobody had permission to say anything to David? I thought as I went through the story, what would have happened if nobody ever said anything to him? And I think one of the things that would have happened clearly is that David would have been emboldened in his sin. He would have been callous to the Lord. He would have said, I got away with this. I can get away with whatever I want. And then there goes the ball steamrolling down the hill, right? But I think more importantly is, David, if I'm right about my guess that he wasn't doing much psalm writing right after this sin, I think David would have existed and lived his life with this idea that there was a wedge driven between him and God and that he could no longer be used by God because he had profoundly disappointed him and God would never care to see him used again. I think he would have carried around this guilt that went unresolved, assuming that God wanted nothing to do with him. And Nathan actually fixes this. I love this verse. It's towards the middle of the chapter, verse 13. After Nathan has detailed all these things, he tells him a little parable about the owners of the sheep, and David says he should die, and he said, that's you, and here's your punishment. After all those things, and this is what's said, David said to Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan said to David, this is great. David is a heap. He's a mess. He is at the height of shame in his life. Nathan the prophet is a representative of God that came to convict him about the wrong thing that he did. And as soon as David repents and says, I have sinned against the Lord, Nathan says, the Lord also has put away your sin. You shall not die. David says, I have sinned against the Lord. And Nathan says, you have. And you need to know that you're forgiven for it. If Nathan doesn't confront David, David never finds out that he's forgiven. And he walks with this sin for the rest of his life without knowing that he's forgiven for what he did. Nathan says, nevertheless, what you did was abhorrent to the Lord, but listen, it was a terrible thing, but you need to know that you're forgiven. And if Nathan never arrives in David's life, I'm not sure that he ever finds that out. The other thing is I thought more about this and inviting Nathans into our life is that we don't just need to invite people who love Jesus and who love us and have permission to tell us the truth. I think a crucial part of this, I want to amend that statement, is not only do we need people with permission, but also with access. Right? It's great to just throw out to your buddies, hey dude, listen, I know that you love me, I know that you love Jesus. Or your girlfriends, I know you love me, I know you love Jesus. If you see anything in my life that I need to fix, you have full permission to tell me the truth. I want to know about those things. Help me see my blind spots. It's one thing to say that. It's another thing to give people access so that they can actually do it. I had somebody one time, we went out to lunch together and he said, hey dude, listen, you're my pastor and I've just been thinking about something. Sometimes in meetings at my workplace, I get a little bit of an attitude. I have a tendency to kind of be mean to people. Sometimes I can steamroll folks. Sometimes I'll kind of say stuff that I regret. And that's really not who I want to be. That's not the witness that I want to have. So can I just, when I'm in these meetings, if I feel that coming on, can I just text you just a word or a phrase? And will you pray for me in those moments I said, man, I'd love to. That's great that God's brought you there. They came to somebody who loved them, who cared about them, who loved Jesus, and they gave me permission to say, hey, listen, I'm praying for you. How's that going? You know what they didn't give me? Access. You know how many texts I got from that guy about that? None. What's it matter? Who cares that we had that conversation? If he never texts me, how can I help? If we don't invite people in and give them access, how can they really speak into our lives with any truth? We need to invite people in to have access. You want to talk about access? How about we send each other screenshots of our screen time at the end of days? How about we start sharing locations with people if we really want to take this seriously? Because here's what I know. David was a good dude. David was a good man. David would have been an elder in any church that he went to. He would have been respected in any group of people that he spent his life with. Everybody that knew David would have looked up to him as a spiritual leader, as a dude with his head screwed on straight. He was the guy in church that when you dealt with your own crap, you'd look at David and be like, maybe someday I could be like him. David messed up. We don't invite people into our lives and give them access and permission because we're doing good. We invite them into our lives and give them access and permission because we know that what was in David is in us. One of the things I always say when I see the sin of other people is I'm two bad weeks away from that. And I think that's generous. What if David had given Nathan access? What if Nathan was like in the palace? What if he had so much access that he was around David all the time as a spiritual advisor and Nathan caught wind that Bathsheba had been invited over and he was able to duck his head into the chambers and be like, David, you good? Like, you just checking up on her because her husband's at war? Like, what's going on, buddy? Mind if I sit in here while you talk to her? Maybe I can bring her some comfort too if that's what you're doing. Maybe we can just do this together, keep everything above board. If Nathan had had access to David, this would have never happened. If people have permission and access for us at our best, then when we have those days and weeks and months and sometimes years when we're not at our best, they can be around us making sure, acting as boundaries, making sure that we don't get to our worst. I hope that if you need some Nathans, that you'll have the courage to ask them. I hope that if some of us are caught up in a sin that is our worst, that we'll have the courage to invite people into that. I have never once, not once, not with me personally, not with people sharing things with me, not hearing stories of other people sharing with others. Heard a story of someone opening up about a sin in their life and not be met with grace and love and kindness. Have the courage to do it. We need Nathans in our life. We need people who love us and who love Jesus and who have permission and access. We don't need them for the good times. We need them for when we're not so strong. And if you don't have them, I would really encourage you to pray about finding some. Let's pray. Father, we love you. You're so good to us. You provide for us in ways that, gosh, we just will never know about on this side of eternity. Lord, if there are folks here who don't have anybody with permission or access in their life, I pray that you would help them even as they think and process. Show them who they can trust. Give us the courage to take steps of radical accountability, of radical permission, of radical access to one another just so we can keep ourselves within some boundaries that we think are good and that you think are good. Father, I pray that if there's anybody here who's caught up in stuff that just isn't good for them, Lord, that you would help them see and find their way out. I know they don't want to be caught up in it. I know that it eats them up. Give them a glimpse of hope this morning that it doesn't have to always be the story. Father, we pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. But thanks for being here on this July weekend. It feels fun and full and energetic. I loved the worship this morning, and I'll just admit up front, I'm at risk today. Whenever I'm feeling good and happy and energetic, I'm going to say some crazy stuff. So I'm going to try to keep it concise. This is the second part of our series called Obscure Heroes. Now, to spend any time in church, to spend any time around the Bible, even to be in the South, in the Southern Christian culture, is to be aware of some of the heavy hitters in the Bible, of Moses, and of David, and of Ruth, and Paul, and all those different figures. But in Scripture, there's so many different people and so many different examples, and I love getting into the nitty-gritty of it and finding it for ourselves. I love uncovering new people and new examples and new stories. And so for eight weeks this summer, that's what we're doing, is we're going to look at some of the lesser-known figures in the Bible and see what we can learn from them and their example. And really, why did God include this story in the Bible? What can we learn from it? So this morning, we're going to look at somebody in the book of Judges, Judges chapter 4. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. There's also myriad free options online. So, you know, take your pick there. But before we do that, before we get to the book of Judges, I want to tell you about something that happened in my house this week. I think this was Wednesday night. Jen starts texting with her sister. And I'm saying, what's going on? What are you texting about? And she said, they've found, her sister's name is Lauren, her husband's name is Rusty. They have a daughter named Meredith. She's my niece, for those playing along at home. And she said, Lauren and Rusty have found this app called State Stack. And I said, what's that? And they said, well, it's just, it's like for learning. It's just a map of the United States with no borders on the inside of it. And then the app gives you a state, and you have to tap on the map where it goes to test your geographical knowledge. And my niece, Meredith, is super smart. Like not the kind of smart like, oh, she's going to be sharp one day. Like the kind of smart where you're like, she's going to create rockets. Like she's really smart. And they were texting because Meredith had beaten her parents. She's three. But she loves maps and she beats her parents at this. And listen, her parents may listen to this podcast. They're not dumb people. They're smart. They're as smart as anybody in this room. But Meredith's a genius at this app, so they're texting back and forth about it. And so Jen says, I want to try it. So she tries it. I'm not going to tell you. You can ask her what she got later. I'm not going to tell you. That's between her and Jesus. And of course, what do I want to do? I know my states. Give me a thing. I want to try it. I got to try this thing. And listen, normally I don't brag on stage. I got a perfect score. First try, right? I got an 80, which bummed me out. It bummed me out. That's the max score. Max score's an 80. Who makes an app with a max score of an 80? It's got to be 100. That's terrible. It's so dissatisfying. That's as high as it goes. In my mind, it's 100, but that's what I got. So I do it really quickly, and I just hand it back to Jen and walk off like, yeah, that's right, you know, waiting for her to kind of acknowledge it. Then, because I'm such a me monster, because I have such a fragile ego that I need the affirmation of others so desperately, after like three minutes, we're sitting there watching the British baking show, and I kind of look over, and I'm like, did you text your sister? Has she heard tale of my victories yet? Does she know that I'm smarter than her three-year-old daughter? Have we covered this? My ego needs to know that they have responded to this. So eventually she's like, yes, Nate, they're very impressed. And once I was adequately stroked, this is good. Great, everybody knows I'm good at states, right? And now listen, that's pathetic. But that all exists in us. We all need the praise of others. We all like to know that we did a good job. We all like to be told that you're important, that you're enough, that you're special, that what you did is exceptional. We all need that. We all want that, which is why I think Saul is such a relatable character for us. We're going to get to Deborah, who we're going to talk about today, but we're going to do that by contrasting her with Saul because we have a picture in the Old Testament of two leaders of Israel and two people who handled it in a very different way. Saul was the first king of Israel. He followed up a period known as the period of the judges that I'll tell you a little bit more about in a second. But he was the first king of Israel. Israel collectively acted like a seventh grade child and stomped their foot and looked at God and said, we want a king too because everybody else has one. And God says, fine, I'll give you a king, but you're going to regret this choice. So he named Saul the king. And Saul was from the smallest clan and the smallest tribe. He was a Benjaminite or Benjamite or whatever. I don't really know how to say that. But he belonged to the tribe of Benjamin. He was of the smallest clan. And so in that way, he was an unusual choice. But scripture tells us that Saul stood head and shoulders above everybody else. If you were to look through a room, he was the most impressive looking guy. He's the one that you would look at and go, that guy's probably the one that needs to be leading us. He probably looked a lot like me. And so that's who God chose was Saul. Saul became the first king. The problem with Saul is that he had this fatal flaw. Here's a man with tremendous opportunity, tremendous choice by God to be named the very first king to lead his nation. He's got the whole world in front of him. He is the first choice by God to lead God's chosen people. But Saul messes up and he continually makes it about him. He continually leverages all of his power and all of his authority and all of his ability to make it about himself, to put the praise on him, to get the attention of other people looking at him and going, Saul, aren't you good? Saul, aren't you wonderful? Aren't you a good king? And we see some big sins in his life. There's one time where he goes out to battle. Samuel is the prophet, and he's the earpiece to God and the mouthpiece to Saul. And he tells Saul, take the men out for battle. Stay here for seven days. On the seventh day, I'm going to come perform a sacrifice, and then you can attack the Philistines, and God will give you favor. So Saul says, okay. So he goes out, and he waits seven days. Well, it's the seventh day. Samuel's still not there. Saul looks around. He feels like people are starting to scatter. We don't know if that's true, if that's an excuse. But he takes matters into his own hands and he gathers everybody around and he grabs the sacrifices and he performs them himself without Samuel. And Samuel shows up as this is happening or right after it's over. And this is in the first part of the book of Samuel. You can see all this stuff. And he says, Saul, what are you doing? And Saul tells him, he gives his excuses. Well, you weren't here when I thought you would be. And the people were scattering and I got scared and we needed to go ahead and do this. And now we can attack. And I was just trying to do the right thing. And really what's happening in the heart of Saul, I think is he's got military authority. People respect him as a military leader. People respect him as a political leader. But Samuel's the religious leader. But now he's not here. So what does scheming Saul get to do? Well, now I get to step into this void and I get to be seen as a religious leader. I get to grab myself a piece of that pie too. And now people are going to respect me politically and militarily and religiously. I can step into that and we don't need Samuel as much anymore. Now we can just be me. And now people are going to think that I'm a religious leader too. They're going to respect me for my faith because the respect that I have already is not enough. I need more, right? And so he steps into that and Samuel says, what are you doing? And because of that sin, God tells Samuel, I'm going to take the kingdom away from Saul. And Saul's made aware of this, but he doesn't seem to change anything in his life. He continues to live and lead and guide that way and continue to make everything about him. Another time later on, he's going into battle and God says,, I want you to go in, and I want you to completely conquer these people. And a lot of us know, particularly if we're interested in military history, that in that day when an army would sweep into a country or a city, that when they would conquer an army or an enemy, they would plunder. They would take for themselves all of their goods. Anything that was there that was of any value at all, they would claim for themselves. And kings had first dibs. And so God says, when you go in and you conquer them, you don't take anything for yourself. You destroy them. Don't touch it. But what did Saul do? There's some stuff there that he wanted. He wanted to build himself up. He wanted to be the guy with the wealth. He wanted to be the guy with the stuff. I don't know why he took the things, but he took it, and part of it was, look at me, look at how great I am, look at my great kingdom, look at my vast wealth. And so he couldn't keep his grubby hands off of it, and he made it about himself again. Later, when David comes on the scene, and he's anointed as the next king of Israel and Saul has to deal with that reality, there was this song that used to just drive him crazy. It incensed him with rage to the point where he tried to kill David. And I'm sure that it sounds better in the Hebrew, but in the English it's Saul has slain his thousands and David has slain his tens of thousands. Saul's getting credit, but it's not enough. He needs more. He's jealous of David. Look at me, look at me, look at me. Saul would definitely wanted to know what his sister-in-law's response was to state stack. He absolutely would have needed to know that. When he got home from battle, he would have to know from his wives, did you text the other wives and tell them about my great accomplishments on the battlefield today? He would have to know that stuff because it was about him and it was about getting praise of man. Saul sought the praise of man. That's what we see in his example. He sought the praise of man. Everything that he did, every avenue that he took, even when he was sorry, when he feigned sorrow to Samuel, when he was confronted with his sin, was this feigned sorrow. He was really just sorry that he got caught. All he wanted is for everybody to like him. Saul sought the praise of men. And this, I believe, stands in direct contrast with the story of Deborah. We find the story of Deborah in Judges chapter four. Judges is the seventh book of the Bible if you're trying to turn there. And I'm not gonna go verse by verse. I will read a portion of it, but I'm just gonna tell you the story. Now, a judge at this time in Israel, they wandered around in the desert and then Joshua came in and he conquered the land of Canaan that we know as modern-day Israel. And then the tribes got scattered to their different states, as we would understand them, or territories. And then Israel had no king. God was their king. But every now and again, the Israelites would go through a pattern that we go through. We see this pattern over and over again in the book of Judges. We see it all throughout the Old Testament, and we see it in our own lives. Sin, slavery, sorrow, salvation. God sets them up in the promised land. Everything's good. He's their king. Everything's wonderful. They have their laws. They love God. He loves them. But eventually, after things went well enough, they would kind of forget about God and be like, God, we're good. We're going to take it from here. Thanks for getting us into the promised land. Thanks for getting us through that hairy spot. But we're fine now. They would forget about God. They'd start to do what was right in their own eyes, the Bible says. None of us can relate to this. So let's all just judge the Israelites together as they failed in this way. And sure enough, when that happens and we go, I'm good, God, I don't need you anymore, what happens? They fall into sin. When they would fall into sin and forget about God, God would allow an oppressor to come in, the Amalekites and the Amorites or some ites, and they would come in, the Canaanites, and they would oppress them. And they would cry out to God, oh my gosh, God, we have sinned, we have forgotten about you, and because of you, we're under the rule of this people. Will you please throw them off? Will you please save us? And God would respond to them, and he would send a judge. He would appoint a judge, and the judge's role was to overthrow the oppressors. When there's a judge in the Old Testament, there's a whole book of them here, their entire job is to overthrow the oppressors. That is their appointed job by God. And so in Judges chapter 4, we see a woman named Deborah. And we're told some stuff about Deborah. First of all, she's a prophetess. Second of all, she's a judge. She's the only lady judge, female judge, that I know of in the Bible. She's the only one, the only judge that was both a prophet and a judge that had both military and religious authority. And to me, I don't know about you, but in this time for a woman to rise to power, anytime somebody rises to power who doesn't look like all the people before them who have risen to power, that's an interesting person to talk to. Deborah's awesome. Love to talk to Deborah. She's a prophetess and she's a judge and the Canaanites are oppressing them and it's her job to get rid of the Canaanites. So she calls on a guy named Barak. From what we can see in the text, Barak seems like a general. She calls on a guy named Barak to come talk to her and the very first thing she does is she kind of gets on to him a little bit. Barak, didn't God tell you to go to assemble 10,000 men and go up against Sisera? Sisera was the general of the king of Canaan, and he had 900 chariots, the Bible tells us, which in contrast with Israel's zero chariots, is overwhelming odds. And apparently incredibly intimidating. And you get the sense that Barak has not assembled the men that he's supposed to assemble because he was scared. He felt like that was an unwinnable battle. It was an unwise choice. He was leading people to their death if he did that, so he kind of shied away from it. And Deborah's like, hey, did God tell you to do this or not? She's just got so much faith. And he's like, yeah, I guess so. And she goes, well, go assemble your men and let's go. And then Barak says this, because I think Barak's a little bit of a coward. He says, I'll do it if you go with me. Because he thinks that this is a bad deal. He thinks that he's going to die if he goes. He thinks there's no way that they can win this. So he says, okay, Deborah, you put your money where your mouth is, and then I'll do it. And I would love to have been in Barack's head when she said, okay, let's go. Right? I would love, like, what did he go? Oh, well, good. Here we go. This is super. That's not what I was planning on, Deborah. So they go. Now, here's what's interesting on stuff right here. Think about this. What would Saul do if he were Deborah? What would I probably do if I were Deborah? Barak comes to me. Didn't God tell you to take your army? Yeah, but I'm scared. What would Saul have done? Saul, knowing that God was going to deliver the victory, that there was glory to be had in this victory, I think would have told Barak, that's all right, dude, go home. Just give me your army. I'll lead them. You don't have to. It's going to be good. Conniving Saul, conniving Nate, some of us, is that not what we would do is look for a way to leverage that for our own power and authority? Let me grab the glory. I don't have any troops, but if you're scared to take yours, I'll take them. You don't have to do it. Barak, don't worry about it. I got this. That's not what she did. She said, this is something that God has asked you to do. You need to go do it. Irrespective of what it meant for her. She's not going to leave the troops. She's not going to get anything from this. And then she says this incredible thing. I love this line. She tells Brack to go and let's attack Sisera. And so they're on their way to go, but before they go, she says this in verse 9. Barak said to her in verse 8, if you will go with me, I will go, but if you will not go with me, I will not go. Okay, so that's his gamble, right? And then she says this, and she said, I'll go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you But you are not going to get the glory for this. No one's going to know about this. No one's going to know what you did. There's a woman. It's not me. We find out later her name's Jael. She gets to kill Sisera, not you. So you're just doing this to be obedient. And I don't think Barak hears her because they go into battle and they defeat the chariots. It's amazing God gives them victory on that day. During the battle, Sisera jumps off of his chariot and takes off to survive. And while he's running, it says that Barak is still chasing him. Barak is still chasing that glory. He still wants the victory. He's still like Saul. He's still that me monster that needs people to look at him and give him the glory for what he's doing and say, you were great. That was a great victory that you won that day. He's still chasing the glory. There's no indication that Deborah's doing that. Deborah's chilled out. She already knows how this is going to play out. She doesn't care. And here's the cool thing about Deborah. Deborah has no idea that this story is going to end up in the Bible. She doesn't even know what the Bible is. It's not like there's some journalist embedded with her who's getting quotes from her as they do this. She has no clue that this is going to be recorded for posterity. But here we are thousands of years later and we know about Deborah because God saw her faithfulness and rewarded her. So Barak is chasing Sisera, and there's a woman named Jael who's married to a king that's buddies with Sisera's king. And she sees Barak running, and she's like, hey, come in here. This is a very loose paraphrase of what's in Judges. She says, come in here. I got a spot for you. So he comes in there. He lays down. He's exhausted. She covers him up with a rug, which I guess will do if you need a blanket. And he asks for some water. She gives him warm milk and dude falls asleep. And then, now I'm sorry if you don't like this part, but it's in the Bible and I like it. I think it's neat that it's in the Bible. She takes a tent peg. It says that she went to him softly, but she did. She put the tent peg against his temple and she drove his head into the ground. Yeah, it's in the Bible. You deal with it, okay? Judges 4. Go read it. Super fun. Now, then she goes to the entrance. Barak and his army are still chasing him. She's like, hey, Barak, you should come see a thing. And he goes in there and she's killed Sisera and God has defeated their oppressors and Israel is free. And we're told that Deborah provided a peace of 40 years. Now, there are so many different places where Deborah could have solved that and made it all about her. She could have taken the army. She could have gotten word of Jael. She knew who was going to kill him. She could have gotten word of Jael. When you get him, just secure him in your tent. I'm going to come and I'm going to kill him. She could have taken any of that stuff for herself. She could have made it about her. In fact, after Judges 4 and the next chapter, Judges 5, there's a song called The Song of Deborah and Barak. And if you read it, she writes it. It's in her voice and all of the credit goes to God. The day that God won, the day that God defeated, the day that God delivered into the hands. None of the credit. She didn't care. She wasn't looking for admiration for other people. She wasn't looking for other people to notice her. Sometimes it just takes a woman to teach us men that lesson that she was just doing the right thing because it was the right thing. Deborah sought the praise of God. Saul sought the praise of man. Deborah sought the praise of God. She did what she did to an audience of one. So to her, it didn't matter who defeated. It didn't matter who killed. It didn't matter who the glory went to. She sought the praise of God. And in that way, I think personifies a principle that we see Jesus lay out in Matthew chapter 6. I think that she is the personification or the best example of this. In chapter 6, Jesus is in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, his first recorded public address, and he says this. He's talking to people about practicing giving. When you give, he says this. Pick it up in verse 2. Can you imagine? You're sitting here having a church service. Some dude, it would have to be a dude, kicks open the doors. Then trumpets sound. He's like, I'm going to give you guys 50 grand. And we're all like, great, thank you. That would be ridiculous. But he says, don't do that like the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be seen in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. I love that. I love the matter-of-factness of that statement. Don't be like the people who seek the praise of men for the good things that they do because I tell you the truth, that's their reward. You want to give something away to somebody? You want to buy somebody a meal? You want to do something nice and altruistic? That's fine. Post on your Instagram story and the likes that you get, that's your reward, God says. Congratulations. You got this from someone you talk to twice a year. Good. When you do something good and we do it for other people, we do it to be noticed and we put it out there, God says, that's your reward. But if you'll do it in secret and not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, then your Father in heaven will see and he will reward you. And can't we admit that we like people who have this figured out? We admire people who have the character to do good things because God has laid it on their heart to do them, and not for any other reason than because they believe it's the right thing to do. Don't we admire people like that? I told you before about my father-in-law and how much respect I have for him. One of my favorite stories about him, he's just like this in a lot of ways. I could tell a lot of stories, but one Christmas, Jen and I gave him a North Face fleece, which was like, I don't know, like a hundred bucks. It was a big deal for us to give that kind of gift. Like, look at us. This is what we're getting to give her dad, my father-in-law. So we give him this North Face fleece. He worked downtown. He worked in an office, but he liked to wear that to work. And he called it pretty, and it was good looking, and whatever. It's a nice fleece where everyone's very happy. Well, a couple months later, or maybe the next winter, I don't know, he's not wearing this fleece anymore. And Terry, his wife, is like, John, what did you do with that fleece? And he says, oh, I don't know. I'm just not wearing it today. He keeps not wearing it. She's pressing him. John, come on. Nate and Jen gave that to you. Where is that fleece? He's like, ah, it's not cold outside. She's like, John, it's like 12 degrees. You need something. She presses him and presses him and finally he confesses. He's driving down the road one day coming back from work and it was a particularly cold day which in Georgia is probably like 56, 57 degrees. It was a particularly cold day and there's somebody on the side of the road spinning a sign which when I see somebody on the side of the road spinning a sign, which when I see people on the side of the road spinning a sign, I'm like big on technique. I want to see what you're bringing to the table, man. Like, I want to see what you got over there. Like, sometimes it's pretty impressive what they can do. I do not notice what they're wearing, but John noticed that this person just had a hoodie. They just had a thin sweatshirt. And their job was really cold. So what's he do? He pulls off to the side of the road. He gets out, takes off his fleece and walks it over and hands it to the person and says, your job requires this a lot more than mine does. You take this. And he gets in his car and he goes home and he never tells a soul. He only tells anybody because his wife bugged him about it long enough to learn the story. We love stories like that. We want to be like that. Deborah lived her life like that. Jesus says when we do that, that God the Father sees us and that great is our reward. And so listen, what I want us to understand today is this. The praise of man intoxicates. The praise of man intoxicates, but the praise of God satisfies. The praise of man intoxicates, but the praise of God satisfies. Here's what I mean. When you're intoxicated, you're not thinking clearly. You're not making the best decisions. You're not the best version of yourself. You probably say some stuff and do some things that you don't mean. It causes you to act in ways that are not reflective of who you really want to be. The other thing about being intoxicated is it always takes what? It always takes a little bit more. If one drink did it this time, then it won't be long before you need two. Right? If one pill, if one whatever does it this time, if I get this feeling for one, then eventually I'm going to need two. And eventually two's not going to be enough and and I'm gonna need three. And isn't this what happened to Saul? He gets appointed as the king, he gets anointed, and people are giving him attention in his little clan and then he continues to get elevated and people continue to acknowledge him and continue to heap praise on him. And it's never enough. So he steps in and he says, I want religious praise too. It's never enough. He steps in and he takes more wealth too. It's never enough. When we live for the praise of man, it's never enough. We can never hear enough good things about ourselves to be satisfied. We always want more. It causes us to act in ways that are not reflective of who we want to be. It causes us to not be the best version of ourself. And we always need just a little bit more, just a little bit more praise, just a little bit more pats on the back, and no one can ever make us feel like we are enough. And God's praise satisfies. And when I say satisfies, I think of it like this. Every now and again, I eat healthy. And when I do, one of my favorite things to eat is just grilled chicken and grilled vegetables. I just put a skewer of grilled vegetables on the grill. Sometimes we roast them in the oven, a little bit of salt and pepper, and then chicken with salt and pepper. I like that meal. I like that meal because I can eat as much of it as I want and I don't feel bad. Now, if you know something about dieting and you would say to me in the lobby, well, actually, it's not good to eat that. Listen, just let me have my chicken, okay? I'm not at that level yet. Just keep it to yourself. When I eat that grilled chicken and I eat those grilled vegetables, I can eat as much of it as I want and I don't feel bad. I just feel full. I feel good. I feel healthy. And if you were to come to me after that and you go, hey, you want a piece of this pie? You want cinnamon roll? I would tell you, no, I'm good, thanks. I'm fine. I'm satisfied. That's what the praise of God does for you. When God has acknowledged that what you're doing is good, when between you and the Heavenly Father, He says, I'm proud of you. That's good. That's enough. You don't need to take the troops and go to conquer anybody yourself. Deborah says, I'm squared away. I'm fine. You don't need to get the credit for winning the battle that day. I'm good. I'm fine. I'm squared away. I'm good. John didn't need to tell anybody that he gave his fleece to anyone. Why? Because between him and God, he's good. I'm satisfied. When we live for the praise of God, it satisfies us. We don't need anything else. Because the one who created us is looking at us, telling us, you're enough. I'm proud of you. I love you. For some of us, that's all we need to hear. If we keep fighting and scratching and clawing to get other people to tell us that, it's never going to satisfy. Even when you get what you think you want, you're going to get there and find out it's not enough. But God's reward satisfies. And so listen, it's not about stamping out this need to be known. It's a very natural need to need somebody to say, you're good and I appreciate you and you're enough. Lily has started in with this. Like yesterday, for an hour. It was the first time it happened. Jen and I were looking at each other like, oh my goodness. Daddy, look at me, look at me, watch this. Daddy, watch this. Daddy, watch this. And I'm like, I'm watching, buddy. Let's go. And listen, Jen's going to be mad at me. It wasn't even that good. I mean, she's just like, she's just running and jumping into a chair. Get back to me when you memorize the states, kid. But she wants to be noticed. She wants to be known. She wants somebody to tell her, that's good. I'm proud of you. So the Christian life isn't about stamping that out. It's just about focusing it on the right thing. Moving from trying to get our affirmation and our praise from man to seeking our praise and our affirmation from God. And when we do, we're told we will get a reward. And I thought about this. If I'm going to make the whole point of the sermon, obeying God so that we get a reward, I should probably be able to define what the reward is. I don't know what it is. For Deborah, it's being in the Bible and us knowing her story thousands of years later. For some of us, it's some sort of arrangement in heaven. I don't know. Great is your reward in heaven. I don't really know what that means, and I can't really define for you what it is for God to reward you for operating for his praise, but here's what I know. God's reward is better than your friend's reward. God rewarding you, noticing your good behavior, and affirming you is better than the reward you're going to get from Mitch in accounting that you talk to twice a year. It's better than these online. God's reward is better than your friends. It's better than your spouses. God's reward is better. And that's what we should be living for. So I hope that as we look at the story of Deborah and we compare it to Saul, that we'll be honest about where we sit and that we'll have a desire to live for the praise of God and be satisfied in that and let that be enough. And in light of those things, I would ask you as we finish, for you to consider as you go into your week this week, for whose praise are you living? For whose praise are you living? Another way of thinking about that is, the next time you feel compelled to do something good, ask yourself, why do I want to do this? Do I want to do it so that other people will see me be good and I'll get their appreciation for that? Because God says, that'll be your reward. Or do I want to do this because it's the right thing to do and I want my Father in Heaven to see me and be proud of me? For whose praise are you living? Let's pray. Father, you're so good to us. You see us and you know us and you tell us that we are enough. You see everything that we do in secret, God. I know that there are good people here who have done so much in their lives that nobody knows, that they feel like nobody sees, that they feel like they're never going to get credit for. And I pray that they would hear loud and clear this morning, God, that you see them. You notice. And their reward is great. God, for people who are like me, or like Saul, and struggle so much with wanting other people to tell them how good they are, would you just help us make you enough? Would you help us live for your praise? Would you help us hold out for your reward? God, we pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

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.