Sermons tagged with John

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

Good morning, my name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here at the early service. As Kyle said, this is the ninth part of our series moving through the book of John. I've been encouraging you every week to grab a reading plan. They're on the information table on the way out in the lobby. We want you reading along, encountering the Savior along with us. We don't want your only perspective on John to be for me and what I say on Sunday morning, but you encounter him with your heart and your intellect as well. This week we arrive at John chapter 17, which I think is one of the most intimate and poignant and important passages in the Bible. It is the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. And so I think just if that's all I would say about it, that it's the longest recorded prayer that we have of Jesus, we should want to lean into it and hear it, right? We should want to listen because this is our Savior and he prayed for us. And anytime he prays, we should want to lean in and go, how does he pray? What does he say? Like, I want to do it like he does it. And so we get the longest example that we have in John chapter 17. Before we dive into it, I want to give us a little context and background for when he's praying this and at the end of what he said and why he's praying it. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to John 17. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. And you can turn, it's the fourth book in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, John chapter 17. And we're going to be looking really at the whole chapter, but specifically at verses 20 through 24 this morning. So John 17 comes at the end of what's referred to by scholars as the farewell discourse. So if you've been paying attention in the book of John, we kind of move through the life of Jesus, right? And so the first, he's been ministering now for three years. He's had the disciples for three years, and he's just been moving through ministry and kind of just dropping in at spots and just giving highlights for each year or different things, right? But then time slows down towards the end when Jesus enters into Jerusalem for what we know as Passion Week. And he is in Jerusalem about to be crucified. The wheels have been set in motion for him to be arrested and tried and crucified and then resurrected, which we celebrate on Easter. So all of that stuff has been put in motion and the Gospel of John slows time way down and focuses a big portion of what he writes on just that week, and then a big portion of that week on just the last night that they're together. So they're around eating. They're eating a meal. Jesus looks at Judas, the one who is going to betray him, and he sends him off. He says, what you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And then he's left with just the 11 faithful disciples in this room together, this really intimate moment after three years of laboring together every day. And listen, his relationship with his disciples is the closest thing that we could experience to having a relationship with children or something like that. They spent every day together. When he called them to follow him, it wasn't like, could you follow me Monday through Friday? Actually, we do 410s here, so just Monday through Thursday. It's every day that you wake up and you talk to him. You wake up and you pray with him. You wake up and you do ministry with him, and you encounter the crowds that he encounters, and you watch him walk in faith every day for three years. They're incredibly, they have this incredibly tight and intimate relationship. And when it's just those 11 that are faithful to him because Judas went to betray him, he starts to teach them. And for a long time he teaches them. He starts to teach them in chapter 13. And we looked at this two weeks ago with the new commandment. He says, this new commandment I give you, that you should love one another as I love you. And then from that new commandment, he launches into 14, 15, 16, those three chapters of teaching. It's the most longest teachings that we have from Jesus. If you have a red letter Bible, and most of you do, and you flip through chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, you'll see that they're all read. And this is one night that Jesus is saying all of these things in one room. And so we looked at one of those things last week in John 15, the idea of abiding in him, obeying him, and bearing fruit. And so then he wraps it up with this prayer. And it says at the beginning, when Jesus had spoken these words, so all the previous chapters from 13 until now, when Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted his eyes up to pray, which is just an interesting aside. There's other ways to pray besides bowing our head and closing our eyes. There's just different postures and different types of prayer, just as an aside. Before we look at Jesus' prayer, before we dive into it, I wanted us to kind of think about it a little bit so we can get a sense of what's being revealed here in this prayer. Those of you with children, I want you to imagine that they're adult children. Those of you without kids, just pretend that you have kids. And this is actually great because they've never sassed you and they're exactly what you want them to be. So just live in that moment. But if you have kids, I want you to imagine a situation where you're gonna part ways with them for a long, long time. Several years, probably decades, dozens of years. You're not gonna see them again. And it's gonna be a long time and you know it. And they know it too. And right before you part ways, you say, hey, let me pray for you. Okay? What would you pray? If you're gonna part ways with your kids for decades, not gonna see them again for a long, long time, you knew you were gonna see them again one day, but not for a while, and you said, hey, let me pray for you, what would you pray? It probably wouldn't be frivolous things, right? It probably wouldn't be like the test goes well tomorrow. It probably wouldn't even be that the interview's good. You would pray deep, meaningful things. You would pray long-term things. And whatever you prayed for them in that moment, I would submit to you is indicative of what your heart is for them. Whatever you pray in that moment is really revelatory of what you feel for them and what you want most for them, isn't it? It's going to show you, if I could listen, I would know what's most important to you for them for their life for the next several years, just by listening to your prayer. And so that's what's happening here. Jesus is about to part ways with the disciples. He's told them, I'm going to go prepare a place for you. Where I'm going, you cannot come for a while. We'll meet again, but it's going to be a minute. And Jesus knows that when he moves on from this moment, when he moves on from this week, he's going to see them a little bit. He's going to go to heaven. And then they've got their lives to live. And they've got the church to lead and the church to grow. We don't find out about Jesus. We never hear this story if the disciples don't do what they were trained to do. And he knows what they have ahead of them, that they have decades, that they're all going to die martyrs, deaths, that some of them are going to get married, that some of them are going to have kids. He knows what awaits them. And so he prays for them. And what I want to submit to you is that Jesus' prayer reveals what he most wants for us. Jesus' prayer reveals what he most wants for us. In the same way, if you were praying for your kids and they were leaving for a long time, you weren't going to see them again, what would you pray for them? That would reveal what you most wanted for your children. This prayer reveals what he most wants for the disciples, and you'll see it reveals what he most wants for us. The thing I find really remarkable about this prayer is that Jesus prays for you. In verse 20, he says this. He's just in the prayer. If you read the whole thing, and I would really encourage you to do that in one go. Read chapter 17 all the way through. He opens up praying about himself, and then he prays for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, in verse 20, he says this, I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word. Do you know who that is? That's you. If you are a Christian, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, if you would say that you are a believer, then Jesus is praying for you here. He's saying, I'm not just praying for the disciples who are here around me, these 11, Father. I'm praying for anyone that comes to faith because of their word, which is everyone ever who has become a Christian. So he's praying for you. And even if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, which I'm so happy that you're here. Thanks for trusting us with your morning. And I will try to go quickly. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, he prays for you too. So I want to know what he prays, right? What does he think is most important for us? When Jesus prayed for me 2,000 years ago to the Father, what did he pray? What did he pray for you? Well, here's what he prayed. Let's look at it. He prays, there's five verses that he prays for us, but this is really a good summary verse. This is the nuts and bolts of it us? What does he want for us? What does he pray for us? I think the answer to that is Jesus is praying for a twofold unity. Jesus prays for a twofold unity, two types of unity here. The first is unity with the Father. He says, let them be in us as we are together. Let them be one as we are one. And I love the heart of Jesus in this prayer, praying, God, let them experience what we have experienced. I think it kind of works like this. Like when you go out to eat, right? Let's say you go out to eat when there's five other people at the table and you win the order battle. It's a great feeling. Like all the plates come to the table and they set your plate down in front of you and everybody at the table goes, oh, that looks good. Should have gotten that. And like everybody knows you win. Like everybody now likes their dinner a little bit less because yours looks so good. That's a wonderful feeling, right? And if you're a good friend, now some of us are jerks and we go prison yard and like we cover it. We're like, sorry, you'll know for next time. But most of us, because we're really enjoying what we're eating, what do we do? We cut it and we hand it to people, right? You gotta try this and we put it on their plate or we pester people or like our grandmas when they love something a lot, they just force feed it to us. Like, if you say no to this, I'm just gonna put it directly in your mouth because they want you to try this because we want people to share in good experiences with us. Oh my gosh, this is so good. You have to taste this, right? That's why when we see something funny, when we hear something funny, Kyle lately, our student pastor, there's a comedian on Netflix named Nate Bergazzi. He is like an evangelist for this guy. He loves him and he's hilarious. And so he's telling everybody about him because Kyle likes laughing and he wants you to laugh too, right? He wants you to share in that experience. This is what we do. And this is what Jesus is doing. Jesus is saying, God, let them experience just a taste of what you and I have. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this. We're gonna deep dive in philosophy a little bit. God exists as a triune God. I don't have time to explain it this morning, which is good because I can't. It's just kind of one of these mysteries of the faith that we believe in a trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And they existed before time in eternity as a perfect unit, in perfect love and a perfect relationship, perfectly affirming, perfectly identifying, perfectly loving, perfectly accepting, never experiencing shame, never experiencing loneliness, never experiencing a lack of self-worth or a lack of identity or any sort of anxiety. They loved one another perfectly and they are perfect. And I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but the most loving thing for a perfect being to do is to make other beings so that they can experience his perfection. Does that make sense? So God created man so that we could get a taste of the relationship that he experiences God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. He created us for the sole purpose of allowing us to experience relationship with him. He didn't do it because they needed it. It's not like God the Father and God the Son were looking at each other in heaven going, man, I am lonely. You know who would fix this? Tom Sartorius. That'd make it great. That's what we need. We need more Tom. This place would be great. That's not what he said. I want some company. I want a different perspective. Let's make people. That's not what they did. They said, this is so perfect that the best possible thing to do is to create people to experience in this relationship with us. The whole point of creation, the whole point of humans existing, is so that one day we can be reunited with God and experience the relationship that he designed us for. It's what our souls yearn for. It's what every bit of clawing for happiness is clawing towards. It's back to that relationship that the Father created just so that we could be intimate and united with him. It's the unity that Jesus is praying for here. And Jesus is saying, this is so good, Father, what we have. This is so good and so right and so affirming. Let them experience it too. Let them be in us as we are in one another. Let them experience a all-affirming love, a love that covers over shame, a love that erases anxiety, a love that imbues us with purpose, a love that assigns us an identity. Let them experience that, God. Bring them to oneness with you is what he's praying for. So it's a good, heartfelt prayer. And then he says, let them be one as you and I are one. So the second type of unity he prays for is unity with one another. He prays for unity with one another, right? He prays that you and I would be one, that all Christians would be one and would be unified. And at first, at first it seems like he's trying to almost pray away like denominations in the church. Like he doesn't want us to be Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists and Catholics and all that stuff. He doesn't want that. He wants us to be one homogenous, like-minded group that agrees on everything. At first, it seems like the prayer is somewhat ineffectual. If you prayed that 2,000 years ago, let them all be one. And then the church launches from that and becomes incredibly diverse. Like I have to drive, when I drive home, I live really close. I live like five minutes away. I live one song away. That's how far I live with no traffic. That's what I know. I get one song on the way to and from work. I pass three churches at least. I guarantee there are things in each of those churches that I wouldn't agree with. I guarantee they would come here and they would not agree with some things. I mean, they'd be wrong, but they wouldn't agree, right? And so it makes me wonder, like, is God, is that prayer that ineffectual? Are we so far off the mark that we're not unified in that way? But as I thought about the unity that Jesus is praying for, I think that that unity is really exemplified in Kyle and Steve. Kyle's our student pastor and Steve is our worship pastor. And they're buddies. They're genuine buddies. As if we needed proof of this, every Wednesday staff goes out for staff lunch. Don't worry, we pay for that ourselves. We don't charge it to the church. We go out for staff lunch and we rotate who gets to pick. When it's your week, you get to pick the restaurant. And so this week, we ate at Pieology over there in North Hills. It will shock you to know that our student pastor chose a pizza place. And so we go there and Steve and Kyle ordered separately. They didn't talk to each other about what they were gonna order, but they both ordered a buffalo chicken pizza, right? And so they sit down and Kyle leans over and he jokingly says, look at us, we're buffalo bros, which is just a dumb joke, which makes it funny. So now they're buffalo bros, right? Like that's the thing. And they really are buddies. Every now and again on Mondays, they go out to eat together. Then when they don't have any plans, they just go eat together and they talk and they hang out. A lot of times when I'm trying to do actual work, they sit in Kyle's office and they distract me by talking to one another. But they're like friends. And it amazes me that they are because they are very different people. Kyle's 25. He's single. He goes out late. He plays Ultimate Frisbee and is good at Fortnite. That's Kyle, right? Steve's 43. I mean, we just started working on a 401K for him. He's so near the end of his career. He's in a different season of life. He's got a kid. He's building a house. Steve's Jewish and grew up in Boston for a little bit, a single mom, and then a stepdad going to Hebrew school. Kyle grew up in the south in a quaint suburb of Atlanta with a dad who worked at a Southern Baptist church with parents who are still together. It's totally different existences. Steve's gone through the loss of a parent. Kyle has both of his parents. Kyle was an athlete in high school, played a ton of sports. Steve's a musician. They don't have those things in common. I think Steve played basketball a couple of times. I question that. Totally different. Kyle doesn't have musical skills. Their interests are different. Kyle recommended Nate Bergazzi to Steve. Steve didn't like him. Kyle took it personal. There is no reason that they should be friends. But they work on the same staff and they're unified by the same goal. They both live to see people get connected to Jesus. They both live to see people experience the unity with God that they have. They both live for the purpose of the gospel. So whether or not they agree on everything, whether or not they're similar in every way, the unifying power of the gospel and the purpose of that has brought them together because it's what they both care most deeply about is seeing themselves walk with Jesus and seeing you walk with Jesus. And so they've leveraged everything in their life around those goals. And so it unites us. This week, I had a guy from South Africa come up. I met him once for a week, six years ago. He's an African-American guy from South Africa who grew up in Ocean View, in the shantytowns there, in extreme poverty, totally different life experience with me. I've only spent a week with him. When he got here on Thursday, he got out of the car and gave me a hug and called me brother. What else but the gospel unifies people in that way? So I do not think that when Jesus is praying here, he's praying that we would be a homogenous group that agrees on everything all the time. I think that he is praying that we would be unified in our goal and in our heart to reach people with the power of the gospel. I think he is praying that we would be brought together by what means most to us. And on a church level, this means that we're not against other churches. This means that we support other churches. This means it doesn't matter if we agree with them on everything. What we agree with them on, the most important thing is they're trying to bring people into the kingdom and we're trying to bring people into the kingdom. People have asked me a bunch of times, Summit's building a big, huge building right around the corner. They're saying, you know, Summit's building this huge building. Are you worried about that? No, no. He's a better pastor than me anyways. Moving closer isn't going to prove it. He's already a better speaker than me. What's it matter? We're all building the kingdom. Who cares? Who cares where anybody goes to church? Just go where you're getting closer to the Father, where you have community. We're all on the same team. That's the unity that I think that Jesus is praying for. And he prays this, and you can see it in the kind of unity that he's praying for. He's praying this. He says at the end, look, at the end of 21, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, and me, and I in you, that they also may be in us so that, listen, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I don't know if you've been paying attention in this series, but if you have, you will notice that this is why Jesus does everything. This is like, this prayer sums up the whole gospel of John. It sums up all of his teaching. It sums up everything. This idea, he wants us to be experienced unity with the Father, that all-fulfilling love of the Father, unity with one another in purpose, and the purpose is so that other people might believe in Jesus. It's what he says over and over and over again. In the very first week of the series, we said that the fundamental questions in life are, was Jesus real, and do I believe that he was who he says he was? And if we answer yes to those two questions, everything has to change. And Jesus keeps bringing us back himself to that question, do you believe in me? The way the gospel starts, John starts, Jesus is God. In the beginning was the Word, Word was with God, Word was God. Without him, nothing was made through him, all things were made. He sets him up as God, and we have to ask the question, do we believe that? The very first miracle that he does, turning water into wine. His mom says, hey, you should do that thing where you turn the water into wine. And Jesus says, it's not yet my time, woman, which is a really interesting verse to have in the Bible. But then he decides that he's going to do it anyways. Why does he do this miracle? Well, at the end, he tells us it's so that the disciples would believe that he was who he says he was. His motivation for the miracle was so that others would believe. We fast forward to maybe his greatest miracle in John 11 when he resurrects Lazarus from the dead. His best friend. He was told two days before his best friend died, hey, Lazarus is sick. You should come heal him. And he stays put for two days and lets his best friend die. And his two sisters, Lazarus' two sisters, Mary and Martha, he watches them get disappointed in such a deep way that when he meets back up with Mary, he weeps with her. He let them die. He let them hurt so he could resurrect them from the dead. And when he comes out, there's a prayer at the end of John 11, and he lifts his eyes up to God, and he says, God, I know. Father, I knew that you would do this, but I'm saying this now so that they might believe, you're following me for the wrong reasons. And they say, what are the right reasons? He says, you're laboring for temporary things. You should labor for eternal things. And they said, how do we do that? What do you tell them? Believe in the one that the Father has sent. Believe in me. Over and over and over again, believe in me. The new commandment that he gives in John 13, love one another as I have loved you. Why? So that others might believe in me. And then here in this prayer, God, I pray all these things for myself. I pray all these things for the disciples. I pray all these things for the church that will grow from the disciples. And I pray that that church will be unified with you and unified with one another. Why? So that they might believe in me. All through the Bible. All through the book of John. This is what Jesus cares about most. And then he prays this peculiar prayer. It's almost vain when we read it. It really kind of took me a minute to figure out why is Jesus praying this at the end of that. Verse 24, Father, I desire that they also whom you have given me, that's the church, may be through their word would see me in my glory, would see me as I am. Say, Father, they've only seen me as this weak and frail human. I pray that they would see me as God, that they would see me as divine, that they would see Jesus in his heavenly state in Revelation. Two or three different glimpses of him, and it's really magnificent. But why is Jesus praying this here? Let them see me as I really am. And as I thought about that, I realized something. Do you know where we experience perfect unity with the Father, what he prays for us? In heaven. Do you know where we experience perfect unity with one another? In heaven. Do you know what Jesus prays over and over again for the disciples in this passage? That God would preserve them. Preserve them for what? Heaven. Do you know where if other people believe because of our unity, because of our love, and because of his miracles, do you know where they go? Heaven. If we're going to ever see Jesus in his glory, do you know where we see him in his glory? Heaven. And so I really believe that what Jesus is praying here can be summed up like this. Father, let them experience heaven. That's what he's praying. If you read through everything here, if you read through John 17 and you want to know what's the heart of Jesus, what's he praying for us, what matters most to him, what he's praying is, Father, let them experience heaven. Let them experience eternity. What he's saying is if there is a perfect God who chose to create us so that we might share in an eternal relationship with him, what he's praying is, Father, bring about the whole purpose of all of creation. Let's go ahead and finish the job that we started all those years ago. Let's bring about the entire purpose why we're here and what we did to bring them to heaven with us that they might experience eternity and a perfect relationship with us and in a perfect relationship with one another. And if you read back through John through this lens, it amazed me as I looked at it this week, you will see that almost the only thing Jesus ever really cares about, it is guiding everything he says, all the miracles that he does, all the teachings that he offers, all the conversations that he has, all the places that he goes, and all of his timing. His primary and sometimes sole motivation is that you would be in heaven with him for eternity. That's his whole life. What matters most to Jesus? That you would be in heaven with him. What does Jesus care about more than anything else? That you would be in heaven with him. Why did Jesus teach all those people all the time? Why did he do all the miracles? Why did he train the disciples? Why did he pray for them? Why did he die on the cross? Why did he live his entire life? Why did he come here? So that you might be reconciled to him and spend eternity in heaven with him and with the Father and with the Spirit and with one another. It's all Jesus cares about is that you would one day go to heaven. And if that's what Jesus cares about most, just eternity, it makes me wonder, do we care about it as much as him? Or are we caught up in the temporary? If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of life and death. If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of our friends. We would have a lot different view of our children and of our loved ones. If we cared about heaven for other people as much as Jesus cared about heaven, we would have a lot different view of people who cut us off in traffic. We would have a lot different view of the person who checks out too many items in the self-checkout aisle in Harris Teeter. Right? If we cared about heaven as much as Jesus cared about heaven, if we were singularly focused on eternity as Jesus was on eternity, it would change our prayers. It would change our relationships. It would change our interaction. It would change our priorities. It would change everything. And what I see as I go through John is that this prayer is a capstone on all the teachings of Jesus throughout the whole book. And do you know what he really wants for you? Do you know what screams to me out of the book of John? Jesus wants to spend eternity with you. It's the whole reason he created you. It's the whole reason he came here. It's the whole reason he died. It's the whole reason he hung around for three years. It's the only reason that he doesn't snatch you to heaven the exact moment that you accept him because he wants you to be about the business of bringing other people with you. The only reason we are here is to go to heaven and bring as many people as we possibly can with us on the way. And when we believe that, and I'll be the first to confess that I don't all the time do, it changes everything. To me, that's the message from John, that Jesus wants to spend eternity with you. He wants it so badly that he's willing to experience the death of crucifixion to do it. And that's what we're gonna talk about next week. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for your love. Grateful for your son. The way that he ministered to us and for us. The way that he fights for us. The way that his singular focus is to bring us into a relationship with you and him and the spirit that we might experience heaven, that we might experience eternity with him and with you. God, give us an ounce of the concern that Jesus has for the eternity. Give us a glimpse of what it's like to be eternally focused like he was. Give us an appreciation for the beauty of eternity with you. Give us an understanding that we really were designed to be with you and that we will only find purpose and identity and happiness and contentment when we are walking in the middle of your will and we are walking towards heaven. Give us a heart to bring as many people possible with us as we can. God, thanks for loving us in that way. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for being here. This is the seventh part in our series going through the book of John. We're going to continue this series through the week after Easter. So I'm thrilled to see all of you here. Hopefully, as I've been encouraging you every week, you've been reading along with us. I think it's hugely important for you guys to be reading the Gospel of John on your own as you process it and we go through it as a church so that my perspective isn't the only perspective that you're getting on this book. That's why it's such a bummer that I realized yesterday I forgot to update the reading plan and the one that we have out there is not current. So I'm real sorry about that. I had a wedding to do yesterday and then basketball, so I didn't get a chance to do the reading plan. But we'll have that done for you tomorrow. We'll get it out online and we'll have a physical copy for you next week when you get here. If you are following along in the reading plan, just read the next two chapters. We've been going at two chapters a week and you'll be good, okay? But as we've been going through this week, I had a sermon planned out of John 11, looking at the story of Lazarus and the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept, John 11, 35. And I had been looking forward to that sermon. But as I got done last week and looked at the chapters that we had to cover this week, there's a portion, there's something happening in John chapter 13 that I just, I didn't feel right about doing a series in John where we don't cover this. There's been a ton that we've skipped over in the book of John. We didn't even stop on the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16. We haven't talked about that, which again is why we should be going through this on our own. But I just didn't feel like it was right to go through a series in John without focusing on what Jesus says in John chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's a seat back in front of you. And then later when I read the passage, it will be up on the screen. And I think we have it in your bulletin. There's really no reason, unless you're illiterate, to not read John chapter 13, 34, and 35 with us, okay? So in this verse, Jesus gives a summation of all of his teaching for the disciples. He's left with just the 11 faithful disciples that are with him, and we'll get to this in a minute, but he's giving them a summation of everything that he's ever taught them. And I find summaries like that to be the most helpful teaching or the most helpful advice, right? We know that good advice summarizes all the other advice and makes it a little bit more memorable. I think something that we can all relate to is many of us in this room have had kids. And we know that when you're about to have a kid, this is the time when you are receiving the most unsolicited advice you have ever received in your life. The only other thing I've ever experienced like it was when I was about to become a pastor. I had been named the senior pastor, and so I had kind of a month to get my affairs in order and then get up here and take over, at the time, Grace Community Church. And so everybody was giving me advice on how to be a senior pastor, including my atheistic uncle, who hadn't been in a church in like 35 or 40 years. I'm literally, I'm golfing with the guy. It's the last time I'm going to hang out with Uncle Dick. And he's in the fairway practicing, and then he like steps off the ball and he goes, Nathan, you know, I've been thinking about you becoming a pastor. And I'm like, what in the world is going on here? He goes, I just had something I wanted to tell you. And I'm thinking like, just like everybody else, come on, let's go. You haven't been in church in 40 years. Let's see what you got. It was okay advice, but I just thought it was hilarious that an atheist cared about advising me on being a senior pastor, right? And when you're a parent, you get all this parenting advice. It doesn't matter if they've had kids before. It just matters that they've read a book or seen something on Facebook. They will tell you what they saw. And sometimes this advice is even contradictory in nature, right? You got the camp over here saying you should use cloth diapers. And I'm like, you're crazy. And then you got this camp saying you should use regular disposable diapers. I'm like, these are my people, right? You got the camp that says when you get home, you do not let that child sleep in the bed with you. You put them in their room on night one or they are going to develop dependency issues. And you're like, holy crud, that sounds really hard. And then you have other people that are like, you let that child sleep in your bed until they are eight if they need to. They are your precious angel, you know? And Jen's reading books the whole time. Jen's my wife, not just some lady who reads books for me. So she's reading books the whole time. And she's getting all this advice. And it's contrary. This book says this thing, and this book says this thing. You're like, well, which person knows more about this? Who knows? Can I speak to their adult children to see if this worked out? You just don't know, and you're getting so much all the time. But one guy, this was super helpful, Kyle Hale, the worship pastor at the church that I was at at the time, I was on staff with him. He came up to me one day. He had three boys under five. So he had earned his dad's stripes, right? And he comes up to me and he goes, hey man, listen, a lot of people telling you a lot of stuff. And I'm like, yep, and here comes your thing. And he goes, listen, just for the first three months, just keep the kid healthy and stay sane. Whatever you have to do. Don't worry about what you're going to do to them. You're not going to do any permanent damage. Just keep the child healthy and stay sane. Try not to yell at Jen. That's it. Just do that. And I thought, this is good advice. I can do this. I don't know about all the other stuff. I don't know about the five S's and all the things, but I can do this. I can just try to take care of them, and I can try to not yell at Jen. This is good. This is actually how I still parent. Just make sure she's good and try not to get mad at Jen. That was good advice. It was a summation of all the other advice, right? It was memorable and easy and executable. And this is what Jesus does for the disciples in John chapter 13. Here's what's happening in John 13. I actually, I feel a little bit badly about the way that we've done this series in that we haven't done a lot to follow the chronology of Jesus through his ministry and through his life. We've dropped in on snippets of what he's taught and things that he did, but we haven't done a good job of following the chronology of Jesus. So here's what's happening in John chapter 13. Jesus has moved through his life. About the age of 30, he goes public with his ministry and begins calling disciples to him. And then they do ministry together through Israel. Israel is a relatively small country. It's really a small country by any measure. And so all over Israel, they're doing ministry and they're following Jesus around and he's teaching them how to do what he does. He's preparing them to hand them the keys to the kingdom. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but why didn't Jesus just come to earth, live perfectly, become an adult, and die for our sins? Why did he dabble for three years with this public ministry? Why was it essential for him to do this in order to die on the cross for our sins? And I think the answer is Jesus knew he was going to have to leave behind his kingdom in the form of the church. And he knew he was going to have to entrust that to people. And so he wanted to invest three years of his life into some young men so that he can hand the church off to them as passing them the keys to the kingdom. So I'm convinced that he spent an extra three years here on planet Earth with us for the main purpose of training the disciples to get them to a place where they were ready to take over his kingdom called the church and propel it into the future, which they absolutely did, or you guys wouldn't be sitting here in a different continent 2,000 years later, right? So that's what Jesus is doing with the disciples. So about age 30, he goes public, he calls the disciples to them, he trains them for three years, and then at the age of 33, he's crucified. And that week leading into the crucifixion is called Holy Week. And we're in the period of Lent that's leading up to Holy Week now. So Palm Sunday, which this year we're going to celebrate on April the 14th, is the day that Jesus goes into Jerusalem. It's called the triumphal entry. He enters as a king. But this sets in motion a series of events that by Friday has him crucified. We call that Good Friday. And then Easter is when he resurrects on Sunday. So he is in the middle of Holy Week here. It is the end of his life. He's sitting around one night with the disciples. If you were here the first week, we know, you know, that Jesus has just looked at Judas who had betrayed him and said, the thing that you are about to do, go and do it quickly. So Judas has left. He's at the end of his ministry with the 11 faithful disciples who he will hand the keys to the kingdom to and entrust them with the church. And he looks at them and he says, I have a new commandment for you, which is an interesting thing. Because the Bible says that Jesus had that all authority on heaven and on earth had been given to him. He had come down from heaven as God. He was God in the flesh. He could have added all the rules that he wanted to. He could have been given out commandments left and right. He could have done anything that he wanted. He could have made any rules that he wanted. And he waits three years to do it. And right before, like a couple of days before he's going to go be arrested and die for us, he says, oh, by the way, I have a new commandment for you, in verse 33, he calls them little children. Come to me, little children. Jesus doesn't play the little children card a lot. That's like maximum God card, right? Because they're peers. He's a dude, they're dudes. But in this one, he says, little children, listen to me. So this is like, hey, pay attention. Jesus is playing the God card here. He doesn't do this a lot. What's he about to teach? He says, I have a new commandment for you. So we should be leaning in. This is the one rule that Jesus makes. He could have made any rule his whole life. He's made one, and it's going to be this, and it's going to be a summation of all his teachings. So Christians, church, we should lean into this. If you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, you should be very interested in this new commandment that sums up everything that Jesus ever taught and did and said. Non-believers, if you're here and you're considering faith, you should be very interested in this because in this one commandment is the whole of the faith that you are considering. This is a hugely important, crucial passage. And this is what Jesus says to them that night before he prepares to go to heaven. He says this in verse 34. He leans in and he says, little children, disciples, church, for the rest of time, I'm going to give you, I have a new commandment for you. I want you to love one another as I have loved you. This is how the whole world will identify you from this moment on. I want you to love one another as I have loved you. Now, if you've been paying attention in the book of John, you should have some questions. How is this a summation of everything that Jesus teaches, and how is it different than things that he's taught in the past? Because at the beginning of the Gospels, in the beginning of Matthew, and at different places in John, he tells us that we are to, what, love our neighbor as ourselves, right? We know this commandment. This isn't new. This doesn't feel different. We know that we're supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. In fact, it was commonly known then. Then there's a story where Jesus is talking to a lawyer, a young man who's been studying the law, which incidentally is the Bible, and he asked the lawyer, what do you think are the greatest commandments? And the lawyer says, love your God with all your heart, your soul, and your mind, amen, and love your neighbor as yourself. This was a commonly accepted teaching. So how is this different than this commonly accepted teaching? There's another theme that runs through John of what Jesus teaches. Over and over again, he continues to come back to this idea that it's our job to believe in him. We looked a couple weeks ago when people asked him, what do we do to inherit eternal life? How do we labor for eternity? He says, believe in the one that the Father has sent. When he prays, after he resurrects Lazarus, Lazarus is a friend of his who dies. Jesus shows up at the grave. He brings him back to life, and he prays, and he says, Father, I knew you were going to do this. I did this so that they would believe that I am who I say I am, so that they would believe in the one that you have sent. So over and over, we see this theme in John that Jesus admonishes us to believe in him as the Son of God. And if we see those themes, it's already commonly accepted practice and commonly accepted teaching that we should love our neighbor as ourself, and we know that we should love God as well, and that it's our job to believe in God. How is this a summation of those things that Jesus has taught us? Well, we start when we understand this. When you look at the command to love your neighbor as yourself, do you understand that you are the standard of love in that scenario? That when the admonishment, when the instruction is, love your neighbor like you love yourself. And to love somebody for all intents and purposes is simply to want what's best for them and to act in a way that would bring that about. We love somebody, so we want what's best for them, and we act in a way that would bring that about in their life. That's what we do. And so when we love somebody as we love ourselves, then we are the standard of love in their life. So however we love ourselves is how we ought to love other people. And that's a problem because we are imperfect and we love ourselves imperfectly. There have been seasons of my life where I did not do a good job at loving myself. And if I were to love you like I love myself, then I would probably owe you an apology, right? There are seasons of your life where you love yourself imperfectly. You're not taking care of yourself very well. You're not making the best decisions for yourself. You're not bringing about the best things in your life. And so if you started to love other people like you loved yourself, if we're honest, that's a pretty low bar. When we say that we should love our neighbor as we love ourself, that sets the bar at us. And you'll notice that Jesus says this at the beginning of his ministry, before the disciples have watched him relentlessly love everyone around him. But at the end of his ministry, when they've watched him for three years, graciously and patiently and givingly and sacrificially love everyone around him all the time, Jesus raises the bar on this command. And he says, it's no longer good enough for you to love other people as you love yourself. No, no, you need to love them as I have loved you. You need to go and love other people as you've seen me love them. And when that's the commandment, do you understand that Jesus is now the bar on that love? Before we set the standard, go love others as you love yourself. That's our standard. And he says, no, no, no. I want you to raise it to my standard. Go and love other people as I have loved you. He says this to the disciples who have watched him over the years. Bring sight back to the blind. Make people who can't walk be able to walk again. Love on people who are found in the middle of sin. Restore people who the world would condemn. Argue with the Pharisees. Teach the multitudes. Perform countless miracles. Sit patiently with them. They've watched all of this. And Jesus says, as you have seen me love on you and minister to you, I want you to love one another that way. He sets the bar at himself, not us. But the question then becomes, if I am to love other people as Jesus loved me, how is it that Jesus loves me? And how does that fulfill the instruction that we should believe in Jesus and love God? How can this possibly be a summation of everything that he's taught? And to answer that question, we need to look at the way that Jesus loves. Now, I'm going to give you kind of three categories or ways that Jesus loves us. I would encourage you in your small groups this week as you discuss this, you guys can probably think of more ways or more categories of ways that Jesus loves us. But here are my three this morning. There are three ways, main ways, I think that Jesus loves us. I think Jesus loves us sacrificially, he loves us restoratively, and he loves us recklessly. Sacrificially, restoratively, and recklessly, I think, are ways that Jesus loves us. Sacrificially is obvious, right? If you were to ask anybody, believer, non-believer, anybody who has a cursory knowledge of Scripture at all, how does Jesus love us? One of the answers would be sacrificially. He died for us, so he sacrificed, he gave of himself for us. But it's not just that he died on the cross for us. That's the biggest of sacrifices. But we see him time and again in the gospels give of his time and give of his energy and give of his attention and give of his patience. We see him constantly choosing other people over himself. He even chose homelessness. He has foxes have holds and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. He just wandered around loving on other people, not being concerned with himself. So if we're going to love like Jesus, we need to love sacrificially, which means that we need to give of our time and our effort and our energy and our resources in his name and for him. And this happens a lot. We have people over there who are watching kids so that young families can sit in here and go to church in peace. And some of these families just need to sleep right now. I'm not even mad at them for not paying attention because they just need rest because it's hard to be a parent sometimes, right? So we have people who are giving of their time on a Sunday morning and loving on them so that they can be in here. We have people who are teaching the kids in there, loving on them, giving of their time. We have servants all over the church who are loving well through sacrificing. I see that happening a lot in Grace. Once a month, we do this incredible thing when we go to Pender County that was impacted by the floods. And Florence came in, the hurricane came in, there was floods, and we're good, and everything's settled, everybody's got power. Except out there, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of homes that have been impacted by the floods that are unlivable. Insurance can't help them out, and these people have no options. And so Grace actually sends a team of people down once a month to go and help restore these people and restore their lives and fix their homes. And so the men and women who do that on a monthly basis are going and loving sacrificially. They are giving up a Saturday to be down there, which is a big deal, particularly in NCAA tournament time, to give up these Saturdays. Incidentally, the trip this month got canceled and got moved to this upcoming Saturday. So if that's a way you'd like to love sacrificially, you can sign up for that online or indicate it on your communication card, and that's fine. And so there are all these ways to go out and to love others outside of our homes and to kind of step into the lives of others and love sacrificially, show up for the food drive and love the people, the kids who might not be able to eat over spring break. That's good. But to me, the surest test to know if we're really loving others sacrificially is whether or not we're doing that in our home. It's easy to go out in fits and starts and to kind of drop in and make an appearance and love here and then retreat back to those who know us best and be selfish and need our space and our time and our TV and all the stuff, right? That's easy to do. It's easy to step out and love for a couple of hours and then step back into our shell. I learned this lesson when I was in high school. I was 17 or 18 years old and I had just gone off to summer camp, right? A place called Look Up Lodge in Traveler's Rest, South Carolina. And it made a huge impact on me. I had grown up in the church, grown up, I think, as a Christian. But this was the time, this was the week where I really, really got it. Something switched for me, and I understood Christianity in a way that I never had. And so I'm on fire for Jesus, right? I'm like the classic mountaintop experience kid coming back from camp. Like I am, I am so fired up. I'm ready to charge hell with a water pistol. And it doesn't have to be one of those pump kinds. It can just be like the single action. Like I'm still in, bring it on Satan. I'm coming for you. Like I am ready. And I'm, my hair is on fire for Jesus Jesus. I come back and I'm telling my parents who raised me in the church and who love God and who love me, are super involved with the church. I'm telling them all the things that I'm going to do. I've made all these commitments. I'm going to do all the things. I'm going to start all the Bible studies. I'm going to lead all the things. I'm going to teach the little kids. You've never seen a Christian like me, Dad. I'm going to change the world. Dad says, that's great, son. Be nice to your mom. I'm like, man, you really cut the legs out from under a guy. And at the time, I thought he was kind of a jerk for saying that. Maybe he still is. But the point that he made is right. That's great. That's wonderful that you've had this mountaintop experience. That's wonderful that you love Jesus. Be nice to your mom and love your sister. It's easy to run out and fake it and sacrifice for others. It's hardest with the people that we know best. That's why we're meanest to the people that we love the most. That's why we have the shortest fuse with them. That's why we sometimes fail to offer the grace to others, the grace inside our home that we offer outside our home. If we want to love sacrificially, then it looks like, for me, this is something that I struggle with, when I come home sometimes, I know we make jokes about pastors and our job, and it is stressful looking at Facebook and golfing a lot, but there are times when I do come home and I am stressed. I've had a lot of meetings and a lot of things, and we've made decisions, and I've had to work hard, and the last thing in the world I want to do is sit on a chair that is too small for me and make Play-Doh donuts. I don't want to do that. I want to sit on a couch that is too big for me and eat donuts. That's what I want to do. But if I love Lily and I love Jen, then I'll come home and I'll sit down and I'll play. And I'll give Jen the space she needs to do the things she needs to do because she hasn't had that space all day and I'll engage with my daughter. If we love our family, we'll come home and we'll sacrifice for them. If we love the people around us, then we will consider their needs before they have to consider their own. I think sacrificial love shows up first in the people that we know best. Jesus also loves us restoratively. He seeks to restore us. There are so many examples of this. A couple weeks ago, Kyle did a great job preaching about the woman at the well, who at that time had had five husbands and was living with the sixth man who she was not yet married to, which by any account throughout all of history is generally referred to as scandalous, right? And Jesus doesn't bring it up. He just mentioned it as if it's true, but he doesn't seek to condemn her about it. He's far more concerned about restoring her and letting her know about who he is and the promises that he makes and her need for him. In the book of John, there's a story that some versions include where there's a woman who's brought to him in adultery in the city streets. And the Pharisees, the religious leaders say, should we stone her? And he has this impossible question to answer. And he does this thing where he makes everybody, he convinces everybody to go away by riding in the dirt. And once everyone is gone, he looks at the woman and he says, is there anyone left to condemn you? And she says, no, Lord. And he says, and neither do I condemn you. Now go and sin no more. He's not there to condemn her. He's not there to convince her, hey, you know adultery is wrong and you really shouldn't do it. You know that the thing that you were doing was shameful and that I don't like it. And that when you do that, you trample on my love. Like I'm here to die for you because you do stuff like that. Could you maybe knock it off? He doesn't say that. He says, neither do I condemn you. Now go and sin no more. We've extended this series a week so that I can preach to you about the restoration of Peter after he messes up. Peter messes up big time. And Jesus comes to him and he has every right to get onto him and condemn him and he doesn't. He simply restores him. What we see in the ministry of Jesus over and over and over again is that he is far more concerned with restoring you than condemning you. And in the church, when we look at other people, it gets so easy to identify that as sin. Is that person sinning? Is that person doing something that's wrong? Look at what they're doing in their life. Doesn't that count as sin? And Jesus says, yeah, maybe, but how about we love them first? He doesn't let them off the hook. He says, go and sin no more. Go and don't do this thing anymore. But first, he says, neither do I condemn you. He's always, always, always more interested in restoring than condemning, in restoration than condemnation. And if we are going to love other people like Jesus loves us, then when we approach others, we should always be primarily concerned with their restoration to spiritual health, not condemning them and defining what they're doing. We restore people. We do not condemn. That's the Lord's job. And Jesus loves us recklessly. Now, I like this one because we're going to sing a song after the sermon called Reckless Love. I think it's called Reckless Love. I never know song titles. It should be called Reckless Love. And it's about the reckless love of God. And it was a popular song in Christian circles. But we had some debates and some discussions about it as a staff because part of the concern was that it was erroneous to call God's love reckless because reckless kind of infers that there's mistakes made, that it's just like reckless abandon, that there might be some mess up or some error to his love or some misjudgments within his love, but it's good and it's fine and we like God's love and so that's okay. So that maybe it was almost theologically inaccurate. But after we talked about it some more, we decided to go ahead and sing the song. And I'll confess to you that the first time I ever even looked at the lyrics of the song was when we were singing it on Sunday morning because I'm really bad about keeping current with worship songs. We do a playlist on Spotify with the songs that Grace Raleigh does, and that's my worship. That's what I listen to. And if it's not on there, I don't listen to it. So I had not heard this song before. And as we're going through it on Sunday and I'm looking at the lyrics and it talks about how he leaves the 99 and he comes after us and he always chases us and he always pursues us and there's no wall that he won't kick down and there's no mountain that he won't climb to come after us. What I realize about the recklessness of God is that it's talking about this emotional recklessness where he has no regard for how much we hurt him. He is always going to pursue us. That's the recklessness of God. It doesn't matter how many times someone rejects him. It doesn't matter how many times someone makes him a promise and says, God, I'm never going to do the thing again. And then they turn around and they do the thing. It doesn't matter how many times we betray God or we walk away from him or we break his heart or we break his rules or we hurt his spirit, he is always going to forgive us and he is always going to pursue us. It doesn't matter how many times he extends a hand to us and we knock the hand away and we say, I'm not interested. He is still going to extend the hand again. He recklessly pursues us. This is the picture that he lays out in the Old Testament when he has a prophet named Hosea marry a prostitute named Gomer. He says, I want you to go and I want you to take Gomer as your wife. She doesn't deserve you. I want you to go marry her anyway. So Hosea, in obedience, does it, marries her. Inevitably, she cheats on him, goes back to her old life, and God speaks to Hosea again and he says, go back and get her and marry her again, regardless of the toll that it takes on you. That's the reckless love of God. Because there is something very human and very natural to this idea that once our heart has been broken, once someone's turned us down enough times, once someone has disappointed us enough times, once someone has required our forgiveness more than a few times, there's a very natural human thing to do to recoil and to withdraw our love from them and to not pursue them as hard and to not go after them as hard because it's hurt us so many times in the past. And so we recoil out of this sense of self-protection and we build up walls and we don't let other people in because we've been hurt so many times, and we've been damaged so many times that we don't want to experience that again, so we learn to protect ourselves from the possibility of other people hurting us. And God's reckless love says, I don't care how many times you hurt me, I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna pursue you. That's the recklessness of God. And if we want to love like Jesus, then we love recklessly. This is how Jesus is able to tell Peter how many times to forgive people, right? Peter goes to Jesus and he says, Jesus, how many times should I forgive someone when they wronged me? When someone wrongs me, when they disappoint me, when they let me down, when they break my heart, when I thought I could count on them and they show me that I can't and it really, really hurts, how many times should I forgive them? Up to seven times seven. As many times as it takes, you forgive them until they do it right. You forgive them as many times as you have to. You recklessly pursue them with your love. That's what it means to love like Jesus loved. We love sacrificially, we love restoratively, and we love recklessly. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking about how to love in that way, what becomes very apparent is we are not able to do that. We are not able in and of ourselves to love in those ways, to love perfectly sacrificially, to always empathize and love with restoration in mind. We are not able to love recklessly. We do not possess the ability to do that. And this is how it fulfills Jesus' teaching that we ought also to believe in him. Because what we understand is it is impossible to love others like Jesus loved us without Jesus's possession of and power in our hearts. You see, unless we believe in Jesus and he has taken up residency in our heart and has possession of our heart and his power is working in our hearts to change our ways and our desires to his and our ability to love to His. Unless He's doing that, unless we've loved God enough to believe Him and place our faith in Christ, there is no possible way we can be obedient to the command to love one another as Christ has loved us. So in this, we come full circle in seeing that it is really a summation of everything that Jesus has taught. It raises the bar on the commandment to love our neighbor as ourself. It fulfills the commandment to love God and fulfills the commandment to believe in the one that he has sent because it's impossible to do it without believing in Jesus. And in that way, it's a summation of everything that Jesus ever taught. Simply go and love. Andy Stanley says it this way. He's a pastor in Atlanta. He says, when you don't know what to say or do, just love others as God through Christ loves you. That's what we do. We love other people sacrificially. We love them restoratively. We love them recklessly. And then Jesus says, this is how the world will know that you are my disciples. This is how I want the world to look at you and know that you belong to me. This is what I want to be your defining and distinguishing characteristic. This should be the way the world identifies you to look at the way you love one another and you love others. That's what I want to define you. And this is something that I think the church gets messed up sometimes. He does not say that the world will know that you are my disciples by what you stand against, by how you define sin, by who you choose to condemn, by what you stand up and rally against in Washington. That's not how we are going to be defined. We're not going to be defined and identified by the world by our good doctrine or dogma or theology. We aren't made known to the world by winning a Bible knowledge trivia contest. We're not made known. The world will not know that we are his disciples by how well we know this book. Now, all of that flows out of our love for him, but it is not our definitive thing. It is not our distinguishing characteristic. Our distinguishing characteristic is who and how well we love. That's what Jesus wants to define us. All the other things are important, but if we fail to love others first, nobody cares what we believe. If we fail to love others first, nobody cares what we're against. If we fail to love others first, then nobody cares how well we serve. We are first to love others sacrificially, distortively, and recklessly. And this is how we will be defined. This is how the world will know that we are his disciples. What would it look like for you to be known in that way? What would it look like for the people around you to say whatever it is they want to say about you, but at the end of the day, that person loves people well? What would it look like to love people so different and in a way that was so other that when people saw you doing it, they were drawn to your God because there must be something else going on here. Nobody could possibly love others that well. Nobody could possibly sacrifice that much. Nobody could possibly mean it. You know how when you meet somebody who's super nice and super gracious and they're very kind to everyone, you think to yourself, they're faking it. You think to yourself, what do they look like when they're down? What if you never were? What if you weren't faking it? Because that love was fueled by Jesus and you loved everybody just as hard as he did. What if this was the distinguishing and defining characteristics of our homes? What if when someone entered into your home and spent some time with you and your family, when they left and they got in the car and whatever else they said about your home, I really like her napkins or those curtains or that's what cozy farmhouse looks like and that's what I want to do. Like whatever else they said about your home, the one thing that they took away was, man, those people love each other well. Man, I felt loved in that house. What if your kids growing up in your house, the one thing they'll say about mom and dad is, listen, they did some crazy stuff and there's some crazy, I got to knock off of me here in adulthood, but man, they love me well. And when I brought friends over, they loved them too. What if that's what was said about your house? That they showed the love of Christ there? What if that's what's said about the church? That when people come to Grace Raleigh, they walk away, and whatever else they experienced here, sermon was okay, music was great, announcements were outstanding. Whatever else they experienced here, they walk away and they go, those people love well. Those people loved me. And I'll brag on you a little bit because I don't think we're too terribly bad at this. Last week we had a guy here, we're getting our website redone. He's our web developer, a guy named Hugh. And Hugh is here. I invited him to just see the church and kind of learn more about us. And so he came in, and he came in after the first service, stayed in the lobby, came to the second service, and then I talked to him afterwards. And I just said, hey, you know, thanks for coming, whatever. And he said, dude, I love this place. I said, really? He says, yeah, these are the friendliest people I've ever met in my life. And he wasn't kidding. He said, they were so nice. He lives on the other side of Cary, like 40 minutes away. He said, if I lived closer, my family would start coming here next week. This place is incredible. So good on you if you were a part of that. I think this is one of the things we do well, but I think we can do it better. What if we were a church where no matter what other people experienced, they walked away and they said, those are some of the friendliest people I've ever met. What if that were everyone's experience? What if when you brought a visitor here, you brought friends or family here, they walked away and they said, that place loves well. It starts in the individual, it goes into the home, and then it comes here. And if we could be a church that loves other people well, that's what we become known for, that's the kind of church I want to be a part of. And you're here, I know, because that's the kind of church you want to be a part of too. But it begins with us. It begins with us pursuing Jesus and asking him and praying, help me to love other people as you have loved me. And what I love about this teaching is Jesus knows he's about to leave the disciples on earth. He's been a physical presence there. He has been the representative of the Godhead there. But he is about to leave and they're going to be the ones who carry the torch. And what better way as the torchbearers of Christ to represent him to the rest of the world than to go and be the embodiment of love to them as Jesus was. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We love you imperfectly. We love you inconsistently. We love you often half-heartedly. Often, God, we love you forgetfully. God, please continue to work in our hearts to draw us near you that we may love you more. And that out of that love, we might love other people more. Give us the grace and the patience to love sacrificially, God. Give us the sympathy and empathy and insight to love restoratively and give us the strength and the faith to love recklessly. God, may we, may our homes, may this place be known and identified for how well we offer your love to others. It's in your son's name I pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here for part six of our series in John. We've been in John for a while and we'll continue to be in John until the week after Easter. I'm really excited about this series. I hope I've been encouraging you guys to grab a reading plan on the information table as you leave. There's only two tables out there. One of them has coffee on them and the other one doesn't. So I trust you to figure out which is which. And on that table, there is the reading plan so that you can be reading along through the gospel of John with us. Because I've been saying the whole time, it's not good to only get my perspective on John and on Jesus through John. You need to put your own head and your own heart and your own emotions into it so that you can process Jesus on your own and then supplement it with this and what you're talking about, hopefully, in your small groups. We've been going through John because John was, for all intents and purposes, one of Jesus' closest friends and offers us a unique perspective of Jesus. This week, we arrive at my favorite verse in the Bible. Now, some of you have already gotten on to me this morning because you say I have a lot of favorite verses. Because like every other week, I'll put in the grace find. This is one of my favorite passages. I'm super excited. And now I'm starting to get a hard time. Like all of the passages are my favorite passages. But shame on you for being mad at your pastor for loving the Bible. I expect more of you, Grace. But no, that's my bad. I'm the boy who cried favorite. But this really is my favorite. I love this verse. It's hanging up in my house. I believe that when we understand this verse, when we choose to believe it, it really changes everything. And this is one that I weave into just about every sermon that I do. I love this passage. To understand this verse, I want to come at it from a different angle and share with you a conversation that my wife Jen and I had last week. Last week, we were talking about something, and she lovingly and fairly pointed out that maybe there's a chance that I have a little bit of an authority issue. It's possible that I don't care for authority or being told what to do. There's a chance of that. And I push back on that a little bit. I say, I don't have an issue with authority. I just have an issue with unreasonable and dumb authority. I mean, that seems fair. If you're telling me to do something that doesn't make sense, I'm not going to do that thing. If your authority was given to you by something that I don't recognize, like, say, putting a stop sign in a shopping center parking lot, I don't recognize that authority. I'm not going to stop. I don't care. That's on you, Kroger, right? That's not my authority. So I don't have a problem with authority. I just have a problem with unreasonable authority, right? And there's plenty of examples of this, but I think back to Snotnose High School, Nate, in Mrs. Parks' ninth grade algebra class. Now, Mrs. Parks is a wonderful lady. She's incredibly sweet. She still teaches high school math at Killian Hill Christian School in Lilburn, Georgia, where I went. It was a small private school. I graduated with 26 other people. I don't like to brag a lot, but I did graduate 24th in my class, so higher than most of you probably. That's actually true. My parents' greatest frustration in life is my academic career, but joke's on them. I'm living the dream. Who cares? She taught me in high school all four years. She teaches everybody all four years, and I can remember a conversation in ninth grade that went something like this. It's not exactly how it went, but it went a lot like this. I took a test, and in that test, there's some simple algebra problems. Like, I don't know, X plus three equals five. And I just write down on my paper, two. X equals two, that's pretty easy. You know, any more brain busters? And so then I hand in my test. I get it back, and she's taking points off that question. So she says, if anybody has any questions, you can come talk to me at my desk. And I'm like, I got a question for you, buddy. I need to see this. So I go up to Mrs. Parks. I'm like, hey, I don't understand. I got this question right, but you took points off of my test. What gives? And she said, well, you didn't show your work. I need you to show the steps. And I'm like, why? I got the question right. I don't need the steps. Your steps are for dummies. I don't need them. And she says, well, I need you to show your steps because in future tests, if you get a question wrong, but you do the work right, I can give you partial credit. And then all my immature 15-year-old bluster, I said, well, I tell you what, how about I just write down the right answer and you give me full credit? What do you think about that? And she kind of did the thing that you guys are doing right now, like, oh my gosh, what's the matter with this kid? And she did it. She was gracious and she was like, all right, that's how you want to do this thing. And when I did it right in my head, she gave me full credit. The problem was geometry. Geometry, I can no longer do it in my head. And all of us, some of us are good at math, but there always comes a point in which we can no longer do it in our head. We have to follow the steps. And I didn't know how to do the steps because I had rejected them and thought that they were dumb, and I didn't follow them. And so I ended up failing geometry because I didn't know how to do the steps. Turns out she was right, and guess what? I was wrong. I have plenty of stories like that in my life where an authority has said something, and I said, I'm not going to do it your way. I'm going to do it the other way, like the stop sign in my neighborhood. Or like I've gotten counsel for something from somebody who probably knew more about that thing than I did, but I said, you know what? I'm going to trust my wisdom more on this one than your wisdom. I'm going to do my own thing. And there are some of you here who can totally identify with me. When I say, I don't really care for authority to be told what to do, you're like, me neither, buddy. And there are some of you who just judged me, and that's fine. I can handle that. Some of you who are a lot like my wife, Jen, my sweet wife, Jen, who, she follows authority, there's security in rules and structure and that's fine. And you tell me what to do and I'll do it. And some of you are absolutely like that and you're hugely uncomfortable operating outside of authority. But what I want us to see is that I, the problem that I have is the problem that we all have, because at some point in your life, even those of you who love and respect authority and appreciate the structure that it brings you and feel safe within that structure, all of us at some point have broken the rules and rejected authority. All of us. If you haven't, then you're sinless and you should be the pastor of the church. I'd be excited to learn from you. We've all, at some point or another, rejected authority, gone our own way, done what we thought we needed to do. We've all, at some point, said, your rules don't make the most sense right here. I'm not going to do those rules. Or your counsel, the advice that you're giving me is a counsel that I reject. I don't care for it. Even though you probably know more about it than I do, I'm going to reject that counsel and do what I think is best in this situation. And I want us to see that when we do that, that implicit in our rejection of authority or counsel is an admission that we think we know better. You see, we've all done this. We've all rejected authority in our life at different times for different reasons. And we've all rejected counsel in our life at different times for different reasons. And that's all well and good because sometimes all authority shouldn't be followed. But when we do that, when we reject authority or counsel, there is an admission in that that we believe our way is better, right? To take it to the next level. A lot of times when that authority is a moral authority, when that counsel is moral counsel, a lot of times when we reject moral authority or moral counsel, we do it in favor of a pursuit of our own happiness. We believe that we're experiencing a happy, joyful life and that the thing that we want to pursue is actually outside of that authority that is being levied over us. And so we push off the authority that would have us act in a certain way in favor of pursuing our own happiness because we don't believe that submission to that authority will bring about our happiness. I said it like this. We reject authority when we do not believe submission will lead to happiness. You see this? When you're a kid, your parents tell you to do something and and you reject that authority, because we're not going to have more fun if I follow that authority. This is actually going to lead to greater happiness if I reject that authority and do what I want. I think back to when I was about 17 years old. My dad, mom and dad said, forget it with the curfew. Just tell us if you're going to be home that night, and let us know when you get wherever you're going. But no curfew. You do what you like. But here's the thing. My dad always said this. Nothing good happens after midnight. Son, go do what you want. But listen, nothing good happens after midnight. And I thought, that is a stupid idea. All the best things happen after midnight, right? All the fun stuff happens after midnight. That's when you get the best stories, right? So he says you need to, yeah, she knows. What are you doing over there, five-year-old? That's great. That's right, baby. He says you need to stay, you need to be in, you need to be safe, you need to make wise choices. And I think that's not going to lead to my happiness. That's not going to lead to fun. I'm going to choose this over here. And so I reject, I believe that submission to that authority will prevent me from being happy. And so I'm going to pursue it over here in rebellion of that authority, right? And here's the thing. Those two ideas that to reject authority or counsel is to say implicitly that we believe that we know better, and to reject moral authority and moral counsel is to say that I don't believe my happiness can be pursued in submission to that, so I believe that my happiness is best pursued in rebellion to that authority. It's through this grid that all of us, in one way or another, view God. You see? If you think about it from a non-Christian's perspective, and if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, I am thrilled that you're here. I'm thrilled that you're dipping your toe in the water to see if we're actually a bunch of weirdies or if maybe we're kind of like you and just trying to figure out life. I appreciate the fact that you're here and that you're exploring. That's wonderful. But for those of us who know people who aren't believers, or if perhaps you are not a believer, I think one of the things we could agree upon is, if you live in the South, first of all, you've been exposed to the gospel. You've heard about the Bible. You've heard about Jesus. You've probably sat in a church service. There's not many people wandering around our culture who haven't at least been presented the story of Jesus, right? And so it's been an active decision to keep Jesus at arm's length. And people do this for different reasons. But a lot of the reasons can be boiled down to a simple rejection of authority. I'm not interested in submitting to that authority in my life right now. Because people who are not believers tend to believe that to become a Christian means I'm going to have to stop doing some things that I really enjoy doing and I'm going to have to start doing some stuff that I really don't want to do. Right? If we think about ourselves and our journey and coming to a place where we submitted to God and said, yeah, I'll live my life under the authority of God's word. If we think of some of the people we know who may be on the fence about it, I would be willing to bet that a big contention that they have is to be a Christian, to live under the authority of God's word means to stop doing some things that bring me joy and to start doing some things that I don't think will bring me joy. So what we see is they're choosing their pursuit of their own happiness over what God's happiness will be for them, right? They think they know a better way than God does, and so no thanks. But here's the thing, even as believers, we continue to do this. We have these pockets of exceptions that we make for ourselves in our life. If you're here this morning and you're a believer, then most of you would say that you live your life under the authority of this word, that if God's word says something, that you try to acquiesce to that, you try to live in submission to it. And yeah, we mess up from time to time. Nobody's perfect, but I do try to live my life under the authority of God. But here's the thing, even as believers, we all have pockets and we all have places where we don't really submit to God's word. We're over here, we're submitted to God's authority and we're pursuing his happiness and the good life that he has for us here. But over here, what we believe is I'm going to hold on to these sins and these things because I really do believe that my happiness will be found here more than it will be found with God. And so we hang on to these things. An easy example of this is the biblical admonishment that we should confess our sins to one another. Scripture teaches over and over again in the Old Testament and in the New Testament that we should confess our sins to loving brothers and sisters, that we should take the dark things that are in our life and shed light on them. Because when we put them in the light and we allow God's people, God's children who love us and who love Jesus to see what's happening in the dark recesses of our life and of our heart that to do that sheds light on a sin and will destroy that sin and break that foothold that is in our life. We know this to be true. If you've been a Christian for any time, you've heard that teaching. But here's the thing. Most Christians I know are really bad at that. When's the last time, I'm being honest, those of you who have been walking with the Lord for a long time, when's the last time you had an egregious sin in your life that was eating your lunch and that you sat down and endured the shame and told somebody who loved you and who loved Jesus, hey man, this is kicking my tail? When's the last time you did that? When's the last time someone did that to you? When was the last time someone called you to coffee or called you on the phone and said, hey, I just need your help with this. This is going on in my life and I don't want it to be a part of my life anymore. For most of us, that hasn't happened in a long time because even though God's word teaches it, we don't like to do it. Why don't we like to do it? Because to do that would cause shame. There would be potential ramifications in our marriages, in our finances, in our standing, perhaps in our careers. It would cost us a lot to have to confess the thing that's going on in our life that we don't want to admit to. And so what we do is, instead of submitting to God's authority and confessing that to somebody who loves us, who can help walk us through it, is we convince ourselves that I'm going to handle this on my own. I tell you what, God, I have a better way. I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to get over this sin on my own, and then I'll never need to confess it to anyone. No one will ever need to know about this part of my life and my heart. And then I'll move past it, and it'll just be a thing that used to exist. Sound familiar? And we know that God's word says that we need to confess, but we go, no, I have a better way. If I do that, that will make me unhappy. I will lose things that are sources of joy, so I'm going to pursue my happiness here. We all do this with God. And it's to this mindset, to those of us who may not be believers who hold Christ at arm's length because we believe that to follow him would cost us a quality of life that we're not willing to give up, or those of us who are following Jesus but we hold him at arm's length in certain areas of our life because we don't want to give up that portion of our life because we don't think that it will really make us happier if we follow him. We think that we're living the best life possible now because we trust our judgment more than we trust his. It's to that mindset that Jesus speaks in John chapter 10. In John chapter 10, if you have a Bible, you can open there. He uses another one of these great I am statements, these big statements that he says throughout the gospel of John that makes it unique from the other gospels. The other gospels, we have parables. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we have parables, stories that Jesus tells to make a moral point. We don't have any of those in John. In John, we have I am statements. A couple weeks ago, Kyle preached about him being the living, he says, I am the living water. Last week, we looked at him saying he is the bread of life. This week, he says he is the good shepherd. And the picture here with the good shepherd, and Jesus often paints himself as the good shepherd, is that he is the shepherd of the flock. The flock is us, his church, his children. And the idea with sheep is they're pretty helpless without their shepherd. They're not going to find their way to food. They're not going to find their way to water. They're not going to find their way to flourishing without their shepherd guiding them. They're going to be totally defenseless against predators without their shepherd there to protect them. And so Jesus sets himself up as our shepherd who is there to guide us, to lead us into good water, to lead us into good pastures, and to protect us. And in this verse, he talks about being the gate for the sheep. In town, when you're a shepherd in town, when you're at your house or your farm or whatever it is, there's like a big structure. There's wood and a structure and a swinging gate and hinges and the whole deal, and he can lock the sheep in there and everybody's good. But out on the hillside in the country, a little bit away from the town where the sheep might be grazing, if you need to stay overnight, the shepherd has to make kind of a makeshift pen. He has to set up rocks and sticks and things like that to keep the sheep hemmed in. And then because he doesn't carry a gate with hinges in his pocket, he's got to make a gate. And so what the shepherd will do out in the hillside is he will sleep in front of the opening of the gate, of the pen, and serve as the physical personification of the gate so that nothing can get to his sheep unless it comes through him. And then he talks about this idea of a thief that might try to get into the gate in any other way by jumping in or coming into the pen by any way that isn't him. Okay? And so that's kind of the context for this verse that has become my favorite verse. John 10, 10, Jesus says this, The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly. The thief is Satan. He is the enemy. We're going to talk about him in a second. But Jesus says, listen, to a room full of people who we at different points in our life for different reasons have all rejected the authority of Jesus in our life at one time or another. To a room full of people who have all at different points chosen our own version of happiness and our own judgment over his to pursue what we think is going to be the best life possible for us. To a room full of people who have done that, Jesus says, I am the gate. I am the good shepherd. And if it comes into your life through me, then the promise is you will have life and have it abundantly. Other translations say have it to the full. The original language, the word there means to have a super abundance of a thing. Jesus tells you, those of us who doubt his authority, who choose our own version of happiness over his version of happiness, he tells us, I promise you that standard is working to bring about the greatest possible happiness and joy and fulfillment for you. If it's counsel from my word or from someone who loves me and loves my word and they're speaking this into your life, I promise you that counsel, even if it's counterintuitive, will be working to bring about for you the greatest possible life that you can have in this life and the next. Jesus promises us that anything that comes from him is working to bring about your greatest happiness. And then he says, but the thief, which is anything that gets to you that isn't through me, is working to steal and to kill and to destroy your life. And we understand that that thief is Satan. And we don't talk a lot about Satan here. We don't talk a lot about the devil. And actually, it's such a big part of the scripture. He's addressed so much that I really do believe at some point or another, we're gonna do a whole series on the devil. I'll wear a double-breasted suit every Sunday and a handkerchief and I'll dab my forehead a lot and yell at you, okay? It'd be great. We need to address him. He's a big part of Scripture, but for the purposes of this morning, what we need to know is Satan is real, he is effective, and he is against you. And Jesus says, anything that gets into your life that is not from me is from him. And it is working to steal and to kill and to destroy your life. And many of us know that this is true experient the thief can derail our life, can steal our life from us, there's easy examples of this. We immediately think of the egregious sins, right? We think of maybe an addiction. Maybe there was somebody who had a surgery, the surgery of the recovery of which required some pain medication. And so they began to take that medication and they liked the way that made them feel. There was more of it than they needed, and we fast forward two, three years down the road, and they've developed an addiction, and that's how Satan steals our lives. I have a dear, dear friend whose wife developed one of these, and it has wrecked their life. He has had portions of his life stolen from him from a sin that isn't even his. We've seen this work in our lives and in the lives of others, right? Sometimes it's a secret sin. It's an affair or an issue or a private thing that we have going on that we won't confess, that we won't let other people know about. And Proverbs tells us that we can't hold hot coals against our chest and not be burned. And sometimes, eventually, that secret sin will fester up and manifest itself and do damage in our life that is irreparable, and Satan will have successfully stolen that portion of our life from us from some egregious secret thing or from some addiction. But for most of us, that is not how Satan is going to steal our life. The Bible says he prowls about like a roaring lion seeking who he may devour. And for some of us, that's how he picks us off. But for many of us, most of us, I think Satan's most pernicious tactic is to simply distract us, to keep us focused on all sorts of things as we go through life that aren't from God, that ultimately don't matter. I cannot tell you how many conversations I've had with people in their 50s and 60s who have poured their life into their career and been very successful into that career, in that career, only to find that they don't have the relationship with their children or their spouse that they would really like because Satan distracted them for so many years and they poured their life into a thing that ultimately doesn't matter very much. We pour ourselves into hobbies that don't matter. We get really good at a thing that has no eternal value And most of that is a masking mechanism because we're not happy with what our home life looks like. And what we really need to do is work on that. But it's easier to be distracted by these other shiny things that are going off in our life. And so we pursue those. We pursue the house that we want. We pursue the family that we want. We pursue all these things that at the end of the day might not matter very much, but Satan has successfully distracted us with things going on in our world and in our culture that don't matter for eternity, and he steals your life from you. Some of you walked in here today, and you are in the middle of having your life stolen. And for you, I hope if nothing else happens as a result of this this morning, that you will recognize that that's taking place. And you'll put your foot on the ground and you'll say, no more. I'm not going to allow my life to be stolen from me in this way. But what I want us to trust is that if it comes from Jesus, even if it's counterintuitive, that it is working to bring about our greatest happiness. There's plenty of examples of how this works. I think of marriage, right? Most of us in the room are married, and if you're married, what do you want? You want your marriage to be vibrant and happy and fulfilling and loving and filled with joy. That's what you want. The problem is not very many of us or not most of us would use those words to describe our marriages because marriage is hard, and to get to that place, it takes a lot of work, and sometimes it's easier to just fulfill the needs of marriage outside of that marriage because that takes a lot less work, right? Sometimes when we're not having our needs met within a marriage, we go outside the marriage to another person or a thing or a hobby or a group of people or some sort of masking activity from what we're lacking in our home. And what Scripture teaches us is that our greatest happiness is found in our marriage. If you are married right now, I'm not talking about in the past, I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad. If you are married right now, I can tell you it is God's will that you would be happy and flourishing in that marriage. It is God's will that you would remain married. I know that to be the case. And so what God really wants us to do, even though sometimes when marriage gets hard, it looks like it would be easier to just go outside the marriage and have our needs met in different ways and keep everything intact. The better thing to do, the harder thing to do, is to lean harder into our marriage and do the hard work that it takes to bring vibrancy there because that is the path through which our greatest happiness and fulfillment will be found. That's what Jesus promises. Another easy one is the confession. When we don't confess, we don't do it because we're afraid of the shame that it's going to bring us. And so we try to work on this thing privately, and it never gets any better. And we never experience the grace of other people loving us without judgment and without shame and seeking to build us up. And so we never obey God and confess our sins to one another, and that thing festers. Instead, if we would just do the difficult thing and shed light on the dark places, we would watch the love of God and the grace of God through His children rush into our life and heal us of this thing that's been eating our lunch forever. Right? Example after example of things that seem counterintuitive, if we follow the authority of Christ, it can't possibly make me happy. It can't possibly make me happy to give away a minimum of 10% of my money. That does not seem very smart. But God promises us that if we do that, if we'll be generous people, that we will experience life as conduits of his generosity and experience the joy that comes from that. Jesus promises us in John 10.10 that even when it doesn't make any sense, if it gets into your life from him, then it is working to bring about the greatest life you could possibly imagine.10? Do you believe John 10.10? Do you believe that Jesus is telling the truth? Do you believe that Jesus cares deeply about your joy and your happiness and the quality of your life now? And do you believe if he does care about that, that he alone knows how to bring about your greatest joy? Do you believe that? Because if you do, if you believe it, then our whole life changes. There's never a reason to sin again. There's never a reason to throw off his authority again, because we know that we trust that God is working to bring about our happiness. When we get to those crossroads in life, where it would be far easier to just do the easy thing, the simple thing, to do the thing that is a rejection of God's authority, or it would be difficult to choose God's authority. When we get to those crossroads, if we believe John 10.10, it will be easier to choose Jesus' authority than our own because we know we can trust him with our happiness and with our joy. If we believe John 10.10, here's the thing, there's no reason to ever sin again when we really think that it's true. And when we really think that we can trust it, it changes everything. So here's how we want to finish. I would love for you to think through, where is God trying to bring me joy? Where am I allowing my life to be stolen from me? What lies am I believing in pursuing happiness outside of God's will that will never make me happy? Where am I allowing my life to be stolen from me? And what would it look like if I actually chose submission to God, glad and happy obedience, and pursued the happiness that he promises me through everything that enters into my life through him as it works to bring about our greatest joy and the greatest life possible, a super abundance of the thing. This week, as you go throughout your days and you hit those crossroads where you realize it's a choice between my authority and my version of good and Jesus' authority and his version of good, whose will you choose? And really, the question as you leave this morning is, who do you trust with your life and with your happiness? Yourself or Jesus? Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for your son who loved us so well, who was so patient with us, who was so gracious with us, who is our good shepherd, who always leads us to the good places. God, I pray that we would trust him with our lives, that we would trust him in submission to you, that we wouldn't be, frankly, so arrogant as to choose our own way, but that we would submit to the founder and perfecter of our faith, to the author of the universe, that we would trust that you have our best interest at heart and you know exactly how to bring that about. Father, let us trust you more. Let us choose your judgment and your authority over our own. Let us believe what your son says in John 10.10. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, sweet. Good morning, everyone. Everyone doing well? Yeah. All right. Yeah. Woo! Yeah, baby! All right. Sweet. Hey, I'm always for being applauded. I've already lost my notes. This is how this is going to go this morning. I'm all for getting applauded before I even have to do anything. So thank you guys so much for that. But as Nate said, I'm Kyle. I'm the student pastor here at Grace. I'm so excited to get to speak to you guys this morning. I'm especially excited, honestly, because I have actually, probably about a month after we decided to do the book of John, I actually did a passage out of John with our students. We did John 4 and our students, and I had read it and kind of studied it a little bit, and something hit me in a different way than I'd ever been hit by this story before. And this is a story I think that many of us know. I know I've heard it tons of times, and it's incredible in itself, but I had realized something a little bit different that I said, you know what? After getting to know our students, I think this would really go well with them. And so I went through it, and it went well. I think that they really enjoyed it, and I really felt like the Lord had placed on my heart, Kyle, I have a bigger audience for you to tell this to as well. And as I realized, I was like, hey, we're doing a John series. I guess this is my moment. And so, you know, it's a pretty big story, and I was like, well, I don't know if Nate's going to let me do something that's that good, you know. But I went to Nate. I was like, Nate, what do you think about this? And he was like, well, you know, let's look at our times. Let's look at the schedule, blah, blah, blah. I didn't know. I didn't know what the schedule was looking like. I kind of had forgotten. I mean, I knew it was first weekend of March, but you know, I didn't know. And so we looked, and wouldn't you know that on the fourth week of John, I'd be able to talk about John 4. And I think that's incredible. And I think that there's something to be said about that. And I don't say that to say, get ready for me to knock your socks off. Get ready for the best sermon you've ever heard. I mean, are those things true? Yeah. No, they're not true. And if you're expecting that, then I'm sorry that it's going to be kind of a bummer. But what I will tell you is that clearly, that the Lord has clearly ordained the ability for me to be able to speak this to you this morning. And so for that, I would say, maybe he has something for you this morning. And so I would ask that you'd open up your ears and open up your hearts to maybe what the Lord has for you this morning. And I'm going to do my best to get out of his way and just let him take over. So anyways, let's jump on in. We're going to be in John 4. I'm going to kind of, we'll talk about it some. I'll read a little bit, you know, the classic one too. And so we're going to be in John 4, and basically at this time, Jesus and his disciples, they've been traveling. They're going from Judea to Galilee, and they stop in this town called Sakaar that's within Samaria. They stop there basically, you know, because they've been walking a long way. Like, I don't like to walk from here to Chipotle with Steve, and that's like right down the road, and I have shoes. So I don't even imagine where they were at, so I'd be stopping a lot. But anyways, they're stopped here, and the disciples go off to try to find some food for them as Jesus goes to the well to get some water. So as he goes, this woman comes up. It says around noontime or the sixth hour, both mean the same thing, that this woman comes and he says, woman, could you give me a drink? And that's where I want to pick up. I want to read her response real quick. Her response in verse 9 says, the Samaritan woman said to him, you are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? And I think to stop real quick, I want, I think it's very important to understand why she's asking that question. The reason in the cultural background and the cultural significance of that is the fact that Jews and Samaritan did not mix. They didn't mingle. They hated each other. It was an NC State fan and an UNC fan talking to each other. It just didn't happen. There was no love lost between the two people. And so this was a big deal that Jesus had crossed that cultural boundary to talk to this woman. In the same token, as she says, a Jewish man and a Samaritan woman, that not only that, but we know that in this time and in this culture, there was this hierarchy between men and women, that men were considered better, they were considered greater. And in the same respects, in this culture, men and women just didn't randomly, a guy would not go up and just talk to a girl in public, especially one that he didn't know. It just was not considered right. And in the same token, as we go a little bit more in depth into something that we know here, is that when it says that this was at noon when this woman approached, that what this is saying and what in this culture, as they would know and as Jesus would know, that the reason why this woman is coming at noon in the middle of the day when it's completely hot and she's completely alone and by herself, what we know about that, and we know that to mean that probably even within Sychar, even within her own people and in her own community, she was in exile. That she was an outcast. That she was somebody who was probably shamed and looked down on, that she was less than or considered unclean. And we realize, and as we get into this, that this is the truth and that she had basically these public sins. And so because of that, instead of going with the rest of the women early in the morning where it wasn't too hot, where they could get their water and come back and start working and doing their chores, doing the stuff that they had to do for the day, that this woman had to wait until everyone else was gone because she was so shamed. And so, hey, you cannot be here with the rest of the people. You have to come by yourself. You have to go in the heat of the day where, I mean, just to be real, probably not great. It was probably the worst. And not only that, but even just to consider the fact that she had to walk there every day by those people who had shamed her and who hated her. And so we know those three things. And the reason why I think those are important is because Jesus is about to talk about some incredible things. Jesus could give the message he gives this woman in a sermon, and it would do incredibly well. It's awesome. There's so much truth in this. There's so much awesome, great stuff in the love of Christ that he shares in this passage. But instead, he goes up to one woman. He walks past every boundary that has been placed culturally for her. And he says, you know what? I'm talking to you. I'm expressing my love to you because you need to hear it. And I think that that's incredible. And what I think that that shows us is that Jesus' love is boundless, and it's for everyone. It's not just for people who are Jews. It's not just for people who are men or who work in the church, who are in the church. It's for everyone. And I think that that's incredible. And so I want to pick back up, and we're going to start back in 10. Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you holy water or living water. Sir, the woman said, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. I would have given you living water. And she doesn't know who he is. She wasn't able to read the first three books of John before having this conversation. She didn't get to hear these great messages that Nate has posted online from the last three weeks. She doesn't know who this is. So she's like, okay, that sounds great, but you don't have anything to get the water, and the well is deep, my man. And so I just think that's funny, and I think that you should too. But in 11, it says, sir, the woman said, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Ah, we've already read that. Sorry. We're going into, yeah what this living water is, it's this well that will spring up into eternal life, that it's this eternal well, this eternal spring where you never have to go back to the well again because you're forever satisfied, your soul is satisfied. And we understand what he means is God's love and the grace that's shown through Christ to us on this earth. We understand that he is pointing to, I'm going to die in a couple years and I'm going to for you, and then I'm going to be raised to life. And in the same way, if you'll come to me, you can experience this as well. This is incredible. It's awesome stuff. It's him saying, dude, look at this grace. This is offered to you, but she still doesn't get it. Instead, her reply, she said, the woman said to him, sir, give me this water that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water. And I love that. She doesn't get it, but what she does get is I don't want to have to come back to this well and come back to the memory every day of the fact that I am completely isolated and completely alone. I don't have to walk past people trying my best to not make eye contact because I know they're looking down their noses at me. And this is not the main point of my message, but grace, may we never be that person. May we never be a place that people do not want to come back to because they're afraid of what people will think of them for a mistake that they've made, for a past that they have, for somebody who's sitting next to you right now that undoubtedly may mess up in their life. That we're always a place where you can come and you can experience the love of Christ with open arms coming in, and I don't care what you did yesterday because you're here today and I love you for that. May we be that type of church. Let's keep going. He told her, go, call your husband and come back. I have no husband, she replied. Jesus said to her, you are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is you have five husbands and you've had five husbands and the man you are now with is not your husband. What you have said is quite true. Now, remember this moment because it seems random. It seems weird. It's always been weird for me. I've never really fully understood it, but I just said, you know what? This is a great passage, but this is what we're going to come back to. This is the meat of the passage, but I want to continue because I think it's imperative that we fully understand what Jesus is saying and who he is in this passage, and then we'll come back and see what that means. So let's just keep reading. I don't know if you have. Bibles need bigger print. You know what I'm saying? All right. Sir, the woman said, I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem. And so basically what she's trying to deflect, trying to get, you know, like, okay, let's talk about worship for a bit. I can tell that you're a prophet. And so Jesus responds, and it's a little wordy, it's a little hard to understand, but basically what Jesus says is, let me tell you, first of all, the God that us Jews, the God that we worship is the one true God that Jews worship in truth because this God is the God. He is the only one true rightful God. But let me also tell you that a time is coming and a time has now come where not only is this the God of the Jews, but this is the God of all people, that this God created every person and loves every person. So a time is coming that not only will the Jews be able to worship in truth, but all people, Jew or Samaritan, will be able to worship in spirit and in truth. That when I die for you, that you have the ability to have the Holy Spirit inside of you, the same well that we've talked about that continues to come in, that you never have to go back. You're always forever satisfied. You have this eternal value and this eternal soul satisfaction. He says, this is going to be for all people, not just for Jews, but for Samaritans, for you as well. And so she responds and she says, basically she says, sir, I know that a Messiah is coming. I've heard that a Messiah named Christ is coming and that he's going to explain all of this to us. And Jesus says, I, the one you are speaking to, am he. This Messiah that you've heard about, that is coming to save all people, it's me. And I'm here to tell you that you're definitely right. And that I, as the Messiah, am here to love you. Not just to love people, but to love you. And how incredible is that? And how incredible is that truth? And if we just ended it there, it's like, oh my gosh, this is phenomenal. And like, how awesome is it that God is a God who loves everyone? And as I've read this in the past, I'm like, it's so great that not only does God love me, but God loves people who've sinned in drastic ways, people who are completely isolated, somebody who's dealt with adultery and seems like to continue to fall under adultery and probably other sins as well, as this passage alludes to. And I love that until I think, why was it in this passage? Why did he, she just asked for holy water, and then he changes the subject and says, come bring your husband. And so it's like, why, that's random, and that's weird. Why did you say that? And then the next question is, okay, so you did know that she didn't have a husband. You did know that she's had five husbands and that she's with her sixth man. You did know all of this. So then it just seems like she's putting the, that he's putting this lady on blast. Like he's just straight up calling this lady out and being kind of rude. And I hear that and I see that. And it also just doesn't make sense. Why are you doing it? But then as I, as I realized is there's no reason why this would be in here if it didn't completely connect with the rest of it. And what I think is that instead of him simply talking about her sin is that he is trying to get to the heart behind her sin. And when you get to the heart behind sin and when you start to think about it that way, it gets a little bit scarier for us. Because we, I don't, most people in this room have not been married five times and are on their sixth lover or whatever. I don't know. I don't know what the word is for that. Sorry, I said lover. But what I do think is that we all have hearts that are seeking out other things besides God. And what I do know is that what that means is we have sinful hearts. And so what I think is he's pointing at this and he's saying, you have been searching for value and worth and identity in men instead of in me. And so because of that, you're continuing to have to go back to this well, because it's never going to be enough. And so like I said, I know that we don't always have these stories. Like for me, like to give you a little background behind me, since I know I don't know all of you quite as well, and I haven't known all of you guys for such a long time, I think the best way to give you a little background behind me is to tell you a little bit about high school Kyle. High school Kyle was killing it with the braces game, aka had braces, like all of high school, which is great. Like, that's the time you want to have braces is high school. Like, you know, let the least amount of judgmental people around, you know, obviously. But no, I think the easiest way to really tell you is to kind of tell you what senior superlative I got. And yeah, I know, I know. Hold your plot. Like, I know I got a senior superlative. You guys are like, wow, this is a girl. I know, I get it. But chill, you know, I'm just a normal person just like you guys. But I, the senior superlative, so like, for those of you who don't know, or maybe you like forgot for whatever reason, but there's like, you know, most athletic, and there's like, most likely to succeed, most likely to be president, smartest. Like, I'm sure like if at Connor's school was like biggest sweetheart, he would, he had that unlocked, because he is the sweetest of hearts. Shout out to Connor. Everyone go meet him because he's great. But I didn't get any of those ones that were mentioned. I got most involved. And most of you know, it's like, oh, cool. That's great. That's whatever. Like, when you think about what most involved is, it's basically a participation medal of the superlative game. Like, literally, it's the participation trophy of superlative. It's like, Kyle, we know you worked so hard in school, and you did really well, but there's just people who did better. And we know you worked so hard in sports, and you played a lot of sports, but there were just people who were more athletic. And we know that you were, like, vice president of your class, you were in a lot of leadership roles or whatever, but, like, you're not going to be, you're not most likely to be president in this scenario. Like, you know, like, but you tried so hard, and so we have to give you something, and so here's this. And so it's really sweet, and I don't know, maybe my mom asked them if they would make that just to be sweet to me because she felt bad. But that's what I got, and we laugh and we joke about it, but at the same time, like, I did wear that with a lot of pride. I think it adequately described who I was and who I am, that I'm somebody who is very focused on succeeding. And I want to work as hard as I can to do the very best that I can in every scenario. You know, I wanted to make 100 on every single test. And it's funny how it goes. If I made 100, then I'd be, like, nervous about the next test. I'd be excited for a second and be like, oh, my gosh, now I have to make 100 on the single test. And it's funny how it goes. If I made 100, then I'd be nervous about the next test. I'd be excited for a second and be like, oh my gosh, now I have to make 100 on the next one. But then if I didn't make 100, if I made a 98 on the test, I was devastated and it was the end of my day. And I think some of us can relate to that. Some of us can relate to the fact that we so seek out success and the success is where we're driven. It's where our worth and our value comes from, and we don't quite reach it, then we feel like we've completely failed. And it takes, it like just messes with our hearts in the same way I wanted to be the guy who was known as somebody who worked really hard. I wanted coaches to be able to talk about, man, that guy's work ethic is incredible. Or to tell the players, if you had the work ethic, that if everyone had the work ethic that Kyle had, then we'd be a better team. Or I wanted parents and I wanted teachers to say, this is a great kid. This is a kid who loves the Lord. This is a leader. This is someone who I want my son or my daughter to grow up to have a faith like Kyle. And I say these things to say that these are not bad things. And I think so many things in our life are not bad things. But when I recognize where he's calling this woman out, it was the same with me. I sought so heavily to find my value and to find my worth and to even rest my identity into things outside of Christ, into being seen as a good person, into being lifted up. I can remember at Greystone, the last church I was at, I would be so excited to preach God's word. I would be so excited to get to talk to our students and I had something for them. I knew that the Lord was ready to speak through me to do that and I'd get done and I'd I'd feel great about it, and I'd leave, and I'd be super bummed out at home because not enough people said it was good. I didn't realize, and what I finally realized is this tweet by my man Timothy Keller. He's an older man. He's actually not a pastor anymore because he's retired. Incredible preacher, incredible writer, incredible tweeter. So the big three as far as I'm concerned for being a pastor. But he actually tweeted this week, and I was like, how incredible that he did this, and this is perfect. He said, sin is not simply doing bad things. It is also putting good things in the place of God. I realized, and it hit me pretty hard, that there are so many things in my life that I seek after. There's so many things that I try to find worth and value in, and it never is enough. I love the way that David Foster Wallace puts it. He's got a two-part last name, so you know he's smart. I may start doing my middle and my last name. So Kyle Jordan Talbert said this. So if you quote me, say that, because then people will listen to you. beauty and sexual allure, you will always feel guilty. If you worship power, you will always feel weak and afraid. Worship your intellect, and you will always view yourself as stupid and a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And let me tell you guys that anything you worship outside of God will end up eating you alive. And what is the issue with these things? What is the problem? Why is it? Why can't I find value in these? Because they're earned. Because you have to work as hard as you can to earn them. And anything that you earn, you are always on the verge of also being able to lose them. And there's always someone else. There's always somebody else who doesn't like you. There's always someone who doesn't laugh at your joke. There's always someone who doesn't approve. There's always someone better. There's always someone more successful. There's always more money to be made. When we focus on our success, when we focus on anything else besides God, then we're left coming up short. One scholar says, and I love this, he says, we seek to find our identities horizontally on earth when we have been hardwired to find them vertically in God's love. We've been created to be able to, we've been created to have a relationship with God, our Father. And that is where true eternal value and significance and satisfaction come from. We need to, we need something to change what our heart loves and what it rests in and what it fixes itself on the most. Jesus says he's the only object of worship that won't abuse you because you don't earn his love, his grace, and his favor unlike every other object of worship. And because the point of the gospel and the point of Christ's sacrifice is that the love and the grace that is given to us is given to us as a gift, as free. And so therefore, it is ours. We can't lose it. It's a perfect love and it is a perfect sacrifice that we only receive. And therefore, we're not at risk of losing it. I love, I wrote this one, so whatever. Maybe it's not good. I just kind like, I'm no longer those things. I'm no longer Carl and Suzanne's son. I'm no longer Jay's brother. I'm no longer Connor's coolest friend. I'm Kyle, child of God. And that's in your thing, but I don't want you to write Kyle. You can if you want. That's nice. I want you to write your name because I want you to realize that that is who you are. That's your identity. That's how Christ sees you. That's how the Lord sees you. It's his child. When the creator of the universe would send his son simply for a chance to have a relationship with you, there's not much more value and there's not much more worth you could ever feel than that. And it's a love that keeps coming and it keeps welling up all the way to eternal life. So what does that look like? What does that look like practically? Because it's a cool point. It's an awesome thing. But as my students know, I don't care at all that you understood my message. Like, if you understood my message and you talked about it and then you don't apply it, then who cares? It didn't mean anything. So what does it look like? And I think a very awesome, very cool example is Trevor Lawrence, who was the freshman quarterback at Clemson who won the national championship this year for football. He said he was in a press conference and they basically asked him about his nerves during the game. Ask Asked him like, you know, like, I don't know the exact question, but his response, I love his response. He says, no matter how big the situation is, I know it's not going to define me. It doesn't matter what other people think or say about me because I know what Christ says about me. My identity is in Christ. My value and my worth comes from what Christ says about me. And that was written in stone a long time ago. And so I don't have to spend all of my time worrying about what other people are going to say about me or what other people are thinking or if I am a great quarterback or if I choked or if I'm the best. I'm not worried about that because that's secure. And so does it mean that the Lord took away football because he gave up football in his heart to God? No. The dude won a national championship this year. But can you imagine how much more fun it was for him to play the game that he loves on the biggest stage, not worried about what everyone else thought of him, not trying to find his worth and his value based on the way that he played in that football game? What if that was the way you guys were at work? What if that's the way that we were in our relationships, in our family? What if we weren't solely concerned with having to find our value and having to find our worth by what people thought of us? And instead, we could simply just enjoy it. Enjoy life. Go through life with joy. Going through life knowing that our value and our worth and our souls are completely satisfied. I think it goes even further, honestly. I mean, like, the way that this passage ends, I absolutely love. Like, this woman who was completely isolated from her society and probably was shown, like, a true picture of love, maybe for the first time in her life. I bet her life was a pretty rough one. And so what happens when she finally realizes this? What happens when she finally understands who this man is and the love that he's offering her? She sprints down to Sicar and she starts yelling, you guys have to hear about this person. I think it could be the Messiah. I think it could be this person that we've heard about. He literally told me everything I had done in my life. You have to come find, you have to come see this person, hear from this person yourself. When Christ changes our hearts, when our value is in him, we care far less about what the culture would have us do, what our culture would have us do. We care a lot less about how other people see success. We care a lot less about how other people think we should parent, how other people think we should be as a friend, about what we should be concerned about, what we couldn't. This woman was completely isolated. She wasn't allowed to interact with any of these people. But when you realize and when you fully allow your heart to understand, realize, and be overwhelmed by the love of Christ, there's no way that it doesn't change the way that you live, the things that you talk about. And can I tell you that in such a cynical and fallen world, someone who's completely joyful, you can tell it on them. Someone who has a worth and has value that doesn't go away based on their current circumstance, people see it. And so they heard that and they saw this woman. I think they probably cared less about the words that she said and more just the fact that something incredible just happened to this woman who I probably haven't made eye contact with in years because she's been trying to avoid it because she doesn't want to be seen with shame. I think they cared less about what she said. I think they cared more about the fact that she was so changed in her heart that she would go out in total love and look like a completely different person in her everyday life. May we be those people. May we experience this living water. May we experience having value that is eternal, complete soul satisfaction. And may it change who we are. May it change what we look like. And may it be like the end of this passage where these people, when they saw this woman, they had to go see for themselves. Jesus made a pit stop into a three-day stop because these people wanted to hear what he had to say because they saw what he had done for this girl. May we have people in our lives who have to come see what's going on here, have to go see what's going on in this person's heart, because man, there's just something different about it. Let's pray. God, thank you for your love. God, thank you for your son, for his sacrifice. God, thank you for the fact that you literally show and offer your love to every single one of us, regardless of our past, regardless of our present, that God, if we would come to you, you offer love. And God, allow us to realize that this love is the only thing in this life that we need. And so instead of worrying so much about our current lives and what's going on in our future and what our past was, God, that we're simply able to rest in the peace of your love and the assurance that that brings us. Man, God, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sending your son to die for me for some reason. Thank you that you see me as a child of God, as a child of you. And God, I do just want to take a second to say thank you for whoever wrote this next song because man, they did a good job. We love you. Amen.