Sermons tagged with Ministry

This is the fourth part in our series called 27, where this summer and next summer we're going to do an overview of all 27 books in the New Testament. We've been spending June in the Gospels, and this week we arrive at John. John is my favorite Gospel, and in the mode of the other Gospels, if you've listened to all four sermons, you kind of know that each Gospel is written to a certain audience and depicts Jesus in a certain way. By way of review, Matthew was written to the Jews, and Jesus is depicted as the king. Mark was written to the Romans, and Jesus is depicted as a servant. Luke was written to the Greeks, and Jesus is depicted as a man. And the book of John was written to everyone, and Jesus is depicted as God. The book of John is different than the other books. It's written to all people for all time, not a specific audience, and it begins right off the bat talking about Jesus as God. John's gospel is different. In fact, it starts off different. It starts off with a resounding claim that feels far different than the other gospels. I love the way that John starts his gospel. It's one of the reasons it's my favorite gospel. Look with me in John chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. And I'm going to keep reading verses 4 and 5 because I read them again this morning and I'm like those are cool verses too. They need to hear them. So here, John chapter 1, this is how his gospel begins. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him not anything made that was made. Listen, in Him was life by John. Who at the very beginning, from the very beginning, places Jesus in the Godhead at creation. He says, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through Him all things were made. Without Him nothing was made. If you think back, this is why it's a big deal to call Him the Word of God, because if you think back to Genesis 1, and you think back to the creation account, how did God create things? He spoke them into being. God said, let there be light. And there was light. He said, let there be fish and birds and animals. And there was fish and birds and animals. He spoke them into being. It was God's very word that was the agent of creation. And here at the beginning of John, right off the bat, just boom, right in your face, John says Jesus is the word, the logos of God. He is the agent of creation. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. He places Jesus in the moment of creation along with creator God the Father and God the Spirit that Genesis says is hovering over the surface of the deep. So right there we get the idea of the Trinity. B.B. Warfield, a theologian from either Yale or Princeton, I should have double checked, from the early 1900s, wrote a lot of things about the Gospels and a lot of different things about Jesus. But one of the things that he said is that the synoptics were written from below upward, and John was written from above downward. The synoptic Gospels are the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They follow the same chronology. They have a lot of the same stories. They have a lot of the same parables. Those are called the synoptic gospels. And they present Jesus from the bottom upward. Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies. Here is Jesus' genealogical tree. Here are the men and women from whom he descends, right? It starts at the bottom. And then they introduce him as a baby, helpless, lying in a manger. And if you know nothing else outside of these gospels, this is your first encounter with Christ. And you see him gradually. We learn that he is God and that he is divine and that he is the son of God and that he is the Messiah. We build Jesus from the bottom upward. But in John's gospel, in John's gospel, we see Jesus from the top downward. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and then we see him show up at baptism. Then we see him human. Then we see him as fully God and fully man. But John's gospel is unique and differentiates itself from the rest of the gospels. If I were going to stay in the mode of the series that we've done so far, every week I kind of look at how Jesus is depicted and why he's depicted that way, and then we kind of pick it apart and see why that's important to us. Why is it important to us that Jesus needed to be displayed as king, or that Jesus is a servant, or that Jesus is man, and we kind of look at that. And so if I were going to follow that mode, I would take this week and I would say, why is it important that we understand that Jesus is God? How do we pull that theme out and how does that apply to us? But to me, and it doesn't mean I don't respect the other gospels, but to me, I love the gospel of John so much and there's's so much good stuff in there, that I found that to be overly reductive and dismissive of the message of John. So I didn't want to do that. And I thought about all the things about John that I love that make it unique, and eventually what we'll do is we'll land on this single unifying principle that comes out of the gospel of John that I think is one of the most profound, powerful, freeing principles in all the Bible. We might spend our entire spring on this one principle. But as we get there, I wanted to share with you what I love about the book of John, what I think makes it unique, because I'll tell you right now, the whole goal of this sermon, the only thing I want you to do is leave here and read the book of John. That's my goal. It's for you to walk out those doors or those doors thinking tomorrow or this afternoon, I'm going to crack open the book of John and I'm going to read it. And I'll tell you, I started reading it again too. And I read chapter one this morning. And if you can read chapter one and not want to read the rest of it, then I can't help you. Chapter one is a great chapter of the Bible when you're locked in and you're paying attention to what's going on. So my whole goal is to have you leave wanting to know Jesus through the book of John and wanting to read the book of John. What I think is unique about John, and it's not just me, I mean, you can find lists online. But the things that matter to me are, first of all, John is written from the perspective of a loving friend. Now Matthew and Luke, they knew Jesus. John Mark knew Jesus through Peter and Paul, but John knew Jesus. John was a loving friend. He was a close friend. And in your life, if someone was going to write the story of your life, who better to write it than a close and intimate lifelong friend, than someone who's known you and walk with you for years? Someone who's seen you, who's seen your vices and your values, who's watched you lose it, who knows what frustrates you, who knows what brings you joy, who knows how to complete your sentences, who knows what makes you happy, who's been with you in the down times and laughed with you and cried with you and mourned with you and wept with you? What about, who else can have a perspective on you like that of a good friend? And we say that John was Jesus' good friend because it kind of drips off the pages. First of all, in John's gospel, he refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Now that, that is a bold claim. To write your gospel knowing the other gospel writers like they're around, they're going to see this and he still puts it out there that he is the disciple whom Jesus loved. So it would almost be like writing a letter, writing a book about your parents and calling yourself the child whom my parents loved. Like it's a bold claim. And in my case, everybody would just be like, yeah, that's true. It's legit. But he calls himself the disciple whom Jesus loved. And you can see that their relationship was unique amongst him and the disciples. At the last supper, they're reclining together and the way that they would eat dinner, you would lean on your side and you would reach to the table that way and so they were kind of front to back and John's head was in Jesus' chest at one point because he was asking, who is it, Jesus, that's going to betray you? And Jesus whispers into John's ear, it's the one who's going to dip the bread next. He whispers into John's ear who it was going to be, that it was going to be Judas. It's this intimate moment that only John records. And John records a lot of intimate moments like this. As a matter of fact, at the cross, we see that John may have been the only disciple that even bothered to show up. And Jesus musters up the energy and the oxygen to push himself up on the nails and tell John, when I die, please take care of my mother. He entrusted Mary to John. That was how close and intimate they were. So John's gospel is written from the perspective of a loving friend three decades later as he reminisces on the sweetest years of his life when he walked with his Savior. And so John just writes down different things than the other gospel writers did. John almost writes down a personal memoir of Christ where we get insights into these amazing conversations. We get insights into miracles that we don't see in other places like the miracle of the wedding at Cana. We get the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. We get long teachings of Jesus that we don't see in the other books. Matthew and Luke have the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon by the Lake, whichever setting you want to take. But John has teachings and conversations that we see nowhere else. I actually have some there in your notes for you so you can use this as reference later when you're going through John. But in John chapter 3, we see him have this amazing conversation with Nicodemus that the other gospel writers don't record. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. And the Pharisees rejected Jesus and who he was. But I've always respected Nicodemus because Nicodemus had a way to see past the fake news and the tide and the current and the way that everything else was running in culture and say, wait, but what do I think and who is this man? And so he seems to have requested a conversation with Jesus. And they meet under cover of night and Jesus lays out everything for Nicodemus, who he is, what he came to do, and how we can be, in our words, saved. And in this discourse with Nicodemus, we see the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the salvation message, it's the gospel, it's the whole point of the Bible wrapped into this one succinct verse. It's in the conversation with Nicodemus that that verse appears. One chapter over in John chapter 4, Jesus has this incredible conversation with the woman at the well, this Samaritan woman where he breaks cultural norms, he goes past hated divides, and he talks with a woman who comes to the well in the middle of the day because she's so ashamed of her life that she doesn't want to be seen by the other women. And Jesus calls her out, says, you've had five husbands. The guy you're living with now is not your husband. That's not good for you. I don't want you to keep doing that, but I love you. I'm the living water. Drink of me and you will never perish. And she goes back to her village or her town and she tells everybody, there's a dude at the well that just told me everything I ever did and you guys need to come check him out. And the whole town goes out there, they meet Jesus and they have faith in him. We don't see that story in the other gospels. And then I referenced it earlier in John chapter 17 we have the lengthiest prayer recorded of Jesus. Now the most famous prayer of Jesus is the Lord's prayer. When he teaches the disciples how to pray, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That prayer. And then we have accounts of the prayer in Gethsemane, right before he's arrested to be crucified, where he says, Father, please take this cup from me. Please don't make me do this. But in John chapter 17, we have Jesus's most lengthy recorded prayer. It's an insight into his heart and his desires into his conversations with his father. And scholars refer to it as the high priestly prayer. And in that prayer, it's so remarkable because he starts off by praying for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, he prays for all of those who would follow the disciples. He prays for the church down through the generations. Do you realize that in John chapter 17, if you're a Christian, if you're a part of God's church, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, and to be a Christian means that you believe that Jesus is who he says he is. You believe that he did what he said he did. And you believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you are a Christian, then in John chapter 17, Jesus prays for you. It's right there in the red letters. And I can't get over the fact that tucked away in this corner of the Bible, in the 17th chapter of John, that my Savior prayed for me and he prayed for you. And it's recorded and we get to read it. We don't see that in the other gospels. That kind of intimacy is not there. We see it in the gospel of John. And just as an aside, do you know what Jesus prays for? For his disciples and for the generations of the church to come? What would you pray for in that moment? Faithfulness? Power and efficacy of mission? The growth of the church? The fidelity of the saints. Jesus, in that moment, the most important thing on his mind was to pray for unity. Unity within the church. Unity within his children. Unity within the descendants of God. So when I read that passage, I feel equal parts inspired and encouraged that my Jesus prayed for me. But there's also a tinge of sadness there for me. Because I think we can admit and confess we're doing a pretty bad job of making our Savior proud of our unity. We, the church, we've let our Jesus down with all of our denominations and all of our differing beliefs. And it's not that we can't have variant beliefs, it's just that we insist on ours to the exclusion of others. And you fire up Twitter and it's just Christians calling other Christians bad Christians and you fire up Facebook and now it's Christians who know each other calling Christians bad Christians. And it's all just gross. And it's not the point of the sermon, but grace, let us not be a part of that evil. Let us not be a part of God's children that further the divide amongst His church and amongst His children. Let us honor the prayer of Christ and seek unity with one another, understanding we're not going to agree on everything and that never really seems to be a priority of Jesus'. But we see those lengthy discourses in the Gospel of John. Another thing that makes John unique amongst the Gospels, as I mentioned earlier, Matthew, Mark, and Luke include the teachings of, and Jesus always very intentionally taught through parables. We know these parables, the parable of the prodigal son, of the lost coin, the shrewd manager, the persistent widow. We could go on and on. We know the parables of Jesus. Even if you're not very familiar with the Bible, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in over a decade, you could probably name and loosely describe a parable because they're just kind of ubiquitous in our Christian culture. In the book of John, you won't find any parables. I don't know why, but for some reason, John didn't feel like he needed to record those. Maybe he had access to the gospels written prior to his and was like, they got those squared away. I don't have anything to add to the parables. Or maybe he thought it was more captivating to describe Jesus in the terms and to follow the teachings of Jesus in the way that Jesus described himself. Because in the book of John, Jesus teaches using I am statements rather than parables. If you read through the book of John, you'll find seven huge I am statements where Jesus tells us who he is. He's not reliant on the descriptions of gospel writers. He's not reliant on the descriptions of historians or other people or word of mouth. He tells us straight up who he is and what he is and how we ought to think of him. And the seven I am's are there in your notes if you have them. They're not going to be on the screen, but Jesus says, I'm the bread of life, I'm the light of the world, I'm the gate for the sheep, I'm the good shepherd, I'm the resurrection and the life, the way, the truth, and the life, and I am the true vine. And if you look at those for a second and you study them, what you'll see is that all of those things are referring to salvation and they're referring to life in him. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but through me. I am the light of the world. I am the bread of life. Come to me. Believe in me. I am the Savior. I am the Messiah. And then once you get to me, I am the shepherd at the gate. I am the good shepherd. I am the true vine. I am the bread. I will sustain you. Jesus beckons you. Come to me, believe in me, know me, and then be sustained by me. All through the gospel of John, these are the I am statements where Jesus invites us to come and to know who he is and then to find life in him. And then in the book of John, we get these verses that I love so much. I tell you guys every week, this is my new favorite verse, and whatever, but I love these verses in John. I love the way that John opens, that we read at the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. That is profound. Elevates Jesus to exactly who he is. Later on in that same chapter we get John 1 16 which is one of the verses I like to repeat around here that humbles me every time, fills me with joy every time. It's a simple verse. From his fullness we have all received grace grace. At grace, we say that we are conduits of grace because we are connected to God. And from his fullness, we have received grace upon grace. We can give grace upon grace to other people. From his fullness, from God's goodness, we, all of us, have received grace upon grace. I pointed out John 3, 16, the most famous verse in the Bible. I also think of John 10, 10, one of my favorite verses for a long time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Where Jesus says, I'm going to give you the best, most exciting, richest, fullest life possible. Well, he promises you, I know, I know the world tempts you with things that you think you want to run after. With wealth or power or success or men or women or attraction or friendship or whatever it is. I know that the world tempts you with things that you want to run after. But I promise that I will give you life to the full. When we pursue Jesus, when we trust our life to him, when we spend our life pursuing him, his promise on that pursuit is not that we will have given up some sort of richness of life to pursue him in this life and experience eternity later. No. It's that if you pursue him now, he will give you that richness now. You cannot imagine a better life for yourself than Jesus would give you if you would only follow him. That's his promise. I come to give you life to the full. I could do a sermon on every one of the things I've said so far. Because there's so many good, so much good stuff in the gospel of John. But my favorite one, the verse that I love so much, the verse that I want to land on that feels to me like a unifying principle for all of Christendom, is found in John chapter 15. After he said that he is the true vine, he tells them this. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. I am the vine, you are the branches. If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Now here's why I love that verse. And here's why I think it is so profound. Because Jesus says, you don't need to worry about anything but abiding in me. You can sweep all the other concerns of life aside and focus on me. Pursue me. Follow me. Make me the apple of your eye. Stay attached to me and you will bear much fruit. And here's what I really love about that promise. One of my biggest fears in life, I think we all carry this fear to different degrees. One of my biggest fears in life is to get to the end of my life and to learn that I've wasted it. Is to have to settle into the harsh reality that my years didn't matter very much. That I could have done more or I could have done better. I first heard this quote from D.L. Moody. I've researched it out. I don't know to whom to attribute it because it wasn't his, but I heard it from him. He said that one of the most tragic things in life is to watch a man spend his entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and realized it was propped against the wrong building. It is profoundly sad for people to spend their life in pursuit of things that don't matter. And I carry a fear of that with me. And this verse, this principle safeguards you from that fruit. Over in first, I think it's first Peter or 1 Peter, it says that if we can learn to love one another, that it will keep us from being ineffective and unproductive in our knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are these promises through Scripture that if we'll pursue God and do what he has for us to do, that we will not waste our life, that we will bear much fruit. The question becomes, I think naturally, what that fruit is and what it looks like. What does it mean to bear fruit? And I think we probably think about that in ministerial terms. We think about that at Grace. We say that we want to be kingdom builders. We actually say we want to be kingdom builders so much that my goal for you, if this is your first Sunday here and you're here for 10 years, I hope that moves you through this process in life where you realize that everything that you have been given, every talent, all your time, all your treasure has been given so that you can leverage it for the growth of the kingdom of God. That's what we want for you, to leverage everything in your life to bear fruit and grow God's kingdom. So what does it mean to bear fruit? Well, I think we think about that ministerially, making disciples and converting people to Christianity, evangelism, discipleship and evangelism. We think about those things. We call it strengthening or adding to God's kingdom. And I think that's absolutely true. That is the way that we bear much fruit. And if we abide in Christ, we can't help but bear that fruit. That's another part that I love. If a branch is attached to an apple tree, then when it's time, that branch is going to grow apples. All it has to do is stay attached to the tree. It doesn't have to worry about what kind of fruit to bear or when to bear it or what to do or how to get the nutrients. All it has to do, stay attached to the tree and you're going to bear fruit. All we have to do if we stay attached to Jesus is we're going to bear fruit. That's it. That's all we have to worry about. But I got to thinking about what kind of fruit we bear. And if you just look at the natural world, there's all different kinds of fruit. Apples, oranges, pears, tangerines, lemons. That's about all I know. I don't eat a lot of fruit. I can tell you a lot of fast food menus. But throughout the natural world, trees grow fruit. They grow all different kinds of fruit. An apple tree doesn't decide, you know what we're feeling this year, boys? Oranges. Let's do it. That doesn't happen. Apple trees grow apples. That's it. For the rest of their days, apples. I don't think that God's kingdom and that this natural world is that much different. I tell you all the time, Ephesians 2.10, you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. I think that's the same ethos that we find in Proverbs when it says that we should train up a child in the way that they must go and they will not depart from it. We're going to train up that child to be quiet in church. That's great. We love you, Faith and Phil. But in that, in that is this tip of the cap to the idea that we're all different. In Corinthians, we see that there are a myriad spiritual gifts, and not everybody has all of them. We all have our different parts to play. We all have our different giftedness. God knew before you were that age when you were going to live, what you were going to do, and what gifts he was going to imbue you with so that you might be used in his kingdom. He already knew that. And I've told you before that because you're a God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them, that your job is to figure out what your good works are and then walk in them. All of that ties in with abide in Christ and you will bear much fruit. I don't think the ministerial fruit looks the same for everybody. I think it is as wild and variant as the natural world and that what abiding in Christ and bearing fruit means is you will bear the fruit that God designed you and intended you to bear. If it comes out of your creativity, your hospitality, your gift of care, your gift of discernment, your gift of boldness, your gift of timidity, your gift of confidence, your gift of charisma, whatever it is, God has gifted you in different ways and he has gifted you to bear your fruit in his kingdom, in his way, in his ministry. So it doesn't look the same for everybody. And so what Jesus is promising is if you abide in me, listen, if you abide in me, then you will become the exact person I created you to be. You will experience the exact full life I want you to experience, and you will produce the exact fruit I designed and created you in your mother's womb to produce. You will be the absolute best version of yourself on this side of eternity, and all you have to do is abide in Christ. All you have to do is pursue him, is walk with him, yearn for him, know him, love him. And we could talk a long time about what it means to abide in Christ. Right now I'm leaning towards making the spring series that leads into Easter. Just call it Abide. And every week talk about what it means to abide in Christ. If you're a note taker, I should have brought it up here with me, but write this down. There's a book called Abide in Christ by a guy named Andrew Murray. I would highly recommend it. I tell a story about the facilities manager at the summer camp I worked at, a guy named Harry Stevenson. And now he's one of the godliest men I've ever met in my life. He has those eyes that when you look at him, you know immediately he loves Jesus and he loves me. Just an incredibly godly man. Harry, when I asked him, I said, what book do I need to read, Harry? And he told me, Abide in Christ, Andrew Murray. And I've read it and reread it. If you're a reader, go read it. If you're not a reader, grow up and go get it. The book of John beckons us to know Jesus that we might find life in him. The whole book of John through the I am statements, through the claims of Christ, through the conversations, through the prayer, through the examples beckons us to come to know Jesus. Look again at the I Am statements. Jesus himself beckons us, come to know me, come to trust me that you might find life in me, that you might find the best life possible in me. The book of John beckons us to know Christ, that we would find life in him. It beckons us to abide in Christ. And I would just close by saying this as I push you back into reading the book of John on your own. We can only abide in Christ if we can know Him. And we can best know Him through John. And that's said with a caveat. There's other ways to know Christ. We experience Him. We pray with Him. We walk with Him. We see Him in the Gospels for sure. But I think if you want what is the best written account to know the person of Jesus, to see His heart and to see Him exposed and to understand Him, then the Gospel of John is absolutely essential reading for knowing our Christ and abiding in Him and bearing much fruit in your life and in your ministry. So I'm going to pray. We're going to sing a song. And I hope you'll walk out those doors and open up the book of John soon and begin a fresh pursuit of Christ. Let's pray. God, we love you so much. We thank you for your son. We thank you for John's account of him. That we can know him intimately through John's gospel. We thank you for all the powerful teachings that we find in there, for the way that your son loves, for the simple admonition to abide in him and let you handle the rest. God, we want to be who you created us to be. We want to do what you intended us to do. Would you give us the clarity of sight, the strength of faith, and the boldness of courage to walk with you? Would you let us shake off the demons and walk past our past and leave the shadows behind and pursue you with vigor and fullness of heart and openness of mind and eyes that we might know you and experience what it is to walk with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning, good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If you are here with your dad today, good for you. You're a good kid. And if you're a dad and your kids are here, man, that's so great, especially if your adult kids still want to hang out with you. That's the dream, right? That's all we're trying to do with John and Lily. Just when we release them to the wild, we want to make sure they come back. I do want to offer a prayer here at the beginning of the sermon for fathers and for Father's Day because it's a day of mixed emotions. In our house, we've lost Jen's dad. And so she wants to celebrate me, but it's also a sad day. And sometimes days like this are wonderful because they allow us to celebrate wonderful people, but we also know that for different reasons, Father's Day can be difficult. And so I just wanted to offer a prayer here as we begin, and then I'm going to go into a message that has nothing to do with fathers or even manhood at all. So let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for being our good father. For those of us who have been blessed and lucky to have good dads, we're so grateful for that blessing. We're so grateful for dads who point the way to you, who are fallible and who mess up, but who love us and love you, and they show us how to do that. So thank you for them. And if we have those, God, help us to be like them. God, for those for whom today is painful, maybe it conjures up loss or hurt or any other things that days like this can stir. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would be reminded that you are the good father and that your love today would fill in the spots that are left behind by hurts or hardships or blind spots. So God, be a good father for us today. Let your children feel your presence. Thank you for the good dads. Give us grace for the not as good dads and help us be good dads too. In Jesus' name, amen. Okay, we are in the third part of our series called 27. We'll be doing it this summer and next summer, going through the 27 books in the New Testament. In the month of June, we've been going through the Gospels. So in the first week, we looked at Matthew, and we said that Matthew was written to the Jews and depicts Jesus as the king. Last week, we looked at Mark. We said Mark was written to the Romans and depicts Jesus as the king. Last week we looked at Mark. We said Mark was written to the Romans and depicts Jesus as a servant. And this week we're looking at the book of Luke. And Luke, the gospel of Luke, was written to the Greeks and it depicts Jesus as a human or as a man. So Luke was written to a Greek audience. There's a guy named Theophilus. It's addressed to, oh, blessed Theophilus. And Luke and the book of Acts are really two parts of the same book, the same letter that was written to Theophilus so that he might understand everything that happened in the life of Christ and then the things that happened immediately following the life of Christ. And so Luke was written to a Greek audience to depict Jesus as a human, as a man, because to the Greek mind and in Greek culture and thinking and philosophy, man is the apex of creation. We are the culmination of all the things. And so to depict Jesus as the greatest man to have ever lived, as the greatest philosopher to have ever lived, would be appealing and capturing and captivating to the Greek mind. But as I thought about us and how to preach that and how to apply that to us and how that should stir us, I was really focusing on the humanity of Christ and kind of asking myself all week long. I started thinking about it last week and just kind of chipping away at what does it mean to be human? What does it mean that Jesus was a human? Why is this important? And I was trying to figure this out. Whenever I write my sermons, I don't know how you guys write your sermons, but when I write my sermons, I try to just like, I think of it as the attack angle. Like, how am I going to approach this? What am I going to talk about? What's interesting about this? What's helpful about this? And I was having a really hard time with it. And so when I have a hard time, I talk to people. And our worship pastor, Aaron Gibson, happened to be around. He's the only person around. I would have loved to talk to someone else. It was just him. So we ended up talking about it. And he actually made this point. I thought it was a great point. So I included in my sermon. Aaron has done at least one useful thing today. But he reminded me that Jesus' favorite title for himself was Son of Man. Jesus' favorite title for himself was Son of Man. And in all honesty, we have such a good staff. I can go talk to any of them and be like, I've got writer's block. I don't know what to do. I can just throw out the sermon. And every time they get me unstuck and they are wonderful. And when he said this, I kind of do a thing when I'm trying to figure a sermon out or something out. And I ask you about it and you say something. Once you say the one useful thing, I'm like, that's it. I got it. You keep talking. I'm not there anymore. I'm thinking about son of man. And he said this, and I was like, that's it. So I dove into some research on that. Why did Jesus call himself that? What did it mean? And what I learned is it very much is Jesus's favorite term for himself. It shows up 32 times in the gospel of Matthew, 15 times in the gospel of Mark, and 26 times in the Gospel of Luke. And every single one of those times, it's Jesus himself using that term to refer to himself. The only time it's used 12 times in John, and two of those times it's someone else calling him that mockingly. But all the other times, this is how Jesus refers to himself as son of man. So why did he like that term? Why did he refer to himself as son of man? Well, first, the phrase son of man would have meant in the ancient world what human being means to us. It's just a way to say that I'm mortal. It's a way to say I'm a human. I'm part of the human race. So Jesus, every time he says it, is declaring his humanity. He's dropping a little hint. I'm a human. I'm a son of man. And we know that Jesus is both man and divine. The fancy theological word for Jesus being 100% human and 100% divine is called the hypostatic union. So Jesus is highlighting the hypostatic union every time he says son of man, because he's declaring his humanity, but he's also referring back to this famous prophecy in Daniel chapter seven, this famous messianic prophecy. And I'm going to read it to you this morning and it'll be up on the screen because it just sounds cool. As I went back and I read it, I was like, this sounds like one of those good ancient prophecies and I want you guys to hear it because sometimes they say cool things in the Bible and this is one of them. Daniel has a vision in chapter 7. I saw in the night visions and behold with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man comes like the Son of Man, and he is presented to the Ancient of Days. The Son of Man is Jesus. Ancient of Days is God the Father. And so this is a messianic prediction about Jesus ascending to the throne and being the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. So when he says in the New Testament, Thy am the Son of Man, the Son of man has no place to lay his head. When he refers to himself like that, he is referring to Daniel seven. He is declaring his divinity while at the same time he's declaring his humanity. And I think that's a really interesting name and choice for Jesus to make to constantly declare his humanity. And I think it's even more interesting that Luke decided that this needed to be a theme of his gospel. There's other themes within the gospel. We spent the spring in the book of Luke, and we talked about it being the hospitality gospel, that throughout the book of Luke, Jesus is either going to, attending, or coming from a meal. It's the hospitality gospel. There's around the table. But another theme of Luke, another thing that he weaves throughout the gospel is the humanity of Christ. Which brings us back to our question for the week. Why did Luke craft an entire gospel with the intent of displaying Jesus' humanity? Why did Luke craft an entire gospel with the intent of displaying Jesus' humanity? What is so important about that? Why should it matter so much that Jesus is a human? Why did he himself choose a name that would highlight his humanity the entire time? Why did Luke, one of the gospel writers, decide to craft an entire gospel to display that aspect of our Christ? Why is this so important? This is an important question that I've been wrestling with all week. And the more I wrestled with it, the more aspects of it that I thought about, even kind of diving into what does it mean for us to be human? What makes us human? And going down that rabbit trail and all the things, what I realized is that there's a story in Luke, in Luke chapter 4, the temptation of Christ, that probably more dramatically and openly and honestly and overtly displays the humanity of Christ more than any other story in the Bible, save maybe the stories around his crucifixion. Jesus is utterly human in this story. And as I went through the story, I realized that the temptations that Jesus has are that Satan offers Jesus and the responses that Jesus offers Satan. I realized that those things actually highlight all of the reasons why it's so important for us to understand that Jesus is a human, that Jesus is man, that he's 100% man and 100% God. And it helps us understand why that's so important. And hopefully, as we move through this, if I do it right, what we'll find is ultimately Jesus' humanity is comforting and inspiring and even an opportunity to experience a little bit of heaven on earth. So let's look at the temptation of Jesus in Luke chapter four and look at the aspects of Jesus's humanity that are on full display for us to see that kind of answer some of our questions. Now, for those of you who are not familiar with the temptation of Christ or need a refresher, at the beginning of Jesus's ministry, he was 30 years old and then he was about to start calling disciples and declaring the gospel and start that process of public ministry. Before he started his public ministry, it took 40 days and he went out in the desert to pray and to fast and to prepare his body and his mind and his spirit for what he needed to do. And this isn't the point of the sermon at all, but it's so interesting to me that Jesus, the Savior of the world, the most capable minister that's ever existed, which is so gross an understatement it is stupid to say out loud. Jesus was good at ministry. Yeah. Okay, let's pray. Go home. That's the best point I got today. Before, he's perfectly capable of the ministry. Before he began it, he went and he prayed and he fasted for 40 days. My volunteers in the room, folks who had stepped into kids ministry, into committees, to being on an elder board, who volunteer with students, who volunteer with the ministry downtown. Those of you who have brought children into the world and started that ministry. Me, as I took over the church. What period of preparation and prayer and fasting do we give ourselves for the task at hand before we just launch right into it thinking ourselves capable? And if Jesus doesn't do that, if Jesus doesn't launch into things without stopping and pausing and praying, then why do we think we can? So maybe there's a season for us where that's what we need to do as we enter into ministry. But he goes to fast and pray, And at the end of the 40 days, Satan comes to him to tempt him. And we see these three temptations that he has. The first one is found in chapter 4, verses 3 and 4. The devil said to him, if you are the son of God, command this stone to become bread. And Jesus answered him, it is written, man shall not live by bread alone. So Satan comes to him, he's maximum hungry. I don't think it's humanly possible to be more hungry than you would be after 40 days. And Satan says when he's maximum hungry, maximum weak, if you are the son of God, this whole time Satan's trying to get him to prove that he is who he says he is. If you're the son of God, then turn this stone into bread and eat it and everybody will believe you. And Jesus says, quotes back scripture, man shall not live by bread alone., how is the humanity displayed in this verse? What we see in Jesus' response is that he's hungry. He's tempted, but he says, I don't need that right now. So what we see is that Jesus feels what we feel. Jesus feels and experiences what we feel and experience. And that's such a short and cheap sentence that if we don't stop, we're going to miss what that means and how profound that actually is. Originally, as I started writing the sermon, I was going to spend the whole morning here because I think it's unbelievable. First of all, Jesus condescended. He was in heavenly form. I don't know what heavenly form is, but it's better than this. And he took on this when he didn't have to and limited himself when he didn't have to. He became a human. It's the ultimate act of humility. I've known a lot of people over the years who want to help the impoverished in other countries. I've not known very many of them to move into that neighborhood. Jesus moved into the neighborhood. He took on human form and he began to feel what we feel. He experienced hunger like we experience hunger. You think God gets hungry? You think God the Father is looking forward to a steak on Father's Day? He doesn't care. He doesn't need food to sustain him. He took on hunger. Jesus was maximum hungry. He lived in a country and in a society that was not wealthy. He said the son of man has no place to lay his head. He wandered around as a vagabond for most of his adult ministry. If you've ever been hungry, people who have ever known hunger, they have a Jesus who can empathize with that hunger because he was hungry. He feels what we feel. I bet Jesus, because he's human, growing up, had insecurities. There was probably some cool kids that didn't like him, and it was hard. I'd be willing to bet that Jesus liked a girl that didn't like him back. I'd be willing to bet that Jesus saw his parents fight. I'd be willing to bet that he was embarrassed, that he was proud. Can you imagine the pride that you would have to fight back if you found out you were the savior of the world? Jesus has experienced all the human emotions that we have experienced. He experienced temptation. He experienced loss. We don't know where or how, but somewhere in between Luke chapter 3, or 2 rather, and Luke 3, Joseph disappears from the narrative. Joseph, his earthly father, who I'm just going to refer to as his father for ease of language, but I know that God's the father. He lost his dad at some point. We're not really given much indication if it was by death or by divorce, but we know that he fades away from the narrative and he's lost in the fog of history. So what we can be sure of is that Jesus understood either what it was to be in a broken home or what it was to lose a father early. Jesus, and I don't say this lightly to make a cheap joke. Jesus had father issues. I've always, I would be very interested to see how Jesus treated older men as he was growing up in his ministry. Because people with father issues tend to revere older men in ways that are different than folks without father issues. And I don't think that we stop to think enough about what it means for Jesus to be a human and to have experienced humanity. Because I started thinking about that too and what is it to be human? And I was reminded of back in the summer of 2020, I started to see a therapist or a counselor. I never know the right word. The one to help me identify and unpack all of my childhood issues. And there was no compelling event that took me there. There was no pressing thing. I just heard from enough people that it was a good practice to see a therapist. And so I thought if it's worked for other people, if it's been a good practice for them, I need to go try it too. And I found it to be an amazing experience. He told me all the things and I fixed it all within about nine months. I'm good now. Never need it again. It's probably time for a checkup, really. But in therapy, as he walked me through things, and I was just telling him about what's going on in my life and different things, and he'd ask me about my past, and it's not all just like childhood and parents, but you do talk about all that stuff in there. He showed this to me about myself. There's things about me that I don't like. There's things about me that if I could wave a wand, I would fix them. If I could wave a wand and give myself more patience, I would. If I could wave a wand and give myself more discernment in conversation, to not be such a dummy all the time, and for the joke that you don't need to go for, I would waive it. There's rough edges of my character that if you gave me the option to get rid of them, I would. I just don't know how. And you start to talk to your therapist about things like that. And what he helped me see is, yeah, those things are a part of you, but they're a part of you because of how you were brought up, the environment you were raised in, the things that happened around you. Those things are a part of you because of so much that was so outside of your control that you really can't even be blamed for those things being in your life. Now, it doesn't mean that as adults we shouldn't deal with those things and cope with those things and try to work them out of our life, but their very existence in our life is not our fault. And I started to learn, because I always thought that when somebody messes up, when somebody does something that they shouldn't do, that that's their fault. And if someone's living a life of bad choices and they're throwing their life away, that's their fault. They need to get their head out of their rear end, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and do the right thing. And I thought that about myself, too, that anything that existed within me that was bad and wrong and displeasing to God and displeasing to myself, I needed to figure it out and white-knuckle it and just walk my way to health. And what I learned in therapy is that that's not how that goes. The things that are a part of me that I didn't want, I didn't put there. Life did. It's just humanity. And learning that about myself gave me a deep empathy for the people around me. I know that it's difficult to tell at times, but it's deeper now than it used to be. It helped me understand if I didn't choose my brokenness, then they didn't either. And the bad habits and the bad behaviors and the bad attitudes and all of those things that exist in their life were not chosen by them because they want them. They are products of the environment that they were brought up in. Those are things that happened to them, not things that they chose. And then those things cause behaviors that are unattractive, but they don't like those behaviors either. It gave me a deep empathy for others. It helped me understand that when I meet a grown man who wants to tell me his 40 time or is proud of how loud his car is or something, that he's not just a jerk. He is a jerk because nobody cares about that stuff. But he's also just saying in an undeveloped way, will you please like me? Will you just tell me that I'm enough? Will someone give me some approval? It helped me realize we're all just bags of insecurities and coping mechanisms. And some of us just learn to do it better than others. But it gave me a deep empathy for humans. And I say all that to say that Jesus was a human too. Jesus carried those things. Jesus had to work through his brokenness and his loss and his disappointment. Jesus watched that happen in the people around him. He saw that too. This is why I honestly believe that when we sin and we mess up and we make life choices and involve ourselves in patterns and habits that Jesus wouldn't choose for us, that when he sees us do those things, I truly don't think that his primary response to us is frustration or anger. I think it's pity and hurt and love and empathy. I think he sees our hurt driving us into places of deeper hurt, and he's just waiting and begging for the day that we come back to him and allow him to heal us. I think it's that song we sing, Reckless Love. There's no mountain that he won't climb up. There's no wall he won't kick down. Like he's coming after us. He sees you hurting and hurting yourself and he's relentlessly pursuing you. And listen, I don't think he's mad at you for your sins. I think he watches your sins and it hurts him that you continue to hurt yourself in that way because he's a human and he knows why you're doing it and he has deep empathy for it and he wants you to stop. It matters so much that Jesus feels what we feel. The other aspect of his humanity that we see in the temptation of Christ is that the second temptation. Your notes say verse 7. I'm going to start and their glory he's offering in the kingdoms of the world. For it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you then will worship me, it will all be yours. And Jesus answered him, it is written, you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve. So Satan takes him to where he can see the kingdoms of the world and he says, they've been given to me. If you want them, I'll give them to you. All you have to do is worship me. And Jesus' response is, I am only allowed to worship God the Father. And so what this reveals is Jesus serves who we serve. Jesus serves who we serve. He's subject to the same laws and edicts that we are. He doesn't say, I only can worship myself. He says, no, I can only worship God the Father, no one else, which means that Jesus was subject to the same laws that we were. He followed the Ten Commandments perfectly. He followed the law of the Old Testament perfectly. He was a human who was tempted to break the law, but he didn't. He still followed God's laws like we do. He didn't think that he was too good for them. Last night I was watching Bluey with Lily, my daughter. And if you are a parent of, I don't know what the age range would be, of a kid under 10 and you don't know what Bluey is, you're not a good parent. It's amazing. We're watching it, and in this particular episode, there's two little kids. Their little dog's Bluey, and Bingo is the little sister, and Bluey is the older sister, and then they've got a cousin named Muffin. All this is important, okay? Don't forget these details. And Muffin's coming. She's riding with Uncle Scout or whoever over to Bluey and Bingo's house. And Muffin asks her dad if she's special. And dad says, yes, you're very special. And then dad says, you're the most special kid on the planet. And I'm watching it thinking, that is not smart. That's not smart. Your kid is not the most special kid on the planet. No kid is. And they get to Bluey's house, and they start to play. The three kids start to play, and they're playing a game, I think, called Library. And you've got to check out the book, and you can only check out three. And Muffin is doing whatever Muffin wants to do. Muffin doesn't want to check out three. Muffin doesn't want to be quiet. Muffin's not following any of the rules of the game. And so Bluey and Bingo go complain to Uncle and Mom, hey, Muffin's not playing right. And they're like, just let Muffin play however Muffin wants. Like, okay. So they go back, and Muffin's behavior is ruining the game because Muffin believes that she is the most special child to ever exist and doesn't have to follow any of the rules. And so finally it comes to this point where Dad's got to get involved. So he goes and grabs Muffin and says, why aren't you playing right? And Muffin says, well, because I'm the most special child, I don't have to follow the rules that anybody else follows. And he says what a good dad would say. I'm sorry, I was wrong. You were not the most special child. You're the most special child to me and your mom. You're not more special than them. Okay. I say all that to say that Jesus did not go through life as God's special little boy, okay? He didn't just declare, I'm Jesus, I can do whatever I want, none of the rules apply to me. He lived with the same humanity, the same restraints, the same limitations that you do. He did not go through life thinking that he was special and some sort of exception. So the challenges that you face with being Christ-like, being godly, trying to follow the rules and do what the Bible says, trying to learn the Bible and apply it to your own life, Jesus faced those too. Jesus serves who we serve. He follows the laws that we're told we're following when we love God and love others. He was challenged just like you were. The last one is of particular interest to me. We see it down at the end of the story, verses 12 and 13. Satan has just told Jesus, he's taken him up to the top of the temple and he says, if you're really God, if you're really who you say you are, then fling yourself off the temple and God will send his angels to capture you. And this is Jesus' response. And Jesus answered him, it is said, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time. Before we unpack what's there in the temptation in Jesus' response, I included that last verse. Satan departed from him to return to him at a more opportune time. It's not as if Jesus had this one encounter with Satan and then was not tempted for the rest of his life. I have a note in my Bible that I wrote years ago that Jesus had moments of weakness too. Satan would prey on him at opportune times. So this resisting of temptation, this humanity that he experienced wasn't just a one and done deal here at the beginning of his ministry and now you're good. This is a persistent, pervasive thing. But in this response, it's fling yourself off and surely God will catch you. Jesus says, it is not right to put the Lord your God to the test. Now this is interesting because Jesus is God. And Jesus later says to Pilate, when Pilate's trying to ask if he was the king, he says, dude, if I wanted to get out of here, I could call the angels and they would get me. So we know that Jesus can call on the angels if he wants to. He doesn't need God the father to do it. He could have done this, called on the angels himself, not been in violation of any laws or any rules, I'm in perfectly fine. But he says, no, I can't do that. It's not right to put the Lord your God to the test. Because if angels are going to come rescue him, it's not going to be because he insisted on it. It's going to be because God acted for him. And so what we see is that Jesus relies how we rely. Jesus relies how we rely. Jesus relies on God the same way that we rely on God. And the phrasing there is a little funny because I wanted it to fit in with the other notes because that's what good pastors do. But I'll explain it a little bit. I think of it this way. When Jesus went through life and was performing miracles and was preaching and teaching and was directing people and doing what he does, he didn't do all that with his Jesus powers. He did that with his Holy Spirit powers. He didn't perform miracles because he was Jesus from his Jesus powers. I don't know how to talk about it as if he's not in the Marvel universe, but that's how I think about it. He didn't use his Jesus powers. He prayed, and through the Holy Spirit, he healed. He prayed, and through the empowering of the Holy Spirit, he cast out demons. He prayed, and through the Holy Spirit, he was guided in wisdom. He prayed, and through the Holy Spirit, he was strengthened for obedience. He relied on the Holy Spirit the same way you rely on the Holy Spirit. He did not skate through life being Jesus, finding it within himself to do Jesus' things. He relies on the same God that you rely on. When he hurt, he ran to God for strength and for comfort. We see him do this. We see his humanity on full display in the Garden of Gethsemane where he falls on his face praying the night of his arrest and eventual crucifixion, God, please don't make me do this. Yet not my will, but your will be done. He did it God's way. He relied on God during his ministry when he would perform miracles. Not only is he praying to the Spirit to bring about this miracle, but then when he's done, he says, don't tell anybody I did this. It is not yet the proper time. He's sensitive to God's timing. He's reliant upon God for direction on the timing of when he should be crucified. Jesus relies on who we rely on. He prays like we pray. He needs the Spirit to move and to comfort and to cajole and to convict in the same way that we do. And so in all these different ways, we see on full display in the temptation of Christ, the humanity of Christ. And we see that he feels what we feel, that he serves who he serves, that he relies how we rely. And this makes him different than any other God in the pantheon of gods that we've invented or created or thought about on this earth. There's no other God that condescends to take on human form and offers his very presence to us, to understand us, to walk with us, to feel what we feel. And there's no other God that can offer this. And this is, my wife pointed this out to me. This is why she's my number one sermon counselor. But she pointed out this, and this is what the humanity of Jesus is driving to, that Jesus offers empathy over sympathy. Jesus offers empathy over sympathy. When we see somebody hurt, before we had a miscarriage, Jen and I, and somebody would miscarriage, I could offer them my sympathy. I'm so sorry that happened to you. That must be difficult. But when it happened to us, he gave us the gift of empathy. And the gift of empathy, there's a couple at the church who miscarried recently. And it had recently happened and I had not called them and I saw them in church during worship. And I was able to just walk up to them and give them both a big tear-filled hug. And none of us said a word. And we all knew exactly what I meant. That's what empathy does. You know when you're going through something and you want to talk to somebody about it. You want to talk to somebody who's gone through it too. When Jen lost her dad, she wasn't super interested in people comforting her that had not walked through that. There's just something to knowing that the person you're talking to has that shared experience. Jesus has shared our experience. When we pray, we pray towards empathy, not sympathy, not a condescending God who doesn't understand the human experience and the human existence. We pray to a God who literally whispers into the ear of the Father as we pray. It says Jesus, Romans 8 tells us Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father interceding on our behalf. Going, I know what they're going through. I've been there. I get that. I understand it. Father, here's what they need. Do you realize that when you pray, you pray to empathy and how powerful that is? in this way, praying to a God that empathizes, understanding that Jesus is human, that Jesus offers us his presence. We can run to him with anything, and he is there with us, and he is present with us. This is why he leaves his spirit and says, it's better than me. I will be with you through my spirit. This is why I think Luke chose to highlight this in his gospel. This is why I think Jesus declared his humanity over and over and over again, and why it's on full display in all the gospels, particularly Luke. Because he wants you to know that you serve a God who feels what you feel, who serves the way you serve, who has to rely on God the way that you rely on God, and ultimately, who offers you his empathy and his comfort, not just his sympathy. And I think that's a pretty powerful thing that draws us to him. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We need you. And we are grateful that you are here for us. Thank you for the way that you love us, for the way that you care about us. Thank you for a Savior who condescended and took on human form, who became one of us so that he might know us and experience us and love us well. Thank you that you empathize with our hurts and our hangups and our habits. We thank you that you are a God who's experienced loss, hurt, frustration, disillusionment, and disappointment. And God, I pray that you would be with us in those things and in those ways. In Jesus' name, amen. Normally, I step off the stage right now, and I let Aaron do his thing. But I was thinking, as we were singing the first first three songs and I was listening to them sing, I'm always moved when people who are gifted with their voice declare it and let their heavenly father who made them that way hear it. I'm always moved when God made musicians on purpose use it to turn people to praise to him because God made them this way on purpose so that they would do this. But it also occurs to me that your heavenly father gave you a voice too. If you're like me, it's average at best. But what better Father's Day gift could we give to our heavenly father than to let him hear the voice that he gave you and declare praise back to him? So as we sing this last song, let's let it go. Let's let God hear us. Let's offer a Father's Day present to him as we allow him to hear the voices of his children declaring his praises.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Jordan, it is interesting to me that you think profundity is what's required to get up on the stage when they parade me out here every week, falling woefully short of the bar. This is the third part in our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at times in Scripture where we see a blow-up or a blow-out or people with with just big overwhelming emotions because that is so much a part of our life. That is something that we experience just as we go through life. Sometimes our emotions are too big for us and they're overwhelming. And so this morning I wanted to take a look at big emotions in our prayers and what happens and how does God respond when big emotions creep into our prayers, when our prayers really become cries. And to do that, I want us to think about prayer together. It's really, when you consider it, one of the more interesting passages in the Bible, one of the more interesting interchanges that Jesus has with his disciples. They're following him around. They're watching him do ministry. And at one point, they look at Jesus and they say, hey, Jesus, will you teach us to pray? Now, this is a really interesting question coming from the disciples. And many of you have probably considered this before. The disciples knew how to pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed their whole life. They had gone to synagogue every week, maybe daily at different points in their life. I don't know. They had seen a ton of people pray. They knew how to pray. They had prayed many prayers before, but there was something different, so different about the prayers of Jesus that they had to stop him and say, can you teach us to pray like you pray? Because that's different than how we pray. And Jesus responds by sharing with them the Lord's prayer. You guys probably all know it. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. And so in that, Jesus gives the model of prayer to the disciples and to us in perpetuity. And if you break that down, I've always been taught prayer and I've taught prayer this way in church, in youth group, in camps, in different places, in men's groups, small group, when we talk about prayer, something that's always been really helpful for me is the acronym ACTS. And you guys have probably heard this before. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. So the way that Jesus opens up the prayer. When we pray, the first thing we should do is adore God. God, you're great. God, you're good. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name. God, you are wonderful for this. God, you blow me away for that. And when we do this, it really puts us in the right posture for prayer, you know? It really reminds us who we're talking to. I had a Bible teacher in high school who was also my soccer coach, who was also my administrator because I went to a small school. And when he would pray in class, he would say, okay, everyone, let's pray, bow your heads. And we would bow our heads to pray, and he would wait 20 or 30 seconds. And so finally, I asked one day, Mr. Dawson, what are you doing? Like, that's awkward. Why do you make us just sit there in silence? What are you waiting on? Because it's almost like, does he want us to pray? Like, should we? And he told me what he was doing. He said he was taking his mind, whenever he would pause before prayer, to Isaiah chapter 6, where the throne room of God is described. And it says that God is on his throne, and the train of his robe is filling the temple with glory. And there's these six-winged angels flying around him saying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And it's just so overwhelming that he cowers in a corner. And Mr. Dawson said that when, he said, when I pray, I like to take myself there to put myself in proper posture before God to remind myself when I pray, where am I going? I'm going to the throne room of God, the King of the universe, and I'm addressing the creator of the universe. That's a serious, somber thing. That's a place for humility. That's a place for penitence. This is why when we teach our children to pray, we teach them to bow their heads and close their eyes. It's a sign of reverence. It's a sign of respect for knowing who we're talking to and where we're going. It's why I encourage you as much as you can to kneel when you pray. Because it's hard to put yourself in the posture of kneeling and not feel humble, at least a little bit. And so Jesus says we should start with adoration. We should adore God. We should praise him. And then we should go to confession. What are the things, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. How have we trespassed against God? What attitudes do we bring into this day and into this prayer? What sins do we carry with us that yet remain unconfessed before the Father? What do we need to confess to God before him? And then we move into this time of thanksgiving, praising Him. God, thank you for your goodness in my life. Thank you for my family. Thank you for a church that I love. Thank you for the rain. Thank you for the day, whatever it is. It's John's second birthday today. Thank you for a great two-year-old son and for friends watching him in the nursery right now. Thank you for all of those things. We praise God for things. And then, suffocation. Then we ask for what we need. And you guys know, and you've heard this, that the tendency when we pray is to skip act and go straight to S. Skip all the other stuff and just go, dear God, I really need blank. I really need you to show up here. I really need this to work out. I'm really worried about this. It's all the I need, I need, I need. And there's a place for that in prayer. But the way that Jesus teaches us prayer, it follows this pattern of first putting ourself in the proper place and then confessing our sins, which remind us of the humility we should carry into the throne room. And then thanksgiving, let's acknowledge all the blessings God's given us in our lives before we ask him for more, and then in that proper mindset, say what we need to say. That's kind of the proper way to pray. But sometimes we pray when our emotions are too big for propriety. Sometimes we pray prayers that become cries. And the emotions that we bring into that moment are too big for acts. I've shared with you guys before that the first time Jen and I got pregnant, we miscarried. And I'm not in the business of doing comparative pain for miscarriages and who has the right to the most sorrow. But for us, the pain was particularly acute because we had been praying for a child for years. For years. We had struggled mightily. Our moms and grandmas were praying for babies. We had the church around us at the time praying that we could have a baby. We knew that's what we wanted to do. On my mama's deathbed, a few years before we got pregnant, the very last thing she did for me was direct someone to the top of her closet to get a stuffed animal that she made to give to my child when we had them. She went ahead and made it, and I think my sister finished it up for her so that we would have that to give to our first child. So when we got pregnant, we were elated. And then we went to the checkup for eight weeks, and the baby wasn't there. I don't know how long it took me to pray after that. But the first time I did pray, it wasn't Acts. The first time I prayed, it didn't look very much like our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. It looked a lot more like God. What in the world? What the heck? I would say different words if I weren't on this stage and there weren't children in the audience. That's how I felt, and that's how I prayed. What are you doing? Because we, and we're not entitled to this. None of what I'm about to say really matters, but to us it did. Jen's a school teacher. She loves kids. She's teaching in a Christian school, leading people towards you. We still have relationships with some of the kids that she taught in those days. I was a school teacher. I taught high school Bible. And then I worked at a church. We had made good choices. We were good Christian people. We had checked all the boxes. We had done all the things. And there was people who were living lives way more rebellious than us who were just tripping accidentally into family. And then we get pregnant and then you take it? No, I'm not praying acts. I'm not following the pattern for this one. There are some prayers that we pray that become cries. When we hear of the terminal diagnosis and we go to the Father and we say, really? This one? Him? Her? Why not me in your jacked up economy? Why them? There's a girl in our community. She's a young woman in our community. Just last week or two. She battled cancer for five years and came to it a week or two ago. Beautiful family, young kids. I don't know when that husband is going to pray again. When he does, those prayers will be cries. We've all prayed prayers like that. Where we're walking through what feels to us like the dark night of the soul and we don't have time or patience for propriety. We just go to our God and we are raw and we are real and we cry out, what in the world? How is this right? How does this make sense? As parents that send their kids to school in that private school in Nashville, what do those prayers sound like when they start to pray again? We've all prayed those prayers that are so big and so raw and so emotional that they become cries. And so I think it's worth it to look and see how God handles these prayers in Scripture. Because we get to see some. God in His goodness left them for us in His inspired Word. And so what I want to encourage you with today is, I know that we've all prayed those prayers. If you've never prayed those prayers, I'm so happy for you. I hope you never do, but I think you will. And what I want us to know as we look into the scripture this morning is that God is not offended by our prayers that become cries. I don't think God in his goodness and in his grace and in his mercy is offended when I look at him after the deepest pain that I've felt up to that point in my life and I go, what in the world? That's not fair. That's not right. That doesn't make sense. I don't think God gets offended by those things. I don't think he's so small that our broken hearts offend our God. And I actually think that there's grace and space for those prayers because we see them in the Bible. We actually see Jesus pray one of these prayers, a prayer that is so raw and so real and so emotional that it becomes a cry. This prayer is recorded in all four Gospels. We're going to look at the account in the Gospel of Luke chapter 22. Beginning in verse 39. And he came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives, speaking of Jesus. And the disciples followed him. And when he came to the place, he said to them, pray that you may not enter into temptation. And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw and knelt down and prayed, saying, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, this scene, many of you know it, Jesus has just left the Last Supper with the disciples. He's instituted communion. He's told them, my body is going to be broken for you. My blood is going to be spilled for you. He knows what is going to happen. He knows when he gets done praying, he's going to be arrested. And he knows that when he's arrested, he's going to be tried. And after he's tried, he's going to be flogged and beaten, and he's going to be hung on a cross and left there to die and then face death and hell. He knows that. And so he brings the disciples with him, and he says, remain here while I pray. And he goes off a distance, one would assume, so that they couldn't hear him. And it is interesting that they all ended up hearing him, because there's nothing in the text to indicate that Jesus subtly knelt and clasped his hands and said, my Father who is in heaven. No, these prayers from Jesus that we see, in Luke it says he knelt. In another gospel it says that he fell with his face to the ground. And the disciples are a stone's throw away and they can hear him clearly. And then he gets so intense in his praying that sweat begins to mix with his blood, which we know is something that can actually happen in moments of incredibly intense stress in our lives. So the prayer that Jesus was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane was not, Dear God, if there's any other way, would you please point me in that? It wasn't that. It was Jesus on his face prostrate, God, Father, please don't make me do this. Please, is there any other way? Is there anything else I can do? I do not want to bear this. I do not want to be on the cross and hear you and see you turn your back on me. I do not want to say, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I do not want the crown of thorns in my head. I do not want the nails in my wrist. I do not want to do this, Father. Is there any other way? Please, please take this cup from me. That's a prayer becoming a cry. That's Jesus sidestepping propriety and crying out to his heavenly father. And in there, he finds what we should find when we pray like this. No matter how deep, no matter how raw, yet not my will but your will be done. Please give me the strength to accept your will. So I know that God isn't offended by those prayers because his son prays one to him in full view and vision of the disciples. And then he tells us about it in all four gospels. And that made me wonder, where else in the Bible do we have prayers that are raw and real and emotional? Where else in the Bible do we have prayers that have become cries? And of course, I went to Psalms. And I just started reading them and flipping through and finding them, these things where people are just raw. I am weary unto death. I want to die. Take my life. And I put them in your notes, Psalm 142 and Psalm 13 and Psalm 77. I think of Hannah's prayer in the temple when she's praying so earnestly and fervently for a child that Eli the priest thinks she's drunk. I think of the book of Lamentations, which is a whole book of tough, raw prayers. And I was going to kind of bounce around between those prayers, but then I was reminded of another psalm that's really dear to my heart, Psalm 88. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to turn there. I encountered Psalm 88 when I took a trip to Israel several years ago. One of the things most groups do when you go to Israel is when you're in Jerusalem, you go to Caiaphas' house. Caiaphas is the high priest that had Jesus arrested, had him tried, and had him murdered. And in the basement of Caiaphas' house is this makeshift small dungeon. And a portion of the dungeon is a cylindrical room that they would tie ropes under the shoulders of the prisoner and lower them into this pitch black, dark room. Now there's stairs that lead down, but in Caiaphas' day, in Jesus' day, that was not the case. They lower you in and they pull you up when they're ready for you. And most people believe that this is where Jesus spent the night after he got arrested, waiting on his trial before Pilate the next day. And when you go to Jerusalem, you can go down into that cell. And our guide pointed us to Psalm 88. Psalm 88 was written by the sons of Korah, we're told. But it's also believed by scholars to be a prophetic messianic psalm. And many scholars believe that this is meant to be the prayer that Jesus prays after he's arrested. If it's not the prayer that he prays after he's arrested, Jesus knew the scriptures, he knew the psalms, this could very well be a psalm that came to mind that he quoted. But when I picture Jesus arrested and alone and reading, crying these things out, it brings fresh meaning to it for me. And when we listen to it and read it, I think you'll be taken aback by how very real it is. So I'm going to read a good portion of it. Beginning in verse 11. Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon? Are your wonders known in the darkness or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? And then verse 13, They surround me like a flood all day long. They close in on me together. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me. My companions have become darkness. That's a real prayer. That's not a prayer you pray in church in front of other people. That's not how we teach our kids to pray. We see accusations in this prayer. You have caused my friends and my loved ones to shun me. It is your wrath that beats against me and waves and covers me. The person crying out to God in this psalm feels the darkness closing in in such a way that they don't know if they will see the light again. My companions have become darkness, he ends with. And that's it. I am grateful to God for choosing to include in his Bible and his inspired word prayers that are that raw and that are that real. Prayers that show us that when our emotions are too big for propriety, that our God can meet us in those places and hear us. He appreciates those prayers so much so that he recorded them and fought for them and protected them down through the centuries so that we could see them too. So when we pray them, it's okay. When we need to cry out to God, we can. He's not offended by those prayers. He hears those prayers. He welcomes those prayers. And here's what else happens when we cry out to God, when our prayers become cries, when we lose all sense of propriety and we're just trying to figure it out. Here's what else happens when it's literally the dark night of our soul and the darkness is closing in around us and our life is falling apart and our children are making decisions that we don't understand and our husband is making decisions that we don't understand and everything that we thought was going to happen, this future that we had projected is not going to happen. This person that I love is not in my life anymore and I see reminders of them all the time and I don't know how I'm going to put one foot in front of the other. I don't know how I'm going to do it. When we pray those prayers, this is what happens. If we look back at Luke 22, there's a verse that I skipped. Verse 43. In the middle of his praying, and there appeared to him an angel from heaven strengthening him. In the middle of Jesus crying out, Father, please don't make me do this. Please let there be another way. God says, son, you're going to have to walk that path. But he doesn't make him do it on his own. He sends an angel to strengthen Jesus in the dark night of his soul. And I can't help but believe that God will send angels to strengthen you too. When you pray those prayers, I think God sends his angels to strengthen you as well. And I don't know what those angels look like. Maybe it's a hug. Maybe it's someone's presence. Maybe it's a text or a phone call or an email. I know in our family it's cardinals. Maybe it's a southern thing, I'm not sure. But we believe that when a cardinal shows up in your view, that that's a lost loved one who's just stopping by to say hello. Just to check in on you. And so sometimes God sends cardinals just when we need them. Another big one in our family is Mallard Ducks. You know that we lost my father-in-law a couple years ago. And Mallard Ducks were really special to him. And I can't tell you all the cool places where we've just kind of looked and there's a duck there that doesn't belong there. And it's just God kind of reminding us that he loves us, that he sees our pain, that he walks with us in that pain. Maybe, for some of us, God's using this morning to strengthen you, to buoy you. I hope so. Maybe this is just what you need. My hope for all of you is that you never need this sermon and you never have to pray those prayers. But my suspicion is you have a better chance of dodging raindrops on the way back to your car in a downpour than you do of living a life without tragedy. And so I think all of us, at some point, need this sermon and this reminder that when our emotions are too big for propriety, God can hear those prayers too. And in the hearing, in those moments, he sends his angels one way or another to strengthen us. I just got done reading a book. It's actually Beth Moore's biography. I would highly recommend it. One of the best books I've read in a couple years. And in it, she was talking to someone who faced incredible tragedy. And she asked her, how is it that you have kept going through these years? And she said, God opens my eyes every morning. I have no other explanation than that. There are nights that I went to sleep and I did not want to wake up and God opens my eyes. And so I get up that day and for us today I use the breath that's in my lungs and I praise him and I go. We will all in different times and seasons and for different reasons and in different ways walk through dark nights of the soul. But when we do, we can cry out to God. And when we cry out to God, He will hear us. And when He hears us, He will send His angels to strengthen us. I'll finish with this verse from Isaiah, and then I'll pray, because it's one of my favorites. We're taught in Isaiah that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, and that he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. You're big, you're good, and you're gracious, and we are broken. We need you so much, and we have no right, we have no right to pound our desk and shake our fist and demand answers from you. We have no right to do that, and yet in your goodness, from time to time, you allow it, and you hug us, and you weep with us. I lift up the people today who might have recently prayed prayers like these, and I just ask that you would strengthen them, that they would feel your presence, they would feel your goodness, they would feel your love, they would be strengthened by you. Father, buoy us and tether us to you. God, we also thank you that Jesus did drink of that cup, that he did die for us, that he did conquer death and sin and hell for us so that we don't have to. And God, we look forward to a day when we understand things just a little bit better. But in the meantime, may your presence and your love be ever enough. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. Thank you for being here and happy Easter to you. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I get to be one of the pastors here, and we so appreciate you choosing to celebrate your Easter here with us at Grace. For the last six or seven weeks, we've been moving through a series called The Table. The series has kind of been moving through the book of Luke. One scholar says about the book of Luke, which is one of the four gospels, and the gospels are the books in the Bible that tell the story of the life of Jesus. And one scholar said about the book of Luke that in the book of Luke, Jesus is either going to, coming from, or attending a meal. Others have called it the hospitality gospel. And so we've been looking at the different meals in Jesus's life and kind of asking, how does he use the table, right? What does he do with meals? How does he integrate those into what he was trying to do in his life and in his ministry? And we've looked at the table as a reminder for us, the table as provision for us, the table to build community. And so this week, we want to point towards what is going to be the greatest meal, the greatest feast of all time. And this series, I think, has been a good one for Grace, because I was preaching it and they were awesome. But I think that it's been a good series for Grace because Grace people, we are table people, right? We love getting around the table. Our biggest event of the year, every year, the Hootenanny, the last is now we call it the sometimes annual Hootenanny because COVID made us not have it. But the last Sunday, every September, what do we do? We have a service. We celebrate. We go outside. We sit around a table. We talk with each other. Our meals are so much a part of all of our lives. Everything we do, every activity that we do, we tend to center around food, don't we? Even when we go do something that's not about food, when we get there, we make it about food. I took Lily, my daughter, she's seven, to her first basketball game. We went to see NC State. They just eked one out against the up-and-coming Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. Go Jackets. And the first thing we did, we're going to a game. There's no food involved with this. What's the first thing I do when we get there? We find our seats. Let's go get some stadium food. That's part of the experience. We need food. We include food in every aspect of our lives. I would be willing to bet that you already know what you're having for lunch. You want to get there and you want me to stop talking so that you can have it. We're going to celebrate. We're going to go eat food. When we get married, what's the first thing we do? Everybody goes to a room. We have a meal together. When someone dies, what do we do? We go to the funeral. We go to the service. And then if the family has friends, they go back to somebody's house and all their friends have provided food. Even when we have babies, what do we do? People just bring you meals for weeks. We call it a meal train. There's a whole name for it. Everything we do is centered around the table. And so we've been asking, how does Jesus use the table to impact us and to do his ministry and to execute his goals in his life. And as we've done that, we've been building towards what is and will be the greatest feast of all time. Most people call it the marriage supper of the Lamb. This is what we do when we get to heaven. I want to read about it to you so that you know where it comes from and what it says. And then I want to unpack it a little bit and tell you what's happening there. In Revelation chapter 19, beginning in verse me, write this, blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he said to me, these are the true words of God. I don't know what you think about when you think about heaven. And I don't know what all is going to be there and how it's all going to work. But I know that when we get there, the first scheduled group activity God has for us is to eat together. When we get there, the first thing he wants us to do is come around the table and celebrate the marriage supper of the Lamb. Now, the language that we read there in Revelation is a culmination of much of the language throughout Scripture, where Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God and where the church is referred to as the Bride of Christ. And one day, Jesus has promised us that he's going to come back crashing through the clouds and he's going to take his church and sweep us up into heaven, the church as his collective bride, and it will be the marriage of the church to the Lamb. Jesus will claim his bride, and then when the marriage is there and done, and the wedding has happened, we're all going to sit down, and we are going to have a feast. And like I said, it's the first scheduled activity in heaven. I don't know what else we'll do there. I would assume after this one particular session, maybe we'll have some breakout sessions, like some free time. The optional, I think they'll probably, it is Master's Sunday. So I think they'll probably, I don't think, I think God probably looks at Augusta National and says, yeah, that's as good as I can do. And he's just going to take it. That's why it's called Amen Corner. He's just going to take it and just put it in heaven and then we all get to play it, right? But before we do that, we're going to sit down to this meal together. We're going to have a feast. And I love to think about what will be at that meal. I love to think about who will be there. Easter is the holiday that gives us hope. Easter is the holiday that makes these promises. I love, and I share this quote every year from John Paul II. We do not give way to despair, for we are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song. And one of the things that we hope to in the promises of Easter, or cling to in the promises of Easter, is that when we sit at that marriage supper of the Lamb, the people that we have loved and lost to know Jesus will be there too. I lost my pawpaw when I was 19. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. Because of him, I know that there will be fried catfish at that supper of the Lamb. And I can't wait to have it with him. I've sat with people, some in my own family, some of you, some friends, who are sitting in the wake of the loss of their parent or their child or their husband or their wife or their friend. And the only thing that you can say there is that there is a hope in Christ that you will be reunited for them. It's the only thing that begins to take away the sting of death is the knowledge that one day at this great supper, I will see them again. So when we think about what's there, the people that we have loved and lost and who know Jesus are there. And they're saving you a seat. But I also like to think about what's not there. You know what's not at the marriage supper of the Lamb? You guys are going to meals later, right? There's going to be family there. For some of you, it's going to be weird. It's going to be tense. You can't laugh right now because they're sitting next to you. You're not sure if you're really looking forward to it. It might even be one of these deals where you kind of be glad when it's over. None of that will be there at the marriage supper of the Lamb. There is no tension there. Nothing but love. And I love to think about this too. The people that you have loved and the people that you have lost and that you will have lost are imperfect people, right? You know that old saying, hurt people hurt people? The people who loved you and hurt you, because it's confusing sometimes, when you see them in heaven, they don't hurt anymore. They will be able to love you perfectly. They will be the best possible versions of themselves. That father figure that you grew up with, who you know they loved you, but they never said it because they weren't the type to say things like that. He's going to tell you when you see him again because whatever emotional crud that they taught guys in the 1930s and 40s won't be there anymore. That mom or dad that you watched age, whose memories, your memories of them, the most clear ones are sometimes the ones that you want the least, that person's gone. It's the best version of themselves. We love you most. You know what else isn't there? Your crudud. You're sins. You're guilt. Chasing you and hounding you when there's worship songs singing and when you walk into a church and when people talk about Jesus. When you're in heaven, none of that's there anymore. It's done. I don't know what song it is that we're singing this morning, but there's a line in one of them about when that final battle against pain is done. We don't have to fight ourselves anymore in heaven. You know what else isn't in heaven? Faith. Hope. We don't need those anymore. Romans 8 says that you don't hope for what you can see. In heaven, we don't have to hope anymore. We don't have to choose faith anymore. We don't have to wrestle with complicated doubts and issues anymore. It's just peace. It's just love. It's just joy and exuberance. It's just purity. And I'm talking about the marriage supper of the Lamb this morning. I'm trying to paint a picture for you of what it could possibly be. Because Easter is what secures our ticket to that meal. You understand? Easter, what we're celebrating today, the empty tomb, is what secures our ticket to the marriage supper of the Lamb. It's what we can place our faith in to know that we are invited to. And I love Easter, and I love the promise of Easter. And Aaron, in one of the songs, read one of my favorite passages in the Bible, and probably my favorite group of words in the Bible. It's my favorite statement in the whole Bible. We actually, this morning, I'm getting emotional. I'll calm down. Just hang in there. This morning, I was able to, I was home for Easter bunny stuff. And one of the things that Lily got this year, and Jen made sure, Jen's my wife, not just a lady I talk about. Jen made sure to tell Lily that we gave you the Bible. The bunny did not bring that, okay? So we gave you the Bible. And the very first thing we did is I opened up to Luke chapter 24, and I said, can you find verses four and five? And she read the Easter story, which is the only sermon I needed today. But in those verses, Mary, Magdalene, and a couple of the other ladies have gone back to the tomb to dress the body of Jesus with spices. And when they get there, the stones rolled away. The tomb is empty. And they're looking around. And the angel says, the best sentence in the whole Bible, why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen. Do you understand that if that verse isn't there, if that tomb's not empty, and if that never happens, that none of this matters? Do you understand if Easter isn't true, that we're all stupid? Like Paul says, if Easter's not true, then Christians are to be most pitied of all people, because we just parade through life trumpeting this hope that's hokum. If Easter's not true, then we're just coming here and we're singing songs that make us feel good and we're leaving with our morals so that we can feel like we have something to teach our children and we can feel better about ourselves and our neighbor. And that's all we're doing if Easter's not true. If Easter's not true, then you will never conquer your sin. You will die fighting it and your crud will exist forever. If Easter is not true, then when you lost that person who you love, who believes in Jesus as well, then it was goodbye, and that's it, and death is final, and there still is sting, and we should not have hope. If Easter is not true, then all that's left is eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die. Everything hinges on Easter. And what I love about Easter is it brings everything together in our faith. I say often that to be a Christian, you need to believe Jesus. You need to believe that he was who he says he was, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. We need to believe that he was who he says he was. He's the Son of God who came to take away the sins of the world, and who else but the Son of God could raise himself from the dead? We need to believe that he did what he said he did, that he actually died, and that he actually rose again. And that there was actually an empty tomb on the outskirts of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. And then we believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, which is to come crashing back through the clouds to claim his bride and take us to dinner. And to secure for us a perfect eternity. It is the hope to which we cling. And Easter is an invitation from Jesus himself to that marriage supper of the Lamb. So I would tell you this morning that if you want to be at that supper, if you want to go to the marriage supper of the Lamb, the greatest feast of all time, if you want to exist in this perfect eternity where you see your lost loved ones who also know and love Jesus, if you want to exist in this perfect eternity where all of your crud is gone and people can love each other perfectly and we get to see the face of our Savior and we get to cry out hallelujah to the face of our God and we get to experience perfect joy and bliss and peace. If you want to experience that, then all you have to do is accept God's invitation. If you want to go to the marriage supper of the Lamb, all you have to do is accept the invitation sealed through Easter and secured through the death of Christ. If you haven't done that, I'm not going to try to bring you to a point of decision right now. Because frankly, after doing a life of ministry, I just don't think that's quite how it works. But what I would invite you to do is to consider it. If this is true, then it's worth considering. If the marriage supper of the Lamb is real, I want to go. And I want to meet my Jesus. And if that tomb really was empty, and everybody who trumpets that hope isn't just faking it, then it's the most important thing that's ever happened. And you know, as Jesus extends that invitation to his supper, to the marriage supper of the Lamb, I think another reason that this series resonates with grace is because we think of ourselves as a table too. We're not a cruise ship or a battleship. We don't talk about being on mission. We consider ourselves a banquet table. And everyone's invited. Broken people. Hurt people. People who don't believe people who simply want to experience community and I think that every time we gather and we think of ourselves as a family gathering around a table and and every time we sing, and every time we raise our voices, and every time the Spirit stirs our affection for Jesus, that it's a whisper of what it will be like at the marriage supper of the Lamb. So I just wanted to finish today by inviting you to that whisper every week. If you're someone who churches in a regular part of your life, I hope you'll find a church that speaks to you. And if you think that could be grace, then we'd love to see you back next week and a lot of weeks after that. But I'm going to pray now and we're going to move into our last time of worship. And I'll just say this. It's good. It's real good. Let's pray. Father, thank you for sending your son. Thank you that he lived and that he died and that he rose and that he invites us to heaven with you. God, we look forward to that marriage supper of the Lamb, to being claimed back to you by Jesus. We look forward to the eternity that you promise and secure. And God, I pray for us in this room that we would make it a habit to gather with your family for the weekly reminder and promise of what's to come. As we close in song, God, I just pray that it would be sweet and that the Spirit would move and that we would turn our hearts towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody, Alan, welcome back to the service. It's good to see you all. Did you shout getting some coffee? That was a great timing. That was the time. That was the spot. It's better than leaving right now. Yeah, you did great. No, you did great. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. If I haven't gotten to meet you, I would love to do that so that in future services, I can make fun of you when you do stuff. And that will be great. This is the second part of our series called The Table. And we're focusing on Jesus's ministry and Luke around the table and how he uses meals purposefully and strategically in his life. And if you've spent time around me, if you've been here for any length of time, you know that one of the things I like to remind people of is the fact that I believe that God speaks to us in stereo. If we hear something from one isolated friend, they say one thing. If a sermon pricks our heart in a certain way, that's great to hear that one thing and try to respond to it correctly. But if we hear it from another friend and then from mom or dad or a husband or wife, and then we hear it from a sermon and then we hear it in a song and then just something, we're scrolling and we see it again, then I would argue that God is trying to get your attention and tell you something very specific. Because again, I believe he speaks in stereo, which is why I thought it was so interesting that I went to a pastor's conference this week in Orlando. And there's like 6,000 other pastors there. Some of the best communicators in the Christian world are there just kind of telling you their ideas and experiences. And it was a real refreshing time. I'll tell you more about that a little bit later in the sermon, but I thought it was really, really interesting that here I am, we're in the middle of this series called The Table. That wasn't my idea, it was Carly's idea, and then I get into it, and it's really, really great stuff. And then I go down to this conference, and what do all the speakers say? The speakers say the future of the Christian church in America is around the table. The future of evangelism in the United States is around the table. The future of discipleship, Christian maturity in our country is around the table. And we believe God is doing something and he is moving and he's moving around our tables. And so I'm sitting in the conference going, okay, I'm in. Like what you got? God, I'm listening. So for me, I do believe that God is speaking through this idea of the table. I shared with you a couple weeks ago, I do think God is doing something here. I do think he's moving here. Look how many of you showed up today. You're better Christians than the people who are cozy and warm watching online. I'm sorry, you know it. If you're home, like, you know that that's true. Thank you for coming here this morning. You really meant it. You really wanted some Jesus today, so we're going to try to take you right to him. But I believe that God is moving, and I believe that God is speaking. And if he's speaking to you about the sacred times around our tables and how we can use those and employ those and use those to push us and others closer to Jesus, then I would encourage you to lean in and listen today as well. This morning is called The Table for Relationship. We're looking at how Jesus uses the table for different purposes throughout his life. And this story we take from Luke chapter 7. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to Luke chapter 7. If you didn't bring one with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Luke chapter 7 has this great interchange between Jesus and a Pharisee named Simon. The Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day. They were the lawyers and the senators and the pastors all rolled into one. And Jesus gets invited over to Simon's house, and he has this great discourse. And I'll get into it, and I'll read it. And when I read this passage, it's the second part that we're not going to cover today that always, to me, jumps out as the most resounding portion of this passage. But I'm actually saving that portion of the passage for our Good Friday service. So again, that Friday before Easter, we'll be here. I don't know the time yet, probably seven o'clock, but don't quote me on that. Just don't make other plans that night. Come to our Good Friday service, and we're going to cover the rest of this story there in a different way. But I want to focus on the front half of this story that we find in Luke chapter 7, verses 36 through 39. If you have a Bible, read along with me. If you don't, it should be on the screen. One of the Pharisees asked him, Jesus, to eat with him. And he went into the Pharisee's house and took his place at the table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at the table in the Pharisee's house, him saw this, he said to himself, if this man were a prophet, he would know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner. Okay, we'll leave the story there. It goes on, and Simon accuses Jesus of this. Why are you interacting with this woman? Jesus tells a little parable about a debtor being forgiven his debt, two debtors being forgiven their debt, and the larger debtor is the one that is more grateful. And Jesus says this great line, yes, he who is forgiven little loves little, but he who is forgiven much loves much. And it's this great instruction about how grateful we are for Jesus and who he is operates in direct correlation to the weight of our sin that we feel. And if we don't feel a great affection towards Jesus, then it's very likely that we walk around thinking we're a lot better off than we actually are, thinking we're somebody when we ain't. But again, we're going to focus on that with Good Friday service. For this, I think it's helpful and interesting to focus on something else in this story. And before I tell that, just so I know that we're all on the same page, I told you what a Pharisee was. Pharisee was the religious leader, senator, lawyers, all wrapped up into one of the day. They were the religious elite. This woman is from the city, and she is a sinner. So that should tell you what she did and what her profession was. It was the oldest profession in the world. If you still don't know what this woman did for a living, ask someone next to you and, you know, make fun of them if they ask you, and then tell them, okay? But that's who she she was and that's what she did. Women didn't have a lot of options back then. And so she comes in and she anoints his feet and she wipes away, she dumps alabaster ointment on his feet, perfume, and then she cries on his feet, she kisses them, and then she washes his feet with her hair. And I'm not going to get into it. Culturally, this was an okay thing. This was understood. Everybody kind of knew what she was doing. It wasn't nearly as weird and awkward as it would be now. If I come to your house and some lady just wanders in and just starts crying on my feet and dumping perfume on them and kissing them, I'm never coming to your house again, okay? That's super weird. I'm not just going to sit there and be like, well, this is biblical. I'm going to, I'm going to leave. And I'm going to swear to Jen, I do not know that lady. I don't know. I don't know what's going on. But in this context, it's fine. So what's interesting to me about this dinner invitation is why Jesus accepted it. Why did Jesus go? We see him, and we'll look at this next week when we look at the table for celebration. When he asked Levi, the tax collector, who later becomes Matthew and writes the gospel of Matthew, he asked him to be one of his disciples. And Levi says, come to my house, I'm going to throw a feast. And he throws a feast with all of his sinning tax collector friends who don't know Jesus. And then Jesus is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard for going to that party and for going to other parties like that. And Jesus' response is, a physician does not come for the well, but for the sick. I came to seek and save the lost. And so we see in Jesus this very high degree of interest in hanging out with people and being around people who we good church people would not typically associate with because they're gross and we're better than them, right? Spoiler alert, we're not, okay? You suck and they do too, and that's why we all need Jesus. So we know that Jesus accepts those dinner invitations, but this one's interesting to me because it's not from a sinner, quote unquote. It's not from the outcast of society. It's from the religious elite. It's from the people that seem to not need Jesus, who he doesn't seem too interested in carousing with, except he gets an invitation from Simon and Jesus accepts it. Now, why does he accept this invitation? Now, this is a guess for me, okay? I don't have a verse to hang on this. This is my guess based on what I know of Jesus and what I know of Scripture, this is my best guess. You guys know Jesus. You know Scripture as well. You're welcome to your best guess, and you're welcome to disagree with this. But it is a guess. Why did Jesus accept this invitation? Was it to be polite? Maybe. Was it just a commonly accepted practice? It could be. But I think that Jesus was also concerned about Simon's soul. I think that Jesus also wanted him to see the light. We see throughout the New Testament and the Gospels that Jesus is pretty hard on the Pharisees. He calls them a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs. He's pretty pointed with them. If he's going to be harsh with anybody, it's going to be the Pharisees and then a couple times the disciples. But in this scene, Jesus is actually amicable to them. He wants to go spend time with them because I believe that Jesus cares about the souls of the Pharisees as well. Not only because he says he cares about everybody, he says he loves everybody, but we see him go into Simon's house. We see him in John chapter 3 have a private, subtle, under-the-radar discussion so he doesn't get in trouble with Nicodemus, another Pharisee. We see Jesus in quiet moments act favorably towards them. Why? Because he cares about their souls too, and he wants them to know the truth. So I believe that Jesus took this dinner invitation, at least in part, to begin working towards the conversion of Simon, to evangelize him. And he knew that Simon's friends would be there, and he'd have an opportunity to begin to work towards their conversion as well. And I believe that Jesus in his wisdom knew that this woman was going to be there as well, and that would give him an opportunity to include her, to rope her in, to say in front of the religious elite, I love her too. She's all right with me too. And you should accept her at your table as well and quit separating things out and quit thinking that you're better than because you're not. Everyone's equal in the kingdom of God. I believe that he wanted to slowly chip away at their thought processes and chip away at her thought process and invite them in. So I believe that Jesus uses this meal for conversion and inclusion, understanding that both require relationships. I believe that Jesus was using this meal to begin to work towards the conversion of Simon and his friends and the inclusion of this woman and people like her into one table, realizing that both of those goals require relationships, require friendships. Jesus understands that for a man like Simon, entrenched in his ideology, since birth he has been poured into by other probably well-meaning rabbis and spiritual leaders who have simply misled him because they were misled. And it's really scary to think how generational teaching can lead to people reinforcing bad ideas on down the road until you as parents are teaching things to your kids because they were spouted to you by some ignorant Sunday school teacher when you were a little kid and you've never reconsidered them in your whole life. You see how this happens? And so this is what was happening with the Pharisees. It's not that they didn't love Jesus or it's not that they didn't like God and want to be in right standing with Him. It's that they were blind. They had been misled. And you don't break someone like Simon free from his ideology with one exchange in the town square, with one pithy remark or parable or saying. You break someone free like Simon from their ideology with conversations over time. You gradually open their eyes. If there's someone in your life who you love who does not know Jesus, we can take a page out of Jesus' playbook and engage in relationship with them and realize it's going to happen over time and over conversation and over consistency and over watching someone love them like they actually love them and love Jesus too. It takes relationship to see people come to faith. And Jesus also uses relationship for the inclusion of this woman. She is a woman one would assume. Maybe she didn't, but I don't think it's a bad guess to assume that she lived with a degree of shame. Maybe she didn't feel it all the time. Maybe when she was around other people who did what she did and other people who hired the kind of people that she was, maybe she didn't feel shame around them, but in general society, anytime she entered into a house like this, I bet she felt shame. I bet she felt unwanted and unwarranted. I bet she felt rightly excluded from genteel society. And what Jesus is doing here is going, no, no, no, no, she's good with me too. She's okay too. She's included here. When we first wrote this out, I was going to say the table for adoption or the table for inclusion and how we can use our table and we can use our friend groups to invite people into the space and say, they're good with me, they should be good with you too. And that's what Jesus was doing. He was providing her a cover for that relationship and for these people saying, we're all equal and we're all even. The challenge for this with her is that when you live your life in shame, it takes hearing that you're loved and accepted more than once for you to actually believe it, doesn't it? You know this is true in your life. Most of you in this room, if not all of you, have heard plenty of times God loves you, he forgives you, he desires you. We sang earlier, he runs after you. There's no mountain he won't climb up, shadow he won't light up coming after you. You know that intellectually to be true. You may even know that if you're a believer, you're an adopted son or daughter of the king, and he loves you as much as he can ever love you, no matter what you've done, no matter what you're going to do, he is passionately in love with you. And you may know that he approves of you and that he accepts you just the way that you are. But isn't the Christian life a slow, painful acceptance of that? Don't we have a tendency to say other people are loved and accepted, but God does not feel that way about me because I know better? Don't we heap shame and guilt on ourself and assume that we're unacceptable to God and others because of what we've done and assign His acceptance and His love to other people? Isn't it one thing to know intellectually that you're loved and forgiven and another thing to know in your heart and soul and actually live like you are? Doesn't that inclusion by Jesus take a long time for us to learn? So Jesus knows, if I want to convert Simon and his friends, and if I want this woman to know that she's truly included and loved, it's going to take time. It's going to take relationship. And Jesus sets a model of relationships in his life. I don't know if we think of it in those terms or if you've considered that before. But at these meals, we see him building relationship. When Zacchaeus is in the tree and Jesus walks by him, he says, hey, I'm coming to your house for lunch. Like, let's hang, man. Let's go. He develops relationships with his disciples. He develops relationships with the people around him. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were some of his best friends, and he went and retreated there. Those were his people. That's where he was safe and trusted, and they were safe and trusted as well. Relationships are important to Jesus, and I believe he lived a life modeling the importance of these relationships. And I believe that one of the reasons he did it is because Christianity requires relationships. Biblical Christianity requires of us biblical friendships and biblical relationships. The whole Bible is written not to individuals, but to communities, groups of people. Even the books of the Bible that are originally addressed to individuals, Philemon, Titus, Timothy, Acts, and Luke, which are addressed to blessed Theophilus, were intended to be shared as groups, in groups. Were intended for people to consume together. It's this unique perspective of Western philosophy and Christianity that has reduced Christianity and faith to our own personal salvation project, where the most important thing in faith is whether or not we're saved. And Jesus offers us so much bigger, robust gospel and love than whether or not we're going to heaven one day. He offers us a relationship with our creator God now that we can share with others on this outpost of eternity. Christianity was never, ever intended to be lived alone. As a matter of fact, if you've spent any time at Grace, hopefully you've heard me say there is no such thing as a Lone Ranger Christian. I would argue with you it is absolutely impossible to grow as close to Jesus as you can without other people in your life walking with you. That's why when we had a discussion as elders years ago around our current mission statement, connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people, there was some pushback. Some of the folks in the circle at the time felt like it should just be connecting people to Jesus. We should not elevate connecting people to people on that level. It's connecting people to Jesus. And it was kind of tough for them to get over connecting people to people. Like, that feels too simple. That feels too easy. And so we agreed that we would put it second. So there's a clear priority there, which who cares? But I was a real stickler about connecting people to people, and some of the other people in the circle were a stickler about that because I would contend that you cannot grow as close to Jesus as you possibly can without other people in your life who also love you and love Jesus. And so we are committed to connecting people to people to help you in that walk. And if you think that, if you have any hesitation about that being true, about closeness with God being possible without, all I need is my Bible and prayer and God and I'm good. Okay, well Adam had that. The first book of the Bible, second, third chapter, he had that. In chapter two, we see him. He has the perfect relationship with God, the exact relationship with God that God created us for, the exact relationship with God that we will finally one day experience in heaven. Adam walked that. He had that. He walked with God in the cool of the evening. They talked every day. Adam was the perfect man. He was intellectually superior. He was emotionally intelligent. He was utterly fulfilled. And he had a perfect relationship with the perfect God. And he lived on a perfect earth with no pain and no death and no struggling. And he didn't work. It's like living in a country club with just amazing fruit everywhere and pretty much walking through life like me, if you think about like the perfect man. And even in that perfection, he looked around after a period of time and he went to God and what did he say? I'm lonely. I'm lonely. I need, I need a companion. You cannot live out this life on your own. You cannot live the Christian life without relationships. To further that point and to show us how essential they are, I actually want to share with you something I heard this week. I've heard this before from this same guy, and I heard it again, and it was such a good reminder, and I feel bad for not having shared this with you before. But the Bible is full of one another's, isn't it? If you read it, we should be kind one to another, we should pray for one another, we should hold one another accountable. We should confront sin in one another. We should love one another. We should outdo one another in humility. We should bear one another's burdens. We should celebrate with one another. We should mourn and grieve with one another. There's a lot of one another commands in the Bible. And one another's are impossible outside of genuine, honest friendships. All those commands are impossible to obey outside of genuine and honest friendships. Now, there's some that are easier. Be kind one to another. We don't have to know people very well to be kind to them. We can be kind to people. But the better you know somebody, the more kind you can be. If I think about Cindy, our wonderful and lovely sound technician today, and I want to be kind to her. It's her birthday or something. Jen and I can buy her flowers. Buy her flowers and have a flower sent to her house, and oh, that's a nice gesture, whatever. But I know that Cindy loves the Duke Blue Devils. And if you don't, pipe down, nobody cares, okay? She loves them. And so if I made the flowers blue and white and sent them to her, that'd be a little bit extra kind, wouldn't it? Or you know what? I might find out that Cindy doesn't even like flowers. So knock it off with that stuff and send her donuts. I don't know. The better you know somebody, the kinder you can be. But there's some of these that really, unless you know somebody, unless you're friends with them, you can't obey these commands. Pray for one another, which seems simple enough, but you guys have been in a small group and you've been in those circles. Hey, does anybody have any prayer requests? Yeah, could you, my cousin's friend has a girlfriend who's, she might have COVID. Oh gosh, is she okay? I mean, it's just a head cold right now. She's probably okay, but let's pray for her. I'm like, I'm not, nope, I'm not gonna do that. And also, just so you know, sometimes Christians, you don't have to pray for everything. Somebody can tell you something and you can be like, okay, you don't have to like, I'm gonna ardently seek the Lord's throne over this. You can just let that one be. Or it's, you know, it's surfacy stuff. My wife is sick. My kids had a little bit of a cold. I got a trip coming up. Pray for traveling mercies. Sure. But when you're in a small group for a long time and trust begins to develop, the prayer requests get different, don't they? Pray for us. Our kids are struggling in school. They might have to repeat kindergarten. We just want wisdom there. We don't know the right thing to do. We just want to do the best thing for them. You start to get really real prayer requests. Hey, man, can you just pray for my marriage? We're not doing great. It's been a rough couple, two, three years. And I really don't know how this is going to go. Will you just pray for me that I can be a good husband? Sure. Hey, I lost my dad last year, and it has really done a number on my faith, and I don't really even know what I believe, and I'm having a hard time trusting God. And I don't even know if your prayer is going to work, but would you pray it anyways? When you're friends, you start to get real prayer requests. And you can really actually pray for each other in meaningful ways. And if you're close enough with them, when they tell you to pray for their cousin's friend who might have COVID, you can tell them to shove it and pray themselves. We can't start obeying these one another's until we're actually friends. If we're supposed to confront each other with sin, let me just tell you, for me personally, you do life how you want to do life. For me, if you want to sit me down and say, hey, Nate, I've noticed this destructive pattern in your life and I really don't think it's good for you, we better be friends or I'm out. I might sit there politely and say thank you. And you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to leave that conversation and I'm going to call a friend. I'm going to say, listen to what this person said. Is this true? But I'm not going to hear it from you if you're not my friend. We don't have a track record of going through life together. And listen, confronting sin and other people, the only way it can be done is with the foundation of relationship. When the Bible tells us to mourn with one another, to grieve with one another, to celebrate with one another, those are things that require a deep bedrock friendship and relationship there to be able to do that. We cannot be obedient to instructions about biblical Christianity without the power of relationships and friendships in our life. And I would even say this, just to push it a little bit further. When I hear about folks who are going through a rough patch, marriage is really, really hard. They've developed an addiction of some sort and they're fighting it. Their personal life is falling apart. Their professional life is falling apart. Whatever it is, when I hear about people whose lives are beginning to spin a little bit out of control, can I just tell you what I often find and what they often share with me? They say things like, you know, I really don't feel like I have many friends. I'm not sure if I have any friends at all. Let me tell you something. As your pastor, and if you're sitting in this room today, I'm your pastor at least for today. As your pastor, if you are doing life without friends, you're in trouble. If you are doing life without friends who share your values, if your closest friend is your spouse and you don't have any true friends outside of that, you're in trouble. And if your closest friend is your spouse and you don't have any true friends outside of that, you're in trouble. And if your closest friend is your spouse, and you don't have, I'm not saying your closest friend shouldn't be your spouse, I'm just saying you should have really good friendships outside of your marriage. If you don't, you're putting too much pressure on them, and they're putting too much pressure on you, and you're going to let each other down, and things aren't going to go good. Jesus designed us to walk in friendships. If you don't have them, the biggest encouragement I could give you is to pursue them. When I counsel with young couples doing premarital counseling, very often I'll do the marriage of people who don't live close to us. They don't live in Raleigh. They live in Fuquay or they live in Greensboro or they live wherever they live. But centrally, their family's around here. So they're choosing a venue in Raleigh. So they want a pastor that's local and close to the venues. They find me online and I agree to do their wedding. And when I talk to these people, I ask them, what's your plan for finding a church? And very often they'll say, you know, we don't have a church. We're looking for a church. What would you recommend? How can we find a good church? And I always tell them the same thing. Listen, find a church. And I mean this, you're gonna laugh, but I really do mean it. And I think this is actually what most of you have done. Find a church that has a tolerable pastor. They don't have to be great, okay? The sermons don't have to blow your doors off every week. You can download really good sermons every week. Find a pastor that doesn't drive you nuts and sit under that teaching. Find worship that's good. Here we have great worship and we're lucky. But find it that's good. But you know what you really need? Find a church where you can make friends. Find a church where you can make friends. And then everything else kind of fades away. You can go to the church with the best preaching and the best worship and the best programs. But if you don't have friends, you're never going to connect in the way that you need to. And that church isn't going to serve you how it should serve you. So when you choose a church, choose a church to build friendships, to do life together. With all of that being said, I want to bring us back to the power of the table and ask, what would happen if we viewed our meals as Jesus did? What would happen if those opportunities around the table, and I don't want to be unrealistic, not every day, not every meal, not every time we sit with somebody who's going to have a sacred element to it, but man, it happens far more often than we think it does. What would happen if we would understand that relationships and friendships are absolutely essential to my faith, and they're essential to the faith of others, and they're essential if I see someone I want to convert, if I see someone I want to move closer to Jesus, if I see someone I want to influence, then relationship is essential within that influence. What if we accepted that and began to use the meals in our life to further those things, to pursue those things? What would happen if when we had the opportunity to go out to eat after church with our friends, we had one or two intentional questions? We don't make the whole lunch and impromptu Bible study, but what if we had one or two intentional questions? What's God been teaching you for the last six months? Anything at all? What'd you get from Nate's sermon? What'd you think of that? That was terrible. Did you agree it was terrible? Yes, I agree it was terrible. And then have a great conversation. Did you love it when he made fun of Alan at the beginning? Yes, I loved that. Whatever it was. Point of fact, I told you I went to conference this week, and the idea for that, it came to me last fall, and I texted an old buddy of mine. We were on staff together at the church I worked at previously. He left and started his own church. He's been a senior pastor for, I think, about eight or nine years now. I'm in my seventh year of being a senior pastor, and so we talk multiple times over the course of the year, how are things going, and I was telling somebody before the service that when you're a senior pastor and you have the opportunity to talk with another senior pastor, the conversation's just different, right? Because we're smarter and more spiritual than all of you. So it's just, no, it's because we have the same job. Like if you're the national sales director of whatever, and you talk to another national sales director of whatever, and there's a lot of similarities there, then you're going to be able to just talk about things that other people don't understand and can't talk about. So the ability to relate is very, very high. And so I wanted to go and have some extended time to spend with another senior pastor and just talk about what it's like to do life in the way that we've chosen to do it. And what his church is almost the exact same size as our church. And so it's good one-to-one comparisons about how you're handling different things. And I wanted to go to this conference, but I was determined to use the conversations that we had with a purpose. And some of you may have seen that I put on social media, we went to, we were going to go golf, and I said, I'd rather go see the Star Wars section because I've never seen it. Nobody in my family cares about it. And so we went to see the Star Wars section, which was great. I don't know if it was $165 great. I was there for like 90 minutes, and I was like, cool, I'm going to go to the hotel. But it was really fun. I got us matching t-shirts because of course, you know. And we had a great time. But at the breakfast, when we wrapped up, we had gone to conference for two days. We went to Disney and had that experience and shared meals together and all this stuff. At breakfast on the last day on Friday morning, I asked him, what are your takeaways? And one of the things that we agreed upon, he said, this was not a frivolous trip. This was an absolutely spiritually encouraging trip. And I made the comment, I would argue that the most important things on this trip happened in line and at meals, not at the conference, not with what we learned. And he said, a thousand percent. And it was because at the beginning of the trip, we shared, we want this to be purposeful. We want to have important conversations. We want to talk about important things. So we talked about silly stuff, our mutual affection for Caitlin Collins on CNN. I mean, we both think that she does a great job as a news anchor. But then we also talked about family. And do you think your mom and your dad and your sister are part of your ministry? What are your responsibilities for them? What do you do with hosting? How do you plan series? How do you keep your spiritual life vibrant when church feels like it's dragging you down? We had good, meaningful conversations that helped both of us. So what would happen if we all did that? And the meals that we had around our table, we began to use intentionally. And we came in with one or two intentional questions just to check on the people that we were having meals with or just to help us become better friends with them. But what if we didn't see our time around the table? And I don't mean just meals. It can be any setting where we have an opportunity to talk with people and we don't have anywhere to go and nothing to do or be? In those settings, how can we use those more purposefully to build friendships, to build the relationships that are essential to biblical living? And then I would ask you, what relationships do we need to pursue so others might begin to pursue Jesus? Who do you have in your life that you can leverage your table to push towards Jesus, to convert or include? Who do you have in your life that you can encourage spiritually? And shame on me for not including this one, but what relationships do you have in your life that you can pursue to begin to push you towards Jesus? Who seems to have things figured out maybe a little bit better than you right now that you can invite around your table and just ask them questions. There's so much benefit from doing that. I issued last week the Dinner Table Challenge for the series and said between now and Easter, we're encouraging everyone here to have someone around your table from grace who's never been around your table before. And we're encouraging everyone to have someone around your table who's not from grace, who's never been around your table before. Point of clarity, someone asked me last week, is that the same meal or is it two separate meals? It's two separate meals. For me, I'm not really down with mixing universes. I don't like it when someone invites me over to their house and they've also invited over other people who I don't know. And I'm like, well, I've been ambushed. What is this? I just want to go back home. This is completely, I was not prepared for this. But listen, if you're down with that, if that's your deal, you like mixing universes and making people uncomfortable, sure, invite them both over and let's just see what happens. But I would encourage you, don't just invite the easy ones over. Be strategic. Who can you invite over and hopefully encourage them towards Christ? Who can you invite over and maybe learn from them? And when God places you in opportunities, in small groups and in meals and around tables and in friend groups, and as you have new acquaintances that you're allowed and enabled to pursue, how can we use those to push them and ourselves closer to Jesus? But what I want us to take away from today, if nothing else, is the Christian life is impossible to live without friendships. It's impossible to live without relationships. If you don't have them or you need stronger ones, the best place to begin to do that is around the table. So let's use those strategically as we move throughout the rest of our weeks leading up to Easter and prepare our hearts for celebrating Easter when it comes. Let's pray. Father, we love you and we thank you for the example that was set for us by your son. How he modeled for us sitting around tables with people and having conversations that needed to be had. Loving on people in surprising ways, encouraging people towards conversion in gentle ways. Father, I pray for people here who feel like right now in their life they're a little bit lonely and they're a little bit alone and they're not sure if they have the friendships that they need and that they want, would you bring them people in their life that they can pursue, that will pursue them, who love them and who love you? Would you build friendships in their life? Father, would you give us the courage to pursue those, to extend the invite, to make the offer, to reach out and bridge the gaps. And God, around those tables, would you bless the conversation? Would you build friendships that last for decades? Ones that encourage us towards you? And God, in these relationships, would we find more of you there? In Jesus' name, amen.