Sermons tagged with Responsibility

The Yo, good to see everybody. Thank you again for being here. This is the sixth part in our series going through the book of Revelation. I have really very much enjoyed going through Revelation with you all. And honestly, you guys have been more enthusiastic about it than I expected because Revelation can be a slog. It can be tough. We just took three weeks working through the tribulation, talking about the wrath of God and all the mechanics of the tribulation best we can. And to me, that feels tedious, but you guys have been incredibly supportive and incredibly kind. And it seemed like y'all have enjoyed going through this with me. As folks have asked me, how is Revelation being received? I say, it seems universally good. However, no one's going to tell me it's bad. No one's going to email me and be like, just so you know, really are looking forward to when this series is over and we can talk about something else. So that might be out there. And if that's you, I'm so sorry. Thank you for hanging with us. But for those of you who have enjoyed this, thanks so much for the encouragement because it's been really, really neat to get to go through it with you guys as a church. This morning, we arrive at Christ's return, the return of Christ. And I said last week that this needs to be the best sermon that I've ever preached in my life, to do adequate justice to the grandiosity of what's happening in Revelation 19. This will not be the best sermon of my life. I just wish that it could be, okay? So let's temper our expectations now. This is a B minus, all right? But in this sermon, we arrive at Jesus' return, at kind of the culmination of God's wrath, the final nail in the coffin. I said we've been walking through the tribulation. We've kind of looked at it through three different lenses. We looked at it in the first week to understand the wrath of God that's poured out in the tribulation, and we defined it. We defined it that week when we looked at Revelation 4 and 5, and Jesus steps forward as the Lamb of God, qualified to open up the seals and begin to open up God's wrath on his creation. We said he's beginning the seven-year process of tribulation. Now, what is tribulation? Well, we define that as the seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath on his creation and reclaiming what is rightfully his. And this week, he reclaims it. This week, he does the last part of the tribulation. Then we looked at kind of the flow of it, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls, and then we looked at the figures of it, and we'll talk a little bit more about the beast, the Antichrist, today. But where we're at in the narrative of Revelation is we're at the end of the Tribulation. God has poured out his wrath. We've had this great battle. There's been a great earthquake. God has sent darkness onto the kingdom of the Antichrist. And then he sends his son to finish up the work. He sends his son to answer the voice of the martyrs that cries out in Revelation chapter 6, the fifth seal. The voice of the martyrs below the throne of God that say, how much longer, God, before you avenge our death? You know who killed us. You see us suffering as your children. How much longer will you let this keep going? And we talked about in that week how we cry out with the martyrs, that every time something in our life happens that seems difficult or hard to understand or seems unfair, every time there's a school shooting, God, how much longer are you going to let this go on? Every time we lose someone too soon, God, how much longer will you let this world be broken? Every time we see something that we can't understand, we cry out with the martyrs and we say, God, how much longer, oh Lord, will you put up with this? And when he begins to open up the seals and begin the process of tribulation, he says, no more. And when he sends his son Christ, when we see Jesus in Revelation 19, that is God putting the final nail in the coffin of evil and saying, now I will make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Now I will rectify things. Now I will restore creation. Now I will answer the groanings that Paul talks about in Romans chapter 8 when we are told that all of creation groans for the return of the king. When we're told that we yearn inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters to experience eternity in the marriage supper of the lamb, we wait for this. We long for this. This is the hope that persists in our faith and keeps us anchored to our savior because we believe that revelation 19 is going to happen one day, that he's going to come get us, and that when he comes back, you guys have heard me say this before, he's not coming back as the Lamb of God. He comes back as the Lion of Judah. And we see this description in Revelation 19, beginning in verse 11. So if you have a Bible, you can read along with me. I love this description of my Jesus. Every time I read it, whether it's out loud or just in private, I get chills. I love this picture of him. And I don't know, I don't know if everybody can relate to this. This may just be silly. This may just be me being a dummy, and that's fine. I'm familiar with this territory. It's not unfamiliar. But when I read this passage about my Jesus, that part of me as a little kid that loved to see the hero win in movies, that teenage boy that loved to watch Braveheart win, that loved Gladiator and seeing Russell Crowe's character stick it to him, that little boy that loves Star Wars, that loves to see the hero win against evil, against all odds, that part of us, and I'm sharing that with you because I think that God lays that in us intentionally. I think we love the hero because the hero is a shadow of this reality that Jesus becomes. We grow up learning to love when the day is saved and when the hero makes an appearance because God wove that, I think, into our hearts to appreciate the appearance of his son when that hero returns and appears once and for all. So it's with that preamble that we'll read the description as Jesus comes back to reclaim his creation. This is the description of him that John records. Chapter 19, verse 11. And behold, a white horse. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty on his robe and on his thigh. His name is written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Gosh. That's Jesus, man. That's Jesus. That's our Savior. When we think of Jesus, when we pray to him, when we sing to him, when we think about him, when we think about being reunited with him in heaven, I believe that it's our tendency to think about the gospel of Jesus, to think about the crucified Christ. And I don't think that's anybody's fault. We have four gospels. We spend time there all the time. I revisit a gospel every spring with you guys. We focus on Jesus at Easter. We focus on Jesus at Christmas. And we see the teachings from Jesus come out of the gospel. And so it's right and good to think about our Jesus as the crucified Christ. It's right and good to think about our Jesus as gentle and lowly. We're actually reading a book, as the staff right now, called Gentle and Lowly, and what it tells us, and I did not know this, but that the only time that Jesus is ever asked to describe himself in scripture, or rather the only time that he actually does it, he describes himself as gentle and lowly. And I think that when we think about Jesus, we think about a humble Nazarene from the country. And that's fine and that's well and good. But that's Jesus in human form. Revelation 19, that's Jesus. You understand? That's who's waiting on us. That's who's coming to get us. That warrior king written on his robe and on his thigh, king of kings and Lord of lords as a callback to Isaiah so that we know exactly who it is. And when you read through this passage, it's unbelievable to me how rich it is with allusions to other parts of scripture so that there is no doubt about it that this is Jesus coming from the very beginning. It says that he was called faithful and true, capitalized. This is a deity. This is Jesus coming. And then it says that only he knows his name, which is, that's Exodus chapter three and four, when God refuses to share his name. That's a throwback to that. And then he says that he was called the word of God, which John is referencing his own writings at beginning of John, the gospel, when he says that the word was with God 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. And then at the end, king of kings and Lord of lords. John, in this description of Jesus is weaving together all of the scripture to point us to our savior. This is the Jesus, the one who has fire coming out of his eyes and a sword coming out of his mouth with which to strike down the nations. The one who rules with the rod of iron, who has the armies of heaven arrayed in linen, following down as he thunders down to conquer the beast and the dragon and the antichrist. That's the one that sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you. That's the one that rules for all of eternity. That's the one that we pray to. And that's the one who's coming to get you. So I want to at least take some time this morning to encourage you. When you sing to Jesus, when you pray to him, when you think of him, when you anticipate meeting him, anticipate the conquering Christ. Anticipate this Jesus. Anticipate the warrior king coming down to settle the score. Anticipate the lion of Judah coming down to wreck shop. To once and for all sweep evil off the face of the planet. And when you do that, when you focus on the conquering Christ, to me, it really caused me to think about this a lot this week, that the conquering Christ renders the crucified Christ all the more miraculous. The conquering Christ, Christ conquering renders Christ crucified all the more miraculous. Because this description in Revelation 19 with a robe dipped in blood and a sword coming out of his mouth and a rod of iron that he rules a nation with, he's gonna tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God with all of heaven's armies arrayed behind him, thundering down to wreck shop. That Jesus hung on the cross for you. That Jesus walked away from all of that, condescended to take on our form, walked with us for 33 years, nurtured disciples to birth a church that would become his true kingdom that he's coming back to rescue so that you and I can sit in here 2,000 years later. He did all that, meek and mild. And when he describes himself as gentle and lowly, yeah, you're not kidding, man. Because look who he is in earth and look who he could be this whole time. This description, this guy, this God, this warrior king, he hung on the cross for you. Not just some sage from the hills of Israel. God condescended for you. He chose to hang on the cross. So I love that moment with Pilate. He's like, are you really a king? And he's like, don't worry about it, Pilate. If I wanted to, this whole place would be smashed. At any moment in Jesus' life, he could have called down these armies and just crushed anybody who opposed him. Caiaphas, the high priest, is sitting there thinking he's got Jesus right where he wants him, and Jesus is just thinking, you have no idea who I am. He dies, he's separated from God. Satan thinks he's got Jesus right where he wants him. Jesus says, you have no idea who I am. Christ conquering, to me, renders Christ crucified as all the more miraculous. And when I think about my Jesus, this is who I think about. He comes to get us and to take us back up to heaven and to start off eternity. And when he comes to get us, he takes us back, we're told, to what's called the marriage supper of the Lamb. He's defeated the beast. He's defeated the Antichrist. He locks them up. It begins the thousand-year reign. We're going to talk about that next week. There's an encore of evil, and then Jesus once and for all throws them in the lake of fire, and that's it. But he comes down. He captures the beast. The armies conquer. He takes his children, he wipes evil off the face of the earth, he purifies his bride, and then we have the marriage supper of the Lamb. And I feel bad for how I'm covering the marriage supper of the Lamb in this series. Because I'm not gonna do it justice. I'm not gonna adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this series. Because I'm not going to do it justice. I'm not going to adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this way of false humility, like, oh yeah, I'm really not doing that good of a job with it. Like, no, I'm not. We just don't have enough time to sink in to everything that's here and even all the symbolism in the marriage supper of the Lamb. But a simple way of thinking about it is the marriage supper of the lamb is the greatest celebration feast of all time. It is the greatest celebration feast that ever was and ever will be. And this should hit home with us. Because what do we do? What do we do when we want to celebrate? I got a little bit of good news last week. Such good news that I went straight to the butcher's market. I bought myself a big old ribeye and I had that for dinner when the kids went to bed. I had myself my own personal private celebration feast. When your team wins, what do you do? You have a feast. When something good in life happens, when you graduate, you have a feast. When people come into town, what do you do? You have a feast. What are we going to do this week? We're going to get together with friends and family. We're going to reflect on the blessings that God has given us, and we're going to have a feast. This is what we do to celebrate. When your kid gets married, and you celebrate kind of transitioning into that season of life. This one has passed. We've formed a new family. What do you do? You get all your friends together and you have a feast. This is what God is doing. It's the greatest celebration feast of all time. In the days of old when kings would conquer and they would come back from conquering another king, what did they do? They feasted. And Jesus is bringing us back to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Why is it called the marriage supper of the Lamb? Because Jesus is getting married. Who's he marrying? Us. The church. His bride. We see throughout Scripture that the church is referred to as the bride of Christ. We see in Ephesians that God purifies his bride. He prepares us. We are made pure for Jesus so that we might marry him in eternity. I don't know how all that works out. It's a word play, but we are made pure by our savior. How are we made pure? By the crucified Christ hanging on the cross. He died for us. He covered over you in righteousness, made you good, purified you, prepared you for this very moment, for the marriage supper of the Lamb, where the church and Christ are united for all of eternity and perfect bliss. And so it's right and good to have a feast to celebrate the marriage. And this feast, man, it's going to be a good feast. The ones that you've lost, they're going to be there. I don't know for certain. I can't find it in Scripture. But I'm pretty sure they're going to serve catfish at this feast. Because my papa is going to be there. He loves catfish. And I know he's got some waiting on me. Your loved ones are going to be there too. Your dads are going to be there. And your moms. And the children that you never got to meet because you lost them too early, they're going to be there. All the saints who have come before us, all the saints that you've loved, they're going to be there. And listen to this. They're going to be the best versions of themselves. They're not going to be sick. They're not going to be unhealthy. They're not going to be unwell. They're going to be the perfect versions of themselves. They're not going to have all the brokenness that hurts us sometimes. Do you understand what I'm saying? Your dad, who you loved, but man, that guy had a temper. In heaven, he doesn't have a temper anymore. He's just love. He's just all the best parts of him. The people who we love, who made it sometimes hard to love them. Jesus has prepared those brides too. Their brokenness is wiped away. And they love you with purity. And you're made perfect too. All the crap in your life, all the stuff that you wish wasn't true of you, all the things that you hope nobody finds out, all the brokenness that spills out of you and hurts the people around you when you don't want to hurt them and you hate that side of yourself, that side's gone at the marriage supper of the Lamb. You're made perfect there. You're made your ideal self there. You're made your eternal self there. And you can love other people finally with the purity that God loves you with. We see the best versions of the folks we love. I am convinced of this. We finally walk in the best versions of ourself and don't have to wonder what it would be like to not have to walk through life as a selfish, egotistical jerk. That one's just for me. I don't know what your thing is. That feast is going to be remarkable. And everybody's going to be there. And Jesus is coming to take you to that. And I think that's pretty great. And as I thought about these things this week, the triumphant return of Christ and the marriage supper of the Lamb and all that it represents and what Jesus really won with that victory. What does it mean for us? Yes, evil is smited. Evil is gone and all the wrong things are made right and all the sad things are made untrue. All that is very true and God wins once and for all and that part of us that loves a hero gets to see the actual hero come storming out of the clouds. He wins those things for us. We see our God claim victory and that's great. But there's something else that occurred to me too. I was prepared. I knew this was going to happen. We're not even to the hard part yet. Jeez, old Pete. Something else occurred to me as I kind of asked the question, what has Jesus won? And what are we celebrating at the marriage supper? And I was reminded of this idea that I have long carried with me, but I've not heard too many other people talking about it. I've actually never heard a pastor talk about this. It doesn't make it a unique idea. It's just one that I've not heard other people mention. And maybe it's because pastors aren't supposed to say things like this and the other ones know better and yours doesn't. But I've long carried with me this idea that faith and hope are burdens. Faith and hope are hard. We celebrate faith and hope in our belief system. We're told that the greatest of all these things is faith, hope, and love. We celebrate faith and hope. We want those. We name our children faith and hope. They are good things. But I, in my life, in my most honest moments, experience them often as a burden, as something to be carried, as something to be chosen. Because faith is a belief in things that you can't see. Faith is what we choose when facts fall short of certainty. Do you understand? There's things that we can know about the universe and about our God and about scripture and about the claims and about life. There's things that can be scientifically proven and broken down and rendered as factual. And then there's what we choose to put our faith in. Then there's certainty. And when facts fall short of certainty, we fill that gap with faith. Whether you're a Christian or whether you're an atheist, there's no way to be totally certain of what you think's going on in the universe. So when we reach the end of facts and we have to arrive at certainty, we fill that gap with faith. So faith is a choice. We choose it. We exercise it. We learn it. We let God speak into it. We let him strengthen it over the course of our life. The longer you walk with God, hopefully the stronger your faith gets, but it gets stronger because it's been tried and it's been tested and it's been a burden that you've chosen to continue to carry. Hope is a burden. Hope is a belief that one day something can be true that I want to be true. Hope, to even have hope, is an admission that right now things are not the way that I want them to be. Right now things are less than ideal. Right now things are not what I want, but I hope, I believe that one day the things that I want can be brought about. Hope is an admission of a shortfall. People who are not yet parents and desperately want to be hope that one day this can be true of us. We, as believers, we read scripture, we hear the stories of Jesus coming down out of heaven, and we hope in that day. We place our faith in that day. We believe that there's going to be a marriage supper. We place our hope in that. We place our hope and our faith in the idea that our prayers are working, that they get to God, that they are powerful and effective and they're not just bouncing off the ceiling. But sometimes, life makes hope heavy. Sometimes life makes hope heavy. When you lose someone too early and your Bible teaches you that your God could have done something about it and you have to be confronted with the fact that he just simply didn't. In that season, you choose hope. And in that season, it's heavy. And sometimes, when life gets hard, and when faith and hope become burdens, and they become heavy, we see people put them down and walk away from them and say, I can't carry this faith anymore. I don't know how to believe in a God that would let that happen, so I'm gonna set down this faith. I don't know how I can still cling to hope when I've been disappointed in these ways, so I'm going to set down this hope. Sometimes faith and hope get heavy, and they get hard to carry. When you grow up in church, being taught a simple faith, and then you become an adult adult and there are things that happen in your world that just don't align with what you were taught when you were a kid and you have to learn how to find this new faith. You have to cling to it and you have to hope and you have to choose hope and you have to find ways to make what you were taught and what you're experiencing mesh and you have to find a whole new way to understand scripture and understand God and to understand how he speaks to you. In those moments, faith can get hard and hope can get heavy and we have to choose them. And I am convinced that the Christian life is simply a series of the decision to choose faith and to choose hope in Christ over and over and over again until we make it to the finish line. My prayer as I prayed before I preached this morning was that if there is anybody in here that's carrying heavy hope that it would get lightened just a little bit today. That we would have the strength and the faith to continue to carry it for a little bit longer. Just get down the road just a little bit further. Because sometimes faith and hope get heavy. And I hate that we don't talk about that as much because we should. And if that's true, if I'm right that they can be burdens, then one of the best things that Jesus wins when he comes sweeping out of the sky is on this day, he lays to rest faith and hope forever. And he says, here, you don't need these anymore. You don't need faith and hope anymore. Maybe that's why Paul writes in Romans 8, he says, for in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. When Jesus shows up, we don't need hope anymore. When he shows up, we don't need faith anymore. There's no more gap between facts and certainty. There's just Jesus. There's no more hoping for one day. There's just Jesus. One day has arrived. Do you understand that when Jesus sweeps down out of the sky, that he lays to rest for us for all eternity, faith and hope. And he says, you can set them down, weary traveler. You're here now. Let's feast. And I think that's a remarkable blessing. Because to be a Christian is to believe that one day these things will be true. To be a Christian is to believe that one day God will set all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. One of my favorite songs in the world is this song called Farther Along. Farther Along, I like the version from a guy named Josh Gerrels, and it opens up. And he says, I wonder why the good man dies and the bad man thrives and Jesus cries because he loves them both. And the chorus is, farther along, we'll know all about it. Farther along, we'll understand why. And it's just this acknowledgement, I think, that faith and hope are hard. Faith and hope are hard, but one day, I won't need those anymore. I can lay that and everything else down at the feet of my Savior. And on that day, when Jesus comes back, there are no more one days. On this day, Revelation 19, marriage supper of the Lamb, on that day, there are no more one days. It is one day for all eternity. There's no more wondering, there's no more hoping, there's no more struggling, there's no more pain. Because on that day, he puts an end to waiting on one day. And I kind of wonder now if that's why Paul didn't say what he said in Corinthians. When he gets to the end of talking about all the spiritual gifts and he says, but now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these, Paul says, is love. And I've always read and accepted that teaching, and it's made sense to me. Love binds. Love is the very nature of God. Love is what unites us together. It makes sense to me that love would be greater than faith and hope. But now I wonder, in light of what I've thought through this week, if maybe love isn't the greatest because when Jesus comes back and lays faith and hope to rest, that love is the only thing that exists for all of eternity. Maybe love is the greatest because it's the only thing left after Revelation 19. And we live in an eternity of perfect love that God designed us for, finally. As I was thinking through this sermon this week, I was pacing in the lobby. And as I was out there, just kind of walking back and forth, thinking through these things, asking myself the question, what has Christ won for us? I noticed on the information table, a bracelet, like a little ringlet. And I picked it up and I saw an inscription there. And I thought, oh, what is this? God, are you talking to me? Let? Speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm working on the sermon. There's a bracelet here. You've got to be working in this. So I reach over, and on the bracelet, it just says, it is well with my soul. Also, if that's your bracelet, it's right out there. It just said, it is well with my soul. And I thought, oh, I love that song. But that's not really helpful. Okay, God's not speaking. And I just kept pacing. And I got done and I kind of had a fully formed idea. And sometimes on Tuesdays when I get a fully formed idea, I get a little bit excited about the sermon and I'll go and I'll tell Kyle because Kyle's always up for a conversation. I said, Kyle, I got it. Listen, I told him about this idea of faith and hope being burdens and that Jesus is going to put those to rest for us. And Kyle started to get a little teary eyed. And he said, he said, that just reminds me of my favorite song, my favorite line from my favorite song. And he quoted me these lines from it as well. And I was like, oh my gosh, God is speaking. I'm just dumb. I always say God speaks in stereo. And Kyle quoted these lines. And he started crying. And I got misty, and I knew that this is what we were supposed to share, and I knew that we were supposed to end the service today with it as well. Because in these lines, we see the author of this song admitting what we've just talked about today. The faith and hope are burdens, and so it is well with my soul. We often sing this song in a response to grief as an admission that I am going to choose faith and hope even though it's heavy today. Now let's sing it looking forward to the day we can lay those things to rest and Jesus has won the final victory and forever we will say it is well with my soul. Stand and let's sing together.

The Pretty epic, huh? I mean, looky there. The sermon is half as good as the video. Y'all are going to leave here with your hair on fire. This is great. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. So thanks for being here. I thank you for watching online or catching up during the week if that's what you're doing. This is clearly the start of our series in the book of Revelation. I have been studying and prepping for this as far back as the summer because Joseph was a fun series. I loved doing Joseph. I love narrative series where we're just telling stories and seeing what we can learn from the story. The prep time on a Joseph sermon is about two and a half or three hours. The prep time on the Revelation sermon is 10 times that for each one. So you got to start those early. But because I've been doing so much studying, I'm very happy to tell you guys that I have all the answers for you. I'm going to tell you very clearly what happens in the book of Revelation. You can't ask me a question that I won't be certain about. And this is going to be a very productive time for the church. So I'm very much looking forward to it. Revelation, for some of us, has a lot of baggage. For some of us, it doesn't have very much at all. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church in the 80s and the 90s. And when you grew up in a Baptist church in the 80s and the 90s, Revelation was a big deal. I don't know if you guys realize that or what your church contexts are, but there was a season in church life when having strong opinions about the tribulation and the rapture was just a part of church. I actually talked to a church one time in a former life. I was a teacher at a private high school, and one of the churches was a small country Baptist church. And they said, hey, we're looking for a pastor if you know anybody. And I said, okay, well, you know, I'll keep my eyes out. And they said, but we're only going to hire people if they believe in a pre-trib rapture. That's a non-negotiable for us. And I started laughing. He's like, why are you laughing? I'm like, oh, you mean that? Like, that's really important to you. And they're like, yeah, absolutely. Well, are you not pre-trib rapture? Because if you're not, I don't want you teaching my daughter Bible. I'm like, rapture is not coming up. All right. We're not covering that in 10th grade Bible. Don't worry about it. I wonder how many of you though have had, like, when I say pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, 1260 days, the four beasts, the man, the eagle, the lion, the ox, the 144,000 Jewish males from the tribes. How many of you know what I'm talking about? You've heard those things before. Okay. And then I won't ask the rest of us, how many of you are like, I got no clue, man. Like, no idea on this. You don't have to raise your hand. But yeah, so like, how do we approach like that wide of a swath of information and knowledge about this book? Because there's some of us that have been a part of really in-depth Bible studies and there's some of us who we've avoided it all together. So in thinking about how to approach the book of Revelation for these next seven weeks, I really thought it was worth noting the tendencies that we kind of tend towards as we approach the book of Revelation. Because again, some of us are very experienced with it, and some of us have never opened it because it's scary or intimidating or whatever. So as we begin, I kind of wanted to begin the series with this thought as we think about how do we approach the book of Revelation. I would contend that most people either overcomplicate or oversimplify Revelation. Most people in their approach to it have a tendency to either overcomplicate it or vastly oversimplify the book. And what I mean is we can overcomplicate it so that we miss the forest for the trees. We can overcomplicate it so much and drill down on things so much and ask so many questions about it. When is the rapture actually going to happen? Because of this verse, I think it's going to happen in the middle of the tribulation. When is the tribulation? When's that going to happen? Are there Christians going to be on the planet during this part of the tribulation? When is the tribulation? When's that going to happen? Are there Christians going to be on the planet during this part of the tribulation? Are people, can you still get saved during the tribulation? What are the four creatures and the beasts and the angels and which angels have which wings and what do they represent and what's going on with the dragon trying to eat the baby and all these different things? what is the mark of the beast? Is it the vaccine? What is all that stuff, right? And so we can kind of drill down and the answer is no, stinking no, that's not the thing. The vaccine is not the mark of the beast. Anyways, we can get so concerned in drilling down on these details that we kind of miss the message of the book. And the thing about all those details that we'll talk about in a little bit and throughout the series is many of them are really not knowable. So to try to figure out what is the creature that comes out of the abyss that has a tail like a scorpion and stings you and it ails you for five months? Is that an attack helicopter or is that a scorpion? I don't know. And you don't either. And there's no way to know. So let's stop worrying about it, right? So we can overcomplicate it and get so mired in the details of the book that we miss the message. But we can also oversimplify it. I had somebody in my men's Tuesday morning Bible study who he's involved in a study in Revelation right now with another small group. He's cheating on me with another small group and it's hurtful. But he said, we were talking about Revelation and he waved his hand and he goes, Jesus wins. That's all you need to know. And listen, that's true. And this is a man who clearly he cares about Revelation and I don't mean to disparage him, but in that moment of just going, meh, Jesus wins, I would tend more towards that camp in my own interpretative approach of it, but that's not enough either. What happens when we overcomplicate or oversimplify the book of Revelation is that both approaches cheapen the message of the book. Both of those approaches really end up cheapening the message of the book in general. If we get so caught up with the details that it matters to us deeply who the 144,000 are and we search through the Bible to try to piece that one together, and we miss the overarching message of the book because of it, then we cheapen the message of the book. If we just dismiss it and say, listen, Jesus wins, that's all you need to know, then we cheapen the message of the book as well because there's a reason that Revelation exists. There's a reason that God called John up to heaven and gave him a vision of what's going to happen at the end of time. There's a reason he told him to write it down. There's a reason that people have died for the preservation of Scripture over the centuries. There's a reason that this book was canonized, was put in the Bible as part of every Bible that's ever been printed. There's a reason that God ends His revelation to us with this book. There's reasons for that, and so it's worth studying. And I would contend that the book of Revelation matters very much to God. And I would actually base it on the way that he starts the book. This is John writing it. Revelation chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. Listen to this. This verse, particularly the third verse, tells us that revelation is important to God. This book is important to God. And it says, blessed are those who read aloud, because this was a letter. It was written to the churches. And so there wasn't a bunch of copies. Gutenberg hadn't showed up yet. So there was just one letter and one person would read it aloud. So it's basically blessed are those who read it, blessed are those who study it, blessed are those who invest time in it. So God says that we will be blessed by doing this. And, you know, I was talking to Erin Winston, our great children's pastor, I think a year and a half or two years ago when we were talking about series ideas. And she just mentioned to me that she can't remember Grace having ever done a series in Revelation. And I thought, well, goodness, our church needs to know about this. Our church needs to know this book. We need to kind of demystify it and walk through it and see what we can learn from it. And we wanted to do it for a long time, but then the pandemic hit and this didn't feel like what I wanted to do strictly over video, right? I wanted this to be in person because some of the stuff that we have to talk about in the book is hard. That's not this week, but it's coming. And so I thought that it would be worth it to do this series together. And it'd be worth it to not overcomplicate things, to try to train ourselves to focus on the message of portions of it, rather than get mired in the details, but also get into it enough that we feel like we can understand it. So as we approach Revelation, we do need to do some background work to really understand why it was written. It was written by John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. He was in exile on the island of Patmos about 90 AD is what we think, is when we think it was written. So about 60 years after the death of Christ. He's the last living disciple. All the other disciples have died a martyr's death. He is the last stalwart of the disciples and the bastion of the early church. John really lived a remarkable life. And so God calls him up to heaven and shows him a vision and he writes it down and that becomes Revelation. And what we need to understand is that Revelation was written to bring hope to a suffering church. Revelation was written to bring hope to a suffering church. To be a Christian at this point in history is to take your life into your hands. To be a Christian is to put yourself and your family at risk. It's to go into the catacombs, into underground graveyards, to have your Easter worship service because you cannot be seen in public doing this because you will be killed. It's to know friends and loved ones who have been dipped in tar and used as live torches to light the path into Rome. It's to watch your friends and loved ones get taken and thrown into the gladiator arena with animals that rip them apart. It is a tough time to be a Christian. And so John wrote this letter to them from God to give them hope, to encourage them, to help them hang in there, to help them see a path to a better day. And so when reading Revelation, we can never separate our understanding of it from how the original audience would have understood it. We can never make it mean something that it wouldn't have meant to them. But that also means that it's right and good for us to approach it, mining it for hope. That's the best reason to approach Revelation. It's not necessarily to know what's going to happen at the end of times with great detail, but to cling to the hope that the book offers us throughout it. This is why I love Revelation. If you've heard me preach any messages for any time at all, you've heard me say things like there's coming a day when Jesus is gonna make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. You've heard me talk about Revelation 18 and 19 where he comes down with righteous and true tattooed on his thigh. He comes back not as the Lamb of God, but now as the Lion of Judah and he's coming to wreck shop. You've heard me talk about that because I take great solace in that in my personal faith. You've heard me talk about Revelation 21 when God will be with his people and we will be with our God and there'll be no more weeping and crying in pain anymore. You've heard me talk about that because it's in Revelation and it's hopeful and it's what we cling to. So when we read it, our top priority, our first priority ought to be to mine it for hope and to let it encourage us in our faith. That's far more important than some of the other details. And it's important enough to dig in and to see how it might offer us hope the same way it did the early church. As we seek to understand and interpret the book of Revelation, a couple rules of thumb for us as we walk through it together. The first is, it's not completely linear, but sometimes it is. It's not completely linear, but sometimes it's linear. And when I say linear, what I mean is just event after event from start to finish. The gospels are linear. The gospel of Mark starts at the beginning and moves through the story of Jesus to a crucifixion and then ascension. That's linear. It's just, it's all happening on the same timetable, right? Well, Revelation's not like that. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it moves through and it moves, this event happens, and then the very next thing he talks about is the event that follows the one that he just described. But sometimes he jumps. He says, I turn and I saw. And I'll show you in a second what I'm talking about. He says, then I turned and I saw, and it's something else is going on. And the thing that he's talking about over here happened before the thing he just got done talking about. Or it happens years after the thing he just got done talking about. And then in the next chapter over, he's going to talk about the stuff that happens in the middle. And then the next chapter over, he's going to talk about stuff that happened before that. So sometimes it's linear. Sometimes it's not. So you just have to know as you're reading it that he's not presenting us from chapter 1 to chapter 22 all the things in order. Another thing you should know is that it's not completely literal, but sometimes it is. It's not completely literal all the time. Sometimes it's figurative. Sometimes it is literal. Sometimes the words that you're reading are actually going to happen. They're descriptive of a thing that really will take place. Sometimes you're reading it and it's figurative language to describe to you in the best way that John can what it will be like. Or because God is intentionally using powerful imagery, it's a picture of other events that have already happened. So as we're reading it and as we're studying through it, and there's a reading plan that will be, it would be on the, is it on the table this morning, Kyle? Okay. It's there and it'll be online as well beginning tomorrow morning. I hope that you'll read through Revelation with us. I hope that you'll be talking about it in your small groups together. But as you read and study, we need to be asking ourselves as we look at the text, is this literal or figurative? Is this linear? Is this happening in order? Or have I jumped back or to a different place? We'll need to know this as we read. Now, some examples of where it's figurative and nonlinear or literal and linear are easy to find. So I'm going to read a passage from Revelation chapter 12. You don't have to turn there. You can just listen to my words as I read. This is a famous scene in the book of Revelation. Just listen. I don't know what diadems are. I think maybe crowns. Cool. Let's just go on to the next thing, right? What's going on there? Well, what's happening there is that John is neither being literal, nor is he being linear. Most scholars agree, and it's not certain, so I don't say it with certainty, but most scholars agree, believe it or not, that this is a picture of Christmas. What if I preached that this December 25th, right? What if I made that the Christmas message? Boy, that would be something. Most scholars believe it's a picture of Christmas. It's figurative. It's powerful imagery that God is using to drive home a point. And that in this depiction, the woman very likely represents Israel. The baby is Jesus. The red dragon is Satan. And Satan is trying to thwart Jesus, thwart the efforts of God. But God rescues Jesus back up to his throne, which means God's throne and Jesus' throne. And then Israel is nourished in the wilderness, which could be a reference to their exile in Egypt as slaves, or it could be a reference to the flight of Mary to the wilderness once Jesus is born and they have to go to Egypt for a couple years because Herod is trying to find and kill baby Jesus. The tail sweeping a third of the stars out of the heaven down onto earth, that's a reference to the fact that when Lucifer was kicked out of heaven and became Satan, that he took a third of the demons with him. So this isn't linear because it's Christmas. This happened 90 years before John even wrote it. And certainly not in order with the other things going on in the book. And it's not even linear within its own depiction because it's talking about fleeing to the wilderness and it's talking about the demons falling from heaven, which happened thousands of years before any of this stuff and the rest of the story was ever happening. And then the 1260 days at the end of it is a reference to half of the tribulation period that Revelation divides in half often in months or in days. So it's literally, as far as the time frame is concerned, it's covering thousands of years in a paragraph. It's got a ton going on there. And it didn't literally happen. It's figurative imagery. So that's neither literal nor linear. But sometimes Revelation is those things. Listen to Revelation 21. At the end of the book, John is given a vision. He's carried to another place where Jerusalem begins to descend. A new Jerusalem begins to descend out of the sky. God is setting it Its length the same as its width. And measured the city with his rod. 12,000 stadia. Its length and width and height are equal. He also measured its wall. 144 cubits by human measurement. Which is also an angel's measurement. Which is nice to know. If you're measuring in cubits. You're measuring as the angels do. So well done. The wall was built of jasper while the city was pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city are adorned with every kind of jewel. The first was jasper, then sapphire, a gate, emerald, onyx, chameleon, chrysolite, beryl, and he goes on and on. And then he says, and the 12 gates were 12 pearls, each of the end of the book. It happens at the end of the story. It happens at the end of time. We can read that, see where it's happening in the book, and know that that's how it's going to happen in time. And it's literal. That's not figurative speech about the specific jewels that are going to be the foundation of the wall or the way that the city is going to look or the size of the city. That's a literal interpretation. So again, as we read, we need to ask, is what's happening here, is it literal or is it figurative? Is it linear? Is it happening in the order in which it's presented? Or in its proper context, should it go in another place? When I was explaining this to Jen this week, she was asking how I was going to approach it, and I was kind of walking her through portions of the sermon. And Jen, she's my wife, for those of you who don't know her, not just a lady I talk to sermons about, but that would be cool. I have one of those. When I told her what I was going to do and how it sometimes is literal, sometimes linear, and sometimes it's not, she said, yeah, but, and she's asked the question that you guys all should have by now. She goes, yeah, but how do you know? How do you know when it's supposed to be one and not the other? Well, that's the tricky part. And the only possible answer to it is you have to work hard. How do I know when it's literal and when it's figured if you have to study? Listen, some books of the Bible are really easy to understand. Proverbs. You don't need to study Proverbs. Just read Proverbs. And it says that we should consider the ant and work even when we don't have to. There's no mystery going on there. That's pretty simple. When it says whatever you do, get wisdom, that's simple. Revelation, not simple. If you want to understand it, it takes hard work. It takes discussion. You have to read a lot of sources. You have to listen to a lot of people. There's no easy path to understanding Revelation. I can't stand up here in seven weeks and explain it to you in a way that will make sense and get everything right. I just can't do it. And people who claim that they can are dumb. They're just being intellectually dishonest. Which is why I think it's important for me to kind of share this idea with you, not just for this series, but as you encounter Revelation as you move throughout the rest of your life, which is simply when it comes to Revelation, be cynical of certainty. When it comes to the book of Revelation, when it comes to who you're listening to and what you're reading and how you're talking about it and how people are presenting ideas to you in whatever form you would consume them, we are wise when it comes to Revelation to be cynical of certainty. Now there are some things in the book of Revelation that we ought to be certain about. Jesus is there. He's in heaven. God is sitting on his throne. He's surrounded by angels. There's going to be a new heaven and a new earth. Satan's going to be dealt with. People are going to be judged. We're going to be called up there. Like there's things that we can be certain about, but there's other things you simply can't be certain about. And for someone to present you information in a way where they are certain, where they don't even acknowledge that there's other theologians, there's myriad other views of this particular passage or this particular idea, and they don't even acknowledge that those exist, well now, I don't know if I believe you about anything. I was listening to a pastor that I really like a lot. He's been one of my go-to guys for years. And his church did a series in Revelation last year. And I thought, oh, well, shoot, I'm just going to listen to his and then steal it. That'll really cut down on the prep time here. This is going to be great. But as I listened, he got to a portion, I think it's in chapter four, where there's these four creatures, these four beasts that are really mysterious. And one is like a lion, one is like an ox, one is like an eagle, and one is like a man. And there's this incredible description of them. And the same four creatures are described in Ezekiel, in an Old Testament book of prophecy, with stunning accuracy and similarity to the four creatures in Revelation. There's very little doubt that both authors, that both John and Ezekiel saw the same four creatures. Now, what are they? And what do they represent? I don't know. But the pastor that I really liked when I was listening to him, he said, well, the ox represents this, the lion this, the eagle this, the man this. Does it not? And then he moved on. And he said it as if he was certain of it. And he said it as if there was no other possible explanation than the one that he just shared. When the reality is we only see them in Ezekiel. We only see them in Revelation. Very little explanation is offered about them in either place. So to presume that we know who they are, what they are, what they represent, and why they exist is not fair. It's not intellectually honest. The most intellectually honest thing to say about them is, they're pretty cool. That's it. They matter a lot to God. They're going to be neat when we see them. They're probably going to be scary. It's going to be awesome. What do they represent? I don't know and neither do you. And don't act like you do. We can make educated guesses. There's plenty of room for that. But we ought to be cynical of certainty as we move through this. And I'm saying that, hopefully, not for your benefit in this series, because hopefully I don't get up here and start teaching you things with certainty that I don't understand. Hopefully I'll teach them honestly and present the sides that exist and are merited. But I say that to you as you move throughout your lives and as you encounter other Revelation studies. Be cynical of certainty. So that's how we want to approach the book. I told you that we would mine Revelation for hope. And there's an incredible space to do that in the first chapter of Revelation. And that's where I want us to focus as we finish up the sermon today. I will also say this for those who know your Bibles well. Chapters 2 and 3 in Revelation are the seven letters to the seven churches. They are wonderful letters. They're hugely important. They're incredibly informative for us, not just of the ancient church, but what our modern churches ought to look like. They're a hugely impactful portion of the book of Revelation. They are so important and so impactful that we're going to skip them. Because I'm not going to reduce them to a week and preach them to you like that. So we're going to skip them. I'm going to set them aside. At some point in the future, we're going to come back and we're going to do a seven-part series as we move through those letters together. But if you know your Bible well, and next week we just open up and we get to chapter four, and you're thinking, why didn't we do the seven letters to the seven churches? That's why, because they're too important to reduce to a week. And Revelation would get too boring to expand to 14 weeks. All right, so we're going to do those later. But as we look at chapter one and we begin to move through the story, I wanted to bring us to what I believe is maybe one of the most poignant moments in all of Scripture. And we find it towards the end of the first chapter. We're going to start reading in verse 12. This is John writing. He says, And these are the words of Jesus now, which will always show up in red during the series. and I have the keys of death and Hades. I get chills every time I read this. John is swept up into heaven. He's told, you're gonna see some stuff, write it down. And he looks and there's someone who is white like snow, who is shining in brilliance, who has a voice like raging waters. And he sees him and he's so terrified that he falls on his feet. He falls at his feet. He collapses in fear. And we learn from those words in red that it's Jesus. And Jesus places his hand on John's shoulder, presumably. And he says, Behold, I am the first and the last. I have died and yet I live. Other translations say the Alpha and the Omega. And I have the keys to death and Hades. I've conquered them. Which is a remarkable moment. But it's more remarkable when we reflect on who John was and what John did. Do you understand that John calls himself in his own gospel the disciple whom Jesus loved? You should probably be pretty certain of your standing before Christ if you want to go around touting that nickname. This John is the John that was the disciple whom Jesus loved that may have been, some scholars think, as young as 10 years old when he was following Jesus. He was so close with Jesus. They were such intimate friends that at the Last Supper, Jesus was close enough to John that he was able to whisper in John's ear that Judas was going to betray him before anybody else did. He was able to communicate with John that closely at the Last Supper because John was, of course, next to Jesus because he was the disciple whom Jesus loved. When Jesus was hanging on the cross dying, when he's watching his savior and friend die, Jesus looks at John and Jesus only said a few things on the cross because you had to push up on the nails to do it. And he looks at John and he says, will you care for my mother? John, this is your mother, Mary, now. That's quite the commission. Can you imagine Jesus himself putting the care of his aging mother in your hands? And if you yourself knew that the end was near and that someone needed to care for your aging mother, who would you choose? Your most intimate and trusted of friends. And John went on from that moment and he cared for Mary. He went on from that moment and he led the church and the council. He saw them through this conversion of Gentiles, this difficult period in the book of Acts. He preached the gospel. He spread the word about his friend. And this whole time, he was promised by Jesus. You see it in the gospels when he tells the disciples, where I'm about to go, you can't go. And they said, we want to come with you. He goes, you don't understand. Jesus is telling them, I'm going to die and I'm going to ascend into heaven and you can't come with me. but where I'm going to go, I'm going to prepare a place for you and it's going to be great and you'll be with me there one day. Do you understand that John, he clung to that hope. He trusted his friend Jesus. He trusted his Savior and he spent the rest of his life caring for the mother of Christ. He spent the rest of his life proclaiming the message of Christ. He spent the rest of his life building the kingdom of Christ. But John eventually ended up as the head of the church in Ephesus, and there he discipled a man named Polycarp and Erasmus, who were the early church fathers that we begin now the church history that leads down to us. John is the linchpin in this. He watched all 11 of his friends, all 11 of the disciples die a martyr's death. And now he's an old man on the island of Patmos writing the last thing that he's going to write. And he's missed his friend Jesus. And he's looked forward to seeing his Savior again. And he spent every day living for his Savior. Every day building the kingdom for his Savior. Every day pointing people towards his Savior. And when he gets to heaven, he sees a figure that he doesn't recognize and he falls to his knees. And out of that figure comes the voice of his Savior, Jesus. Out of that figure comes the assurance that John has waited for and longed for his entire life. Out of that figure rushes the peace that only Jesus brings. He gets his reunion moment. He gets his welcome home. And it tells us that meeting Jesus is the best promise in the whole book. Meeting Jesus face to face, hearing his voice, seeing his eyes, feeling his embrace, that is the best promise in the whole book, man. There's other stuff that happens. We get to be with God. We get to spend eternity. There's going to be loved ones there. It's going to be perfect. There's no more weeping or crying or pain anymore. We're going to experience all of that. It's going to be an incredibly peaceful, joyful existence. But none of it, none of it is better than seeing Jesus in person. None of it is better than your welcome home moment. When he hugs you and he says, I've prepared a place for you. And he invites you to the marriage supper of the Lamb. I was thinking about it this week. What it would be like to finally meet my Savior. And how I would probably feel compelled to say I was sorry. And how he would probably just say, don't worry about it. I've covered over all those sorries. And how we would be compelled to say, I'm sorry, Jesus, I should have done more. And he would say, that's okay. I did enough. I did it for you. And I've thought about that moment when the burdens of hope and faith don't have to be carried anymore. When we can cast those things aside because our Savior is looking us in the eye. After all the stresses and all the struggles and all the triumph and all the worry and all the anxiety and anything else that we might experience, the loss and the pain and the sufferings and the joy, whatever it is, after all of it, we as weary travelers will end our spiritual pilgrimage in heaven at the face of Christ and he will say, welcome home. And maybe he'll even say, well done, good and faithful servant. But that's the best promise of the book. That if we believe in Jesus too, that one day we will see our Savior face to face and we can rest. And if you love Jesus, and that's not the part of heaven you're most excited about, I don't know what to do for you. I hope this series can change that. But more than anything else, as we move through this book, that's what we cling to. That Jesus is there waiting for us. And we'll get that reunion moment too. Where we get to meet our Savior face to face. Now, before I close, I never do this because if I tell you guys that I won't be here for a particular weekend, then what I've found is you don't come, which is mean. That's just mean to whoever is preaching that's not me. But I'm going to tell you this time that I'm not going to be here next weekend. I've got a bunch of my buddies I've talked about before. A bunch of us turned 40 this week, so there's going to be seven of us in a cabin in North Georgia making questionable decisions. We planned this back in the spring before I knew that this would be week two of Revelation, which is a week I'd rather not miss. So when I was thinking about who should I get to preach it, Kyle's great, Doug Bergeson's great, we've got plenty of folks here who would do a fantastic job with it. But there's one person who I know that knows more about the book of Revelation than anybody else I know. I'm not saying he knows the most about the book of Revelation, just more than anybody else that I know, and that's my dad. So dad's going to come next week and he's going to preach Revelation 4 and 5. And you'll get to see half of the equation of where all of this came from. To give you a literal picture of how deeply he loves this book, I wanted to take you to Israel with us. Dad and I had the opportunity to go to Israel, maybe about 2013. And we did the tour. We're up in Galilee. We were there for a whole week or eight days or something like that. And we get down to Jerusalem and we're in the Garden of Gethsemane. And from the Garden of Gethsemane, which is where Jesus prayed the night that he was arrested and then crucified, you can actually see the walls of Jerusalem, and you can see the Temple Mount. And so this is what you see from the Garden of Gethsemane. And you can see in kind of the bottom right-hand corner of the portion of the wall is a gate. That's the eastern gate. And when we were just walking along and we saw that, my dad said, that's the eastern gate. And I said, oh, cool. And then I looked at him and he was crying. And I said, dad, why are you crying, man? It's a gate. And he says, that's the gate that Jesus is going to walk through when he returns. And it moved him. And he doesn't get moved to tears very often. But he was moved by that. Because one day Jesus is going to come back and he's going to walk through that gate. And he knows it. And he believes it. And he knows his Bible. And he knows it so well and he believes it so much that it moved him to tears. So I couldn't think of anyone better to come and teach us a portion of the book of Revelation next week. So I hope you'll come. I hope you'll be kind to him. I hope he tells you some stories about me that make you laugh and like me a little bit less. And just you're thinking, oh, he must be an experienced teacher and have done this before for Nate to be asking him to do this here. No, he's an accountant. He's taught Sunday school a bunch of times, and I think it's going to be really, really great. So I hope that you'll give him a warm welcome when he's here next week and know that I'll be beaming from ear to ear watching him online with my buddies. So with that, let's pray, and then I've got an announcement for you guys, and we'll worship some more. Father, thank you so much for who you are and for how you love us. God, thank you for this book of Revelation. I pray that we would see clear and simple messages coming out of it. God, I pray that you would give us wisdom as we move through it. Give me wisdom as I teach it. Wisdom that I have no business having. Maybe just a special blessing for these next few weeks. God, I pray that we would always find the hope in it. That we would always see the justice in it, that we would always see the good news that we can cling to, God. Be with us as we go through the series. I pray that it will enliven our hearts to you. I pray that it will increase our passion and desire for you. And I pray that it will give hope to folks who might need it really badly right now. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life, all over my life. I see promises in fulfillment. All over my life. All over my life. Help me remember when I'm weak. Fear may come, but fear will lead. You lead my heart to victory. You are my strength, and you always will be. I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. All over my life. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life, all over my life. See the cross, the empty grave, the evidence of your goodness. Jesus. I see your promises in fulfillment all over my life, all over my life, yeah. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life. Yeah, you're all around us. So why should I fear? The evidence is here. Why should I fear? Oh, the evidence is here. I searched the world, but it couldn't fill me. Melted deep rays, treasures of fame were never enough. Then you came along and put me back together. And every desire is now satisfied here in your love. Oh, there's nothing better than you. There's nothing better than you. Oh, there's nothing, nothing is better than you. Come on, tell them. To show you my weakness My failures and flaws Lord, you've seen them all And you still call me friend Cause the God of the mountains Is the God of the valleys There's not a place Your mercy and grace won't find me again. Oh Come on. Tell them now. Come on, choir. Oh, there's nothing better than you. Nothing. You turn bones into armies. You turn seas into highways. You're the only one who can. Somebody give a praise in this house. I don't think we're finished yet. Come on. Come on, one more can. You're the only one who can. You're the only one who can. Jesus, you're the only one. Come on, give Him one more shout of praise. When all I see is the battle, you see my victory. When all I see is the mountain, you see a mountain moon. And as I walk through the shadow, your love surrounds me. There's nothing to fear now, for I am safe with you. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees, with my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs for you. Thank you, God. God, you see the end to tell. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees. With my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs to you. And every fear I lay at your feet. I'll sing through the night. Oh God, the power of our God. You shine in the shadow. You win every battle. Nothing can stand against the power of our God. In all mighty fortunes, you go before us. Nothing can stand against the power of our God We wanted to let you know that our mission here at Grace is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people. One of the best ways to communicate with us here at Grace is through our connection cards. If you would like to speak to a pastor at Grace, if you have any prayer requests for our prayer team and our elders, or if you're not receiving our Grace Vine weekly emails, this would be a great way to fill it out and let us know. If you're watching with us online, you can click the link below and submit the connection card there. Or if you're here with us at Grace, the connection card is in the seat back pocket in front of you. Just be sure to drop it on your way out in the box next to the doors. Thanks so much for joining us this morning and we hope that this service is a blessing to you. Well, good morning, everyone. It's great to have you here at Grace Raleigh. I'd like to ask you to stand. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace, and it's great having people here in the room. It's great having people at home joining in with us. I thought that this morning we could start off with the scripture of John 3.16, that God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Come all you sinners Come find his mercy Come to the table He will satisfy Taste of his goodness Find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us. Whoever believes in Him will live forever. bring all your failures bring your addictions come lay them down at the foot of the cross Jesus is waiting there with hope in our hearts For God so loved the world praise god praise god from whom all blessings Praise Him, praise Him For the wonders of His love For God so loved the world that He gave us His one and only Son to save The power of hell forever defeated Now it is well, I'm walking in freedom Oh God so loved, God so loved the world Bring all your failures, bring your addictions. Come lay them down at the foot of the cross. Jesus is waiting. God so loved the world. Amen. God sent his son. They called him Jesus. He came to love, heal, and forgive. He lived and died. To buy my pardon. An empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow. he lives all fear is gone because i know he holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives And then one day I'll cross that river I'll fight my spine No war with me And then as death Gives way to victory I'll see the lights of glory and I'll know He lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow Because He lives All fear is gone Because I know He holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives. And life is worth the living just because He lives. Amen. Amen. All right, y'all can have a seat for a moment. Good morning, Grace Raleigh. It is fabulous to see your smiling faces in here. And welcome to those of you that have joined us online. It is a beautiful and sunny Sunday morning, Welcome to the world for this beautiful sunny weather because in two weeks, the mission committee will be here to gather all of the goodies that you choose to bring. So if you go to Grace Raleigh's events page, you will find a list of things that the mission committee is looking for for the Interfaith Food Shuttle. You will buy those. And then on either that Friday or either that, I'm sorry, that Saturday or that Sunday, you can drive through. The hours are listed on the screen. You can drive through. They will come out to your car. They will pick it up. They will bring it inside, and they will take care of it. So all you have to do is go to the grocery. And I guess these days you could even have it delivered to your house. So that is fabulous. And speaking of driving by and dropping off, if you are the parent of a 6th grader through 12th grader, today is the day you get to drive by and push them out of the car. Woo-hoo! We are so excited to announce that Grace Students is back up and running live and in person. Kyle will be here tonight in all of his fun. And we have the cool thing happening too that he's live streaming the service. So if for some reason your 6th through 12th grader can't be in the building tonight, no problem. Email Kyle, kyle at graceralee.org. And he has all the information and the links that you need to be able to be attached to the live stream and join in that way. They're now going to start into a routine of being in person one week, meeting online together the next week in person, and you get the idea. But email Kyle for any information that you guys might need. So thank you again for coming, for being a part of Grace Raleigh thisbbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody here. This is as full as the church has been since last February. That's crazy. Man, you guys, apparently, we've been going through Ecclesiastes. Y'all love depression and hopelessness. So thanks for showing up to that. You're like, I got to get out of the house now. Maybe that's what I needed to do the whole time, which is make you really, really sad. So you had to come see people. This is great. If you're still joining us at home, we're so grateful for that. This is the third part in our series called Vapor, where we're moving through the book of Ecclesiastes. We've said the whole time that we've saved the dreariest book of the Bible for the dreariest month of the year. And what's really fun is that this is the joyful sermon. This is the one, this is the good news. This is the one where we celebrate. We only did two songs up front because we want to end praising God together, and he gave us sunshine to do this. So it seems that the weather is matching the rhythm of the series, and I think that that's fantastic. In the first week, we started out and we talked about this idea of a hevel or vapor or smoke, and we concluded that Solomon would argue that a vast majority of Americans are wasting their life, right? Which means a vast majority of us are probably investing our life pursuing things that ultimately we can't grab onto or vapor or smoke. They're here one day and they're gone the next. And so that really left us with this question at the end of that week, is there a worthwhile investment of our lives? And if you have notes, you see that at the top of your notes. I think that's been a question that's been lingering in the series. Is there really a worthwhile investment of my life or is it all just a waste of time? Is everyone here just, we're all just chasing vapor? And I think that there's a good answer to that question, but last week we answered it a little bit, but we stumbled into another harsh reality. The harsh reality that even if we pursue wisdom with our life, even if we're obedient, the godliest of the godly, that does not insulate us from pain. Our godliness doesn't protect us from grief, right? And so what we learned by looking at that beautiful passage in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy. There's a time for grieving and there's a time for healing and there's a time to be hurt. There's a time to live and there's a time to die. Like we saw that passage. And what we learned is that pain is not punitive. God's not tightening the screws on us to punish us. Pain is the result of a fallen world, right? And that the harsh reality that Solomon gives us in Ecclesiastes is that no matter what we do, we're going to hurt. No matter how godly we are, there will be seasons of mourning in our life. And so that leaves us, I think, with another really difficult question. Can I ever hope for true happiness? Can I ever, on this side of eternity, grasp onto something that isn't Hevel or vapor or smoke? Can I grasp onto a joy that is immutable and unchangeable, that is resistant to circumstances in life, that even as the storms come, I can still find myself in seasons of joyfulness and contentment? Is it even possible to do those things? And I think those are the two big questions that we bring into this week. Is it possible to pursue anything that really matters? And is it possible to grab onto anything that looks like actual true contentment and joy? And the answer to those questions, I think, is yes. And Solomon answers those questions multiple times in Ecclesiastes. I think in four separate passages, he addresses those with the exact same answer. Four different times, he gives this answer, and I love this answer. I think there's so much bound up in his choice to answer the questions in this way. But like I said, he says it in four separate times. I'm going to read you two of them so that you can get a sense. They're in your notes. If you have them, they'll be on the screen if you're following along at home. But here's what he writes in Ecclesiastes, Solomon repeats this idea. That at the end of the day, what's left for us to do is enjoy our toil, enjoy our food and drink, and honor our God. The end of the book, he ends. The end of the matter is this, all has been heard, fear God and keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. We talked about that last week. And it's important that as we look through what I think is kind of this formula for contentment, that we understand that when he's talking about eating and drinking, when we see eating and drinking in the Bible, that is almost always a reference to a communal activity. Eating and drinking is inherently communal. The Bible rarely talks about eating for sustenance, right? It rarely talks about food as this way to be healthy. It always talks about food and bread and gathering around a table as a form of community. And so when he says that there's nothing for man to do except to find joy in what he does and to eat and to drink. What he means is when we look around the table, when we have our meals, if we love the people who are around us, that's good. That's a gift from God. We go out to eat, we're eating with our friends, and we look around and we have genuine affection, we enjoy these people. That's a gift from God. When you look around your table and you have family there and you love that family. Now listen, we're all parts of families. We know that love isn't just sing song and fairy tales all the time. Sometimes it's hard, but at the end of the day, if you know that I love you and you love me, then that's a gift from God. And so when he's talking about food and drink, he's really referencing community. And then when he talks about toil, enjoying your toil, I have a men's group that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6.30. Anybody can join us if you want to. Just email me. Well, the more the merrier there. And we were talking about this word toil. And to a room full of men, it means career, right? It means work. It means what's your job? But Solomon uses that word a lot more broadly than that in Ecclesiastes. And the word toil really doesn't refer to your job or your career as much as it refers to the activities that you have set aside for that day, the productivity of that day, whatever it is you're going to do. Because we have some men in the group who are retired. If it's only about work, career, then they have no shot at happiness, right? They better get back to it. But really, it's broader than that. It really means, Toyo, what do you have set for yourself today? What productivity are you going to engage in today? And then in this verse, he says that we should do good. And he defines doing good as honoring God with our life, fearing God and keeping his commandments. And it's with these understandings that I kind of arrive at this conclusion of kind of Solomon's equation for contented joy and apex happiness. And I really do think it's this. People you love plus tasks you enjoy plus honoring God equals apex happiness. Listen to me. If when you eat, if as you move through your day, you look around and the people in your life bring you joy, and when you wake up, you're looking forward to the things that you're going to do in that day. Maybe not everything, but the point of the day brings you joy. And you're honoring God with your life. If those things are true of you, then I want you to know this morning, you are apex happy. It doesn't get better than that. Sometimes our problem is just that we can't see it. But I'm telling you, man, if you wake up every day and you get to have breakfast with your family or you go out to lunch with some people at work that you enjoy or you look forward to seeing some friends at small group or something like that, if you look around at your community and you're surrounded by people you love and you look at your days and God has given you something to put your hand to that you enjoy, that gives you a sense of purpose, that helps you become who he's created you to be and use your gifts and abilities to point people to Jesus as you move throughout your days, if that's what you get to do and you're honoring God as you do those things, then listen to me, you are experiencing apex happiness in your life. And I think that we get it so messed up sometimes. We do all the things that Solomon talked about in the first two chapters, and we chase all the things. We run out there and we chase all the success and all the relationships and all the money and all the fulfillment and all the pleasure and all the stuff that's out there. When really what's true is God has already given us everything we need for joy. God has already provided in our lives everything we need for joy. And listen, if you don't have those things, if you look around, you're like, I don't like any of the people in my life right now. If you don't have a fulfillment in your job, if you're not honoring God with your life, then guess what? Those things are attainable. Those things aren't out there and forever away. Those things are attainable. They're right around you. God gives us everything we need for joy within our reach. That's why I brought this chair today. This chair here is my chair from my house. This is my chair in my living room. This chair sits in the corner of our living room, and opposite me is we have a little sectional couch. There's other people who sit in this chair sometimes, but for the most part, it's me. When I sit in this chair, I get to watch dance recitals. I get to watch Lily come in with her friends, and they sing Elsa to me. And I pretend to care about Elsa. I get to watch dumb little magic tricks. We went to some restaurant and they gave her some pot with a magnet on the bottom and there's a plant that comes out of the wand and she comes in and she does the abracadabra, the whatever, and then she pulls it out and for the 37th time, I'm amazed by this magic trick, right? I sit in this chair and Jen sits on the couch and we talk about our days. We talk about what's hard and we talk about what's fun. From this chair, when someone rings the doorbell, if I angle my head just right, I can see down the hallway to the front door and I can see the little face that's there to come play with Lily. If they're all over, I can look this way out the window and I can look at them all, all the neighborhood kids jumping on the trampoline that we got to get for her. In the mornings when I'm doing life right and I'm downstairs reading like I'm supposed to, at about 6.45, 7 o'clock, I can look up the stairs and see Lily up there and motion her down to come sit in my lap and tell me what she's going to do that day. When we have friends over, which I love to do, eventually we end up in our living room and we sit around and we talk and we giggle and we laugh. In the pandemic, I worked from this chair. I set up a little table right here and I do my Zoom calls and I argue with the elders and that's pure joy except for Chris Lata. I love working from that table. I can see all the things that bring me the most joy from this chair. And if I go out there chasing joy, if I go out there trying to track everything down, what am I going to do? Buy a new house for this chair These are from old David. If this church grows to 2,000 people and I get to feel what that feels like, do my conversations with my family and friends get any better from sitting in this chair? No, man. This is it. And sometimes it's not the chair, right? Sometimes it's the kitchen. Sometimes it's when I get to cook dinner and Jen sits on the stool and we talk about our days. Sometimes it's the mornings when Ruby and Lily are on the bed and I'm in the chair in the corner of that room and we're all talking, just enjoying our times. But here's what I know. I can go out there chasing whatever I want to chase. But my times of most profound joy come when I'm right there. They come when I'm around the people that I love the most. They come when I'm soaking in the blessings that God has given me. And this is what we need to pay attention to. Solomon tells us these are God's gifts to us. If people in your life that you love, who love you, they're God's gift to you. Drink them in. Hug them more. Tell them more that you care about them. Tell them more that you're grateful for them. Tell them more that they are a gift from God in your life. You have a thing to do every day that you like to put your hand to, whether it's raising kids or volunteering somewhere or spending time in your neighborhood or going to work or looking forward to seeing your friends or whatever it is. You have things that God has given you that make you productive, that let you feel like you are living out His intended will for you? That's His gift for you. That work, that toil, that's His gift. It's designed for you. And then if we honor God, His invitation to honor Him is His gift to us because He knows that when we live a life honoring Him, we live a life of fewer regrets. We live a life of deeper gratitude. We live a life with a deeper desire for Jesus if we'll just revel in his gifts. This helps me make sense of the Honduran children I saw at one time. For years of my life, I would go down to Honduras with some regularity to take teams down to visit a pastor named Israel Gonzalez. Israel is one of my heroes. The things that he's done for the kingdom are unbelievable. And he is based in a city in central Honduras called, called, uh, Swatopeke. He and his wife have set up a free clinic there. He has a church there. And then from that church, what they do is they organize these goodwill parties and they bring teams down and you get together hot dogs and little tchotchke gifts and you go up into the hillsides. There's mountains surrounding Ciguatapeque and you go up into the mountainside and you go to these villages and he throws these goodwill parties and he hopes that by doing this, these villages that are deeply Catholic, but Catholic in such a way that shuts them off to faith rather than turns them on to faith. And so they're lost communities. And he goes and he throws these parties, and by throwing these goodwill parties, they invite him into the community to plant a church. He's planted 14 churches that way, last I checked. And I would go on these parties. And you go up into these mountains surrounding Suwatopec into a village. And that's not derogatory. It's literally a village. Homes are built of mud and wood, makeshift roofs, one or two rooms, literally dirt poor. I've had the opportunity in my life to be in a fair amount of other countries and to see poverty on multiple continents. Honduras is just about the worst. But yet when we would go there, we would get out and there would always be these children there. And these children would have the biggest, goofiest grins on their face ever. They were so joyful, and they would laugh, and they would play, and they were happy to see you, and it never got wiped off of their face. And I always wondered, kid, how can you be so happy? Don't you know you don't have a Barbie house? Don't you know you don't have a PlayStation? Don't you know your soccer ball stinks? Those kids had it figured out, man. They had people around them who loved them. They had things to do each day that they looked forward to. And they hadn't lived enough life to carry the weight of what it is to not honor God with our choices. They were walking in apex happiness. And I carry all my American wealth down there and privilege, and I look at them and I'm jealous. Because they figured out something that we haven't. And I just think that there is this profound truth that everything that we need is right there within our grasp. We don't have to run around out there chasing vapor and Hevel. God has given us these gifts already. And in that truth, in that truth that everything we need for joy is within our grasp? We answer those two questions we started with. Is there a pursuit that's actually worth investing my life in? Yes. The people you love, the tasks that give you purpose, and honoring God. You want to live a life that matters? You want to get to the end of it and wonder if it's all vapor? Or not have to wonder that? Then invest your life in the people that you love and the tasks that God has ordained for you. Ephesians 2 says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, that we should do good works, that we should walk in them. Walk in those good works that God intended you for and honor God with the choices that you make. Those are worthwhile pursuits. You will get to the end of your life if you pursue those things and know that it was a life well lived. And he actually doubles down on this idea of pursuing relationships with other people. I don't have a lot of time to spend here on it, but again, this is a passage that I can't just skip over as we go through the book of Ecclesiastes. He doubles down on this idea of having more folks in our life when he writes this has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Solomon doesn't take a lot of time to tell you to invest in a lot of things in Ecclesiastes. If you've been reading along with us, he doesn't tell you to do a lot of stuff there. He just kind of tells you, hey, this stuff's a waste of time. You should honor God. And then he tells you how we got to that conclusion. But here he stops and makes sure you understand the value of having people in your life who love you, who you love in return. And he sets up life as this struggle, this fight, because it is a struggle and a fight to choose to honor God with our lives. It is a struggle and a fight to keep our marriages healthy. It is a struggle and a fight to direct our kids in the right way, to love our families well, to share our faith, to be evangelists in our community, and to make disciples of the people who are around us. That's hard. And Solomon says, if you try to do this alone, woe to you when you fall and you have no one to pick you up. Woe to you when addiction creeps in and there's no one you can tell. Woe to you when doubts creep into your faith and there's no one you can talk to. How hard it must be for you when your marriage gets rocky and there's no one to fight for it. If there's two, he says, you've got a fighting chance. If there's three, that's not quickly broken. We need people in our lives to fight for us. We need to fight for the people in our lives. It seems to be a big value to us. That will help us ensure that we always have people to eat and drink with that we love and enjoy. So I thought it was worth pointing out Solomon's emphasis on this. The other question that remained from the previous weeks is, can I ever hope for true happiness? Yes. Yes, because here's the thing. If the bad things in Ecclesiastes 3 are true, then so are the good ones. Last week, I read the passage and I said, listen, pain is coming for all of us. It's going to hurt. We're going to mourn. We're going to grieve. No one gets to dodge that based on our godliness. It's going to happen to all of us. We will walk through hard times, but here's the reality. If that's true, then the flip side is true. If the bad things are true, then God says we will walk through seasons where we experience the good things. Look at the good things. There is a time to be born, to plant, to heal, to build up, to laugh, to dance, to gather things together, to embrace, to keep, to sow, to speak. A time for love and a time for peace. If we're going to have to walk through hard times, there's going to be good ones too. And I just think that the blessing from Ecclesiastes is this. It hits us with some hard realities. It's stark. It's unflinching. Hey, most of us are wasting our lives. And no matter what you do to invest it well, you're going to hurt. Those are hard truths. But I've said the whole time that if we can accept them on the other side is this joy that is waiting for us. And this is the joy. The joy is, yes, there's big things going on that we can't control. But in the midst of all that stuff that we can't control, God gives us these gifts, these moments of joy, these pockets to lean into where we celebrate him, where we're grateful for him, and we acknowledge those things as gifts. And I just think that if we accept the difficult realities from this book, then we can start to look for these little pockets of joy in our life, and they will bring us such more fulfillment than if we just move through them waiting to get to the next thing. At our house, we do a thing called Breakfast Sammy Saturday, all right? I like a good breakfast sandwich. I know it's hard to tell by looking at me, but I like a good, I put butter down, I toast the bread, I do the eggs, I do some bacon, do some cheese on there, and then I put it all together on the blackstone, cut it in half, and the good egg bleeds out onto it. It's all the goodness, and then you dip your sandwich in there. It's the best. I love breakfast Sammy Saturdays. You guys are not enthusiastic enough about this. You need breakfast Sammy Saturdays in your life. Well, I'll just let you guys sign up. Come over to the house. I'll make them for you. We love it. But it's just kind of a thing that I do. I like it. I make one for Jen and Lily, and they kind of eat half of theirs. I'm more excited about it than anybody else. But then one day, Lily brought this home from preschool, and it made me cry right on the spot. That's breakfast Sammy Saturday. She drew my griddle. She put food on it. Apparently, I make pizza there. And she brought it home to me. Now, the thing about this is, it was an assignment at preschool. She was told, just make whatever you want. It's an art project. And she made breakfast Sammy Saturday. And she brought it home to me. And she said, look, Daddy. And she told me what it was. I started crying right there on the spot. I got these big old alligator tears in my eyes looking at Jen. What a cool thing. And sure, life's going to be hard. She's going to be a teenager. She's five now, so she's kind of maxed out on cuteness, and now it's just hyper sometimes. But even though I know that there's hard times ahead, even though I know she won't always appreciate things like Breakfast Sammy Saturday, I know she does now. And I know that that's a gift from my God. And I know that what Ecclesiastes says is the best thing I can possibly do is to drink deeply of that. The best thing we can possibly do is find joy in these moments that God allows. We don't know how long we'll have them. I was talking with a friend last night who's got a new infant. And he said every time he gets up with the infant in the middle of the night and holds her, that it's a privilege. Because he doesn't know when that last time's going to be. And that's the truth of it. I think that we have so many pockets of joy in our life every day. If we have people that we love, if we have something to do that we appreciate, if we're choosing to honor God with our life. And I think that because we're so busy chasing vapor, sometimes we miss these sweet little moments that can all be had right here if we're just paying enough attention. That's why I think on the other side of these realities awaits for us this profound joy. And I think that when we realize that, that when we realize that God has designed these things to bring us happiness in our life, that what's really important is if we don't believe in a God, if we're atheistic in our worldview, then that's it. The joy terminates in those moments. That's all we have. But if we are a spiritual people who believe that God designed these things and these blessings in our life to make himself evident in our life, then our joy doesn't terminate in the moment. It turns into exuberant praise. It reminds us that we have a God that designed this for us. And the other part is, and this is incredible, that the joy that we're experiencing in that moment is only a glimpse of the eternity that he's designed for us and won for us with Jesus, which is what we're going to come back and talk about next week, is how these things are glimpses to the eternity that Jesus has already won for us. So in a few minutes, the band is going to come, and we've saved two fun, exuberant songs to praise God together. And while we do that, I want to encourage you to keep those two thoughts in your head. What are the things that I can see from my chair? What are the joys that God has given me that are within my reach from places that I already have in my life? What are the things that maybe I'm missing because I'm chasing stuff that I don't need? And then let's reflect on the reality that there is coming an eternity where that's all we experience. It's no more just pockets. It's reality. And that is something for us all to celebrate. Let me pray for us. Father, you are so very good to us. You've given us so much. Lord, I pray that we would be grateful for those blessings. I pray that you would steep us in profound gratitude for the things that we have, that you would show us what we need and what we don't. God, if there is somebody here or who can hear my voice, who doesn't have people in their life that they love, God, would you bring that to them? Would you provide that community for them even here at Grace? Would you give them the courage to slip up their hand in some way, to fill out some sheet, or to send some email, or make some phone call, or some text, and help them engage with relationships that matter to them. God, if there are people who don't have something they enjoy in their days, would you give them the courage to find that? Show them how you designed them and what you created them for. God, if we are not honoring you with our lives, I pray that you would give us the courage to do that. Let us praise you exuberantly, God, for the joys that you have given us in our lives. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. Amen, amen. Thank you, Nate. Let's all stand up. guitar solo Our God, firm foundation Our rock, the only solid ground Let's lift his name. you are the only king forever you are victorious Unmatched in all your wisdom In love and justice you will reign and every knee will bow we bring our expectations our hope is anchored in your name the name of jesus Jesus you are the only king forever forevermore you are victorious We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. You are the only king forever. Mighty God, we lift you higher. You are the only king forever. Forevermore, you are the only king forever Forevermore, you are victorious. He is doing great things See what our Savior has done See how His love overcomes he has done great things. We dance in your freedom, awake and alive. Oh Jesus, our Savior, your name lifted high be faithful forever more you have done great things and I know you will do it again for your promise is yes and amen you will do great things God you do great things Oh Oh you have done great things you've done great things every captive and break every chain oh god You have done great things. You have done great things. Oh God, you guys here today. God bless. Have a great week. Thank you. Come all you weary, come all you thirsty, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Well, come all you sinners, come find His mercy. Come to the table, He will satisfy. Taste of His goodness, find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us, His one and only Son to save us. If you never believed in Him, you'll live forever. Here we go. We'll live forever. God so loved the world. Praise God. Praise God. From whom all blessings flow. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. Praise God. Praise God. Praise God. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. His amazing love. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us Whoever believes in Him Will live forever Oh, the power of hell Forever defeated Now it is well I'm walking in freedom For God so loved the world. Amen. You are here, moving in our midst. I worship you. I worship you. You are here, working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are here. Working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are way maker. Miracle worker. Promise keeper. Light in the darkness. darkness my god that is who you are Jesus. Jesus I worship you. I worship you. You're mending every heart. You are here and you are mending every heart. I worship you. I worship you. You are here and you are way maker, miracle worker, promise keeper, light're the way maker. Yeah, sing it again. Oh, that is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. Yes, even when. Come on. You never stop. You're the way maker. Oh, that is who you are. Oh, it's who you are, my Jesus. Miracle worker. That is who you are. is above depression. His name is above loneliness. Oh, His name is above disease. His name is above cancer. His name is above every other name. That is who you are. Jesus. oh i know that is who you are When darkness tries to roll over my bones When sorrow comes to pain is all I know, oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. I am not captive to the light. I'm not afraid to leave my past behind. Oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. Oh, I'm standing. There's power in your name. Power in your name. There's power that can break off every chain. There's power that can empty out a grave. There's resurrection power that can save. is Thank you. I'm standing in your love. I count on one thing. The same God that never fails will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. The same God who's never late is working you're working Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy. My heart is heavy God that never fails. Will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. This ain't God who's never late. He's working all things out. You're working all things out. Oh, yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will. For all my days. Oh, yes, I will. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all names that nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all Thank you. The name of all names. That nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise. To glorify, glorify the name of our names. That nothing can stand against. Oh yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy when my heart is heavy. All my days. Oh, yes, I will. Thank you. Come let us bow at his feet. He has done great things..

Good morning, Grace. This has been quite the two weeks. We're supposed to, this morning, be in the middle of a series in the book of Acts called Still the Church. But in light of everything that's happened in our country, the elders and I universally and quickly agreed that we could not just continue on in the book of Acts like nothing was going on outside these walls. And as I've watched the protests and the demonstrations and the rioting and the looting and all the back and forth and been consumed in the news and social media and everything happening and all the voices being heard and all the things being said, I just became deeply convicted that we needed to stop and talk about this as a church. I became deeply convicted that I needed to prayerfully consider and address this as your pastor. And so I've talked a lot this week. Called people, I've sat in people's homes, I've met people, I've watched interviews, I've listened to discussions, I've read books, I've consumed podcasts, I wake up thinking about this issue of racial inequality and tension and injustice in our country. I go to sleep thinking about it. I scour the internet. It has consumed me, like many of you, for these past few weeks. And all of it, I think, has pressed on the church, has pressed us into this one singular question of what do we do now? What do we do? In light of everything we've seen, in light of what we're witnessing, in light of these demonstrations that feel different. We've seen protests before. We've seen rioting and looting even before, but these feel different. And I think it impresses upon the church the necessity to answer this question, what do we do now? What do we do as individuals? What do we do as a church? And for Grace, pointedly, what do we do as a predominantly white church in the face of the reality of the last two weeks? So as I've thought about how to answer that question, I thought it would probably be most helpful to start in this place of agreement. Every reasonable person that I know agrees that George Floyd was murdered by that police officer. I don't know any reasonable person, I haven't even actually talked with anybody, who would argue that what happened to George Floyd was justified and deserved, that what happened to him was anything short of murder. I don't know anybody arguing that. Conversely, I don't know anybody arguing for the morality and the rightness and the justification of protests that devolve into looting and rioting. I've not heard anyone make a good nuanced argument that people of color deserve the right to just charge into stores and white people deserve the right to just charge into stores and loot and take what they want and get violent. I've not heard anybody arguing from the morality of protests that devolve into looting and rioting. No one's supporting those. No one's saying that they're okay, and no one's excusing them away. So I don't think that it's worth our time this morning to further condemn the officer that murdered George Floyd or to decry the morality of looting and rioting. We all agree on those things. I think the more interesting question that we need to be asking, that I want to be asking as a member of the white community, is what is the message coming out of the protests and the demonstration? What is it that the black community would have us hear as a result of these protests? What are they using their voice to say? And if we listen closely, what should we be hearing? I've actually started thinking of the demonstrations and even the looting and the rioting in this light, kind of like this. Many of you are married. And if you're married, you know what it is to have a little spat with your spouse. You know what it is to have a little mundane day-to-day disagreement. And if you're not married, think about your relationship with a parent or with a sibling or with a close friend or with a child. We've all been in these discussions where there's a little disagreement, there's a little spat, there's kind of a flare-up, but then all of the sudden our spouse goes maximum angry. Whatever maximum angry looks like for your spouse, whether that's just like quiet, cutting comments, whether it's just getting silent and retreating, if it's throwing things, if it's yelling, whatever it is, we've been in these situations where all of the sudden at the drop of a hat, for reasons we don't all the way understand, our spouse is maximum angry with us. And we know that their reaction, that what happened that day in that instance does not warrant their reaction. If we are an unwise spouse, if we're bad at this, we will react to that overreaction. We'll point at him or we'll point at her, and we'll say, I don't deserve that. You shouldn't be saying that. What happened doesn't warrant your reaction. This isn't fair. You shouldn't do that. And we'll condemn the overreaction. And we'll heighten the argument. But what wise spouses do, what wise people do, is acknowledge. Yeah, that's an overreaction. But clearly, that's not a reaction just to what's happening in this moment. Clearly, there are things that have been simmering under the surface. There is a series of frustrations and disappointments that have led to this moment, that have caused this person to boil and bubble over in this way. So rather than reacting to the overreaction, let me be interested and listen and see what I can learn about the series of events that have built up in this person's heart to lead them to this place. Wise people want to understand what led to this response in the first place. And I think the best thing that I can do, the best thing that we can do in the face of these protests and demonstrations is to ask the question, wait, wait, wait, what is it that led to this moment? What are all the simmering frustrations and disappointments that you've experienced, that the black community has experienced that have led to this moment of demonstrations for the past two weeks? The most important question we can be asking, I think, is what is it the black community is trying to say? What are they trying to communicate? And as I think through that question, my belief is that the loudest message coming out of these protests is simply, will you listen to us now? Will you hear us now? Will you give us a voice now? I think what the black community is telling us is that, hey, racial injustice still exists. Racial inequality still exists. Racial oppression is still a very real thing in the United States of America, and we bear the brunt of it every day. It is still a thing that is happening. And I would be the first to tell you, I would be the first to argue that this country has made tremendous strides in racial equality and justice since 1968. We have come an incredibly far way in just a generation. But what these protests tell us is that we still have strides to make. We still have a ways to go. We're still not there yet. The black community is telling us we still experience injustice and oppression. And if you are a child of God, if you would call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, if you would call yourself a Christian, then when there is a group of people in your community that is telling you, hey, we feel like we exist in injustice, we feel like we are being treated unfairly, we feel like we are oppressed, that ought to perk up your ears. When there is a community of people saying, raising their hand and saying, hey, we feel oppressed. We feel like there's systemic injustice in our country. That perks up the ears of God. That breaks the very heart of God. And it ought to break our heart too, particularly as God's children, particularly as God's church. When there's a group of people in our community crying out that they feel oppressed, that life feels unfair, that it is unjust, as God's children, we ought to perk up our ears and listen intently and wonder at why and allow our hearts to be broken at that reality because that reality breaks the heart of God. Justice and correcting oppression are very near to the heart of God. I know this is true because the Bible says it over and over again. I know this is true because of passages like Isaiah chapter 1. Isaiah chapter 1, verses 10 through 18. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. That's one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. I know I say that about a lot of passages. I really mean it for this one. I love Isaiah chapter one, 10 through 18. Those eight verses, those are the gospel. It's a beautiful passage. But I've never thought of it in the light that I'm about to explain it in until this week. If you look at that passage in verses 10 through 15, God is blasting Israel. Israel, those are his children, those are his people. They would have considered themselves the church or saved back in that time. And God is blasting them for going through the motions of their faith without really living it out. And he's saying things to them like, your solemn assemblies, listen to this, my soul hates. He says, when you pray to me, I will turn my back to this. I'm not there. I'm not listening. When you perform your sacrifices, I don't care about them. I don't want them. All the religious duties that you're doing, I'm not interested in those. And then in verse 16, after he blasts them, after he says, quit going through the motions, I'm not interested. In verse 16, it's almost as if he's saying, you want to know what I'm interested in? You want to know what's important to me? You want to know how I want my people to be defined? If you want to do the right thing, do you know what you need to do? This is what he says, verse 16. After blasting them, he ends 15 with the phrase, your hands are full of blood. 16, he says this, wash yourselves, make yourselves clean, remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes, cease to do evil, learn to do good. So he says, listen, repent of all the things that I've just accused you of. Admit that you've been going to the motion. Stop doing that. Admit that you're living out this heartless faith and seek to do right. And if you want to do right, here's what you need to do. Learn to do good. Seek justice. Correct oppression. Bring justice to the fatherless. Plead the widow's cause. God says, you want to know what's near and dear to my heart? You want to know how I want my people to be known and what I want them to be marked for and what I want to be important to them? You want to please me? You want to make me happy? You want to know what God wants from me? Seek justice. Correct oppression. There's a community of people in our nation crying out that they are experiencing injustice and oppression and God's people should listen to that brokenheartedly and want to help. It's not just in Isaiah. In Micah, chapter 6, verse 8, a famous passage. Micah similarly ends a long diatribe of the ways that God's children have failed, And he says, if you want to do good, here's what we need to do. He says, he has shown you, oh man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you, but to seek justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Three things God wants from his people. Just distill it all down to whatever God would request. And what he leads with is seek justice. In the Psalms, we are told that we need to be a voice for the voiceless. It's the idea that when our voice is the loudest in the room, we ought to use it to help those with the weakest voice. Justice and the correction of oppression is near and dear to the heart of God. That's why I am firmly convinced that what is happening in our country right now is not a political issue. It's not political at all. And honestly, if you think it's political, you don't understand it. It's not political. It's a right and wrong issue. It's a gospel issue. Caring about this isn't about activism. It's about caring deeply about a manifestation of the gospel and the culture in which we live. What's happening breaks God's heart and it ought to break ours. It is our job as his people to diligently and fervently and generously correct oppression and to seek justice. This is a church issue. This is a gospel issue. This is a morality issue. So we have to talk about it. And even as I say that, even as I say that, there are those who I know and love who are good Bible-believing people, good moral folks, who would simply say, Nate, man, I agree with you that we need to care deeply about justice, and we need to care deeply about people not being oppressed. But I got to tell you, I just don't think that there is systemic oppression happening in our country. I just don't think that there is systemic injustice and racial inequality occurring in our country. I've heard statements like that even this week, and they're not statements from people who are racist or who mean ill will. They're just earnest, honest observations and thoughts from folks. But I would tell you if that's something that you might think, that first of all, that's something that I've thought too. But when you repeat that to black people, as I have this week, they went. I sat in someone's home and I said, hey, you know, there's some folks who would say that they just no longer see systemic oppression or injustice in our society. What would you say to them? They winced at me. It hurt them. And it wasn't a wincing of anger. They weren't mad. They didn't want to correct. It was a wincing of surprise and of disappointment and of hurt. That some people right around them don't even see what to them is so very evident. And if we don't believe that oppression is a thing, there's plenty of stories, there's plenty of examples of it continuing to happen in our country even to this day. As I spoke with people and listened and watched, I saw a lot of conversations happening between white people and black people. I was involved in some of those conversations. And in every one of those conversations, whether I'm watching them or involved in them or listening to them, the question would always come up, how have you experienced racism in your life? What are some instances where you've encountered, the white person's asking the black person, what are some instances where you've encountered racism in your life? And all of the black people had answers. They all responded with stories, sometimes multiple stories. Do you realize the power of that reality? Do you realize how condemning that truth is? That every black person you could go up to and find, even on the street, and just grab them and say, hey, I'm curious, how have you experienced racism in your life? When have you encountered racism in your day-to-day life? In the years that you've lived, what are the stories about your encounters of racism? Do you realize that they all have answers? You realize they can answer that question? That not a single one of them went, gosh, you know, I don't know that I have. You know how different that is from the white experience? I've never experienced a racial moment in my life. I've never been the victim of racism. I've never even asked my white friends, hey, when have you experienced racism in your life? Because we don't. Far and away, the vast majority of us don't even experience it. Do you realize the chasm and experiences there when they all have answers for it and we don't have any? One man shared his story, successful black businessman, went to a good college in the South, got involved in corporate America. He shared that in his office place, he often felt discriminated against. He shared some of that was probably imagined and some of it was probably very real. But what he knew is that the last thing in the world he could do is bring it up. The last thing in the world he could do is be honest about it or complain about it because you don't want to play that card and get that label. So he just kept his mouth shut. And after years of keeping his mouth shut, he gets promoted to their office in Manhattan. He moves his family up there. They find a great suburb in Connecticut where they decide to buy a home. They're walking through their neighborhood on the very first day that they're moving in. He's got his wife and his daughter in the stroller, and a car rides by them, and a white guy leans out the window and calls him the N-word and tells him that he's not welcome in his neighborhood and he needs to go home. In progressive Connecticut, a few years ago. It's still happening. I talked to somebody on the phone this week that confirmed an article that my wife, Jen, had read this week. She read an article. It wasn't an article. It was a post on Facebook that kind of went viral by a black man who just said, hey, listen, just so y'all know my experience, he loves to go on walks every day in his neighborhood. Kind of refreshes him like a lot of us like to go on walks. But he said, I'm very aware of the fact that I can't go on a walk without my wife or my daughter with me. I can't just walk through a neighborhood as a lone black man because I've gotten the cops called on me too many times because I'm seen as a threat in his own neighborhood. That story was confirmed this week when I was talking to somebody on the phone who said that they just bought a new house and they're about to move into this neighborhood. And he shared with me that his wife sat him down and said, honey, I know that you like to go on walks, but before you do that, for the first month or two that we live in this neighborhood, me and you and our kids need to go on a walk every day so that the neighbors can get used to seeing your face so that when you are out there by yourself, they don't think you're a threat and they don't call the police on you. I just moved into Falls River in April. I go on walks all the time. Never a single time, not once have I thought, gosh, I hope my neighbors don't see me as a threat. I hope they don't see my whiteness as a threat and call the police on me and I have to explain myself to them. I haven't once even considered that. It blew my mind that they still have to care about that. I was talking to another person who is very successful, who has degrees from colleges that I can't even imagine going to. He has brothers and they're all successful. And I asked him, growing up in a black home, clearly you would point to your parents as the reason for your success and your brother's success. But what was it about the way that they parented you that made you successful? And he told me that his parents always told them that they have to hold themselves to a higher standard than anybody else around them, that they have a smaller margin for error in their life than anybody else around them, that they're going to have to work harder than the other people around them if they want to achieve the same things. And they were incredibly hard on their boys for their sake because they knew that the margin for error for their children was slimmer than the margin of error of a house full of people who look like me. Then I started hearing about the conversations that black parents have to have with their children when they start to drive. They have to tell them that they're black and what their blackness means and how they should be sensitive to carry themselves. They have to walk them through protocols. If you get pulled over, do these things. Do not do these things. And they have to do this for the safety of their children. When I got my keys, my dad just handed me the keys. And he said, don't speed. And if you do speed and you get pulled over, just say yes, sir, to the officer. Be nice to him. That was it. There was no conversations about my whiteness. There was no, I've never thought to have a conversation with Lily, my daughter, about her whiteness. It's different, you guys. It's two different Americas. It's two different experiences. This points to an injustice and an oppression that still exists. This points to the reality that Martin Luther King's dream has not yet been realized. And if we want to see it come to fruition, that even though we've made great strides, we still have more to take. If the stories aren't enough, if those are anecdotal, I could point to evidence. I could point to statistics. I could point to how poverty skews greater in the African-American community. I could point to schools and how they lower in quality in African-American communities. I could point to a loss of the father figure in black homes. I could point to joblessness in the black community that's greater than that in the white community. Statistic after statistic that would lend itself to this understanding that the playing field is not level in our country. And yet even as I say that, even as I share those stories and those statistics that we all know, there are those of us who would say, yeah, but there's other factors, Nate. This is not easy. This is nuanced. There's other things going on there. There are those of us who would look at those statistics or look at those anecdotes and point to systemic issues within the black community and say, they need to get those taken care of too. They have some things that maybe they need to think about a little bit differently that they should correct as well. And I would tell you honestly, that I agree with you. This is not a one-sided issue. No conflict, no disagreement, no misunderstanding, no matter how great, is 100% one side's fault and 0% another side's fault. We all have things that we can own within the discussion. But even though I would agree that both the white community and the black community have a ways to go to achieve racial equality. I've begun to think of it like this. You know, when I was growing up, if there was somebody at school mistreating me, somebody in my life doing something that wasn't fair, treating me in a way that I didn't deserve. If I were to complain to my dad, hey, so-and-so's treating me like this, it's not fair, I don't like it, I don't appreciate it, he would say to me, son, when they act that way towards you, I want you to be gracious. I want you to be kind. I want you to forgive them. I do not want you to respond to them on the level that they are acting towards you. And I would get upset and I would say, but dad, that's not fair. They're doing this and they're doing that and they treat me in this way and I want to get back at them and I want to do this. And my dad would say, son, you're a rector and I'm not worried about them. They're not my children. You're my son. And this is how rectors act. I'm not worried about that house. I'm worried about my house. I'm not in control of that house. I'm not a voice in that house. I don't have authority in that house. I have authority in this house. And so I'm gonna worry about my house. And as long as you're a part of my house, then this is how you're going to behave. So in the issue of racial inequality and injustice, I've adopted the posture that I'm not going to think about that house. I'm not going to think about what other people need to do. Frankly, candidly, I'm not gonna think about what the black community needs to do. I'm gonna think about my house. I'm gonna think about my responsibilities. What are the mindsets and mistakes that I've made over my 39 years that I need to repent of and correct? What do I need to do? I'm not going to worry about that house. I'm going to worry about my house. Other voices will speak up in that house. They're responsible for that. That's not my responsibility. I'm worried about me. I'm worried about grace. And grace is a predominantly white church, so I'm worried about our house. What do we do? And it's because of that mindset and just focusing on myself and what I should do that I've come to really think about my role, however small it is, in racial reconciliation to really parallel the story of the Good Samaritan. A month or two ago, we were going through a series called Storyteller, looking at the stories that Jesus told to make a moral point. And one of the stories that we covered, one of the parables was the parable of the Good Samaritan. So we know this story, right? There's a man, he's on the road to Jericho, he's going from Jerusalem to Jericho. He gets injured. A priest and a Levite that we would expect to know how to do the right thing see him injured, see him dying, and they just cross over him and continue on with their day. Then a Samaritan shows up, the one that you wouldn't understand to be the moral exemplar in this story. He shows up. He sees the injured man. He kneels down. He tends to his wounds. He picks him up. He puts him on his donkey. He takes him to a hotel. He swipes his credit card, and he tells the innkeeper, whatever this person needs, you charge it to my account. That's the story of the Good Samaritan. And the point of that story, Jesus tells us, is that we're supposed to love our neighbor like the Good Samaritan, loved the injured man. And I think the current situation relates to that parable in that the black community is depicted by the injured man on the road who is crying out and saying that they are hurting, that they are in pain, that they are experiencing injustice. And every time I've heard one of those stories in my life, the first one I remember was Rodney King in the 90s. And every time it bubbles up again and every time the black community cries out and says, hey, it's still not fair. Hey, Martin Luther King's dream is still not realized. Hey, pay attention to us, please. Listen, every time that happens and every time I see the suffering of the black community, I always take the role of the priest and the Levite. And I look at them and I see them hurting and I continue on with my way. Because I think, I'm so sorry that you're there. I'm so sorry that you're hurting. I hate that this has happened to you. But I didn't do it. It's not my fault you're there. I don't hate you. I'm not racist. I don't hate people who look like you. I would never do this to you. As a matter of fact, I hate the people who did that to you. But I didn't do it. Not my fault. I'm not going to feel bad about that. And I move on. And then sometimes in my moving on to justify walking past this suffering brother, I'll begin to wonder, what could that victim have done to have prevented getting robbed like that on the road to Jericho? How late was he out? Who could he have brought with him? When he started to get robbed, did he mouth off? Did he resist? How is he to blame for what's going on? And usually, if I'm being honest about myself, those questions are asked out of a motivation to quell my own guilt. And I should confess to you that I'm, this is not figurative for me that I've played the role of the priest and the Levite. I'm a very flawed messenger for this sermon. I'm not good at this. I don't have black friends. In fact, all the arguments that some of you may have made to refute the things that I'm saying, I can promise you I've made those to my friends. So please, in my words and in my voice, don't hear condemnation, hear confession. I've been the priest and the Levite, and I'm ashamed of it. And God calls me to be the Samaritan. The Samaritan, even though it wasn't his fault, knelt down and he bound up the wounds of this person who had previously hated him. We presume that the victim was a Jew. There is racial tension between the Samaritans and the Jews. And the Samaritan ears to be perked up with what I think perks up God's ears as he encourages us, admonishes us to seek justice and correct oppression. I want to be one of those agents. And I am acknowledging and admitting, not just to myself, but publicly, hopefully, so that some of us can make the same admission that I have been the priest and the Levite stepping over the black community because I felt like it didn't have anything to do with me. I felt like because I'm not racist, because I didn't do that, it's not my fault. It's not my problem. But now I'm convicted that God himself told me to love others as the Samaritan loves others. To be a neighbor to everyone. To care about everyone's suffering and hurting. And I have been moved in the last two weeks and my heart has been broken that I want to be a part of the striding forward. I want to be a part of the healing of the racial divide. I want to help my hurting brothers and sisters. And hopefully you do too. And some of you, to your everlasting credit, you've been way ahead of me on this. I hope there's room at the party for some more. If you want to help, if we want to do more, if we want to help heal the divide, what can we do? And that's really the million-dollar question. As I've had conversations with people this week, really, people to varying degrees will say, yeah, we agree with that sentiment. We agree with that. We're with you. We want to do something. What do we do? That's the big question. So as I've wrestled with that this week, I've come up with three things that I think we can all proactively do. For those of us who want to be a part of the healing, I think we can proactively do these things. The first one is that I think that we should diversify our life. Diversify our lives. Make some black friends. I was on a call with a pastor, Albert Williams, from Dothan, Alabama, this week. And we were talking about all of these things, and I was telling him all the things I wanted to share with my church, and he said, Brother Nate, let me ask you a question. And I so love his boldness in this question. He said, let me ask you a question. You ever have black folks over to your house for dinner? And I said, well, you know, Albert, we just moved into a new house in April and it's been in quarantine. So I really haven't had much of a chance. And he laughed. He said, come on, Nate, you know what I'm asking you? No, I haven't. I haven't. And he got on to me. He told me the truth. And he didn't use these words, but he basically said, man, you don't have a leg to stand on then. You don't have any right to preach this. You're not even doing it. How are you going to go tell your people what they need to do and you're not even doing it yourself? And he's right. I'm a flawed messenger. But I'm going to diversify my life. I'm reaching out to other black pastors, not to build bridges between churches, but to build friendships between men. And I want people of color to be regular visitors in our home. I want Lily to grow up around that. And honestly, I think that this could bring about maybe a more profound change than anything else to just diversify our lives, normalize it for our children, learn empathy as we hear their stories and what they're walking through. And if I'm just being candid with you, at the risk of offending some people, there are very few people that I know who think that oppression doesn't exist who also have black friends. It just changes your viewpoint. So I think we need to diversify our lives. The second thing I would encourage us to do is to adopt a posture of listening. Adopt a posture of listening. I was talking to another person this week who agreed with me on everything and said, yeah, there needs to be a discussion. We need to talk. There needs to be some back and forth. But both sides of the party, both the white community and the black community, have some baggage to own. And there needs to be some give and take at this table. One side can't just take all the blame. And I said, yeah, you're right, but why don't we just listen for a minute? Why don't we just give? How about instead of yeah, but, instead of arguing with the statistics, instead of finding nuanced ways for that to not all the way be true, how about instead of searching for the one exception or the one article that makes us feel right about ourselves, how about we just listen to the voices and the messages coming out of the black community? We don't say anything. We don't argue. And some of the things, I'll be honest, some of the things I've seen coming out this week have just been completely illogical and nonsensical. But we don't have to respond to those. Just sweep those aside. Let's listen for the deeper messages. Let's be receptive to what our black brothers and sisters are saying. And then the third thing I would encourage us all to do is to develop a muscle for empathy. Develop that empathy muscle that you have in your heart. Learn what it's like to be a black person in the United States. Read some books. I thought about having books to recommend to you, but the truth of that is that we have all had books recommended to us. It's not hard to find them. Read a book that opens your eyes. Listen to a podcast. Seek out interviews. Listen to the voices. Seek to be empathetic and to understand. And even as I say those things, what can we do? We can do those three things. Even as I say those, there may be some of you that hear that and think, come on, Nate, like those are wispy, kind of mamby-pamby, like what real things can we do? Those feel insufficient to me. I would say to you that, respectfully, if you're doing all three of those things, if your life is diverse, if you're listening to the voices coming out of the black community, if you're developing that muscle of empathy intentionally in your life, and you still find those three steps to be inadequate, then please please let's talk and find some more adequate steps. But honestly, if you're not doing all three of those or none of those at all right now, how about we just do those and then talk about if they're empty? How about we just take those steps and then assess if they're insufficient and inadequate? Let's do the work first and then find out if what we're doing is working. I would finish by saying this. There are those of you, I believe, who will hear this sermon this morning and get fired up. You'll be excited, feel refreshed. You'll wanna be a part of the solution. You'll be happy we talked about this. Let that fire burn in a sustainable way. In a few weeks, the energy of the protest will be done. COVID will be back in the news cycle and our culture will have moved on to something else. And if we allow our fervor and our conviction to pursue racial equality and justice to fade along with the cultures, then we're gonna be right back here again. So let's let the fire burn in a sustainable way. Let's stick with it and let's mean it and let's make meaningful, lasting changes in our lives. There are others of you who may be offended by different things that I've said or disappointed in the way that I've handled this. And I understand that, I really do. This is a difficult issue. It's a nuanced topic. It stirs up emotions that we don't even understand how they got there. And it's not right of me to experience a conviction and then expect everyone else to be okay with that conviction being impressed upon them. So I would simply ask you, if I've offended you or upset you, to have some grace and some patience with me. And I would invite any one of you in response to this message or what's been happening to email me and let's start a dialogue. My email is at the bottom of the screen. It's nate at graceralee.org. Reach out to me and let me know and let's continue this discussion. I think it can only be helpful. But I know that for me, I want to be the good Samaritan. For grace, I want us to be a part of the healing. I want us to take seriously what grieves the heart of God. Would you pray with me as we pray for our city and our community and our country and our role and what God would have us do to bring about a very necessary healing? Father, you continue to be good. We know that you love us. We know that you love minorities and majorities with equanimity. We know that your heart is that we would love one another. God, give us the strength and the desire and the vision and the grace to overcome these differences in our race that are beautiful differences. Give us the strength to embrace one another. Bring people who don't look like us into our lives that we might befriend and understand them. Help each of us do what we believe is our part to heal this divide. God, I pray that you would work on our hearts. I pray that you'd speak to us even now. I pray that we would be moved by what moves you. And God, I pray for an America that's the same for everyone. Somewhere there's a four and a half year old girl running around that is in a black family. She's the same age as my daughter. God, can they be adults in the same country? Can they raise their children in a place that is void of oppression and injustice? Would you help us be a part of that reality? In Jesus' name we ask these things. Amen.

Listen, I'm supposed to dive into a sermon, but before I do that, I just wanted to stop and celebrate what happened here last weekend. I feel like that was a big deal. Yeah. For those that don't know, last weekend, our series, we had a campaign series that culminated in a pledge Sunday, and we had a goal to have $1.5 million pledged in a weekend. And I kind of just quietly thought maybe if we could crest $800,000, that would be great. That would be a step in the right direction. And then you guys blew us away, and God blew us all away with the fact that we hit our goal. And now our pledges are up closer to 1.6 as they continue to come in throughout the week. And if you are here, I've heard, I've talked to some different folks who have said, oh man, I haven't had a chance to pledge yet. I didn't get mine in. Is that still going on? Absolutely. Absolutely it is. And please don't think, oh, we hit the goal. So my pledge isn't useful. That's not true. Everything we get above and beyond, we're just going to buy that much more of an expensive building and really leverage. Everything we get goes to step closer to getting out of debt and helps our payments be lower so that we can do more with the resources that we have. So every bit counts and every bit helps. And I just stand totally humbled at our God. And I also feel like I owe you guys an apology for underestimating your spirit of generosity, for being hesitant about whether or not we can do it? That's right, that's right. I must have had small faith. You guys expanded it. I know for me, it's an affirming moment. When I opened up the series, I opened it up by saying, God's hand has always been on this place, and we believe that it still is. And my goodness, did he affirm that. So before we continue on, I just wanted to stop and praise God together. So would you pray with me as we praise God for what he did? Lord, I know that a lot of us have given you exaltations this week, have praised you this week, have exclaimed towards you this week and just saying thank you for your hand being on this place. Thank you for caring about our little church. Thank you for caring about this community. God, we have faith in you. We have faith that you're guiding us in this direction, that you're inviting us down this path, and so we are here to walk with you. We are here to thank you. We are here in gratitude for you, God. May this church be a place that always honors you. Thank you for loving us and looking out for us. In Jesus' name, amen. I'm so excited for our new series because our new series is all about stories. And I think that stories are a big part of the human experience. I think we all love a good story and we really love good storytellers. You all probably have that person in your life that you can think of who, when they start to tell the story, the whole room leans in. Everybody at dinner stops. Have you ever been in a place where somebody, you're with one of those storytellers and they start telling a story at the end of the table and whoever you're talking to, you're just thinking, please hurry up. Like I want to hear this story. For me, it's a guy named Billy Bryce, just this big, huge bear of a man. Every time he tells a story, I'm leaned in, man. I just want to hear it because there's something about stories that just connects with us. There's something about a good story that we all pay attention to. The more I thought about it, the more I realized stories are so powerful because that's for millennia how we as people have transferred truth and values to the next generation. And stories are powerful because they're emotive and participatory. They invite us in. Rather than just giving us a list of facts or a bullet point of suggestions, stories invite us in. We empathize with the characters. We put ourselves in the story. We feel what the people in the story felt. It invites us in to participate and to feel what's going on in a way that just a cold list of facts doesn't necessarily. This is why stories are so powerful in driving home points. A friend of mine this week that is, he makes short films, he makes movies, his whole life is invested in story. I called him and I said, give me your best 30 seconds on why stories are so valuable to us. And he brought up a great point. He said the things that I did, the stories invite you in and that they're emotive, but he said that stories invite you to mine for your own truth. They invite you to find the truth within the story, to find what's being communicated, to find what the real point is and make it your own. Rather than someone just dictating to you a list of facts and things that are true, a story invites you in to mine for your own truth. And this, I think, is why Jesus so often taught in stories. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we have a collection of teachings of Jesus that are called parables. A parable is a short fictional story that's used to make a point, typically a moral point. And Jesus was famous for teaching in these stories. To me, they're the greatest stories ever told by the greatest storyteller to ever live. And he told these stories to multiple audiences, and it would strike them all differently as they listened. To some, it was the Pharisees and they would hear the stories in a certain way. To some, it was common folks who were trying to figure things out and they would hear the story in a certain way. And then there was the disciples and they would hear in a certain way. And Jesus was always saying things like, he who has ears to hear, let him hear. He taught lessons in these stories so that you really wouldn't get it unless you were inclined to get it, unless you were open to the message of the story and to the hidden meanings of the parables. So for the next seven weeks, we're going to go through these stories of Jesus. We're going to look at the parables. I went through and basically just picked out my favorite ones, ones that I love, that have resonated for me over the years, that mean a whole lot to me. And the great thing about these parables is I'm going to tell them and I'm going to mine them for some truth that I think can serve all of us, but there's multiple applications to these. So you are invited to participate and come along and let these stories strike you however they would as we study them as a congregation together. So I'm excited to jump into these stories. I'm also just excited and relieved because I felt like in the campaign series, every week I had to like rally the troops for this new great vision of grace, and that was a lot of pressure. And now I just get to kind of open the Bible and be like, here's what I think it says. And that's way easier. So sermon prep this week was a lot of fun. I felt way less pressure. And this is one of my favorites. But before we dive into the parable this week, I wanted to preface it so that it hits us in the right way with something that I believe is common to the human experience. I think that to be a human is to feel the weight of expectation. To be a person, to be alive, to be human is to feel the weight of expectation. Here's what I mean. When I first started my career, when I went pro as a Christian, I worked at Greystone Church, which to be in ministry is just to be a professional Christian, and it's ridiculous, okay? We all have assigned roles, and you're going to see that as we go through this parable today. But when I started at Greystone, I think I was about 28, 29 years old, and I was the student pastor. I was the middle school pastor and the small groups pastor. And somewhere in there, I got invited to begin teaching on Sunday mornings. And as I did that, the more I did that, the more I taught on Sunday mornings, every time I would do that, people would come up to me afterwards and they would say, hey, what are your plans for your career? What do you want to do with your ministry? Do you want to be a senior pastor someday? Do you want to maybe plant your own church? Which in church world, I don't know if you know this, but if you're kind of entrepreneurial and you want to do your own thing, or if you're just a punk and you can't get along with anybody, then you go out and you plant your own church, right? That's what you do. And I always said, that looks like really hard work. You kind of parachute into a city, you get people to believe in you and give you money. And then you plant a church. And it seems like super hard work. And I said, I don't really think I'm wired to do that. But I don't know what I'm going to do. And people would ask me, are you going to plant a church? Are you going to be a senior pastor? Like, what are your goals? What do you want to do one day? And I just remember thinking, gosh, you know, I haven't really thought about it. Like, right now I have 150 kids. I'm trying to convince them that I know what I'm doing. I have no goals beyond trying to not screw up Sunday. That's all I got. But the more people would ask me, the more I felt like that was something I needed to think about. What are my goals for my life? What do I want to do? And I began to feel this weight of expectation. And the truth of it is, the weight of expectation that I felt is no different than what we all feel at different seasons in our life. When you're in college, the question when you meet anybody is, what's your major? What are you studying? Which begs the question, what do you want to become? What do you want to accomplish? What kind of person do you want to be? In your 20s and 30s, you're trying to figure out in your career, who am I? What am I going to do? What am I going to give myself to? What is my career going to look like? What are the expectations that are being placed on me? In your 40s and 50s, you begin to evaluate, how did I do? How's it going? Sometimes we do a mid-course correction. Sometimes we go, I'm nailing it. But we all feel this weight of expectation, this pressure to produce and to perform and to be. It reminds me of a comedian jokingly attributed a quote to Abraham Lincoln one time because all of Abraham Lincoln's quotes are so very simple. And so he made this one up, but I think it applies here. He says, whatever you are, be a good one. And I think we all feel that weight. Whatever you are, whatever role you find yourself in, if you're a daughter, be a good daughter. If you're a husband, be a good husband. If you're a teacher, be a good teacher. Whatever we are, we want to be a good one. We all feel this sense of responsibility and this weight of expectation that I'm supposed to accomplish something. I'm supposed to be something. I'm supposed to matter. And I think that that's an important thing to feel. It's a fair thing to feel. We should feel a weight of expectation. It's not good to drift through life never accomplishing anything. But to that weight of expectation, I think this story directly speaks. And this is probably my favorite parable. It's why we're kicking off the series with this one. This one is found in Matthew chapter 25, verses 14 through 30. I'm not going to read them all to you, but this is the parable. It's the parable of the talents. In the parable of the talents, Jesus is describing to the listeners the kingdom of God. And he says, the kingdom of God is like a master who assembles his servants. And he has three servants, and to one, he gives five talents, and to another, he gives two talents, and to another, he gives one talent. Scripture says, each according to his own ability. And he says, I'm going to leave. I'd like for you to invest these talents how you see fit. And a talent is just a denomination of money, okay? I'd like for you to invest this money how you see fit. And the master goes out of town for a long while, and he comes back. And when he comes back after being out of town for a while, he gathers the servants together, and he asks for his report. What'd you do? And the one with the five talents says, here, master, I know you to be a shrewd man, so I took the talents that you gave me, and I invested them, and I traded them in the marketplace, and here I have for you five more talents. So he hands back to him 10 talents. And the second servant does the same thing. He says, I knew you to be a shrewd man. You gave me two talents. I went, I invested them in the marketplace, and I traded, and now here are two more talents. He hands him back four talents. Each of them doubled the master's investment. And to each of them, the master says the exact same thing. Look at verse 21. It'll be up on the screen. After the one with the five talents gave him back 10 talents, two talents more, a total of four. He says the exact same thing. Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things. I will set you over many things. Enter into the joy of your master. It's the same response. And then he goes to the one that he gave one talent. And the one talent person responds this way. Master, I knew you to be a hard man reaping where you did not sow and gathering where. He's not the most capable employee, but at least he's got his money back. No harm, no foul. But that's not how the master responds. But his master answered him, you wicked and slothful servant. You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed. Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers and at my coming I should have received what was my own in interest. So he takes the talent from the one and he gives it to the one with five and he says, whoever has much more will be given and you will receive nothing. And he kicks him out where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. It's an intense ending. I've always thought, man, I do not want to be that one talent servant. I do not want to be the one that takes what God gives me and buries it and gets in trouble for not producing. So we're going to come back to something in that story. We're going to come back to a statement that's made by the master, by Jesus. But before we do that, I don't want to miss the main point of this parable. The main point of this parable, what Jesus is driving at, if we want to do justice to it, I can't just blow by this. So the main point of this parable is the unavoidable truth that being a Christian means getting to work. That's the point of the parable. Being a believer, being in the kingdom of God, being a servant of the Lord means getting to work. It is an unavoidable truth. No one signs up to be a Christian and then just coasts the rest of their life like they're on a cruise ship or something at a buffet. We all have to get to work. So that weight of expectation that we talked about, that we all feel, is very real, and it comes from God himself. He places on us, if we are believers, he places on us a weight of expectation that we will get to work. Three weeks ago, I talked about some of this work when we talked about evangelism, and I shared with you the parable of the sower that scattered seed over four different surfaces, and the best surface, it took root, and the plant shot up, and what does Jesus say that the plants did? They reproduced 30, 60, and even 100-fold. And we said that's a tip of the cap to this weight of expectation that when we are believers, God expects us to reproduce ourselves. God expects us to share the gospel. He expects us to make disciples. We talked about the Great Commission the week before when we're told to make disciples, and we said, this is not optional. These are Jesus's marching orders to the church for the rest of time. Go and make disciples. Make no mistake about it. To be a Christian is to get to work, and there is a weight of expectation on each and every one of us who would claim faith to reproduce ourselves and others and to share the love of God with them. That's the point. But there is a beauty to this parable as we seek to bear up under this weight of expectation. And we see, I think, the beauty of this when we look at God's interactions with the five-talent servant and the two-talent servant. And we ask ourselves, okay, God does have an expectation of us. What is it? What are God's expectations of me? What are God's expectations of you? If we want to understand this, I think the first thing we need to do is be honest about the responsibilities that we've been given. The first thing we need to do is be honest about the talents that have been assigned to us. Be honest about the responsibilities that have been handed over to us. I think everybody reads the story and we go, man, I don't, I mean, I don't want to brag. There's a chance I'm a five-talent person. I think God's probably apportioned that to me. Maybe not. Maybe I'm this two-talent. I'm definitely not a one-talent. But here, let me help us all out, all right? Ain't nobody in here a five-talent person. Let's just get that off the table. One of the things we need to do in life is come to grips with the responsibilities that God has assigned to us. I think one of the damaging things we do in life and one of the damaging things we do in the church is we are a bunch of two-talent people running around disappointed in ourselves because we're not producing five-talent results when God never asked us to do that. So one of the first things we need to do is come to grips with the responsibilities that we've been assigned. If you look at the parable, who assigns the talents? The master does, according to their abilities. And if you take that a step further, in our life, who assigned, who gave us our abilities? God did. He's designed each of us. He's wired each of us. And he apportions to each of us responsibilities in his kingdom. But one of the worst things we can do is run around beating ourselves up because we're a two-talent person trying to produce five-talent results. I think of Metta this weekend. This weekend, we had our big student student event and we've got our great student pastor, Kyle, who's kind of heading that up. And we had about 40 kids participating in Metta. And in church world, we look at the way that Metta broke down and we tend to go, Kyle did the most. Kyle was the biggest deal. He had an impact on all 40 kids. He's the one that really nailed it with the responsibilities. And then we might look at the small group leaders and we go, they did good, but they did a little bit less. I think of a girl that we have, Jordan Shaw. She leads songs up here sometimes. She's a friend of ours. She's got two little kids. And her assignment for the weekend was to minister to a group of middle school girls, six to eight middle school girls. That was her assignment for the weekend. And what we're tempted to do, particularly in our American culture, is economize those things and say Kyle's impact was greater than Jordan's impact because Kyle impacted 40 and Jordan impacted eight. And I think that's entirely erroneous. Kyle is a single guy. He gets paid to do that. That's his job. That's what he has been assigned to do. Jordan did it for free. She left two kids at home. You know who the real hero of the weekend is? Dylan. Because he watched the kids to free her up to do that ministry, right? That was her responsibility for that weekend. And the difference she's going to make in the lives of those girls in a lot of ways is greater than the difference than Kyle is going to make. So it's not a value. It's not a numbers game. It's not a largeness of impact that we're comparing. It's simply what are the responsibilities that God has assigned to you? And to Kyle, he assigned the whole group. And to Jordan, he assigned a portion of the group. And I think the temptation is, if we're not even participating in something like that, is to degrade what we're doing even more. I think of Faith, who was over here. She left the service because her infant baby was fussing, and she knows that I'm easily distracted. And so she walked out, and it would be very easy for her to sit here and hear about Jordan investing herself in the lives of others, to hear about the great things that Kyle is doing, to see the people in charge of the food drive and think, gosh, I'm not doing anything for the kingdom. I'm not doing anything that matters. And to beat herself up for not returning the investment that God is making. But you know what she's doing? Her life is consumed with three kids. She's got Wyatt and Henry and a new baby, Katie. She can't see straight. She's probably not sleeping. And for now, for this season of life, those are the responsibilities that God has apportioned to her. It is not her responsibility to run around trying to impact everybody. She has those kids to think about now. I think so often we see five-talent people doing five-talent things, and we beat ourselves up because we're not doing that either. And that's the wrong way to think about it. The first thing we need to do under this weight of expectation is be realistic about what God has assigned to us right now. God has assigned to each of you, according to the way that he's wired you, according to the way that he's gifted you, he's assigned to each of you a ministry. It might be your kids. It might be a business. It might be a small group. It might be a single friend. But God has assigned to you responsibility of ministry. And your responsibility is to be realistic about what he's assigned you. And stop heaping guilt and pressure on yourself to do more outside of what God has asked you to do. And here's the really freeing part about that. Here's what I love about this parable. God's response to the five-talent person and the two-talent person. It's the exact same. It's the exact same. He doesn't look at the five-talent person and be like, whoa, you gave me 10 back. This is super impressive. Well done. You are a big deal in my kingdom. And the house that I'm making you in heaven is going to be nice. It's going to be on the lake. Two-talent person, thank you. Your community will have sidewalks. That's not how he does that. That's not how he does that. He says, well done, good and faithful servant. To both of them, you did the best you could with the resources that I gave you. And at the end of the day, that's the only weight of responsibility that we need to feel. We need to do the best we can with the resources that we've been given. In your season of life, in where you are, and the responsibilities that God has apportioned to you, your job, the weight of responsibility that you should feel, and the only weight of responsibility that you should feel, is to do the best you can with the resources that you've been given. If you're in your 20s and you're setting up life goals, you need to make it your goal that no matter where I am, no matter what I'm doing, no matter what God's apportioned to me, I want to know that I'm doing the best I can with the resources I have. If we're in our 40s and our 50s and we're assessing how have I done so far, the question we need to be asking based on this parable is, can I honestly say I've done the best I can with the resources I've been given? If we're trying to figure out how good of parents we've been, if we're trying to set goals for how good of a husband or a wife we want to be, if we're trying to assess whether or not we're a good friend, the one question that matters is, have I done the best I can with the resources that I've been given? Have I honored God with the opportunities that he's given me? Have I been realistic about the responsibilities apportioned to me? And have I done the best I can with those responsibilities? That's why when people kept asking me that question early in my career, what is it that you wanna do with yourself?? Where do you think God's going to take you? My answer became, my goal is to hear well done, good and faithful servant. My only goal, the only thing I want in life, the only thing I want in my career, the only thing I want to hear about my efforts as a pastor, about my efforts as a husband, as a father, as a friend, the only thing I really want to hear is one day when I get to heaven and I finally get to see the face of Jesus, I want to hear him say, well done, good and faithful servant. I wanna know that I did the best I could with the resources that he gave me. And I wanna be so bold as to put that in front of you and let you make that your life goal. I don't know what your life goal is. I don't know what you came in here thinking you should do with your life. I don't know what your mantra has been, but if you don't have one, I would invite you to borrow that from me. That one day when we see the face of Jesus, he will look at us and he will say, well done, good and faithful servant. Let us not put any more pressure on ourselves. Let us feel no more weight of expectation than to simply honor God with the responsibilities that He's given us, with the gifts and abilities and the way that He's wired us to do what He's called us to do. Let us collectively make our life goals well done, good, and faithful servant. Can I tell you that frees you up from so much? Can I tell you it frees you up from so much pressure, from so much comparing, from so much, man, that mom is doing all of these things and I feel like I can't get my life together. That guy has eight side hustles and I don't have any. That person is crushing it in ministry and I don't feel like I'm doing anything. Let's stop doing that and playing the comparison game and just ask ourselves, am I doing the best I can with the resources that I've been given? One day when I see Jesus, will he tell me, well done, good and faithful servant? What if we make that our collective goal as a church? We're dreaming big dreams and we're moving forward and we're gonna build a building and it's gonna be bigger than this one and we all have hopes and yada, yada, yada. But what if instead of worrying about all of those things, what we worry about is week in and week out in our small groups, as we serve the kids, as we pass baskets, as we encourage one another, as we rally around one another. What if what we worry about is simply hearing those words from our Savior, well done, good and faithful servant. If we do that, He will say, you have been faithful with a few things. I'm going to trust you with more. I think it is one of the most freeing life goals and truths that we could have, and I would encourage you to adopt that as well. Let's pray, and then we'll celebrate communion together. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for loving us. God, I pray that we would accept the responsibilities that you've assigned to us. I pray that we would be comfortable and secure in knowing that we are working for you. We are working under your weight of expectations and no one else's. God, I pray that one day as we see your face, we would hear those incredible words, well done, good and faithful servant. I pray that those who are faithfully serving, faithfully giving, faithfully working and have been quietly for years, that you would bolster them, that you would be with them, that you would give them confidence and courage to continue walking in their quiet ways. Father, I pray that we would honor you, that we would do the best we can with everything that you give us. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.