Sermons tagged with Scripture

Good morning. My name is Wes. I'm one of the elders here, and I'm going to start us off with a reading from Psalms 131. And yes, I've joined the club now, too. My heart is not proud. Lord, my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters of things too wonderful for me, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord, both now and forevermore. Thank you, Wes. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. We are in the fifth part of our series called Ascent. It's inspired by the book by Eugene Peterson called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a hugely impactful book for me and for some of the folks on staff, and I've encouraged you guys to pick it up and read it. And hopefully you've started to do that and it's impacting you in similar ways. The book Long Obedience in the Same Direction is based off of, and you should know this by now because we're in week five and we've been saying this every week. It's based off of the Psalms of Ascent that are found in Psalms chapters 120 through 134 that were meant to be read and sung and worshiped through on a family's pilgrimage to Jerusalem on their way to go worship. So it's worship to get their hearts and their minds right on the way to go worship. And so the whole idea of the series has been to go on a journey of spiritual pursuit of God as I challenged you guys in September to let's all take our spiritual lives, our spiritual health more seriously and begin to take intentional steps in that direction. The series has been designed to help us with that. And so this morning we arrive at Psalm 131, which is a Psalm that places its focus squarely on this idea of humility. And humility is an idea that I think that we probably think incorrectly about. I think we probably default to an unhelpful definition and application of humility. I remember a few years ago, and I think I've mentioned this story in church before. I can't remember if I have or not. So if you've heard it before, if it sounds familiar, I'm not going to belabor it, but I think it helps me make my point today. A few years ago, I was with some family and family friends, and we were at this get-together, and the guy whose house it was at said, hey, come help me get some food for everybody. I said, great. So we go outside. We get in this car. It was a brand-new Mercedes S-Class, super nice car, over $100,000 vehicle. And I get in there, and I go, oh, is this new? And he goes, yeah, yeah, I just got it last month. I said, do you like it? He goes, I love it. It's great. I said, it looks great, man. These seats are nice. They got the cooling things. You got the screen across here. This seems like a really great car. And he goes, yeah, it's just a car. Just gets me from A to B. And I just went, okay. And we started talking about something else. But in my head, I thought, oh, crud. Just a car. A 2015 Prius with 150,000 miles is just a car, okay? $115,000 S-Class is not just a car. That's a choice. And if that's a choice you want to make, that's fine. I'm not here to critique it, okay? I have no criticism for what he chooses to do with his resources. And any of you that have nice vehicles, I'm not trying to criticize those. But here's what I will criticize is when someone, when you spend $115,000 on a car and someone goes, this is nice, don't try to act like you're driving a Civic, okay? I just found it to be disingenuous, and I think it was his attempt to be humble and modest, but I found it annoying. Kind of like those people that you have in your lives that you can't give a compliment to. Compliments won't stick to them, right? You go tell Aaron he did a great job leading worship last week, and he just goes, oh, glory to God. Like, he won't accept it. I I've seen women do this to each other you show up at a wedding or at an event or the the I joke that the Addis Jamari uh night of new beginnings every year is like uh Grace Raleigh prom everybody gets dressed up for it when you go and a group of women standing around you're like oh you look so good I love your dress and they're just like oh this I just got it at Dillard's it's deal. You know, like they won't just say thank you. I feel pretty too. They won't say that ever. You go over to someone's house and it's wonderful. This meal is fantastic. Oh, thanks. My husband did all the hard work. And we know good and well your husband didn't do anything. But there's this idea in our culture, and I think particularly in Christian culture, maybe Southern culture, which how do you unparse those things, where humility is really false modesty. And I think that's just an insufficient way to think about humility because I think if we can actually understand what biblical godly humility is, that there's an efficacy to that that we really probably haven't considered when it comes to humility. So this morning I want to posit to you that maybe this can be a working definition of humility that we understand together. Maybe humility is the result of how we estimate our sin and ourselves. Maybe humility, true biblical humility, is how we estimate our sin. And when I say our sin, what I mean is the current situation of our sin, the current sins with which we wrestle, the things that entangle us and cause us to not run our race that we need to cast aside, the current sins that we deal with, and the capacity that we have for sin in the future. If we want to be truly humble, we need to adequately and accurately estimate our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here this morning because I think what we'll find is that we're all on the same page and it would be a little bit of a redundant sermon. I think how to accurately estimate ourselves is where we can make some more interesting headway. But I can't talk about biblical humility without addressing the fact that it's immediately intertwined with how we understand our sin condition because of verses like this. I'm going to read from James 4, 6 through 10. It's on your bulletins, but it's not in the notes. James 4 says this, will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. James, when he says humble yourself, when he says that really ought to be scary term for us, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. I'm not exactly sure what God's opposition looks and feels like, but I don't want to know. But he gives grace or favor to the humble. James immediately ties humility into an awareness of and disgust with our sin. You see that? He immediately says, be humble. And to be humble, he says we have to weep and wretch before the Lord, that our joy has to turn into mourning, that our laughter has to turn into sorrow, that we need to be brought to a place where we are rock bottom with our sin, where we despise our sin and what it does to us and those around us. Now, I'm not going to belabor this because any point that I would make here would be very similar to the points that I preached in part two of this series on repentance. The first Psalm, Psalm 120, is a Psalm on repentance. It's how the Psalms of Ascent start off. And I said, no journey towards God can begin without the first step being repentance. And for repentance, we have to come to a place of disgust with our sin and who we are and what it's doing to the people around us. And that's what James is echoing. And that's what leads to true humility, which is why we're talking about it today. Now, as it relates to being realistic about our current sin condition and our capacity to sin in the future, I think that Christians, in my experience, kind of fall into three categories. And I've been in church world, I have no memories outside of church. I've been in church world my whole life. These are the blocks of Christians that I've experienced. So the main block of Christians that I've experienced are the ones who, when you say, how are you doing with sin? How's sin in your life? And what do you think of your capacity to sin? You think terrible, wretched, I'm miserable. I'm so glad everyone in the room does not know what the sins that I'm dealing with, the things I'm thinking of right now. When I say, what sin do you deal with in your life? For many of us in the room, instantly, we know which one it is for us or five, right? And for you, you walk around constantly aware of your sin. On Tuesday, I was sitting in a recliner, not moving, watching TV, and I got a crick in my neck. I don't know. I'm getting old. I guess this is what it feels like. And it's gotten a little bit better every day since. All right, I can do this now. But on Monday, on Wednesday morning, if Lily, my daughter, needed something, I had to go, yeah. And every, on Wednesday, everything I did, every reflex that turned my head, every way that I sat, every way that I laid, every time I tried to take pressure off of it, it didn't matter. Sometimes it felt a little bit bad. Sometimes it felt a lot a bit bad. But I was all day acutely aware of it. And if you've ever had a crick in your neck for days afterwards, it is part of your consciousness. That pain is there all the time. And for a lot of us, we carry sin in the same way. There's a sin that we're aware of that we need to fix, that we need to eradicate, that we need to start doing or stop doing. And we don't do it. And so anytime we're in church, anytime we're in small group, anytime we're exposed to spiritual things, any movement, any slight movement of our head, we feel it, we're reminded of it, we feel bad about it, we want to get rid of it. That's fine. That's actually a good, humble place to be. It's not a good place to stay, which is why we should go through repentance and not exist there. But we should all have a sense of our capacity for wretchedness. The second category of Christians that I've seen and how we think about our sin is kind of the group of people that goes, you know what? I'm doing okay, right? I'm not an alcoholic. I don't have things in the shadows that I'd be ashamed for other people to see. When they talked about me being embarrassed if everybody knew my sins, I mean, maybe a little bit, but not really. We think we're kind of doing okay. That's great. But what I would ask you is, is your doing okay really just you playing the comparison game between you and people who are not? And going, I'm doing fine? Is your okay complacency? Is it laziness? Is it fear or cowardice? Is it a lack of engagement? I would argue almost always that it's just simply a lack of awareness of ourselves. If you think you're doing okay, ask your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your close friends. In the last three to five years of my life, do you see me increasingly growing in the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, do you see in my wake a greater production of those things? Do you see me growing closer to God and increasing in zeal and increasing in discipline and increasing in patience and wisdom and joy? Do you see these things manifesting in my life? Because if for the last three to five years those things are not increasing in greater measure year over year, then what I would tell you is, buddy, you're not doing okay. You're stagnant. And if you're stagnant, you're going back. But I do think there's a third group that genuinely is doing okay. And you say, no, I am increasing in those ways. I don't want to make space for that. Because I'm not trying to make everybody feel bad. But if you are doing okay, if this is a season in your life where you feel closer to God than you've ever felt, you have more earnest desire for him than you've ever had, I think the humble thing to do there, the thing to help us accurately see our sin is to understand I'm in a good spot now, but nothing that has happened has changed my capacity for sin in the future. There but for the grace of God go I. I don't care how good you're doing. You're two bad weeks away from some of the worst decisions you've ever made in your life. And so if you are in a good place, look at that as grace from God. That every day and week and month that's gotten you there is a gift of grace that he gave you where he gave you the clarity to allow him in your life to shape your character, to sanctify you, and to make you more like Christ. But it's God's working in you that puts you there. So the first thing we do to seek humility is we have an adequate perception of our sin. We hold that well. We understand our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. But I didn't want to belabor that or spend a lot of time there this morning because I think having an accurate estimate of ourselves is something that, because I think as Christians we've probably all thought about the things I just said in some capacity. But I'd be willing to bet that not all of us have thought about humility in this light and accurately estimating ourselves in this way. The first verse of Psalm 131 speaks to this. I want to bring our attention back to it. My heart is not proud, Lord. My eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. In long obedience in the same direction at the beginning of every chapter, you're given the psalm. But it's the psalm from the message that was translated by Eugene Peterson to be very easily approachable. And the way that he phrases it there is, God, I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think that I'm a bigger deal than I really am. And I think that's a great concept. But the problem is that I think we've tended to apply that principle. My eyes are not haughty. My spirit is not proud. I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think I'm too big of a deal. I think we've applied that the way that my family friend applied it to his new car. It shows up as a false modesty. It shows up as disingenuous. It shows up as, oh, you know, I didn't have anything to do with that. Oh, no, that's not me. It shows up as that friend that won't let compliments stick. And you just want to grab him by the shoulders and say, can I just please bless you? Will you accept this? Will you just admit that you've done something good in someone's life for once? And we apply this incorrectly. I think we often mistake humility as the disingenuous reduction of ourselves. I think we often seek to be humble. God opposes the proud, gives grace to the humble, So I'm not going to be, to run from pride, I'm going to be extra reductive of myself and who I am. I have no talents. I have nothing to offer. I've never done anything good. Even like, I used to do this. I've tried to move away from it. But if somebody said, hey, you know, that was a great sermon. I would say either, yeah, hey, glory to God, thank you so much. Like, nothing to do with me. Or I would say, yeah, well, you know, blind squirrel and things. Like, not accepting any of it. And I think when we're the person trying to compliment, when we're the person who sees other people, when we're the person who sees what other people have to offer, and we can't get that person to agree with us, not in a braggadocious way, not in a haughty way, just in an honest way, it becomes frustrating and disingenuous. So I actually think that true humility is realizing our abilities, our gifts, the things at which we excel, are actually gifts from God. He created us with those gifts, and he gave them so that we might use them to build God's kingdom, which is a wonderful invitation from God that fills our life with purpose beyond ourselves. It's incredible how it all works together. So let's say that you're smart. God made you smart. And here's the thing. We have a lot of smart people in this room. I think about, Grace, that we have an unusual concentration of capable and intelligent leadership. Some of us bring the average way down. Others of us are really gifted in this area. So let's say you're smart. So, what'd you do to be smart? You were born smart, right? Let's say you're fast. You can run really fast. So, you were born fast. What'd you do at three to get fast? Nothing. Let's say you're funny. Great. You're going to brag about it? Did you make yourself funny? No. Somebody making fun of you when you were a little kid and giving you trauma made you funny. No, I'm just kidding around. God gave you the capacity for humor. Let's say you're a leader. You're a good leader. People seem to follow you. They seem to rally around you. When you use your voice, people tend to listen and you don't really understand, but people just always kind of get behind you and kind of go where you're going. So, did you make yourself that way? You're hospitable, or you're kind, or you're gracious. Whatever your gifts may be, my attitude about those gifts with you and with me is who cares? Who cares? The Bible says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. He created all of us with gifts and abilities and a path to good works that we should walk in. We're told in Corinthians that we are the body of Christ and that within the body, the nose, the toes, the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the arms, they all have a job. We were all gifted to be a part of that body. What do I care about what your gift is and what my gift is? The flip side of this is being haughty about it, is being proud of it. Let's say you're smart and you're proud of the fact that you're smart. And you kind of think everybody else can be a bunch of dummies sometimes. And if they don't think about it like you think about it, maybe you find yourself gracious by thinking, well, I don't think they're that smart. So it's probably hard going through life that stupid. I'll give them some grace. I've never personally thought that. It's not my struggle. If you're successful, it's to be haughty about that success. I've done it. I've earned it. I put together the amalgamation of ambition and perception and leadership and intelligence that produced in me what has been successful in the business place. I am proud of that, and we walk around with our chest puffed out because I'm a big deal. You know what you're like when you do that? You're like the teenage kid whose parents decide to buy them a $100,000 Range Rover. If that's what you want to do for your kid, I'd like to be adopted. But, not criticizing you. But you're like the kid whose parents buy you the $100,000 Range Rover, and you drive to school, and you park next to the kid in the 2015 Civic, and you make fun of them for it. You look down on them for it. Look at your stupid car. My car's so great, your car's so dumb. Yeah. Jerk. You didn't do a thing to earn that Range Rover except breathe for 16 years. All right? That's your daddy's money or your mommy's money. That is not your money or your granddaddy's money. I don't know where you got it, but you didn't get it. That's what I know. And that kid probably earned his car. Which one of you is better off for that? When we walk around proud of our gifts and abilities, yeah, I'm smart. Yeah, I'm talented. Yeah, I'm kind. I'm nicer than everybody else. And we take pride in that. I take care of other people better than everybody else, and we take pride in that. When we walk around proud, one pastor put it this way, we were born on third base, and we act like we hit a triple. We should not do that. Once you've identified where your gifts and abilities lie, the absolute wrong thing is to start to give yourself credit for putting those things in there because you didn't make yourself that way. God did. And this is what gives Christians a unique path to humility because we're able to go, yeah, God made me smart. So I have a capable and curious mind. God, how can I use that to further your kingdom? God gave me a good voice. So, God, how can I use this voice to bring glory to you and grow your kingdom? God made me a good leader. God made me good at making money. God made me good at building things and companies. God made me good at hosting people and making them feel welcome. I have this unnatural ability where when I sit down with someone I don't know, they just start telling me all of their problems. Okay, great. That's a gift that God has given you. Who cares about bragging about it? The important question is, once we acknowledge it, is to go, great, I've been made this way. You've been made that way. Nobody cares. What's the best way to use and deploy this gift to build God's kingdom? And in that way, we exist in this posture of gratitude. God, I'm so grateful that you made me the way you did. And then it gives me the opportunities that it does. Please help me to always hold them in the proper light and to use them to bring glory and honor to you and to build your kingdom. When we have this posture of humility, where we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's not bragging to admit and to acknowledge that God has gifted us in certain ways. It's actually in concurrence with all of Scripture because we know that He does. It's simply estimating ourselves accurately and holding them properly to know that those gifts were not given to make our lives better. They were given so that we might participate in the building of God's kingdom. I think Jeremiah the prophet probably said it best when he says this in chapter 9 verses 23 and 24. or the strong boast of their strength, or the rich boast of their riches. But let the one who boasts boast about this, that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth. For in these I delight, declares the Lord. God says, if you want to boast, don't boast because you're wise. Don't boast because you're smart. Don't boast because you're capable or successful or kind or generous or hospitable. Don't boast about any of that stuff. If you want to boast, boast in me and boast in this. Boast that you know me. Boast that you have the humility to know me, to recognize and have faith in me. Boast in who your heavenly father is. I was walking by before church started to get my last minute water. And as I walked by, my son John is three. As I walked by his room, he saw me and he goes, that's my dad. For everyone to know. If you're going to boast, boast like John, that when we see God, we go, that's my dad. That's my heavenly father. I know him. I'm his child. I'm proud to know him. Everything else is just a gift that your dad gave you so you can point other people towards him. That's all it is. To hold it in any different regard than that is foolish. Now, there's a flip side to this coin because not everybody in the room has the same comfort level with admitting their various gifts and abilities. There are some of you in the room. There are some people, when I say, hey, whatever your gifts and abilities are, they go, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, I got them. There are other people that when I go, whatever your gifts and abilities are, that you think to yourself, I'd love to know, because I don't have any. And I don't really have anything to offer anyone. I'm just kind of there. I'm nice. I do my part. I don't have anything in particular to offer God or his kingdom. The second verse in the psalm is for you. This verse says, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. In the chapter that Peterson writes on this psalm, he points out these opposing sides of the humility coin. One is pride and haughtiness. And the other is infantilism. To infantilize ourselves unnecessarily. And he thinks that's the figurative language with I'm a weaned child because a child that isn't weaned, that still relies on its mama for sustenance day to day, can't yet be a productive member of society. And so the picture that he paints is once we are weaned, once we are separated, once we don't need somebody else for our daily sustenance, we can actually take our step into being a productive member of society and God's kingdom. And so it's actually harmful to refuse to acknowledge our gifts. And when we do that, when we think we have nothing to offer, when we've taken humility so far in the other direction, so far away from pride that we don't allow ourselves to even identify how God has gifted us and how we might be used. This psalm says we're like a child who's still a suckling. We're not yet ready to be productive. And I think that refusing to acknowledge our gifts actually makes us less productive as believers. Refusing to acknowledge that you have a good voice, that you have musical talent, that you're organized, that you lead well, that you build well, that you ask good questions without, by refusing to acknowledge how God made us we actually make ourselves less productive towards God's kingdom now I will admit to you and I don't think this is going to come as a shocker to anyone if you we all lean towards one side of that coin this is not the side to which lean. So I don't want to try to paint a picture like I don't struggle with pride somehow. I do. But there has been one very, to me, profound area in my life where this struggle has shown up. I went into vocational ministry when I was 19 years old. In the year 2000, I began to get paid to be a Christian. I just took my faith professional. That's all I did. Because I think that what I do is just be a professional Christian. I think everybody's got their part to play. Everybody has their gifts to apply, and we should just do it. Anyways. I've been in vocational ministry close to 25 years. And again, started in 2000 as a student staffer for a local Young Life Club. It took me until 2021, the summer of 2021, after I read Eugene Peterson's autobiography called Pastor. It took me 21 years of vocational ministry to say out loud, I believe God has called and purposed and designed me to be a pastor. Not simply a teacher of God's word, which is how I would have phrased it prior to, but a pastor, a shepherd, someone who has been called and purposed to look out for people, to draw people in to one another, to provide leadership for the corner of the kingdom to which he's assigned me, Grace Raleigh. It took me 21 years to acknowledge out loud that I believe God has designed me and purposed me to be a pastor and that he's gifted me in some capacity to be a leader so that I might serve his kingdom in that way. It took me 21 years to admit that because I thought it felt so arrogant for me to admit that before 2021, even though functionally I had served as a pastor for 20 years. It struck me as so arrogant and I had so much imposter syndrome about it that I could never say it out loud. I always considered myself less than that, apart from that, not quite made to be that. It took me so long to be able to admit that and simply say it out loud. And when I said it and when I admitted it, there wasn't an ounce of pride in it, I promise you. It was just coming to the place where I could admit what other people told me and what God has shown me that this is the way that he's gifted me and what he wants me to do and I think that there is a lot of you who are limiting yourself and your estimation of yourself by over-correcting pride towards a useless humility that's actually causing you to be less productive in God's kingdom than you could be. Since that revelation in 2021, I'm not looking for any of you to say like, yeah, I've noticed you've been a markedly better pastor since then. But here's what I know. Since then, I've accepted the mantle of the church far more readily than I did before. Since then, I understand my role with more acuity than I did before. Since then, I understand what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to use my voice so much more accurately and clearly than before and unapologetically. And again, not because it's somehow gone to my head and now I think this is what I can do, but because I feel the weight of responsibility of where God has placed me and it does me no good to not acknowledge that weight. And it does you no good either. You have people around you waiting to be impacted towards God's kingdom. You have people in your lives who need you to walk with God. You have friends and neighbors and family members who will listen to your voice far more than you think they will if you'll simply acknowledge how God has made you to reach them. But refusing to accept it isn't humility. It's fear and overcorrection and dishonesty. And it's not godly humility. When we accurately estimate our sin and ourselves, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. When we have that first piece of the puzzle in place, I have an accurate estimate of my capacity to sin in the future and my current sin situation now. When we see that clearly as God sees it, and when we see ourselves as God sees us, you are for me, not against me. I am who you say I am. We just all sang it together. When we really believe that and we see ourselves as God does, and we see our sin as God does, and our potential to sin as God does, and we don't hold our gifts as something we're proud of. We offer them up to God, and we have the courage to admit how he's gifted us. When we can do that and accurately see those things, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. Don't you see? Because we go, okay, sure, you may be good at this thing. Who cares? It's neither good nor bad. It just is. God, how should I use it? And I just wonder what could happen in your families if you decided to pursue true godly humility and saw your sin in yourself accurately the way that God does. Parents, most of the parents in the room that's still raising kids are over here parents what if what if the kids that grew up in your home had the clairvoyance to think when they were 16 years old, sure, I'm smart. So what? It's my job to figure out in the next decade how God wants me to use that in his kingdom. What if that's who you release into the wild? What if that's what we produce at Grace? What if your kids at 25 and 30 have careers and lives and are involved in things that are a result of true humility that you showed them and modeled for them. How much better would they be at this than you are? If we can do that now. When we pursue godly humility, we perfectly position ourselves to build God's kingdom. And it's a powerful thing. So let's no longer think of humility as simply a disingenuous modesty. Let's think of it as accurately holding a vision of who we are that agrees with God's vision for ourselves and pursues the future that he's designed for us. Let's pray. Father we thank you for. Who you are. We thank you for how you love us. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. God, for those of us who have a tendency to let pride and haughtiness sneak in, to begin when we go unmonitored to think that we're somebody and we've done something special. Would you help us remember who we are and who you are and how you made us? And God, would we see what you see and hold our abilities as gifts that were given to us so that we might build your kingdom? Father, for those of us that struggle and might think that we don't have anything to offer, I pray that you would help us see through the people in our lives who love us, the way that you've gifted us so that we might be productive in your kingdom, so that the people around us who need us would see us and be pointed to you by us. God, I pray that we would be a church full of humble people, but not humble in the way that the world describes it. Humble in the way that you lay out so that we might be servants to you as we go. We thank you for all these things. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Michelle Maskin. to be one of the pastors here. And sorry about that. This is the second part or the third part of our series called Ascent, where we're focusing on the 15 Psalms, Psalm 120 to Psalm 134 in the book of Psalms that are meant to be used as your family takes its pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And so these particular 15 Psalms in a book with 150 Psalms are really important and central to life growing up in Israel. And so we thought it would be good to take some time and focus on them for us and see what we can learn from these Psalms of Ascent as we journey towards God ourselves. Last week I talked about repentance. Mikey, those are all online. You can listen to those whenever you'd like. I talked about repentance and how that's always, repentance is always the first step in a journey towards God. This week, I'm looking at Psalm 126 that Michelle just read for us very well about joy. And I picked this because I think I'm the perfect person to give a sermon on joy, right? Like if you guys were out to dinner with some friends who didn't go to Grace and they said, describe, give me three words that you think best describe your pastor. 95% of you in the top three would have joyful somewhere. I'm pretty sure of it, right? There's giggles because I think that there are some misconceptions around joy and what it is. I think sometimes we can think of somebody who's joyful, and it just means that they're exuberant. It just means that they're bubbly and they're happy all the time. But we don't realize that that could be masking a deep anxiety that they're trying to counter with and they're not actually a deeply joyful person. And so I was talking with Jen about this idea, about, Jen is my wife if y'all don't know us, about joy and what it is and how we define it. And I actually saw a clip that helped me think of it a little bit. It was just a quick clip of Jerry Seinfeld on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show. And I showed it to Jen and I showed it to Aaron Winston and to Carly. And it's of Seinfeld and he's talking about vacations and complaining about stuff like he always does. And he goes, but at one point he looks at Jimmy and he goes, I'm very happy. I'm a happy guy. I'm very, I hate everything. And that makes me happy. I'm, I'm perfectly happy hating everything all the time. And I told them like, I feel so seen. This makes, I love this. I'm a very happy guy. I love, and then he goes, he goes, but I do like to complain about things, and that's something I do enjoy. And I was like, yes, this is my guy. So I think joy comes in all shapes and sizes, and I was asking Jen, when you think of someone who's joyful, what do you think? And she actually said Jimmy Fallon, and because he's bubbly and exuberant and yada, yada, yada. And I said, I don't know. I don't think, that's not what I think of. And she said, what do you think of? And I know he's going to hate me for saying this, and I'm very sorry. But I think of Ron Torrance when I think of someone joyful. And if you don't know Ron yet, you will. If you come back three times, he will know your name. I promise you he will. He's got some more years under his belt than me. But whenever I talk to Ron, whether it's during the week or on a Sunday morning, I always leave that conversation a little bit happier and a little bit more encouraged than I was when I entered that conversation. And he exudes for me the type of joy that we want to think about this morning. So as we seek to think about it, understand it, learn about it, we should probably together define it. The problem with defining joy in a sermon on joy is that our definition needs to come from the Bible. It shouldn't come from me. However, when I search the scriptures for a clear definition of joy, the Bible is quiet on that. It's not quiet about the topic of joy, but it is silent on giving us a direct explanation of what it is and how we can best understand it. So instead it just talks about it and it brings it up and it points us to it and it says that God desires it from us and it says that God seeks to make us joyful and shows us the benefits of joy, but it doesn't define it. And so we are left to define it on our own. So I'm going to offer you my best definition of joy. And if you don't agree with me or you think it's somehow incomplete, that's okay. You add your own stuff too. The important part is that we have a common understanding of the foundations of it. So here's how we're going to define joy this morning. Joy is a state of happiness fueled by gratitude. Joy is a state of happiness fueled by gratitude. So it's not a fleeting moment of happiness. This is important. I thought about words like foundational and unimpeachable, but those seem too cumbersome in a clear definition that I wanted you guys to kind of remember a little bit. So it's a state of happiness. It's not an experience of happiness. It's not a brush with happiness or a feeling of happiness. It's a state that we exist in, just kind of this simmering happiness, positivity, joy. And it is fueled, and this is important,'s fueled by gratitude. Joy is always fueled by gratitude. It has to be. When you think about it, when you think about the things that make you joyful, you're thinking of things for which you are grateful. And this psalm maps it out for us very clearly. It shows us, they model for us how we arrive at joy. Those first two verses, I don't know if you paid attention to them when they were being read, but this is what they said. When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion. So there was a time in the past when they were not doing well, where the people were not doing well, where they were living, they were living in poverty, they were living in oppression, and they were scattered. And then God restored their fortunes. He built the nation back up. And now there are joyful people with songs in their hearts. And the other nations around them looked onto them and said, wow, they are really blessed. And so this joy that they're experiencing comes out of abundance. Joy is always the product of abundance. If we want to talk about the joy that we experience from God, it is always the product of abundance. Think about a time in your life in which you've been exceedingly joyful. Think about some of the happiest moments of your life. Think about a season where you were just deeply content and you look back and you go, man, that may be the sweetest season of my life. I don't think of seasons for me as much as I think of moments. I know that for me, anytime I have my arms around both of my kids voluntarily, and we're not wrestling on the bed, anytime I sit there with that long enough, I start to tear up. Because we'll be watching, I'll be watching football and sometimes I'll want to come watch it with me, which really makes me tear up because that's just great. This is the perfect, the absolute perfect two minutes right here. Because I'm watching my favorite thing and I'm hugging my favorite people. And sometimes we're watching TV and one of them will climb up on my lap and then the other one will want to do that too. And I just completely tune out. I check out of whatever's on the television and just kind of sit there. And I just feel so much joy. Why do I feel that? Because I'm existing in this abundance right now. Right? I remember, this is so cheesy, but it's true. Jen plays the piano a little bit, not a lot of it. And don't get any ideas, she'll never ever play it for you, ever. You will never hear her play the piano. But she plays it, and sometimes she'll play the old hymns like Great is Thy Faithfulness, and those are my favorite. And whenever she plays the piano, I always tell her, that's my favorite sound in the world. I love you filling the house with the sound of this piano because I know it brings her peace and joy and I love it too. And I think it was last Christmas. In the lead up to last Christmas, Jen was at the piano and I was standing next to her and she was playing Oh Holy Night. And then she and I just started singing Oh Holy Night. That's my favorite Christmas song. It's my favorite song, just in general. And Lily knew some of the words, so she started singing it too. And it was this moment of abundance. And then here's what I did that makes me a crazy softie, is I spun it forward. Because I think that the house that we're in now, Lord willing, and the creek Don't Rise, is the one that we're going to be in for a long time. And so I think our kids are going to come home from college to this house. And I would anticipate, if God grants it and is good to us in this way, that they might one day bring grandkids into this house, and we might get to celebrate holidays in this house. And our piano is in the dining room. And so I just, for whatever reason, I let myself start to imagine 15, 20 years down the road when the family's coming in and Jen and whatever her weird mama, Mimi nickname is, is playing piano. And the whole family's singing along. And I just started to, like, I started getting emotional. I started to tear up. And Jen's like, what's the matter with you? I was like, I really don't want to tell you because I'm going to sound like a loon. But when we think about the moments of joy in our life and the pockets of joy in our life, I think we can conclude that the joy is always produced by abundance. It's always in moments and in times when we realize we have these amazing blessings in our lives. And it reminds me of a verse that I like to remind you guys of often, one that we have on our wall in the house, John 1 16, where it says, but from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From the fullness of God, from all of his goodness, he bubbles over grace and goodness, and it spills down onto us, and we are happy recipients of this grace and goodness. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From his fullness, we have all been blessed in ways in which we don't deserve. I love Tom Sartorius, one of our elders and greeters. If you ask him, hey, Tom, how you doing? I guarantee you, better not deserve every time. That's kind of an acknowledgement of this. From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And so one of the things I would just stop and point out to you is if you're not experiencing joy, if you don't think of yourself as a joyful person, if you don't think of yourself as existing in a state of happiness that is fueled by gratitude, maybe what's happening is we're running short on fuel. And it's not because we don't have enough. It's because we don't notice what we do have. We're like my son John when he goes to the store. Whenever John goes to the store, the Dollar Tree or whatever it is, if he sees animals, little plastic animals in a bin, in a bag, on their own, if he sees animals, he wants the animals. He has to have them. He loves animals, and he wants them. Now this, I've been complimentary of Jen. Jen is a sucker. I never buy that kid animals. 100% of the time, they go to the store. He comes back with another gorilla, and I'm like, what are we doing here? Because he loses his mind if he can't get the animals, and it's easier at the Dollar Tree just to spend $1.25. Go he'd go, here, kid, shut up. Here's a monkey. Now let's keep going. So she does it to keep the peace. I get it. But he's so concerned with this animal that he wants that he forgets that we have literally a whole bookshelf full, like in cubbies, filled with plastic animals that will never see the light of day again until we throw them away. Ever. If any of you just had kids, because we've got a lot of you right now, if you need animals, we got you. I think so often in life, we can move through life like John moves through the Dollar General. And we have a house full of blessings. But we just want the one that we don't have. And I think that if we would just stop and spend some time being grateful for the abundance that we see in our lives, that we would by, be a more joyful people. And so I think in many cases, we might not be experiencing joy because we're just not looking around at the abundance that does exist in our life. And so that's where we should start. And if we're not experiencing joy, we probably want it, right? We probably all want to live a joyful life. I know that this is true because if you ask anybody from any walk of life, no matter their religion, I can at least speak to Western culture, what is your top hope for yourself? And more interestingly, what's your biggest goal for your children? What do you want your children to experience? What do you want you to experience? What do you pray about for your children to experience? Somewhere in the top three, unlike your answer about me being joyful, this is actually legitimate, sometime in the top three, you're going to say happiness. What do you want for your children? I want them to be happy. I want them to be content. What do you want for your future? I want to be happy. I want to be content. The whole world defaults to a pursuit of joy. Every commercial you see tells you, if you buy this product, you will experience a more joyful life. If you vote for this candidate, usually the way it goes is you will experience a less joyful life. Right? We are drugged up. We are counseled up. We are self-helped up. Every facet of our society tells us to pursue this happiness. And here it is sitting right in the Bible where we get this psalm of joy. And we need to realize that joy is fueled by abundance. Joy is given to us by abundance, fueled by gratitude for that abundance. But we ought to be asking the question by now, if I'm not experiencing joy, how do I get it? If it's a little bit more than just looking around at my life and seeing what's there, how do I pursue this joy? How do I pursue this happiness that God offers? I think that there's a great answer for this that Eugene Peterson offers himself. He says in the chapter on joy, he says, joy is the verified, repeated experience of those involved in what God is doing. Joy is the verified, repeated experience of those involved in what God is doing. I want you to do this with me. Think of the most joyful person you know or the most joyful people you know. Think of who would come to mind in your life when you're asked that question. People who seem to exist in a state of happiness that's fueled by gratitude. Once you have them in your mind, let me make two bets about this person. The first thing I bet is true about them is that they have said they have sacrificially served others with their lives they are people who have spent their lives serving others I bet you they are people who have spent their lives getting involved in what God is doing and going where Jesus is growing I bet you the most joyful people that you know whoever it is you're thinking of I bet you that they have a long track record of getting involved where God is involved, of serving Christ and pursuing him and living their life for him. And I would bet that they have personally sacrificed. They've allowed some pain and some pain points to come into their life so that they could serve Christ well, so that they could serve others well. I bet you the most joyful person you know is also a servant of Jesus who sacrifices for others. See, we think that the road to joy, this is what the world would have us believe, that the road to joy is paved in pleasures. That if we just go from pleasure to pleasure, from experience to experience, from good time to good time, from enjoyable thing to enjoyable thing, if we can just stack together enough fun, enough pleasure, enough relaxation, enough good times, enough luxury, enough things, then eventually we'll arrive at joy. And the path to joy is not paved in pleasure, it's paved in sacrifice. Joy is the verified, repeatable experience of those who are involved in the work that the Lord is doing. So for one, that joyful person you're thinking of, I bet that they are a servant of Christ. The other thing I would bet about them is that their life has not been void of tragedy. I'd be willing to bet whoever you're thinking of has walked through some dark days. I'd be willing to bet that whoever you're thinking of has reasons, good reasons in their life to maybe not be joyful all the time, and yet their joy persists. We do not get to joy by pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. That's not the pathway there. The pathway is through Christ. And when we pursue Christ and what he has for us, what we find is that he produces an abundance of joy in us that cannot be touched. I think of it this way. So we do not pursue joy. We said, how do we pursue joy? How do we pursue this abundance that God offers us? We don't. We don't pursue joy. We pursue Christ. We don't pursue joy. We pursue Jesus. This falls in line with this other verse I like to mention that I have on the wall of my office that I think is really applicable here. John 10 10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I've come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says, do you know that I want you to have the best life possible? Do you know that I want you to, to, to, to experience an abundance of joy? Do you know that I want you to experience the overflow of the Father and His goodness? Do you know that I want you to have the best life possible? And I love this verse because if we just decide to trust it, we'll never mess up again. Anytime in our life we mess up, we sin, we develop a bad habit, we make a bad decision, we behave poorly in a situation, we allow something into our life that we know we shouldn't allow into our life, but we keep it there. All we're doing is saying, Jesus, I don't trust you to bring about the best life for me. I'm going to figure this one out on my own. But Jesus tells us, the path to joy is through me. The path to happiness that we want for ourselves and for our children that all of society seeks after every day in every way. The path there is through Jesus. So we do not pursue joy. We pursue Christ. And when we pursue Christ and he blesses us with an abundant life, and we have to be careful about this because I am not talking about financial abundance. I'm talking about the kind of abundance that actually makes you joyful. I'm talking about blessings. I'm talking about your kid coming up to you and giving you a hug when you didn't expect it. I'm talking about a wealth of relationships and friendships that you have in your life that when you think about it, you're just so grateful for. I'm talking about the years of marriage when you've been married 25, 30, 40 years and you look at this person that, gosh, we haven't always gotten along and sometimes I don't know that I would choose you every day, but man, we love each other deeply for what we've walked through. That type of richness. That type of abundance. That's what Jesus offers us. So when we pursue Christ, we can proclaim with the Israelites like they do in Psalm 126, verse 3. I love this proclamation. The Lord has done great things for us. We are filled with joy. The Lord has done great things for us. We are filled with joy. And Eugene Peterson's the message. He translates it. We are a nation of joyful people. We are a joyful nation. And so if we can look around at the abundance that we have in our life and allow that to fuel gratitude within us, then that will fuel joy. And if we can pursue Christ, then by that pursuit of Christ, the byproduct is joy. So the first two things I would say to you today, if you're not experiencing joy in your life, check those two things. How's your gratitude doing? How grateful are you for the abundance that you have in your life? And then how's your pursuit of Christ coming along? Are you devoting your life to him and serving him? Are you getting involved in the things that God is involved in? If you'll do those two things, I promise you God will move you in this inexplicable way towards joy, and you will be able to proclaim with the Israelites that we are a people of joy. Now, here's what I also know about joy. There are some who are in this room, who are listening online, who will listen, who are absolutely not feeling like they're in a season of abundance right now. As a matter of fact, they're feeling like they're in a season of scarcity. And the reality of life is that sometimes life is hard. And sometimes the days are dark. And sometimes it's heavy. And so I know that for some of you, as you listen to me go on and on about joy, you're like, yeah, dude, this ain't for me because that's not what I'm feeling right now. If I had to try to preach this sermon to my wife in the wake of the loss of her father without this last part, she would have scoffed at the whole thing and swept it aside, and I wouldn't blame you if that's what you wanted to do so far. But sometimes life can be heavy, and if that's your season, I understand. This week was a little bit of a heavy week for Jen and I, just in the things that were happening in the lives of the people around us, not in our lives. But in a 24-hour period, we got news that a mama who we had been praying for since she started trying to get pregnant, there were struggles there, and so we joined with them and we prayed with them and we were elated when they were pregnant. We'd been praying the whole time. She went into labor. We were very excited, but a C-section had to get involved. And it was frantic there for a minute a minute and it was scary and I spent some uneasy moments with her mama and daddy in the waiting room of the hospital who were concerned about their baby that was heavy everyone's happy and healthy there then the next morning we learned that a really good friend of ours, someone that we hold dear, was going to need to be hospitalized for psychological issues that have not been experienced before by this individual. It's a scary thing. There's a heavy load on her family. And then just a few minutes after getting off that phone call, we found out that another friend of ours was separated from her husband because her husband let his family down. And she doesn't really know how to walk through this. And then that day, I'm on the phone with my buddy who's in marriage counseling with his wife and they were asked hey his name's Dan it doesn't matter you don't know Dan do you think you could find a path to love for Beth and he said yeah I think I do I think there's a version of her that I really love and I'd like. And she said, Beth, do you think that there's a path to love for Dan? For you to love Dan? And she goes, no. I think that ship sailed years ago. They have four kids. He might be thinking about divorce. She might leave him. Sometimes we have seasons like that. Sometimes we have heavy seasons of pain. And when somebody gets up and starts talking to us over and over again about joy, we're like, yeah, man, not for me. I'm not buying that this morning. So if that's your season, or you know somebody in that season, this psalm actually addresses that. It finishes with this in mind, that we don't all just look around at hyperabundance all the time. Sometimes life is hard. So this is how we pursue joy in moments when we don't think we're having it at all because life is heavy. Verse four, restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the Negev. Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them. I don't know if you picked it up, because I didn't. I just saw it as kind of flowery language and imagery. But Eugene Peterson points out in the chapter this idea that the pain and the sorrow that we're experiencing, the heaviness and the worry that we have, those are seeds. Those are seeds of future joy. And what we're supposed to do, what they pray here in this psalm is, God, when I'm experiencing pain, when I'm experiencing hurt, I'm going to hand my pain over to you. I'm going to trust you with it. I'm going to give you my suffering and my despair and my pain, and I'm going to trust you with it. And I know that one day, eventually, if I trust you with it and I walk towards you, that you will reap for me a great harvest of joy from this seed of pain. And I think it's a beautiful idea that even at our darkest and even at our lowest and even when life is the most difficult, we can take the pain that we're experiencing, we can see it as a seed of future joy that we hand God and say, I don't know how you're going to turn this into joy, but I'm going to trust you to do it here. And we walk as faithful pilgrims on our journey waiting for God to bring about joy. It reminds me of what I do find helpful to say to people who are experiencing great tragedy. The best advice I ever received on how to talk to people who are going through incredible pain was from my pastor growing up. And his advice was, Nathan, don't say anything stupid. Okay? Thank you. What's stupid? Stupid are the empty words that don't really help. Stupid is when we miscarried our first child and somebody meaning well said, I guess God needed another angel. That's dumb. That's not helpful. So we'd be very careful about what we say in those moments. But one thing that I do think is helpful is when someone's hurting very much and they say, this sucks. I don't see how I'll be happy again. I don't see how I'm going to get through this. This hurts so much. I hate this. The one thing I found helpful to say there is to say, yeah, today stinks. Today's the worst. And you're allowed to hurt. And however you respond to this hurt is the right way to respond. No one can tell you what to do here, but here's what I also know. Not every day will feel like today. Not every day will hurt as bad as today. I know right now you can't see a light at the end of the tunnel. You're not even sure if light's going to be there, but one day you'll wake up and you'll see light. And one day you'll wake up and you'll be closer to it. And one day you'll wake up and you'll be in the light again. So let today be what today needs to be. And just know that not every day will be like this one. I think it's the same idea from Psalm 126. You think of your pain and your suffering as seeds of joy to be planted with God and allow him to reap a harvest of joy. So our job in pain and in trial, if we're here today and we're just feeling low, and it's not because we don't have abundance, it's not because we haven't been pursuing crisis because something really cruddy is going on and it's heavy on me and I'm having a hard time finding joy from here. Here's what you do. So your seeds of pain with God and wait expectantly for him to reap a harvest of joy. If you're hurting, sow that seed of pain with God and wait expectantly for him to reap for you a harvest of joy. So this morning, we're talking about a thing that everybody wants. Everybody that you meet, everybody that you see just wants what this is offering. They just want joy. They just want happiness. That's what everybody wants. And so in this psalm, we learn about it. We see about it. We learn how to get it. So here's my encouragement to you. If you are not in a season of pain right now, if life is pretty easy, pretty good, you're in good steady flow, nothing really bad's happening, but you wouldn't call yourself a joyful person, you're not in a state of happiness that's fueled by gratitude, two things for you. Check your gratitude dial. How's that doing? Check your Jesus dial. How much am I pursuing him? And if those are both turned way down, then it's no wonder that you're not experiencing exuberant joy. If you are in pain, plant the seeds of that pain with God and walk daily expecting that one day he will turn that sorrow into wonderful, exuberant joy because we serve a faithful God and he wants that abundant life for you. So my prayer for you is that you would be a joyful people and that together grace can say the Lord has done great things for us and we are filled with joy. Let's pray. Father, we thank you that you want us to experience joy. We thank you that you desire for us to live in abundance that's been poured out by you. God, I pray that you would give us an unshakable, unimpeachable joy out of a sense of gratitude for what you've done for us. God, give us eyes to see the blessings that maybe we miss. Give us ears to hear the good news that maybe sometimes we tune out. And God, for those of us who are hurting, those of us who are in pain, for those around us who hurt, I pray that they would hand that pain over to you, trusting that you would produce from that an unmeasurable joy. And God, I pray that we would be such a joyful people that those that we encounter would mark us for it, would sense it from us, and that through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you simply by the joy that we exude. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Morning, everyone. My name is Tom Sartorius. I'm one of the elders and partners here at Grace, and this morning's reading is from Psalm 120. I call on the Lord in my distress, and he answers me. Save me, O Lord, from lying lips and from deceitful tongues. What will he do to you, Tom. You may have noticed Tom using a church Bible for that. We do not require elders to own their own Bibles, but we're hopeful that Tom will be able to acquire one in the coming months. Thank you, Tom. Yeah, this morning is the second part of our series called Ascent. Last week, Erin Winston, our children's pastor and pastor extraordinaire, opened the series up for us. And she kind of explained a little bit what it was, why we're doing it, where it's from. But as she was doing that, there was a little bit of sound issues. It was really nobody's fault, but no one was paying attention. No one heard what she said. So just to reorient us in this series, it is, this is one that's been a long time coming. I've kind of shared with you guys before. Sometimes we'll have series that we know we want to do. We know they'll be good for the church. We know we want to expose you guys to that thought process or information, but it just, it sometimes takes two, three, four years to work it into the calendar just right. And so we're all excited to finally be able to do this series. It is based on the Psalms of Ascent, which are Psalms 120 to 134. And what I didn't even know, I knew offhand that these existed, but I didn't really learn about them entirely until I read a book by a pastor named Eugene Peterson called Along Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a phenomenal book. If you get nothing else from this series, I hope you'll write down the name of that book and that you'll read it. It's a movement through all 15 of the Psalms of Ascent with some commentary before and after, and it will serve you. I just tell you, it will serve you better in your spiritual journey to read that than to listen to me preach about it for the next several weeks. I hope that I can do it justice, and I hope that it can focus our attention on the right things, but Eugene Peterson, to me, he's one of my favorite Christians that's ever lived. I think back in 2021, maybe, I read his autobiography just called Pastor about his story as a life in his life being a pastor, and it's one of the most personally impactful books I've ever read. So I'm really excited to expose you guys to what is probably his greatest work, a long obedience in the same direction. And these Psalms of Ascent are called the Psalms of Ascent because typically when you're going to Jerusalem, you're ascending, you're going up a mountain. No matter where you're coming from, Jerusalem's highly elevated compared to the rest of the country of Israel, give or take. And so usually when you're ascending, you're ascending to Jerusalem. So these are psalms that families were supposed to go through as they approached the city on pilgrimage. There's also a specific place in Jerusalem, the Temple stairs, I believe, where you were to pause when you arrived. You were to pause on the first step and sing this first psalm and pray over it as a family. Take the second step, do the second psalm. There's 15 psalms and 15 steps that aligned in this way. And overarching this entire series is this idea of pilgrimage, of a long obedience in the same direction, of the perseverance required by the Christian life, an acknowledgement that the Christian life is not simply a decision one day to accept Christ as our Savior and allow God to be the Lord of our life, but it is a daily decision that we renew. The Christian life is a long, steady obedience in the same direction. And so that idea serves as an umbrella over everything we talk about, that this implication that the Christian life is long and it is difficult, and we are pilgrims on a journey. This morning, we take the first step of that journey. The first psalm is Psalm 120, and that is a psalm of repentance. And when I think about repentance, I kind of think about it like this. Have you ever been in a space, your office, kids' room, kids' playroom, your kitchen, wherever it is, and you just look around and there's so much junk everywhere, you go, I can't live like this. This is disgusting. I have to clean this before I can do another thing. Have you ever had that impulse? If you have never had that impulse, you should clean your home this afternoon. Some of us would freak out. Some of you have that impulse so much that you will secretly clean your sister's house or your mom's house. You'll secretly go behind people and just clean at their place because you just want it to be nice for them. It's funny. I wrote this sermon a couple of weeks ago, but Jen took the kids. Lily's on fall break. Lily's my eight-year-old daughter. So she took Lily and John down to Jen's sister's house so the kids could play together and go to zoos and all the things that little kids do. And so I've been home alone since Thursday. And when I got up this morning, took a shower, went downstairs, got my Bible, got my notes, and went to go through the sermon. I go through the sermon on Sunday mornings just to make sure I'm familiar with it. And I went to go through the sermon. I'm standing in the kitchen, and I was like, I can't live like this. I can't do this. It just had four days of bachelor junk sitting around, you know? And I was like, I got to whirlwind clean this thing. So after I was able to clean the living room and the kitchen, I was able to get to work. But I don't know if you can relate to that, but I think most of us can. This idea where you just look around and you go, this is a mess. This is disgusting. I can't live like this. I have to do something about it right away before I can take another step. This, to me, is the heart of the beginning of repentance. Now, repentance gives a bad rap. We don't like to think about repentance. That one's hard. That's when we have to be hard on ourselves. We have to make better choices. We have to change things. Repentance is tough, and it might be uncomfortable to bring it up, but it's absolutely essential, and I hope that after this morning, that many of us can think about it perhaps in a different way and even seek to make it a habit. But along the lines of repentance being the first part of it, just kind of being disgusted with what's going on as we look around our life, Eugene Peterson says it like this, a person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. So a person before knowing Jesus has to look around at their life and be so disgusted with the way things are going, with the current state of affairs, with what's happening on their inside life and in their outside life. And be so disgusted with it that they go how we do in a mess. This is disgusting. I can't live like this. I have to do something about it. That moment has to come, has to precipitate genuine repentance. So he says, and I think as a Christian, because most of us in the room are Christians, as a Christian, we can think about it this way. We have to be so disgusted with the areas of our life that we have not yet relinquished to God. Because we've given our lives to God, right? But we've all got these little pockets where we know God probably doesn't want this habit in our life. He probably doesn't want this attitude. He probably doesn't want this pattern. He probably doesn't want this in my life. But I'm a Christian, and I'm good, and I'm pretty squared away. So I'm just going to keep this. This is under the lordship of God. Yes, this is my Christian life. This is my personal life. It's under the lordship of me. I'm going to continue to run things here. And Eugene says, until we get disgusted with how this feels, we will never convert it over to the Lordship of God in our life and take a step towards the Christian path. So one of the objects this morning is to help us think about our sin and look at the things that we have in our life in certain ways that make us miserable and make us disgusted and cause us to wake up in the morning going, who am I? Or cause us to finish an argument with our spouse and think, what was that all about? Or after we lose our mind on our kids, we go, what in the world, where did that come from? Or after we just go through a day thinking everyone's annoying or everyone's a moron or everyone's an idiot, and then we get home and we're like, is this really, do I want to be this angry? In those moments, we should reflect and become upset at the mess around us that our sin is making. David did it like this in the Psalm. Tom just read it for us. It starts off doing exactly this. I call on the Lord in And I think that's great. It's a great way to start off repentance. Last week, Aaron preached about, when I struggle, where does my help come from? Does it come from the mountains? Does it come from the altars on the mountains that serve me in different ways, that allow escapes and outs in different ways? And the psalmist says, no, lift your eyes up to God. Your help comes from God, creator of heaven and earth. So this repentance starts out in the exact right way. He looks to God in his distress. It's the song we just sang, God, I need you. We look to God in our distress. Run to the Father, fall into grace. So in his distress, he looks to God, which is the right way to start in repentance. Very first thing, I can't do this. I'm not going to white knuckle my way out of this sin or out of this attitude or out of this way of life. I need your help, God. And then he laments his sin. He laments his lying lips and his hypocrisy. He laments who he is and who he has become because of where he is and who he's surrounded himself with. He reaches a place of disgust with his sin, and so he cries out to God in his distress. And as I wrote this sermon, it occurred to me that for this to make sense, we can't just exist in the hypothetical and talk about vague sins that we deal with, you deal with, David dealt with, I dealt with, you know, whatever. We would need a specific example, and that example could only come from me. So I'm going to share with you more about my personal life than I want to. Don't get nervous. It's not any bad. Because I think we need to actually walk through a sin together to help us get this idea. Somebody did this for me, and it's what helped me understand the idea. So a couple, two, three months ago, Jen and I were finishing up the day, and Jen's my wife, and we got in a little spat, just a little normal marriage tiff, you know, not a huge deal. And we don't really do a lot of those. We're not fighters. Fighting with Jen's like kicking a puppy. So you can't really do anything there. You just feel terrible and shut up. You're right. I'm sorry. So we don't do a lot of anger and frustration in the house. We really don't. But we were frustrated with each other this night. And I honestly don't remember what it was about or what brought it on. I think it was probably just our typical disagreement, which is she's annoyed at me with something and I'm annoyed at her for having the audacity to be annoyed with me. And so then we butt heads. And towards the end of the conversation, I hit her with this one. This is a classic marriage argument. I don't know if you've used it before. I would not recommend if you don't mean it. But I hit it with, you know, lately I haven't even felt like you've liked me very much, which is kind of the emotional jujitsu of, do you see how all this is your fault? Because you haven't been being kind to me. You haven't been being the wife that I deserve. How do you expect me to do the things you want me to do when you don't even like me? It didn't land and we went to bed. And that whole night I was tossing and turning because I realized that the whole disagreement, I was reflecting on the last couple weeks, months of my life. And I realized that the whole disagreement was my fault because of some bad patterns in my life. And I knew that I needed to confess. I knew that I needed to apologize. And so I couldn't sleep. I'm just waiting for her to wake up so I can pounce on her with apologies and love, right? I just, I need this to be right, and I need her to know that I know it's my fault. And so I get up, I make us coffee. That's the peace offering, coffee on the nightstand. And when she wakes up, I said, hey, listen, I'm super sorry. She said, okay, tell me more. I said, the argument that we had last night was 100% my fault. She goes, what makes you think that? And I said, I just realized that all I've wanted from anyone in my life for the past couple of months is just to leave me alone. I've just been living selfishly. I just feel pulled in every direction. And all I want from anyone all the time is just leave me alone. And I said, that's a really cruddy way to be a father. It's a really cruddy way to be a husband. And by the way, I'm really sorry. It takes some special kind of chutzpah to accuse you of not liking me when I've been acting wholly unlikable for the last two months. My bad. And she laughed, and she said, I'm glad you know. And then we were good. We were good. But that tossing and turning all night, being concerned with the disagreement, wanting to get to the bottom of what was going on and motivating there. That was the process that the Holy Spirit used to bring me to a point of disgust with myself. Because what a terrible thing it is to go through life, especially as a father, a husband, and a pastor, and all you want is for people to leave you alone? Dude, you've made some bad choices. You have misaligned your life with what you need to do if that's really what you want is to be left alone. And so that's not an option. So I had to come to a place of disgust where it shook me so much that I could actually stop and let the Holy Spirit help me see where I had been selfish and confess that to my wife. So first I had to confess it to God at four in the morning and then I had to confess it to at seven in the morning. Because I got to this place of disgust where I looked at my life and I said, I can't live like this anymore. I have to clean it up. Right? But if we're going to truly repent of a sin, after we confess, we have to consider. Once we confess our sin, yes, this is in me. Yes, this is wrong. Yes, I have this habit, this pattern, this attitude. Yes, I've been making exceptions for myself in this way. I confess my sin. After that, we must consider the consequences of our sin. David says it this way, Psalm 123-4. I don't know what burning coals of a broom brush are, but I don't want them. I'd like to not find out experientially. He says, he stops and he considers. What will happen if I continue in this pattern? What will happen if I continue to be surrounded by lying tongues and deceitful lips and I continue to have lying tongues and deceitful lips? Well, what will happen in this instance is that God is going to allow warriors to come in and punish us on his behalf. The consequences of this sin are grave. And so it's good for me to sit and face those consequences and look at the reality that my sin could bring about. For me, in different times and ages and places throughout the church, the threat of divine punishment has served the church well to get us to make better decisions in our life. But for me, that's never worked super great. For me, I have to think about the actual literal results of my sin if it goes unchecked. And so to consider your sin is to think through the impact that it's having on the people around you. So in that season of selfishness in my life, which was just a season. I've only been selfish about two or three months out of my life. Everywhere else is super giving. So how about in that heightened activity of selfishness in my life in that particular season? I did the exercise the next day in the office. I sat down, I had my quiet time, and I made myself go through the exercise of how can this sin hurt the people around me? And the first thing that was brought to mind was Lily, my eight-year-old daughter. And I immediately just felt terrible because I've noticed this with other people's kids before I had kids. And now that I have kids, I see that it's absolutely true. When there's a little kid, three is like the height of cute. Three is super cute. One, two, three, it's all great. Four is pretty great. Five, all right, most of the time. But eventually, somewhere around five, six years old, it's like, all right, you're just an annoying little kid now. You've transitioned. You've got a goofy-looking smile. You do dumb stuff. You're always saying, look at me, when you do some regular thing that every kid in the world can do. Like, look at me, dad. Yeah, I mean, you jumped. That's really great. You know, like, every kid gets to this annoying phase until they're cool again. Like, they're, I don't know, 23. And part of what was requiring energy from me was to engage with Lily, to laugh at her jokes, to watch her dance, to give her the attention that she wants from her dad. But my selfishness, and this is hard to say, my selfishness was penalizing her for being eight. Not bad, not unreasonable, not demanding, not selfish. My own junk, as her dad, was penalizing my daughter for simply being eight. What does it communicate to her if I'm annoyed with her at every turn? It teaches her that she's fundamentally annoying. What an awful thing for a father to do to a daughter. It taught John similar lessons. When I didn't want to do trucks or have the dinosaurs fight again, or listen, I'm so bad at engaging in imaginative play. You be the dad. Oh, jeez, I am the dad, and he doesn't want to play. But by not doing those things, what I teach him is I don't want to be with him. I don't want to indulge him. I don't want to. I just want, I'm going to be selfish, and I'm going to do my thing. You do your thing, John. I distance myself from him. And then worse than that, the way that it hurts Jen is because she sees me annoyed with the load and the burden of the family, because she's sweet and because she's selfless, she takes on more of it. She tries to protect me by protecting me from the kids, and she takes on a bigger burden in the home. And that engenders in her resentment for always having to pick up my slack because I'm always in a grumpy mood because I always want to be left alone. It's completely unacceptable. And then you think about how it makes the staff feel at church when my door is constantly closed and I never want to talk to anybody and I go quick into meetings and out of meetings and I'm not available because I just want to be left alone. The ripples of this are terrible for a husband and a father and a pastor. But it's an important step in the process of repentance to think through the consequences of your sin if it goes unchecked. The question, after we realize our sin, after we've come to a place of disgust and we've said, I've got to clean this up, as we begin to clean, the question we should all learn to ask about our sin, we need to do the mental exercise to help with the disgust. The question we should learn to ask is, who am I hurting with my sin and how am I hurting them? Who am I hurting with my sin and how am I hurting them? I don't know what your sin is. I genuinely hope by now that you've been thinking along with me. That when I talked about the idea of confessing sins, that maybe you started to go through your mind and what the wake of your last few weeks have looked like or months. And I hope that you started to kind of go, I wonder what I need to confess. I wonder where my messes are. I wonder where the pockets of my life are that I haven't surrendered to the Lordship of God and I'm still ruling the roost there. And maybe those are the things that are actually making me miserable or anxious or whatever sometimes. I hope that you've begun to do that exercise. And I hope that as I was walking through the consequences of my sin with the people that I love the most, that you were starting to spin forward and think about the consequences of your sin with the people you love the most. Maybe it's selfishness like me. Maybe there's a secret habit or addiction that you're fostering. Maybe there's an attitude that you're maintaining. I'll tell you this, if you can't think of one, if you're sitting there going, gosh, I don't know what I need to confess or repent of, this is tricky. Well, then yours is pride. So that's easy to figure out. And if you still don't know what it is, ask your wife. She knows. She'll tell you. Ask your sister. Ask your best friend. Hey, I need to think about confession and repentance, but I don't really know what I'm doing wrong. I promise you they do. They'll help you out. But I hope that you've been doing that math and thinking along with me. But even as we confess and consider our sin, that's still not repentance. Repentance requires this last step. After we confess and consider, we must commence. After we confess our sin, we consider its consequences. We must commence. We must step. We must move. David are going to be if the sin goes unchecked. And he chooses to commence and take a step and go, I can't be here anymore. I have to move. I have to move away from what the world offers and towards what God offers. This whole Psalm follows the prescription that Eugene Peterson laid out at the beginning when he said that we have to be thoroughly disgusted with things the way they are before we can take a step towards God. It is not lost on me that in this sacred portion of the solemn book of Psalms, in these songs of ascent that were written by David for every generation of worshiper that would ever follow him to go through them every year in their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. That a Jewish person would know these Psalms as well as a lifelong Christian knows the Christmas story out of Luke 2. And the angels appeared over the shepherds giving watch of the flock by night. It's all very familiar stuff for us. To the Jewish person, these Psalms of Ascent were just as familiar. You heard them every year. You heard your granddad give them, and then you heard your dad give them, and then you gave them. They were part of their life. An absolutely crucial spiritual linchpin in the life of a Hebrew in ancient Israel. And it is not lost on me that something of that great of import was started intentionally with repentance. He could have picked any topic. He could have started anywhere he wanted. He could have talked about the greatness of God. He could have talked about our need for God. He could have talked about the glory of God. He could have talked about loving our family. He could have talked about joy. He could have talked about all these things, but he starts with repentance. And I think it's so important because the first step of every journey towards God is always repentance. The first step of every journey towards God is always, always, always genuine repentance. To confess, to consider, and then to commence, to move. The most clear example of repentance in the Bible that I see is found in the book of Acts in chapter 2. Jesus has died. He rose again on Easter. He spent 40 days ministering to the people in and around Jerusalem, specifically the disciples. He ascended up into heaven. And then he told the disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit to come. And they waited for 40 more days. And then at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came. And when the Holy Spirit came, Peter goes out on the balcony and he preaches to thousands of people in and around the Jerusalem area. And these are the same people who were a part of the mobs 80 days ago who crucified Christ. And he goes out there and he tells them who that Jesus was that they crucified. And they said, we believe. What do we do? And Peter says, repent and be baptized. The very first step he asks them to take in their Christian journey is to repent. And it's to repent. This is a fundamental repentance of all Christianity, I believe. What are they to repent of? I believe that specifically what they needed to repent of in this instance is repent of who you thought Jesus was before I told you the truth about him. That's the fundamental repentance of Christianity. And if you're here today and you're not a Christian because you came with a spouse or you're just checking it out or you're considering or whatever. If you are going to become a believer, the Bible urges you to make this fundamental repentance of Christianity, which is whoever I thought Jesus was before I came in here today, I now agree with who he says he is. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God who came to take away the sins of the world. He did what he said he did. He died on the cross to make a path for us to heaven and reclaim creation. And he's coming back again to get us. Revelation 19, crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh to rescue creation back to its maker. That's what it is to be a Christian. And so the fundamental repentance of Christianity is to repent, move away from, confess, consider, and commence away from who we thought Jesus was and move towards who he is. And in this way, all repentance is saying some version of no to the lies of the world and what it offers and to our little kingdoms and fiefdoms in our own lives. And moving towards, as we confess that sin, we consider the consequences and then we commence our movement towards God in this pilgrimage of a long obedience in the same direction. Confession is fundamentally, or repentance is fundamentally a rejection of the world and an acceptance of God. And you know, in September, September 10th, I opened up a series called The Traits of Grace. And I said, this sermon is going to be, I think, the most important sermon I've delivered in several years at Grace. And I rolled out for you discipleship pathways. And I encouraged us to be step takers, people who take our next step of obedience, kind of like being on a pilgrimage. I said that everybody has in front of them a step of obedience that they need to take. And I want to encourage you to take yours. And I challenged us on September 10th. Listen, the most important thing we can do over the next few years is not build a building, is not grow the church, is to allow God to grow us in our depth spiritually. I challenged you to begin to take your spiritual growth personally, to begin to prioritize it, to begin to prioritize personal holiness. And now here we are at the onset of another series. And God has brought this theme back around of repentance and confession and a beginning of a move towards him. So I'm inviting you as we move through this series together, as we reflect on the one that we just had and what it asks of us, on this journey towards God with grace. And if you want to do that, if you want to take your spiritual health seriously, then that journey begins with the step of repentance. So what I'm going to do, instead of closing us out in prayer, is I'm going to let Aaron continue to pray. And I'm going to invite you to respond to what you've just heard in a time of your own prayer. If you're not sure what to confess, if you're not sure where to start, ask that God would open your eyes and let you see. Where are the attitudes and actions and habits in my life that don't need to be there that are actually causing me misery that I might not recognize? Ask God to make you disgusted with the pockets of sin in your life. And then in prayer, consider how that sin could hurt the people that you love the most if it goes unchecked. And then in prayer, if you feel so led, begin to take steps towards God in that area. And let's have a time of repentance together this morning as we take our first step on this journey towards God in the Psalms of Ascent.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If you had to park across the street, I'm very sorry that you were late. But no, I am very sorry you had to do that. I know it was crowded out there this morning, so we're getting creative with our parking spaces, and I appreciate your willingness to walk across the street. Before we just dive into the sermon this morning, I just wanted to pause and pray. I know that many of us know and love people in the western part of the state that have been impacted by the storm and storms and may know some other folks in different parts of the country that were also affected. So let's pause and pray for them as a church, and then we will continue in the service. Father, we lift up our friends and family in Western North Carolina and Asheville and Boone and Todd. We lift up the friends and family that we don't know. Lord, I pray for the men and women that are out there working hard to get things back to normal for people. God, we pray for the families that lost, lost loved ones, lost materials, that lost keepsakes, memoirs, and family heirlooms. God, we just marvel at the power of your creation, and we lament when it costs us. But Lord, I pray that in the wake of these storms that you would show yourself, that people would see you, that they would be comforted by you, that your churches out there would wrap their arms around the community in your name, and that people would be built back up. And we lift up the people that we know specifically. God, that you would just be with them, that you would strengthen them, that you would strengthen their faith, that you would point them towards you. But they're in our hearts. We know you're looking after them, God, and we pray for all the other folks that were affected by the storm as well. In Jesus' name, amen. Okay, this morning we are in part four of our series called The Traits of Grace, where we're talking about the characteristics of the partners of grace. If you call yourself a partner at grace, what do we want you to embody? What do we want you to grow into? What do we want to be a characteristic of you and your life? And so this morning we arrive at one that is like all the others, fundamental to who we are, that at grace we are people of devotion. When I think about being a person of devotion, my mind goes back to 2007 when I took a job as the high school Bible teacher and school chaplain for a small private school in suburban Atlanta. My second day there, the new chemistry teacher, science teacher, walks into my office. His name was Coach Robert W. McCready. He was a colonel in the military. He was a recon marine in Vietnam. He crawled around shirtless in tunnels trying to root out the Viet Cong. He was as tough as they come. He's one of my favorite humans that I've ever met. He called everyone baby, and he had a soft spot for everybody. He was so nice and friendly, and then he could, I've never been more scared of a human in my whole life than I was of Robert W. McCready. And so he came into my room, and he said, Coach Rector, what are you doing this afternoon? And I said, I don't coach anything, Coach. He goes, yeah, you do, baby. You're a football coach. Come on. And he made me come to practice. So I go to practice. I've never played football, but I played soccer for a long time. And I said, coach, I don't know anything about football. I love it, but I know how to kick stuff, and you've got a kicker over there who stinks. And he goes, he puts his hand on my shoulder, and he goes, baby, you're our special teams coordinator. I said, all right. So I started coaching. When Coach McCready took over that team in that year, 2007, 2006, that team went 2-8. They were terrible. And Coach needed to rebuild this thing from the ground up. And one of the very first things he did was he threw out the playbooks. The players had those fancy wrist guards with the flip-up play sheets. There was dozens of plays that these high school kids had to memorize. They can barely memorize a Bible verse a week, and most of them are cheating on it. I know they were because I was teaching them. And they're supposed to remember 78 plays. So coach threw that away. Then there was a defensive wristband that had an equal amount of plays, and coach threw those away. And he reduced the offensive playbook to 16 plays, 13 of which were runs. And that's what we did. And he reduced the defense to two formations. And the only decision the defensive coordinator had to make was are we blitzing or not on this play. And if you don't know what that means, it doesn't matter. It means are we going to send extra people to try to get the quarterback this time. That's what it means. My last year, I was the defensive coordinator, which sounds fancy until you know all I was doing is going, uh, don't blitz. That's it. Or, blitz. That's it. The other team knew what we were doing. They could see me going, or, it didn't matter. Coach said, none of that matters. All that stuff is silly. We don't need it. All we need to do is focus on blocking and tackling. And that's all we did. Every practice we blocked and we tackled. Coach, should we run some routes? Why? That doesn't help us block or tackle. We should block and tackle. And that's all we did. He stripped it down to the bare minimum he focused the boys on on simple concepts on which they could focus so they didn't have to think they could just act and the very next year that first season we went to the playoffs and then the season after that started our run of back-to-back to backstage championships with the such listen the same 16 plays he let me add a play one year. I was so excited. It was so simple, and I loved it. And what I loved about it is this part of me. I don't know if you have this in you, but there is something in my brain that is always trying to strip complicated ideas down to their bare essentials. I want to be able to look at church and go, gosh, there's so much to think about with church. If I just focus on these few things, when I was taking over the church, somebody gave me this advice. It was the best advice that I got. He said, listen, man, there's a lot you can't control. Love on your people and preach your heart out. And for the first two years, that's what I did. Now, I don't know if I do either of those things very well, but for the first two years, I was super focused. That's all I thought about. It was just to still down, love on your people, preach your heart out. I love when you go to work, the idea of being able to say, listen, I've got a lot to do. It's very complicated. But if I can just focus on these simple things, then I know that I will be successful and that I will do well and I'll do my job well. And so, of course, I apply that mentality to my faith and to how I live out my Christianity. And Christianity can be something that's very complicated, that feels very big and complex and unwieldy. Which denomination should I be? Should I be Presbyterian? Should I go full-on Catholic, just jump ship from the Protestants entirely? Should I be a Baptist? Should I be non-denom? Who's getting this right? What should I do? What about predestination? What about if I'm saved now, will I always be saved or can I lose my salvation? Which version of the Bible should I read? Who does my faith demand me to vote for? What should I do in all of these different scenarios? Christianity can begin to get very complicated. One of the things that always humbles me is in my men's group when we're talking and I see the breadth of experience. Some men who came into faith in adulthood, some men who grew up with a Bible in their room and know it very, very well, and just the chasm of knowledge that can exist between Christians of Scripture and of theology and of the person of God, not based on intelligence or effort, but just exposure over time. And I'm always humbled by just how much there is to learn and do. And even I, the pastor, who was supposed to be kind of an expert on this, when I listen to some other pastors, I'm so humbled by what they seem to just know inherently. And it takes me back to my studies and back to curiosity and back to reading, and there's always more to grow and do and develop. But I also think that Christianity, like Coach McCready's football team, has a very simple concept that if we simply focus on that, all of the other things that we think about, worry about, wonder about, all of those things will fall into place. So this morning, I want to acquaint you or reacquaint you with the beautiful simplicity of abiding. It's the first thing there on your notes. The beautiful simplicity. Of abiding. I believe. That there is a singular thing. That if we will make it our foundational. Daily. Prevailing focus. As we move through life. That the rest of the pieces of Christianity. And life and faith. Will fall into into place if we will simply do this one thing, which is abide in Christ. Back in the spring, we spent two weeks on this concept. So I'm here reminding you of it again, but I can't talk to you about being a person of devotion if I don't talk to you about abiding in Christ. If you've been coming to church here for any length of time, this morning is going to feel like, I'm tempted to call it my greatest hits, but maybe I should just call it, I don't know if I have any hits, so let's just call it a reminder. These are reminders. We know these verses. We know these things. If you're new to grace and you haven't heard me say these things before, these are fundamental to who we are. These are fundamental to what we believe it is to be a believer. So I point us to the beautiful simplicity of abiding that we're introduced to in John chapter 15. These are the words of Christ when he says, I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing. Jesus says, I'm the tree. You're the branch. If you remain attached to me, you will bear much fruit. If you allow yourself through life and through choices and through sin to become detached from me, then you can do nothing. And it's this beautifully simple idea. If you think about a branch attached to a tree, that branch does not decide when it produces fruit, how much fruit it produces, or what kind of fruit it is. The only responsibility of the branch is just don't fall off. That's it. That's all the branch has to do. Catch some sun, don't fall off. And then that branch produces fruit, but it doesn't decide when it produces fruit. It doesn't decide how much and it produces fruit. It doesn't decide the type. This is a beautiful picture of what it is to be a Christian. Next week, I'm going to be talking about building God's kingdom. And I'm going to challenge you that all of us spend our life building some kingdom. Are you building your kingdom or are you building his? And the natural thought from that is, okay, what do I do to build God's kingdom? To build God's kingdom, you produce fruit. How do I produce fruit? I abide in Christ and remain attached to him. What fruit am I supposed to produce? What am I supposed to do? To what should I apply my hand? Where should I go? That's up to God. Don't worry about that. When should I produce this fruit? What should my expectations be? Don't worry about that. How much fruit am I going to produce? Don't worry about that. That's up to God. Your job is to remain attached to Jesus. And when you do that, you will bear much fruit. To me, it's one of the greatest promises in scripture because I've shared with you before this quote. I've tried to track it down. We don't know who to attribute it to, but it's no greater tragedy in life than for a man to spend his life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. It's a proverb about the thing we all fear. It's all in our top three fears. Wasting our life. It not mattering. And this promise is a safeguard against that fear. Hey, you stay attached to me, Jesus, and I will make sure that your life matters. You stay, you just focus on me. And I will make sure that you produce much fruit. You stay focused on me. You follow me every day. And I will make sure that you are taken care of. I will make sure that you're doing the right thing. I will make sure that you produce fruit. I will show you how much fruit I want it to be. And I will show you what kind I want it to be. But you don't worry about those things, you worry about me. That's the message of Christ, and that's what he's saying in John 15 when he says, abide in me, and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. This idea of being primarily focused on Christ is not unique to this passage. This is when Christ voices it. But famously, the author of Hebrews voices it this way in Hebrews 12, 1 and 2. us by fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith for the joy set before him. He endured the cross, scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. I've brought this verse up before because I love it so much. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, so that kind of puts us in the arena of life. All the saints that have gone before us are in heaven watching us. Our loved ones are cheering for us. They're praying for us. It says that Jesus himself is in heaven being an advocate for us, whispering to the Father things on our behalf as he sits at the right hand of God. We are surrounded by this heavenly audience as we are in the arena of life. And it is, we have to run our race. And what is our race? Our race is to build God's kingdom. Our race is to bring as many souls as we possibly can with us on our way to heaven. It's the only reason we're still on earth. That's the only thing we need to be focused on is building God's kingdom. So since we're surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run our race by throwing off, and I love this phrase, the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And that phrase carries with it this idea that there are things in our life that are not in and of themselves sinful. They are simply not helping us run our race. They are weighing us down. They are holding us back. We do not need them. All of us have things in our life that may not be sin, but we probably don't need to help us build God's kingdom. And so it challenges us and commissions us to run this race. How do we run this race? What are we to do? By focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. The same thing that Jesus says when he says, Abide in me. The same point he's making. You focus on me and I will produce from you. It's the same point that the author of Hebrews is making. You focus your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith, and he will help you run your race well. I think this concept of singularly focusing on Christ as a foundational effort in our life is so important. Because in our lives, we try hard at a lot of things, don't we? Is anybody else here a try hard? I'm going to try to do that. I'm going to try to do that. I'm going to be better at that. I'm going to do that better. Yeah. We try hard to be a good employee. We try hard to be a good boss. We try hard to run a good company. We try hard to be gracious. We try hard to be kind. We try hard to be a better husband, to be a better wife, to be a better mom, to be a better dad. We try hard to be a better friend. We try hard to be a better steward of our body and get ourselves in shape. We try hard to be friendly to that neighbor that we don't like. We try hard to be self-aware enough to know where we can improve. We try hard on our marriage. We try hard on so many things. And what this beautiful message tells us is, just try hard at me and I'll take care of the rest. So we try hard at pursuing Jesus. We foundationally and fundamentally, before we try hard at anything else, we try hard at pursuing Jesus. Here's what this means. If we feel like we haven't been a good husband to our wives lately, and we think, gosh, I think I need to be a better husband, the very first question to ask after that is, how's my pursuit of Christ? Am I having my quiet times? Am I making him a part of my day? Do I start and end each day with Jesus? If you want to be a better employee, kids, if you want to be a better student, if you want to be a better kid, you want to be a better grandparent, you want to be more present, whatever it is you think you want to be, before you go about being that thing, ask yourself, before I try to be a better dad, am I being a good pursuer of Christ? Because you can try as hard as you want to be a better dad, but if you're not being a good pursuer of Christ, apart from him, you can do nothing. You will still, no matter how hard you try to be a good dad without Jesus, you will be an inefficient father. You will be an insufficient father. No matter how hard, ladies, you try to be the wife that you feel like your husband deserves, even when he doesn't act like he deserves that wife, no matter how hard you try to be better at that part of your life, no matter how hard it is, no matter how well you do, you will never be the wife to your husband God calls you to be if you are not first pursuing Christ. Husbands, you will never be the husbands to your wife that God calls and created you to be if you are not first pursuing Christ. You will never be the friend to your friends, the parent to your kids, the boss to your employees, the peer to your coworkers, the Christian and the churchgoer. You will never be the person that you want to be and that God created you to be if you do not first pursue Christ to become those things. So this is our foundational effort. We try hard at pursuing Jesus. And in different seasons, this looks different ways. Your pursuit of Christ might lead you to acknowledge that you need to deal with your anger, that you get too angry too quickly and it's undeserved. There's something there and you need to figure it out. And your pursuit of Christ has now led you to a place where you're going to go talk to a counselor about your anger. Maybe your pursuit of Christ leads you to a place where you work harder. You need to do more. You need to provide more. You need to build more. This is a season of hustle. And you look at your husband or you look at your wife and you go, hey, I'm going to be a little bit less present for a season because I got to press hard right now. But this is for us. Maybe that's what your pursuit of Christ looks like. Maybe your pursuit of Christ looks like slowing down. Maybe it looks like looking at yourself and going, okay, I can't keep doing everything that I'm doing. I need to peel some things back so that I can make some room for Jesus in my life and for prayer and for margin. In different seasons of my life, my pursuit of Christ has led me to convictions on different areas that I should focus. But let me tell you one way to pursue Christ in all seasons. One thing we can do in all seasons is to be a person of devotion. One thing we can do in all seasons is to be a person of devotion. And when I say be a person of devotion, I mean be a person who has devotions. It's that simple. Be devoted to Christ, be devoted to the church, be devoted to your family, be devoted to your friends. Yes, all those things, but fundamentally be devoted to Jesus and be devoted to devotions. I hope that you've heard me say many times. If you haven't heard me say this yet, it's just because you haven't been going here long enough. I say all the time, the single most important habit anyone can develop in their life, many of you can finish this sentence, is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. The single most important habit any of us can develop at any time in our life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. It is fundamentally important to who we are. And now listen, some of you are here. You've heard me say this before. You've heard me preach this before. I've preached this sermon, the, Hey, go read your Bible sermon. I've preached it at least a dozen times since I got to grace. And, and I know for a fact that some of you have been touched by that sermon, not because I did a good job, but because the Holy Spirit was working despite me. And he moved you. And you came to me and you said, I hear you. I believe you. I am convicted. I am going to do that. And you start your devotional habit. And you wake up tomorrow and you open up the Bible and you read and you do it the next day and the next day. But some of you, I'm guessing, because I've done it too, have fallen away from that habit. So let this morning be the Holy Spirit pricking you. And let your response be, yep, okay, tomorrow morning I'm going to start. Some of you haven't heard me say this. And maybe you haven't thought about doing this in your life. Or maybe you know somewhere that reading the Bible and praying every day is important, but you haven't really thought about it in a while, let this be the morning where you think about it. And wake up tomorrow and start yourself a devotional habit. It is the single most important habit anyone can develop in their whole life. And if you don't know how to do that, if you have questions about it or it feels a little bit murky, this summer I wrote a devotional guide. It's on the information table out there. It's just a short pamphlet that is written for people who aren't confident that they know how to have a good quiet time. It's just my best advice on how to make this a good habit and where to go and some resources. So grab one of those on your way out. If you forget to grab one, email me or write it on your connection card and drop it in the box on the way out the door and I'll email you an electronic copy of it this week. But guys, we need to be people of devotion because how can we abide in him if we are not devoted to his word? When we talk all morning about abiding in Christ, about pursuing him first, about focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith, about the idea that we'll never be a good anything if we're trying to be that thing without Jesus. How can we talk that decision and say that we're going to abide with him. And we are not abiding in his word. The words that he left behind. Do you realize there's no other document, there's no other copy that contains the words of Christ. There's no other way that we can get to know our Savior. I heard a pastor say one time, he said, how can you possibly call yourself a disciple of Jesus if you're not reading the Gospels every month? And I thought, that's extreme. But I would ask this, how can you say that you are walking with Jesus and that you know Him well if you're not reading the accounts of His life at least once a year? Why would we not read all four Gospels at some point or another every year, whether it's spaced out over time or whether we just do it in a couple of sittings? But how can we claim to be followers of Christ and not be intimately aware of the Gospels that tell his story? How can we claim to be followers of Christ and to be abiding in him and be building his church if we're not intimately familiar with the acts of the apostles and of the Holy Spirit in the book of Acts following the gospels? And how can we claim to be living out our Christian life if we are not intimately familiar with the letters that follow Acts and tell us how to live out this wonderful faith that Jesus carved out for us? How can we possibly be the Christians that we are called to be if we are not intimately familiar with the words of this text that he left us to instruct us on how to get to know him better? How much do I have to plea with you to get you to read his word, to know him better. And to make it personal. For yourself. We've got to be people. Of devotion. And if we will. Here's what happens. Because this idea. Of abiding in Christ. And focusing on on him is not just a New Testament idea. David wrote about it in the Psalms. As a matter of fact, this idea is so important to him that he led with it. It's his first words out of the gate in the longest book of the Bible, one of the most impactful, well-known books of Scripture. This is how David starts What we would think of as the Bible. Whose delight is in the law of the Lord and who meditates on his law day and night. Then here's the promise of running the race well and bearing much fruit. That person who abides in Christ, that person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season, and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever they do, prospers. It is my prayer for you, Grace, that you will be a tree planted by streams of water, meditating on the law of the Lord day and night, that all that you do will prosper. It is my prayer that you would abide in Christ, allowing him to bear fruit in you. It is my prayer that you would focus first on Christ and run your race well. I hope that you will do that. And I hope that you'll begin to do that by taking personally your pursuit of holiness and your spiritual growth. And for many of us in the room, that means that our step of obedience that we need to take as a result of this series is to simply start this habit. Grace. Go pray and go read your Bibles. Let's pray. Father, thank you for how easy you make this. Life can get so complicated. It can get so tricky. Sometimes it's difficult to know the right thing to do all the time. And sometimes it's easy to lose focus when there's so many things demanding our attention. And God, so many of us want to be better so many things. Wives and husbands and friends and employees and workers, brothers and sisters and children. But God, would we first simply want to be a follower of you? Would we know you? Father, for those of us who are in the habit of spending time with you in prayer and in your word every day, would you please strengthen and enrich that habit? Would you breathe fresh life into it that we might begin to grow anew? Father, for those of us who have fallen away from that habit or maybe have never developed it, would you help us find a way to begin this new discipline? Give us the time, protect it, help us devote it to you, that we might be people who are abiding in you by being people who are students of your word and who spend time with you in prayer. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is I was just looking at Aaron Winston this morning. Aaron's our children's pastor. And I looked at her and I said, do you realize this is our eighth September together? It's been a minute and I love September. September's everyone's back. Sched are regular, people are in school, small groups start, football kicks off. Football is the great unifier. Everyone can talk about the same thing on Sunday morning when we get here. It's very fun. And so I just love the fall and I love September. And for us at church and on staff, we think of September as the beginning of our ministry year. We've come off the summer. We try to get some rest in the summertime a little bit, but come September, we are sprinting and we pretty much go until summer extreme in June. So we are excited from our standpoint. And I have been excited to share with you this message that's really been about two years in the making, which puts a tremendous amount of pressure on its efficacy. But, you know, we'll see how it goes. But for about two years, God's been doing something in me, and it's kind of culminating in what I'm going to share with you today and where we're going to go for the rest of this series. This series is called The Traits of Grace. You may remember that we did this series in the fall of 2022. Prior to that, the staff had kind of gotten together and brainstormed what makes grace, grace, what makes us unique as a church? What are our unique characteristics? What do we want the characteristics of a partner of grace to be? And so we put stuff on the whiteboard. We settled on some things. I wrote it up. I submitted it to the elders. The elders enthusiastically agreed with it with very few changes. Yes, this is who we believe we are called to be at grace. And so then I walked us through the five traits in September and October of 22. We spent five weeks on them. We looked at each one of them, why biblically we believe we're supposed to do these things. But here's the thing is once I rolled those five traits out, I didn't really know what to do with them anymore. I didn't know how to continue to bring them up, how to continue to put them in front of you, how to really inculcate them as part of the culture of grace. And I feel like now, two years later, I do. And here's how we're going to do it. We're going to start by talking about discipleship. Discipleship, I don't know if you know this or not. Discipleship is the goal of every church. Every evangelical church ever, discipleship is the goal. It is the white whale of church ministry. To produce disciple-making disciples. To make disciples that serve Jesus Christ. To make disciples that build other disciples. That build other disciples. And on and on it goes. This is the goal of every church. Every church is seeking to make disciples of Christ. And this is right and good. This should be the goal because it's the commission. It's the great commission. Jesus, after he died on the cross, resurrected, did ministry with the disciples for 40 days, and ascended back up into heaven, his last instruction to the disciples were go into all the world, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He tells them to go and make disciples, not converts, not people who simply believe and extend faith towards Christ, but disciples. People who take their spiritual health seriously. People who are actively pursuing Jesus. Who are actively becoming more like Christ in character. That's the process of sanctification. So that has been the commission for every church ever. And it is what I talked about in my interview process when they hired me at Grace. It's what I've always thought about at church. How do we make disciples? And here's the secret that not many churches will admit to. And you certainly won't hear pastors confessing it from stage. But we're not very good at it. We're not very good at making disciples. Those of you who have been a part of the church for any amount of time, at least not intentionally, those of you who have been part of the church, when I say the church, I mean Big C Church, not just Grace, but just church. Church is a part of your life. I'd be willing to bet you've had some awkward interactions with the idea of discipleship. I can remember when I was in college, I went to Toccoa Falls College in Northeast Georgia, and I kept the grounds for the school. And the leader of that team, the full-time employee, was a wonderful godly man named George Champion. And I thought very highly of Mr. Champion. So I went to him one time and I said mr. champion will you disciple me will you show me what it is to be a godly man and mr. champion said yes of course because that's what you when people ask you that question you don't say no they'd be a jerk so you got to say yes okay people hey will you decide for me yes that's your answer so he says he says yeah sure and I go okay what do you want answer. So he says, he says, yeah, sure. And I go, okay, what do you want to do? And he says, what everyone says in that situation, let's, uh, get breakfast and read a book. Cause that's what you're supposed to do to make disciples in America. Apparently as you go to waffle house and you read a book, our problem was our town was so small. We didn't even have a waffle house. We We had a Huddle House with three bullet holes in the hood vent. But we went during safe hours, so it was fine. Mr. Champion said, I'll disciple you. You can meet me at the Huddle House. We'll go through a book together, but I get to work early, so I need to meet at 5 a.m. I was 20. 20-year-olds and 5 a.m. don't mix unless they've just been up that whole time. So I missed some. I hit the first two or three. And then the fourth one and the fifth one I slept through. Mr. Champion saw me at work, said, did you sleep through it? Yeah, I'm really sorry, sir. And by the sixth time, I couldn't look him in the eye anymore, and that effort at discipleship fizzled. We could probably tell stories of times that we asked someone to disciple us, of ways that we've learned about what discipleship really means, of programs and systems that we've done. We've done discipleship programs, discipleship groups, where the church puts us in this funnel, and we take classes. And as a result of doing all these things, we squirt out the other end of disciple, fully fledged forms, disciple of Christ. Now I'm ready to help other people go through the funnel. We've all tried these things, but they've lacked success and they've lacked success for me as well. It was with this background that I went to a small conference, I think in about 2019, 2018 or 2019, that was led by a pastor named Larry Osborne, who's got a pretty successful church in San Diego. And it was just 25 senior pastors sitting around the table while Larry was just sharing with us his wisdom. And Larry shared with us how they frame up discipleship in his church. And it was like a bulb went off for me. It was a fresh, brand new way to understand discipleship. Because I had always been told that discipleship had to be life on life. You guys ever heard that phrase, life on life discipleship? I was told that's how it had to be. Like when I was a student pastor, I'd go to these conferences and they would say, when you're discipling your students, you need to invite them into your home. Let them see how a godly man talks to his godly wife. Let them see how a godly man addresses his kids. Let them see how a godly man does yard work. Take them with you shopping. Let them see how a godly man shops at the grocery store. And I thought, well, probably a lot like a kind atheist or like a humble Hindu, you know? It's probably not too, I bet the Hindu is a nicer grocery shopper than I am anyways. And that never really resonated with me because in the first century, we think the model of discipleship based on scripture is life on life, is the disciples living with Jesus, following him around, being with him every day, watching all of his interactions. The problem is that may have been practical in the first century AD. It is not practical in the 21st century in the United States. So there's got to be a better way. With that background, I went to this conference and I heard Larry Osborne frame up discipleship in this unique way where he says discipleship is really nothing more than taking our next step of obedience. That when Jesus wants to grow us, he puts a step of obedience in front of us and he asks us to take it. And if we take it, we are being discipled. We are a disciple of Christ. If we don't, we are stagnating in our faith. And I had never heard it described that way before, but then he went through scripture. I went back and went through scripture and found it to be pretty obvious. Once you start putting the pieces together, I would remind you of a couple of verses first in John chapter 14, verse 15. When Jesus says this, if you love me, keep my commands. That's pretty simple. This is Jesus talking. If you love me, if you say you love me, then do what I say. If you say you want to be like me, then do what I tell you to do. If you love me, keep my commands. He says it even more clearly in Luke 6. I love this one. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I say? Why do you call me Lord of your life and not treat me that way? Why do you call me the king and not crown me? Why do you say one thing out of this side of your mouth and another thing out of this side of your mouth? Why do you sing to me on Sunday like I'm Lord and I'm your treasure and then act on Wednesday like you've never met me? I think that's pretty convicting and pretty applicable for all of us at different seasons. Why do you call me Lord and not do what I say? That's Jesus talking. And then we have this great passage from John, the disciple. John was probably the youngest disciple. He could have been as young as 10 when he was with the disciples. He's referred to in the gospel of John as the disciple whom Jesus loved. At the last supper, we see that John was reclining against Jesus's chest and Jesus was able to say things to John that only John could hear. And at the death of Jesus, at this crucifixion, he looked at John and asked John to take care of his mother, Mary. So they were very, very close. And John spent the rest of his life in service to this Jesus. He led the church and he had two disciples of his own, Polycarp and Erasmus, that became early church fathers to whom he handed off the keys of the kingdom. And at the end of his life, John writes some letters, general epistles to be circulated amongst the churches in Jerusalem and Asia Minor. And in his first letter, 1 John, he makes one thing abundantly clear, and we see it captured here in 1 John 2, verses 3 through 6, where he says this, We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands. Whoever says, I know him, but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person. But if anyone obeys his word, love for on all that he learns, giving a final encouragement to the churches that he loves so much to whom he's dedicated his life. He says, we know we love him if we obey him. If we say that we love him and we do not obey him, then we are liars and the truth is not in us. He says the litmus test for Christianity is very clear. Are you obedient to Christ or are you not? And so I would make simply this point about discipleship and its relationship with obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. If you'd like to know how you're doing spiritually, take an inventory of your life. Over the last few years, have you been growing in your obedience to Christ? Has your obedience to him increased? Are you giving him more and more of yourself and of your margins? Are you letting go of more and more things that don't need to be there that don't help you obey? Are you throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and running the race set before you? Or have you been stagnant in your obedience? Does your obedience in 2024 look pretty much how it looked in 2020? When you look behind you, do you see a wake of obedience or do you see stagnation? Scripture makes it pretty clear that if we want to call ourselves disciples of Christ, then we are people who are taking steps of obedience. And ever since Larry framed it up this way, I quit thinking about discipleship as this essential relationship with a person that walks you through life and tells you what to do. I quit thinking about discipleship as a program that you take. Because if we're being honest, those of us in the room who take our spiritual health seriously, those of us in the room that other people would look at and probably say that person is a disciple of Christ. That's someone who's growing in their obedience to Jesus. They're growing closer to him. They're growing more like him in character. I've seen that person taking strides. They are someone to whom their spiritual health is very, very important and they guard it fiercely. And I know that very few people in here would raise our hand and be like, yeah, I think I would call myself a disciple of Christ. But there's plenty of people in here who would say, I've taken my spiritual health very seriously and it matters to me and I'm intentional about it. If that's you, I wonder if you could point me to the program or the singular person who got you to that place. I wonder if you could point me to the Bible study you did that got you to where you are today. To the discipleship program that you enlisted in that spit you out the other side of the disciple. I wonder if you could point to the person who came alongside you, put their arm around you and said, I'm going to show you how to be a godly woman. Follow me. Some of us are blessed to have answers to those questions. A program or person for a season has profoundly impacted and changed your life. But most of us, our spiritual life and our discipleship is an amalgamation and a mosaic of all the different encounters that we've had in our life, of all the different relationships we've entered into and out of, of just the different programs and the different studies and the different information that we've been exposed to, and the different seasons of our life where God allowed someone to speak into our life. And so what I want us to see is that discipleship isn't so much a dynamic relationship with a person who guides us like Jesus did the disciples. And it's not a program that we enter into that if we just do the work, we'll come out the other side of the disciple. No, a disciple is someone who consistently takes steps of obedience as God places them in front of us. So at Grace, being a disciple means we're someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. That's how we frame up disciples. And that's why this first trait we're focused on is that of step-takers. Step-taker is a way of saying disciple. Those words to me are interchangeable in our vernacular. Someone who is a step-taker, someone who's committed to taking their next step of obedience that God places in front of them. And listen, I'm a firm believer that God at every season of our life, no matter where we are in our relationship with him, always places a next step of obedience in front of us. There's no such thing as perfect sainthood where we get to perfection and we've got nothing left to do but simply be holy for the rest of our lives. There's always something else that God is pressing us to do. And it could be that you're here this morning and you're not yet a believer. You wouldn't call yourself a person of faith. Maybe your step of obedience is just to explore spirituality more, to explore Christianity more. Maybe it's to take a step of faith and profess faith in Jesus Christ. Maybe you've been coming for a little while and your step of obedience is to join a small group this morning or this semester and put yourself out there in that way. Maybe your step of obedience is to volunteer somewhere in the church or somewhere in the community and partner with what God is doing. Maybe your step of obedience, we're going to talk about being people of devotion, and I'm going to tell you that the most important habit that anyone can have is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. Maybe your step of obedience is to do that. Those are simple things, and I'm rooting for you that that gets to be yours. Because steps of obedience can get much harder than that. It could be to admit that we have an addiction and we don't know what to do about it. It could be to forgive that person in our life that probably doesn't deserve our forgiveness, but the anger we hold towards them is a cancer that eats us, not them. We could admit that a problem's too big for us. Maybe our next step of obedience is to approach our spouse and say, hey, neither of us have been happy for a while, but we have a responsibility for a joyful, godly marriage here to model for our kids, so let's figure this thing out. Maybe your next step of obedience is to quit a job or to change careers or to start a small group or to share the gospel with your neighbor. I don't know what your next step of obedience is, but I know that God is pressing one on each of us in the room. And here's the thing. Here's what I know, that if God presses on us to take a step of obedience, that Jesus will be there when we take it. Which is why I say that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The scarier the step God asks us to take, the more it deepens our faith when we take it and see that Jesus was there the whole time. And when we think about this model of discipleship simply being not necessarily life on life or a program that we do, but a step of obedience that we take, that really is the biblical model. That's how Jesus did it in here. If you read through the gospels, looking for Jesus to tell them to do something and to see whether or not they'll do it, what you'll see is that he really did form the disciples and train the disciples through these steps of obedience. I think about the call of the disciples. When he went and he called Peter, one of the greatest disciples. Peter had just got done fishing. He was on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. And Jesus went up to him and he says, hey, I want you to go back out there and I want you to cast your nets on the other side of the boat. Now, this is a hassle. Okay? This is annoying. Peter and his boys had just spent the whole day fishing. They didn't catch anything. They were discouraged. They had come in. They had wound up the nets. Have you seen those nets? Those things are huge. I can't imagine the unholy hassle it would be to just put those together at the end of every day and unfurl them at the beginning of the next day. It seems like a hugely tedious task. They had done that. They were done. They were putting up the boat. They were going to go and have some wine and olives and maybe some feta cheese. That's what I would do if I lived in Capernaum. They were looking forward to the next thing. And Jesus comes up and he says, hey, put that on hold. Go back out. Unfurl the nets on the other side. And Peter was obedient and he did it. And he had a greater catch than he had ever had before. He took a step of obedience. And Jesus grew his faith. Levi's call was different. Jesus went to Peter and he said, I want you to do your work more. And he went to Levi and he said, I want you to not do your work at all. Levi was a tax collector. He was making very good money because tax collectors did because they were jerks. And he goes to Levi who later would become Matthew. And he says, I want you to quit this and I want you to follow me. I want you to take this step of obedience. Quit your job and do what I'm asking you to do. And he did it. And he followed him. And Jesus turned him into a disciple and grew his faith. I think about him training them in ministry. When the disciples had been with him for a matter of months or a year or more, And he said, you've seen me casting out demons. You've seen me doing things in God's name. Now you go out too, but you pair off two by two, go into the surrounding towns and villages and you do what you saw me do. Go take this step of obedience and do what I'm asking you to do. And then I think about the restoration of Peter. And this is worth the sermon at some other point. I love this story in the Bible. But at the Last Supper, Jesus looks at Peter and he says, before the rooster crows in the morning, you will have denied me three times. And Peter says, no way, I would die for you, Jesus. And Jesus is like, okay, I'm not usually wrong about this stuff, but all right. And sure enough, that night, before the rooster crows, Peter denies knowing Jesus three times. And after the third time, the rooster crows, and Jesus looks Peter in the eye, and Peter goes away weeping because he's failed his Savior. And we see that Peter disqualifies himself from ministry because he goes back to what he was doing before he met Jesus, and he's fishing. And Jesus makes breakfast on the beach, and he up to Peter and he says, Peter, do you love me? Peter says, yes, Lord, you know I love you. He says, then feed my sheep. Obey me. Go do what I'm telling you to do. And then he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've trained you to do. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Then go take care of my lambs. Be a good shepherd like I've shown you how to be. Do what I've told you and taught you to do. Obey me and go and lead the church. It's this beautiful restoration. Three times Peter denies Christ. Three times Jesus says, do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. And what we really see throughout the New Testament, throughout the Gospels in particular, is that to be a disciple of Jesus is to be one who simply obeys Jesus. And if it's true that disciples are step-takers, then how do we make disciples? How do we get actively involved in making disciples of other people? We do it this way. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We don't have to jump in and have breakfast with them and show them what it is to be a godly person in all ways. No, we can just be in their life and help them see what their next step of obedience might be. Yeah, you should join that team. Yes, you should start that ministry. Yes, you should have that conversation. Hey, you should read this book with me and then let's apply it to our lives. It's just, it's helping someone identify and take their next step of obedience. And here's what I love about this model of discipleship is it allows us to speak into people's lives in categories, in specific ways. It allows you to invite someone into your life to teach you in a specific way, but not all the ways. When I went to Mr. Champion when I was in college and I said, will you disciple me? That was such a loaded question because in my naive 20-year-old brain, what I meant was, I didn't know this is what I meant, but what I meant was, will you meet with me for an hour once a week over a soggy waffle and teach me how to be a godly theologian, a godly husband in the future? Will you teach me things that I can remember so that I'll be a godly parent and a good dad for my kids? Will you disciple me in how to do ministry and be the good pastor that I want to be one day? I was putting on him my hopes and dreams for my whole life. Will you help me become who God wants me to be? That's a heavy weight. But if discipleship is simply helping people see their next step of obedience and take it, then I can go to somebody and I can say, hey, you've accomplished some things in your life and in your ministry that I admire. And you've done it in a godly way. Can I ask you questions about how to lead my church like you've led yours? You can go to a mom who's older and has children that seem to actually like her and say, hey, your kids are in the early years of high school and they will talk to you at restaurants. How did you do that? Teach me how to do that so that my children will talk to me when they get older. Will you disciple me in motherhood? You can go to someone who seems to know scripture really well. Say, hey, you seem to know the Bible well. Will you meet with me and just teach me how you study it and help me and point me to the books that you've read? And then after I read them, can we talk about that? We can invite people in for pockets of our life as we seek to take our next step of obedience, but we don't have to make someone or some program responsible for all of our discipleship. And I find it to be a really freeing thing to think about it in that way. Now here's why I'm talking about this today. Here's why I'm leading off the series with being a step-taker. So that I can tell you the story that I'm about to tell you. Before I do, I just want to finish up. This is kind of the sermon portion of the morning. The next is a family meeting. Our next step of obedience as a church is to get serious about being step-takers. I believe that we all have steps of obedience to take as individuals, and God is pressing those on us. And my prayer for you over this series is that you'll be open-hearted and open-minded and open-eared and open-eyed so that you'll be able to see what God is pressing on you to do. It's my prayer for you is that you'll take a step of obedience as a result of the series. But I also think that we as a church, grace, our partnership, we have a next step to take as a church as well. And it's to get serious about being step takers. And here's why I'm convinced of this. Two years ago in October, I was with a very good friend. He wasn't yet a good friend at the time, but he would become a very good friend in part as a result of this conversation. We were on the back porch late at night with our favorite beverages. And I believe that God works in those moments. Those are glorious nights. And we were talking about church and he's someone that's got a couple of years on me and so he was pressing on me a little bit and he was asking me questions. What do you want grace to be? What do you want to be? What do you want to be known for as a pastor? When you spin it forward five, ten years, what do you want to be true of you? What do you want to be true of grace? And he just, he kept pressing on me. And I said, well, what do you want grace to be? Well, you know, I've been a part of other churches and I've seen these patterns of unhealth in those churches. And I don't want grace to be a place that falls into those patterns. I don't want to do that. What do you want to be as a senior pastor? Well, I've, you know, I've been around other senior pastors and I've seen what it does to senior pastors to be the guy in the room for their whole life. And when you, when, when in most places, I know it sounds obnoxious, but I'm just being honest with you. All right. And if you want to judge me as a jerk, that's fine. You're probably right. But when you go through life, you've seen this in business. You've seen this in ministry. When you go through life and most rooms that you're in, you're the weightiest voice in that room, that does something to you. It messes you up. And if you don't monitor that stuff, you become an unholy jerk. That's why I've told the staff and the elders, part of your responsibility, your holy sacred duty to the church is to keep the senior pastor stink off me. And if I ever get to acting like I'm too big for my britches, some of y'all need to knock me down some pegs. Not this week, though. I'm busy. I lost my place. I said, so I don't want to become one of those guys. What about staff? What do you want to do with staff? Well, I've been on staff before, and it was unhealthy. It wasn't good. I've seen how church hurts people. I don't want to hurt people and burn people out. I don't want them to be a cog in the machine. I don't want staff to be taken for granted. And he kept asking me questions, and I kept him my best answers. And finally he got the smirk on his face and I said, what? And he goes, I feel like I know a whole lot about what you don't want to be. I don't have the first clue about what you do want to be or what you want grace to be. And I went, I think it's time for bed. He was right. And I realized that night and subsequent days and thought and prayer that my greatest vision for grace had only ever been health. My greatest vision for us was simply to be a place that was healthy. And for a while, for a while, that vision has served us very well. When I got here in 2017, that's the vision that we needed. We were grossly unhealthy in myriad ways. Those of you who weren't here at that time, I'm not going to go through the whole story, but let's just say that I got hired in the first week of April. I started in the first week of April in 2017. Let me just tell you, if they hadn't figured out how to get a warm body up here preaching by April, there is no way they would have made it out of May. Okay, they were teetering on the brink. If you were here, raise your hand if I'm lying. It was tough. And so we needed to get healthy. That's the vision that we needed to have. Then right about the time we got healthy, we launched the campaign, we do all the things, the whole nation got unhealthy with COVID. Our last Sunday was March 8th, 2020. We announced how much had been pledged for the campaign. And then we just didn't meet again. Do you realize that our next, that our last service was March 8th, 2020? That our next normal, non-summer, unmasked service was in September of 22, that COVID profoundly infected Grace for two and a half years. And it was somewhere in that two and a half years that I realized and accepted as we were trying to hold things together with duct tape and wire, we are never going back to that church that we were. All the health and all the growth that we saw were hitting the reset button. And I had to mourn that. And that was tough. And it made me want to quit at times. But we got back from COVID and we started rebuilding. And we've worked Gibby onto our, Aaron Gibson onto our staff, which has really been a bear. And we've gotten to a place of health again. Where one of the things I'm most proud of, you might find this silly, but one of the things I'm most proud of is that we had a friend in our small group that we had been friends with the whole time that we were at Grace who came on staff with Grace and we're still friends. I still treat her like my little sister and slam her laptop shut whenever I walk past her in the office. We're still buddies. There's no secrets that were found that made us unattractive. When someone comes on as an elder, they don't look around and go, this is really surprising. They look around and they go, this is pretty much what I thought was going to be going on over there. We have volunteers that come in during the week. They're not surprised by what they see. There's no seedy underbelly to grace. We are what you see. I am who I am on Sunday and on Wednesday, and so is everybody that I know. and I think with great pride we are a very healthy church. But I've also been deeply convicted that that's not enough. It's not enough to simply exist in our health. It's not enough to simply come on Sundays, praise God together, hear a sermon that's hopefully decent, and go home and reflect and then go to small group and yuck it up for 45 minutes and then pray for five. That's not enough. And what I see happening, I'm just going to speak honestly as your pastor right now, what I see happening is grace sinking into this healthy malaise where we're happy to be good enough. And this is where I will also press that, and I'm including me in this, that church-wide malaise sinking into good enough creeps into us too. And I know a lot of us, I know a lot of us, me included, who have settled for good enough in our own spiritual lives, who have gotten to a place of health and said, I think I'm good. I'm just going to cruise it in from here. You didn't, never did you cognitively think that. Never did we cognitively just slide into health as a church at Grace and go, well, there's nothing left to do. But we do it by default if we don't press to the next thing. And so this morning, together, I want us to press into the next step. Also, during that fall, I met somebody named Ru Sin, who is a worldwide church planner, tip of the spear stuff in countries where the gospel is illegal, and it is amazing. And I would go to these seminars that he would lead where he would train these pastors in these other countries how to make disciples in their churches. And he had so many slide decks and so many slide shows that I asked him if he proposed to his wife via slide deck. It was one of those guys, like so many. And it was so organized and so many different things and so many different modules and things that you need to do. And it was just mind numbing. And in one of those trainings, I took with me an elder of our church and that elder raised his hand and asked the question I wanted him to ask, which was, Rue, this is great, but discipleship is not linear. The Holy Spirit is wild. He's unpredictable. We can't program spiritual growth. So why are you trying to do that? And Rue's answer was fantastic. He said, you're right. The Holy Spirit is wild and free. The Holy Spirit is unpredictable and uses life experiences and different things to grow us in ways that we don't expect. He said, but that's the Holy Spirit's job is to grow. My job is to build the lattice work that directs where that vine grows. And as I heard him say that, I went, yep, that's what we need. That's our next step of obedience as a church. That's what I need to be working on is latticework for grace so that when someone says, I'm ready to grow spiritually, we have a way to point you and to point that growth. So last September, on this very same Sunday, the first one after Labor Day, last year it was September 10th, I stood up here and I said, hey, in my sabbatical I became convicted that I wasn't working for you guys as hard as I could. And I know a thing I need to do and I'm going to spend the better part of my year working on it. And I did. And we developed what we are calling discipleship pathways. These are in the lobby. I didn't put them in your seat because I didn't want them to be convoluted with your small groups thing. These are in the lobby. These are online. We've got a whole resource page that Carly worked on very hard that looks very good where you can go and you can see a list of all the things that I'm about to tell you about. In the discipleship pathways, in our lattice work to direct our spiritual growth, I sat down with Rue and I said, I want to develop this for grace, but I can't develop it like you develop it because we're not a slide deck church. We're not a linear class taking church. We need options. I'm not going to go tell anybody what to do. I'm certainly not going to go tell small group leaders what to do, but we need an answer to how we can grow spiritually. How can we develop this? And he said, well, what's important to you? What are the key values in your church? And I said, well, that's easy. The five traits that we are kingdom builders, that we are step takers, that we are a people of devotion, that we are partners and that we are conduits of grace. Those are what's valuable to us. And he goes, great, let's start there. And so what we have is each of the traits, conduits of grace, and then recommended opportunities and studies under each one of those things. People of devotion, how do I understand the Bible more? Things that I've written for that that are recommended for groups and for individuals. We got them for all five traits. If you go out into the lobby, you'll see over the glass doors where we have now emblazoned on the wall the five traits of grace. And now I know what to do with who we are, which is to press the partners of grace into embodying the five traits of grace all the time as much as I can, because it's our next step of obedience to take to become serious about taking steps. And we're going to see at the end of this series that the apex trait, the one that I want to push everyone to, what I want, what I want grace to produce is a church full of kingdom builders. And I can't wait to build there and tell you about exactly what that means. But these discipleship pathways, just so you understand what they are and how we're going to use them. Underneath each category, underneath each trait, is something that's called group study and then individual study. And the group study is things that you can do in your small groups. You want to grow as a conduit of grace in your small group. You can go to your small group leader and say, hey, could we maybe do this study this time around? I shared this with all the small group leaders on July 28th. They've already been thinking about it. So maybe they'll kick out two or three to you that maybe we can do in our group this semester. Is this what you'd like to do? Then there's individual studies, resources, things you can watch, things you can read so that you can grow on your own in these areas. I would also encourage you, we've talked about sacred spaces in here, having two or three people in your life who know you intimately and can encourage you spiritually. Maybe you go through a book in your sacred space and say, hey, will you guys, will you ladies read this together with me? Then we're also introducing something else that I'm very excited about called Pathway Courses. These are courses that are going to be offered as one-offs for you to take. They're not small groups. They're not part of your small groups, although your small group could together choose this semester, let's not meet as a small group. Let's go to this course that's being offered. The courses that we're offering, you're going to hear about one here in a few minutes. Doug Bergeson is going to be teaching through, he's one of our elders. He's going to be teaching through the big picture, a 30 week course. It's this, this semester and next semester that walks us through the Bible. A couple other guys, Jim Banks, Jim Adams and Burt Banks are going to be going through, yeah, Jim Banks. Don't tell them. They're going to be going through Bethel Bible Study. It's a two-year deal. It changed Jim's life, changed Burt's life, and we want to get a handful of people and go through that. I've become convicted that we have an unusual concentration of leaders in our congregation. There's more of you here that lead outside of these walls than what is normal in the population. And so I want it to be true that people who work for you, their life is better because they work for someone who came to grace. We want to impact them by impacting you. So one of the leaders in the church, one of the business leaders in the church and I developed a seven-week discussion thing for leaders to talk about being godly leaders in the workplace that we're going to go through. My dad wrote a theology 101 course that Gary Green is going to teach. Gary Green's in the back there in the blue shirt looking just great. Gary Green's going to teach that maybe as soon as next semester. We've got a couple more. Aaron's doing a theology of worship to take his team through and anybody else who wants to be interested in that. Those are courses. And we're not going to offer them all at once. We're going to offer them one at a time, sparingly. And make that something that's available to you that you can say, either as a small group, let's go through this together. Or you can just double up for a time. Or you can go to your small group leader and you say, hey, I'm going to take a semester off. I'm going to go do this. But that's what the discipleship pathways are. And there's nothing magical about this sheet of paper and the resources on it. There's nothing new under the sun here. The point is not to point to the pathways. The point is to get you on the pathways. The point is to get you to see that the next, I've said, this is the most important series we've done in years, and it's the most important thing we'll do for the next three to five years, because we cannot, listen to me, Grace, we cannot just happily stagnate in good enough. We cannot happily stagnate in healthy. We're healthy. We're here. We're moving forward. We're growing. We've got to ask what's next. Where do we go? And where I think we go is getting really serious about our spiritual health and our personal holiness and taking steps of faith together. So I hope that over the course of this series, you'll be ready to do just that. Let me pray. Father, thank you for the way that you gently convict, for the way that you bring us along. God, I pray that if we have been stagnating in our own health, that we would realize that that's a pretty precarious place to be. Father, challenge us in our own spiritual growth. Challenge us to take steps of obedience towards you. Challenge us, God. Help us to answer the call as a church to pursue you more earnestly. God, grow in us a desire for you. Grow in us a desire for holiness. Help us to model that for the people who are around us and use this series as a season of profound change for grace as you activate us to pursue you. In Jesus' name, amen.