Grace Raleigh Sermons

Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I'm the student pastor here at Grace. I'm thrilled to be here this morning to be able to kick off our joy series that we're going to be going through throughout December. To start out, we're going to be in John 1. And so I tell you that right now because I would love for you to be able to open up your Bibles with me if you've brought them or if you can get the one out of the back of the seat. We're going to be reading out of John 1. And as you're turning to that, I wanted to make a quick shout out to my younger brother, Jay, who's also a student pastor and who is also preaching at his church this morning. And so I say that one to say, Jay, we're thinking about you and we're praying for you. But also as a public service announcement to you that if you leave and you say, man, that sermon was not good, then I assure you, you can go to his church's website and listen to his recording tomorrow and it will be much better than what you have this morning. Anyways, let's go ahead and let's jump into scripture. We're going to be reading that light so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light. He came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. Let me reread 6 through 8 real quick. Let's pray real quick. God, thank you for bringing us here this morning. God, thank you for allowing me to come and just get to share my joy in you. Allow that joy to radiate through me, and please speak through me this morning and into the hearts of the people who are here. God, we love you so much. Amen. So just a quick background before we really jump in and before we really dive into these verses, I want to give a little background behind the John that is being talked about in here. This is not the titular John of the actual book. This is talking about John the Baptist. John the Baptist is someone who's also referred to as or known as John the Forerunner. He was basically the forerunner for the Messiah that he was actually prophesied about saying there will be a man who comes. He will come and he will make way for the Lord. He will make way for the light for Jesus. This man, he's going to come and he is going to make it known that Jesus was on the move and that Jesus was on the way. He lived in the woods. He was kind of a gross dude. He ate bugs. His entire purpose, his entire life's mission and life's goal was just preaching to these people. What was he preaching? He was preaching, get ready, get prepared, repent, because the Lord is coming, Jesus is on his way, and he is about to rock everyone's world. He was Jesus' cousin. He had a similarly miraculous birth, just as Jesus had. He had all of this awesome stuff. He had these things that made him special, so he should be in the Bible, right? He had a miraculous birth. He was prophesied for that literally people hundreds of years before had said, this guy is going to come, and he's going to signify the coming of Jesus. And all of these things are incredible. Maybe more notable than all of those things is that Jesus himself said, John is the greatest of any man who's been born of a woman. That there is no one greater than John. And that is high praise. That is the highest praise. That is coming from Jesus' mouth. And you think about it, it's like, that makes sense, right? There's a lot of special and there are a lot of miraculous things. But what I think is that Jesus said that not simply because he was somebody who was prophesied about, not simply because he was one who came and fulfilled a prophecy and had this miraculous birth and experienced these miracles, but because he was someone who understood his calling and understood his life and how he stacked up against Jesus and his entire life was motivated by that. I think what made him so great and why he was so notable and noteworthy and standoutish in Jesus' eyes was because he understood the claims of seven and eight. He came as a witness to testify concerning the light so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light. He came only as a witness to the light. And so I stand here this morning with my ultimate goal and my ultimate message being that I think that it is attainable for us to be seen in the light and to be seen in the light of Jesus' eyes as the same type of person as John the Baptist. No, we are not going to be the named fulfillment of prophecy. And no, we are not. Most of us probably didn't have this miraculous birth, but every single one of us can live that passage out. Every single one of us can live the calling of John's life, of that we realize and we understand that we are not the light. But boy, do I know the light. And I think why John stood out in this time was because I think better than any person who walked the earth prior to Jesus's death and resurrection, I think John understood why Jesus was there. And when you understand why Jesus is there, how could you do anything but proclaim what he was coming to do? This man that you've been looking for, that you've been searching for, this king that us Israel Jews, that we have been searching for and that we've been excited to come and so ready for so he can come and save us. I'm here to tell you that he's here. And I think John knew that he wasn't meant to be an earthly king like a lot of people thought. I think John understood that it meant that he was going to solidify our eternal home in heaven. And that meant that he had this joy in Christ and this passion for Christ that allowed him to preach in such a way that as he preached in the back of these woods and ate these things that all of these people, thousands of people in Israel had to come and hear what he had to say. Because he had a message worth hearing and he was preaching it out of the joy that he had found through knowing and understanding that message. And so when he was asked, when people came to him and he said, are you this person? Are you this light? Are you the savior that is coming and the king that is going to come and save us? He said, no. There is one that's coming that is far greater. And I guarantee you, I promise you, he is going to be far more than anything that you could ever understand. And so now, repent, give way to him. John was a huge deal. He was a biblical hero. But what I'm here to tell you is I think at his base, he understood that he wasn't the light and that he understood who the light was. And because he came in contact with him, it changed his life forever. And it built up this joy in him where he had to let it out to everyone he possibly could. As I was thinking about this, and as I was thinking about John and his life and what that looked like, and as I was thinking about how that connects to our life and maybe what it looks like in our life, I was reminded of an episode of one of my favorite shows. Now, if you ask any of my students, if you ask any of my friends, if you ask my small group, if you ask my family, hey, what do you think the over-under for how many sermons it'll take Kyle to come to a TV or to a movie reference? Every one of them would say probably one, and it'll be within the first two minutes. I love TV. I love movies. I watch it all the time. I make way too many quotes and references. I've got students up here laughing because they know it. I've got small group people that I see in the back laughing because they also know it. Yeah, hey, I got a fist bump in the back, so I know I'm saying something that someone agrees with. They would all say one, but hey, I'm here to tell you. I mean, hold your applause, but I'm here to tell you that it is now my third sermon here at Grace, and this is only going to be my first TV reference. But I just think it's perfect. This reference is going to be from a show called The West Wing. I don't know how many of you guys have seen it or know of it or whatever. It's an older show. It's a show that's on Netflix that I have watched. I'm actually currently re-watching it on Netflix because I just think it's that good and because, as previously stated, I love watching TV. In this particular, well, let me give you a background behind what the West Wing is. If you don't know what the West Wing is, it is basically giving a peek behind the curtain at what the West Wing of the White House looks like, of the offices and the president and the president's staff and them working and running a country. And this particular episode that I'm thinking about is actually a flashback episode. And so we know that these people are in the White House, that there's a president,b Bartlett, and then he has this staff that is working, and they've done this. This episode in particular is a flashback that talks about how the staff came to be on staff for President Bartlett. And so it opens up with this guy named Josh Lyman. He's basically, he is running the campaign for this other presidential candidate named John Hoynes. They basically have it sewn up. This guy is going to be the next Democratic presidential candidate. He's got the whole thing sewn up in the bag. Everyone else is a far distant second, and they know that it's going to happen. It opens up, though, not really as exciting, as joyful as that sounds. This opens up. They're sitting in a circle, and Josh is going off and arguing and fighting against all of the other people that are at this table. And it ends with John Hoynes. The candidate walks him out and says, Josh, dude, you've got to chill out. You've got to get off of my back. You've got to get off of these people's backs. To which Josh says, sir, I don't know what we're about. I don't know what we're for. I don't know what we're against. I don't know what we believe in. All I can really tell is that we're for winning and that we're against losing. And you see the guy who is destined to become the chief of staff to the president, one of the highest jobs that you can hold in this country, and yet you see in his face, you hear in his voice the discontent, that it's not enough because he's working for this guy that he doesn't see is the real deal. That conversation ends, and one of Josh's dad's old buddies comes up to him. His name is Leo. He says, Josh, can I talk to you for a minute? So they walk outside, and Leo says, Josh, I'd like for you to go see a guy named Jeb Bartlett speaking in Nashua in a few days. Josh is like, why would I do that? Like, not only, like, I know that he is a presidential candidate, but I'm already working for a candidate. And not only am I working for a candidate, I'm working for the candidate, right? I'm working for the candidate who is about to win. Why would I go and check out this guy who has absolutely no way of winning? And Leo says, I just think you should check him out. If not for me, just do it because I'm an old friend of your dad's. And he walks away. And you see in Josh's eyes, and you see this glimmer of hope that this is probably a task that is not going to produce any fruit. He's probably going to go, be like, all right, I did it. You're welcome, sir. But you can see that there's some type of intrigue because what you realize is he realizes this could be the real thing, that just in case I want to go check it out. And so he books a trip to go there. On his way there, before he goes, he hits up New York City. He hits up this guy named Sam, one of his buddies who's working in this law office. Basically, Sam is this brilliant lawyer that what he does, in probably his words, he works for the bad guys and makes sure that he insures the bad guys to where they don't lose money if they skimp in ways when they buy boats and ships in case they have some type of oil spill or whatever. Like, not good dudes. Like, can we all agree? Nods all around the room, not good dudes. And so you can see within Sam's life before Josh comes into it that Sam is pretty discontent as well, right? He's not happy there. He doesn't really want to be there. It's basically just a job. It's a law firm that's about to make him partner. Josh shows up. They go get a hot dog, 9.30 a.m. I don't know why I said that, but it's a funny fact, and so I said it. They go, and basically Josh says, man, I'd love for you to come work for us. You're a great writer. Come write some speeches. Come be a part of our campaign. Make it better, and you can work for the next president of the United States. Sam pretty quickly turns him down. And you understand that, right? Like, you understand, like, he's got a life in New York. He's got a job who pays really well in New York, and he's happy, and he's satisfied there. Or he may not be happy, but he's satisfied there. And that makes sense until you see, until you peel back the curtain as to why he really turned him down. He says, Josh, Hoynes isn't the real thing, is he? The guy that you're working for that's about to be the president, he's not the real thing, is he? Josh stumbles and he fumbles around for his words until finally Sam cuts him off. He's like, dude, what are you doing, man? What are you doing? And Josh, I don't know. Before he leaves, Josh says, hey, Sam, I'm going to see this guy speak in Nashua. If I see the real thing, do you want me to come and tell you? Sam says, you won't have to because you've got a terrible poker face. So Josh heads over to Nashua. He listens to this man. He's sitting in this like half-filled VFW room with these old families that are there, and he's giving this speech. Josh is chilling, whatever. At the end of the speech, they take questions. Someone raises his hand. He stands up. He says, Mr. Bartlett, I voted for you three different times. And you have continued to choose to hurt me and my family and my crops and what I do. You are taking money out of my pocket. How whatever he can to where even if he's lying, he's telling them what they want to hear because he needs their vote to win a presidency. But instead, he stands up, he says, you know what, you're right. I got you pretty good there. And I'm sorry that you lost money, but I am standing here and telling you that I did what I think is right. My goal was not about the money in your pockets, but to make milk more accessible to all people. He stands in front of these farmers and tells them, yes, I have made movements that have hurt you, that have taken money from your pockets, but I'm telling you that I stood up and I did what I believe is right. And if you're asking me to tell you something different now that I'm standing here in front of you, I'm not going to do it. And if you don't think that that's a value that you want in your presence, then do not vote for me. He stood up for what he believed and for what he knew was right in his eyes instead of telling these people what they wanted to know. He wasn't running an election. He wasn't being a politician. He was just being someone who said, I want to stand up for what I think is right. And it pans to the back of the room to Josh. And he doesn't go and talk to anyone. He doesn't go and talk to Leo who invited him. You instead just see a guy who just looks up and you see just this wonder and this awe in his eyes as he's listening to this president talk. And he's like, are you kidding me? This is it. This is the real thing. This guy's not trying to win an election. This guy's trying to do the right thing. And if he can do that, he would love to win an election so he can continue to do what he thinks is right. He realized that he had spent all of this time with John Hoynes just trying to win an election. And now here is this guy standing up for what he knows is right. Speaking truth to that power, standing up for his convictions. And you can see in his face that his life is about to change. Just in his face and just in the joy of his face, you can tell this guy's all in. So what does he do? He goes right back to New York. He's so excited that he forgets where Sam works and he forgets the name of the law agency. And so he's standing out in the middle of the pouring rain on this payphone and he's talking to the operator saying, ma'am, what are some of the law agencies? I don't know how to call. I want to call ahead, but I can't remember his law agency because he's freaking out because he's so excited. He goes, but ma'am, you've got to help me out. I just saw this guy and I just, you got to help me. He can't get the words out because he's so overjoyed that he's finally found the real thing. When he finally finds Sam's law office, Sam is sitting there with his clients and he's sitting there with the rest of the people that are on the staff. Josh comes up to the window. He knocks on it. Sam looks up and you see Josh grinning ear to ear, soaking wet, doesn't say a word, points at his face. And Sam knows that is joy. That's what I'm looking for. That's the face I was looking for. And that's how you're going to get me to come with you. He stands up. He walks out of the room. And that is that for Josh and Sam working for President Bartlett. And this was a flashback episode, so we already know how it goes. We know that their life becomes fixated on getting this guy elected. And that once he becomes elected, you're able to see over and over again that because they love this man and because they believe in this man, because he's the real deal, they are happy and proud to say, I serve at the pleasure of the president. Now this is a human and worldly example, but is that not what it looks like to be someone who believes this passage? This is the real deal. I've experienced this, and because of that, I am overwhelmed with joy and excitement. And I'm so passionate about this now that I have to let people know. Josh had seen the real thing. And because of that, his joy was uncontainable. He had to let it out. He had to let his buddy know. He had to let the world know of who this guy was because this guy was the real thing. And it was unmistakable. There was no way to of passion and the type of joy that John had experienced and why he had made such an impact in Israel. Oh my gosh, look at this Jesus that I get to tell you about. I cannot wait to tell you what he's going to do for you. And I think that is where the impact came from. Because he himself was not the light. He came only to be a witness to the light. And I believe that this is what our lives are meant to look like. Not only do I believe it, I think that throughout the Bible, everybody is caught like there's just this huge, giant call of your life should reflect Christ. Your life should build up Christ. Your life should make Christ known. Your words, your actions, everything should make Christ known. In John 20, 21, Jesus says to his disciples, one of the last things he says before he's raised up to heaven, he says, peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you. The Father has sent me. I'm going back up to heaven. You are now my body. It is now your turn to go and be a witness to me. Unlike John, guess what? We've got the rest of scripture. Unlike John, who is so overjoyed and so impassioned by this is the Jesus that is coming, this is the Jesus who's coming to win, this is the Jesus who's coming to save, we have the joy and the passion of this is the Jesus that we live in. Not simply the expectation of the light that is to come, but as the result of the light that has come. The joy that John was promising through Christ has now been seen. It has been delivered to us and we live in a time where we are able to point to Christ in all of who and what he was and is. We're able to see his life on earth and be able to read and say, oh my gosh, look at the way that he loved. Look at the way that he served. Look at the way that he healed. We look at his death and we realize that this death, that his ultimate reason for coming was to die for us, that he took our sins and he said, I am making a way for you to enter into eternity with your father and with my father because I'm going to die for you. He was raised to life signifying the end of death for anyone who would believe. And he was raised up to heaven, sitting at the right hand of God, constantly, every day, every minute, every hour, interceding for us with the Father, that we forever have access directly to the Father because of Jesus. This joy is no longer living out of the expectation of who will Jesus be, but the reality of who Jesus is forever. And so I ask you, how much worse should our poker face be? How much harder should it be for us to contain this joy? John the Baptist was called to witness, and he witnessed the light. Not in the way of Josh going to Sam in the first time, where he knew it was out of obligation. He knew it's what he should do. Sam immediately saw through that. He could tell that Josh didn't truly believe what he was asking him to do. No. How did John the Baptist do it the way that Josh did it the second time where all it took was one look to see that something about Josh was different because he had encountered the light. John the Baptist encountered the light and he was never the same because of it. And just as he was called to witness to the light, so are we. And so this Christmas, I urge you to seek after this joy. If you just started coming to church or if you've been around church for a while but you've never truly found or experienced this joy, I ask that you would pursue that over anything else this Christmas. Pursue the real thing. And if you have found it, allow this to serve as a reminder to how good, how great God is, and allow this Christmas season that every time you think about, you get so overjoyed at the fact that we are celebrating not only that Christ is coming, but that Christ has come. And let this joy radiate from your lives in a way that is unmistakable. Let's pray. God, thank you so much for all that you are. God, the more I learn about you, the more overjoyed I am because I just realize how far from you and how distant from you that I should be, but because of all that you've done, because of your love and because of your sacrifice, that God, I'm able to have access to you and to your Father. Lord, I pray that our lives radiate your joy, that as we witness, it's not out of obligation, but it's out of a joy and a passion of something that we cannot hide. God, we love you so much. Amen.

Well, hello. This is the last part of our series in Ephesians. We've been going through Ephesians now for six weeks, so this week we arrive at Ephesians chapter 6. Ephesians chapter 6 is a famous passage. It's got the armor of God starting in verse 10, and that's where we are going to land this week. I've been excited to get here and have thought a lot about the best, most effective way to approach this passage. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn to Ephesians chapter 6. If you don't have a Bible, I would encourage you to grab the one in the seat back in front of you and go ahead and turn there so that you can be looking through the text as we go through it together. I always think it's helpful if we look at it and we process it at the same time in the same way. So as I approach the text this week, I actually, I did the normal research that I do, but I wanted to call a buddy of mine who has some experience in combat. This particular guy did what we see on the movies. He's a special forces guy over in Iraq, Afghanistan. And they would do night raids every night where you drop in, you go into somebody's home or a compound or a building, you have a target and then you have the secondary targets and you try to either eliminate or obtain them. That's the technical term for kill or kidnap them. So you go in and you do that, and that's what they did every night. And then for part of the career, they watch on the screen as the rest of the team does it. It's like the stuff you see in the movies. And so I thought, I want to know what his perspective is on this text. And so I gave him a call, and we talked it through, and I love military stuff. I am too feeble of body to have been effective in it, but I like to hear about other people who are. And so we talked at length about things, and he shared with me two things that I thought would be really helpful for us as we approach this passage. He told me that in a good raid, when you would go in and you've got your target, he's in the house or he's in the compound or whatever it is, and you're bringing these special forces operators to bear on the target, you're trying to obtain the target. I think we kind of picture that in the movies as depicted as a firefight, like you drop in from a helicopter and like everybody's, they're armed and you're armed and you fight your way into the compound and you get the person. But he said really and truly what they would try to do rather than just landing close and letting them know, hey, we're here and inviting the conflict, that what they would try to do whenever they possibly could is drop about six kilometers away from the target and then sneak in, walk in under the cover of night without being detected. And what he told me was an effective raid would end with no shots being fired. That they would get into the compound, into the home, into the building, into the area, and that they would have their primary target and the secondary and the tertiary targets, and everybody would be at gunpoint before the lights would get flipped on, and then the lights get flipped on, and everybody surrenders and go home. His words were, actually, if they decide to resist at that point, that's on them. I thought, well, gosh, I would not resist. But he said those were the best raids, was when there was no shots fired at all, when the enemy didn't even realize that they were in a conflict until they were already captured. I thought that was interesting. I'll tell you why in a minute, but I wanted to talk about this other point that he made too. He said the most dangerous time for him and his teams was actually not the firefight. It was not when they were engaged in combat. They were prepared for that. They had a plan for that. They knew where everybody was going to be. They knew where all the targets were going to be. If the enemy did something, they knew how to counter that. They were ready. They're not worried at all about once they're engaged in conflict. The most dangerous point of any raid for them was actually the approach to the target. Because you don't know while you're approaching the target if they can see you. You don't know if they're about to open up machine guns on you. You don't know if you're about to be under attack. You don't know if you're about to be ambushed. The most dangerous time, he said, was as they were approaching the target. And he actually noticed in his early years of doing this, in the early months of doing this, that as they're approaching the target, he's not really aware of what's around him. His head is already in the compound. He's already at the plan. He's going through, when we get here, I'm going to go to the eastern wall, and we're going to breach this door, and there's going to be this many people, and yada, yada. He's going through this in his mind, but he noticed that the veterans, the guys who had done dozens if not hundreds of these, seemed to be almost talking to themselves the whole way up, concentrating on other things. And he learned that what these guys are doing is they're constantly assessing their surroundings. They're constantly preparing themselves. If we get attacked now, I can duck behind that wall. I can go behind that rock. That car will provide cover. We can return fire from here. They're constantly, every hundred feet, redoing their attack plan and their defense strategy. If we get attacked, if they throw it open on us here, then I'm going to go here, and my men can go here, and we can attack, and then we can counter like this. And in both instances about the plan and the strategy of these raids and the danger encountered in these raids, it occurred to me that the most dangerous time of any conflict is when you don't realize you're in one. The most dangerous time of any conflict is when you don't yet realize that you're in it. Those guys sitting in the compound getting raided, they were trying, the strategy of the U.S. military is to avoid making them aware that they're even in combat until it's too late. Do you see that? A good raid is when there's no shots fired. It's when they don't even know that they are under attack until it's too late for them to do anything about it. They wanted to withhold that information from their opponent for as long as possible because the most dangerous time in any conflict is when you don't know you when you're in it. And then walking to the target. The most dangerous time was that they might be in a conflict before they're ready to be in a conflict. They might be in an ambush. They might throw it open on them before they're ready to be in that conflict. And I thought, oh, how interesting as we think about spiritual warfare, that the most dangerous time of any conflict is when we're in one and we don't realize it. And this, I think, is what Paul is trying to open our eyes to in Ephesians chapter 6. And it's why he writes what he writes. At the end of this letter, he's written this letter to this church, not necessarily to Ephesus, but to the churches surrounding Ephesus, and it ended up camping out in the church of Ephesus. But to many churches, to many early churches, he writes a letter. He describes what salvation is. He says what we do because we're saved. How should we live and how should we live in the home and in the workplace and with our children? And then he finishes up the letter with a warning followed by an encouragement. And the warning has a lot to do with the point that we just made about being unaware of the conflicts that we're in. Look at what he says, beginning in verse 10. We're going to go 10 through 12 right now. Paul writes, finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God. We're going to talk about what that is in a second. That you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. This is such an important verse. Listen to this verse. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Paul is saying, listen, listen, listen, you need to know this. Listen, hey, pay attention. We are in a conflict. We are in a battle. To be born into the world is to be born into the midst of an eternal struggle of good versus evil over God versus Satan. To be born into the world is to be born into a conflict where there are elements warring against and for your very soul. So wake up. We're in a battle. And if the most dangerous point of any conflict is to be in it and not be aware that we are in it. Then what Paul is doing is he's grabbing the church in Ephesus and he's grabbing our attention 2,000 years later and he's going, hey, listen, you need to know. Everything's not okay right now. Everything's not safe right now. You are in a conflict. Whether you know it or not, whether you admit it or not, whether you feel it or not, you are in one. And we don't like to talk about this a lot. We don't like to think about this a lot. I certainly don't like to preach about it a lot. But if we believe that the Bible is true, then we have to believe this uncomfortable truth about our reality, that Satan is real and that he is against you. We don't like thinking about it. We don't like talking about it. No one comes to church going, you know what I hope Nate talks about? The devil. But here's the truth. Satan is real and he is against you. And I would add, he is smarter than you, he has more energy than you, and he is more passionate than you about his goal. And his goal is to hurt God any way he can by tearing people away from his eternal love. And then once you are signed up for his eternal love, once you have received salvation and you have God's love, then his goal is to tear you away and to ruin you from being effective at all at bringing other people into a knowledge of God. It's to make you so ineffective in your faith that you have no impact whatsoever in the kingdom. He is at war against you. This is why Peter says in his letter, 1 Peter 5, at the end, he writes a letter to the church as well. This is just a general epistle that floated around to all of the churches in the ancient world a few years after the death of Jesus. And he finishes his letter the same way. Verse 8 in chapter 5, be sober-minded, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. We've all watched those nature shows, right? You've seen the gazelles out on the Serengeti? They're just like chilling out, munching on grass or whatever it is. And there's a pride of lions in the bushes waiting for the one that they're going to devour. Those gazelles are in a conflict and they don't know it. And their adversary is prowling around waiting to find someone to devour. Incidentally, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's too important to pass up here. Who are the ones that he always gets? Who are the ones that the lions always get? The ones that wander away from the herd. Church, a small group, consistency, and a family of faith, it's important. The further away we wander, the more vulnerable we become. But I thought it was interesting that the two fathers of the early church, I mean the two pillars, the guys, if you were in the early church a couple years after Jesus passed away and then goes back up into heaven, If you're in the early church, you know that Peter's the guy. There's the apostles, but Peter is the leader. He is the leader of the church in Jerusalem. And if you go outside of Jerusalem to any of the churches, Paul is the guy. And both of these pillars of the church wrote a letter to the general churches. And at the end of both of their letters, they both said, wake up. We are in a conflict. We don't like to talk about it. We don't like to think about it. But we exist as physical people in a spiritual realm and there are spiritual forces that are against us. Satan is real and he is against you. And he is smarter than you and he is more dedicated than you. So make no mistake about it. We are in a conflict. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, and this is for Christians and non-Christians alike. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, try to choose purity in this world. Try to choose sexual purity in this world. And tell me that you don't every day feel forces pressing against that. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, try to raise a kid. For these boys that were up here, those of you who have kids who are grown, as you look at the Janczewskis who are up here with their two little boys and all the triumphs and all the trials that are in front of them, try to tell them that they're not in a conflict for the souls of their boys. Listen, when I talk about passages like this, when we encounter passages like this, there's kind of two ways to respond to them. If we believe in that fight or flight doctrine, some of us have in us fight. That when you start talking about conflict, you start talking about fight, you start talking about spiritual warfare. I open up a sermon with talking about special forces in Iraq. Some of us in the room are like, I'm in, let's go. What you got? Some of us like that stuff. There's others of us in the room who are a little bit more like my wife. She's sweet, man. Fighting, that's not her thing. Conflict, that's not how she does. I start talking about spiritual warfare, she's like, nah, you have fun with your warfare. But here's the thing. She's in just as much of a conflict as I am. This isn't just for a select few. Whether this passage speaks your language or it doesn't, whether you are fierce or whether you are timid, whether you fight or whether you would choose flight, wherever you are on any of the spectrums, be very clear, we exist in a conflict and Satan himself is warring against your marriage. He is warring against your children. He is warring against your friends. He is warring against your family. He is warring against the things that you love the most and his goal is to steal your life from you and to make you as ineffective as possible by catching you up and all the entrapments of the world so that you do nothing for the kingdom. If you hear nothing else this morning, please don't leave here. Wandering through the field, eating grass like a gazelle, unaware that you're in a conflict. As I thought about this passage as your pastor, I wondered, including me, how many times do we sit at home flicking through our phone while there is a night raid being planned against us? We are in a conflict. And because we are, Paul finishes the passage. What do we do? Because we're in a conflict, because it exists, because Satan is real and he is against us, because he's prowling about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, what do we do? Well, the rest of the passage gives us the answer. In verse 13, he starts it out. He says, therefore. Now, hopefully you've heard me say this before. A little bit of biblical interpretation. This is high-level graduate school stuff. Whenever you see a therefore in Scripture, you have to ask, what's it there for? I know, it's very technical. What did he just say that allows him to say what he's going to say? So what this therefore means is, because you're in a battle, here's what you need to do. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand firm, stand therefore. Having fastened on the belt of truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, He finishes by saying, praying at all times. So if we're in a battle for our marriages, for our families, for our children, for our friends, for our very souls, if we are in a battle, what do we do? We put on the whole armor of God. And I've seen a lot of people go through and break down each element. What's the belt of truth? And what's the helmet of salvation? And what's the shield of faith and the breastplate of righteousness? And we could do that, but I would just make two points about that. It's boring. And ultimately, it's not super helpful. What we need to know, those are the defensive elements of God's armor. And what we need to know about them is that the defensive elements, the armor that we put on to protect us from the onslaught of the devil is essentially salvation. It's the idea of clothing ourself in salvation. If you want to look back at each one of the elements, they're an element of salvation or something that comes to us as a result of salvation or something that is required so that we can receive salvation. But it's this idea of if we are going to stand firm, because we are in a conflict, what do we do? We clothe ourself in the salvation that God offers us, and we stand firm. I love at the beginning it says, when you have done everything you can to stand, stand therefore. Stay. And I've always pictured in my mind, I don't know how your mind works as I've thought about this passage, I've always pictured this weathered soldier as I think about a mature believer who just stands there with the shield of faith decked out in armor and the evil one is sending the flaming darts towards them and they just weather it. They're just a bulwark in the storm of conflict, and they will not back down, and they will not retreat, and they just stand there, and they take it. That's what I've always pictured. And then I talked to my buddy about this passage, and I said, when you read this passage as a soldier, what do you see? And he said, you know, it's interesting as I read it this week that the only thing I was really interested in was the weapon. He said, as a soldier, when he looks at this and it gets to the armor part, he's like, yeah, that's great, that's great. What's my weapon? What can I fight with? He said, in the special forces, they keep talking about building these like Iron Man suits that make you like impenetrable or whatever, like a juggernaut on the battlefield. And that nobody in special forces is really that interested in these because they don't care. That's not about defending ourselves. It's about what's my weapon and how do I attack the enemy? And he went through a couple of doctrines of attack of the United States military. And the commonality that they had is when you get in a conflict, the best defense is a good offense. When you get in a conflict, the thing you're trying to do as quickly as you can is attack, attack, attack. We do not stand there. They're not just standing there taking it, just weathering the storm of bullets. They attack as quickly and as forcefully as they can. So when he reads this, he wants to know, what's my weapon? How do I go on offense? How do I attack the person who's attacking me? I loved that. That changed my paradigm for me. Because so often I had this picture of the Christian life of somebody who just stands there on the hill, weathering the throes of the evil one, weathering the battle, just standing there as a bulwark and being defensive in this posture of, I will not move, waiting on Jesus. But that's not the picture that the word of God paints. And that's not the picture that my military friend has in his head because there's a weapon here with which we can attack and beat back the attacks of the evil one. It's similar to the wording that Jesus uses when he announces his church. When Peter says, you are Jesus, the son of the living God. And Peter says, yes, you are Peter. And on this rock, I will build my church. And we know that part, but what comes after that? And the gates of hell will not overcome it. The gates are not offensive, they are defensive. Jesus paints this picture of his church forcefully attacking the powers of evil. And so for me, it changed the way I think about what a successful soldier looks like. A successful soldier in this conflict is not one that just sits back and holds up the shield of faith and weathers the storm. It is one that presses forward and attacks. So he wanted to know, in this armor, what's my weapon? What do I get? Our weapon, according to the text, is God's word. The sword of the spirit, which is God's word, is what Paul says. Our weapon, what we use to beat back the attacks of evil against us and our families and our loved ones? Our weapon is God's word. And so to me, the question becomes, why is this the weapon? What's so effective about God's word? And so you can look at the claims that God's word makes about itself. In Hebrews, we're told that the word of God is living and active. It's sharper than any two-edged sword, that it penetrates soul and spirit, bone and marrow. Jesus tells us that God's word will not return null and void. There is this power and efficacy to it. But as I thought about it on a practical level, there's plenty of reasons why God's word is the most effective possible weapon against the schemes of the evil one. But there's two that I wanted to highlight this morning. The first is that God's word speaks eternal certainty, eternal truth into temporal uncertainty. God's word speaks eternal truth into temporal uncertainty. If there are forces working against us, then one of the things that they want to do is to shake our faith, is to make us feel like the world is spinning around and there's nothing that can be done about it. Everything's going to hell in a handbasket. This place is getting worse and worse. This is spiraling out of control. I don't know how this just this last week. Last Friday, we had our very first parent-teacher conference. Lily, our daughter, is going to turn four in January, and she's in preschool, and we had our very first teacher conference. Jen was very excited to go, and she said, I'm so nervous about what they're going to say about Lily. I'm like, she's three. I can say anything that matters. Like, it's whatever. And so she goes, and she's got this sweet teacher named Michelle. And Michelle has really, really short hair because we learned that Michelle is a cancer survivor, and now she's fighting cancer again. And so when Jen went, she shared with Michelle that she was about to run home. Michelle says, oh, why are you doing that? And she said, well, my dad has cancer and he's going to get a scan and I want to be home for that. And so then Michelle shared her story. And as Michelle shared her story and empathized with Jen and understood in this unique way what her family is going through, they began to cry together. And into those tears, Michelle began to share verses off the top of her head that had helped her in her journey and that strengthened Jen in that moment. She spoke eternal truth into temporary uncertainty. And then, as they began to talk about Lily, which it turns out that Lily excels at most things that preschoolers should excel at. She has a hard time holding scissors. So if you see her trying to hold scissors, please don't make any jokes. She's very sensitive. But then they started talking about Lily and all the things where she, all the ways that she's good and all the ways where she can grow. And for everyone, Jen told me as she was recounting the conversation to me, she said, Nate, for every one of these, Michelle, she had a passage to go with it. And she wasn't looking at notes. She was just speaking truth out of God's word over Lily and what was going on. She just breathed scripture. She said, Nate, I want to be like that. And as a dad and a husband, I'll try to keep it together and not get choked up. I am so grateful that there is a woman who is in the conflict, who has sharpened her sword, and who is swinging it on my family's behalf. She's speaking truth into my wife and strengthening her against the enemy. She's speaking truth over my daughter and protecting her against the onslaughts there. Because at some point in her life, she has dedicated herself to sharpening her sword so that it's ready for the battle. At one point or another, she realized that her battle is not against flesh and blood. It's against the spiritual forces in the heavenly places that would seek to tear us away from our God. And so she's awake, and she's standing firm, and she's swinging her sword in that instance for my family. And I'm grateful for that. That's why it's the best weapon. It's also the best weapon. We see this in the life of Christ. I'm gonna get my act together now. It's the best weapon because it overpowers the strength of temptation. I believe that there is something supernaturally powerful. I think that there is something supernatural that happens when we speak God's word into temptation. When we face these moments of trial where we want to go one direction and we can call up a portion of scripture that encourages us to go in the other direction. Jesus exhibited this in his 40 days of fasting at the beginning of his ministry. He fasted for 40 days in the desert. At the end of those 40 days, Satan, the adversary, appeared to him and tempted him in three different ways. And all three times, based on my old understanding of the passage in Ephesians, I would expect Jesus to clothe himself in his own righteousness and just stand there and take the temptation as the onslaught comes. But that's not what he does. He returns, he attacks with the sword of the spirit with God's word in all three instances. Rather than standing there and taking it and weathering it, he returns fire with the word of God that overpowers the strength of that temptation, and the enemy goes away. He quotes scripture to temptation. I've seen this in my own life. I don't very often like to set up myself as the example, but I saw this in my life when I was going through memorizing Romans chapter 8. A couple years ago, I just decided that I wanted to memorize Romans chapter eight. And so by God's grace, I was successful at doing that. But when you commit yourself to memorizing an entire chapter of God's word, it runs in your head all the time, whether you want it there or not. The way that I did it is I used my car rides. I had YouVersion up on my phone and and then at stoplights, I would read as much of the passage that I could, and then in between stoplights, I would try to say it back to myself. So it was playing all the time in my head. And during that season of life, I can't tell you how many times something came up, and I went, that reminds me of verse 13. That reminds me of verse 27. That reminds me of verse 39. I can't tell you how many times it came up where that was all of a sudden relevant again to what I was dealing with in life. I can't tell you how many times I was able to speak the truth of that passage against temptation so that I was no longer interested. And with God's word rolling in your head and in your heart all the time, you become far less easy to tempt. That's why we're told to hide God's word in our heart that we might not sin against God. And I love this truth because you've heard me many times as your pastor say that the most important habit any of us can develop in life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And it is just reinforced all the more this week as I encounter this text. The most important habit we can have is to spend up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer, clothe ourself in our salvation, ground ourself in our salvation, focus on God in prayer, and sharpen your sword. Because you don't know when you're going to have to swing it. You don't know what conflict is coming. There's no announcement about, hey, there's going to be a temptation today. Hey, you and your wife are going to get into a fight today. Hey, your kid's going to deal with something tough today. Hey, you're going to get a really hard phone call today. We don't get warnings about those. And we don't know when the onslaught's coming, but there is a night raid being planned. So we sharpen our sword. So I want to finish with the encouragement today. Threefold. Wake up. We're in a conflict. It is happening all around us, whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we're even comfortable with it or not, it's happening. Stand firm. Persevere. Why do you think at every turn in scripture that the encouragement of the apostles is to persevere, persevere, persevere, persevere? Why do you think that they hold up perseverance as this great thing to be attained? Why do you think that when Paul is ready to end his life, he says, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith. Why do you think we are told to run the race to win it? Why do you think it says, once you have done everything you can to stand, then stand some more. Stand firm. Persevere in your faith. Life is long. Cling to your salvation. And then sharpen your sword. Be a student of this word. Swing it for the people in your life. Know it well to keep yourself clean. And then go fight for others as we advance as God's army. And here's the promise. Here's what I love. This is not fatalistic at all. We don't just stand there and weather it. We push forward and we fight. And if we do this faithfully, if we stand firm, if we wake up and we stand firm and we sharpen our sword and we swing it when life requires it of us, we will win this battle one day because in Revelation chapter 19, Jesus is coming back. And when he comes back, he's not coming as a lamb of God. He's coming as a lion of Judah and he's coming to wreck shop and he's gonna win this conflict. And so we fight until he gets here. Wake up, stand firm, sharpen your sword. Let's pray. Father, you're a good God. You love us so much. God, I pray that we would feel you empowering us. I pray that we would allow you to wake us up to the reality of what's happening around us. Give us the strength to persevere, to stand firm, to cling to our faith and our salvation. Give us the discipline to sharpen our sword. Help us be ready to swing it when we need to. God, I just pray over all the conflicts and all the battles and all the fights that are going on in this room, all the raids being planned and all the places that Satan is prowling. God, I pray that you would help the people in this room fight, that we would fight for the people around us, that we would feel the strength of your salvation and the joy of your spirit.

I hope that you guys are getting excited about the holidays as they are coming up. I know that we are decorated at my house and we've got big plans here at Grace. I'm really excited about the Christmas series that we have coming up and all the things that we have planned for you in December. So I hope that you and your family will be a part of that. I'm very excited for our December series. This week we are in the fifth chapter of Ephesians. Technically the fifth chapter, but the fourth and fifth chapter, you'll see why in a minute as we move through this letter from Paul to the churches surrounding the city of Ephesus. As we jump into this week, I wanted to start at a book that was written a few years ago. There's a guy named Charles Duhigg that wrote a book called The Power of Habit. If you're a reader, you've probably heard of it, and you may have even read it, and you know that it's a good, interesting book where he says a lot of things about the habits that are in our life, how we can harness them for good. I really enjoyed the book. I didn't implement any of the things that he told me to, but I acknowledged them as very good ideas that seem wise. One of the things that he noted that he presents was the idea of what he calls a keystone habit. He says a keystone habit is a habit that you can adopt that if you will just focus on this one small change in your life, that it's going to manifest itself in other areas of your life. That kind of one habit can be get disciplined in other areas. It'll have almost a trickle-down effect if you pursue it as a foundational habit. And he says the best example of this, of a keystone habit, is exercise. In his research, he found that people who exercised regularly were people who tended to be more disciplined in what they ate. They were better at managing their time throughout the day and focusing on home and focusing on work, maintaining a better work-life balance. They were overall more disciplined people because the discipline of exercising on a regular basis kind of spilled into other areas of their life. And I really identified with this because like a lot of you, I've had seasons in my life where I have been regularly exercising. Clearly, I'm not in the middle of one of those seasons now, but I've had them before. And I've noticed that when I'm in those seasons, I am more disciplined in general, that that habit kind of spills over into others. And so as I encountered this idea, of course, because of the way that I'm wired, I thought, I wonder if this has spiritual applications. I wonder if this can help me in my walk. The way that we're phrasing the question this morning, you have it there on your notes, says, I wonder if there is a habit that can change the way that we obey. I wonder if there's one single habit, if there's a keystone habit, if there's one small thing that we could do, that if we'll just focus on this, that what happens as a result of that habit will manifest itself in other places in our spiritual life, and it will change the way that we obey. This morning, I want to propose to you that I think that there is one. I think that there is a keystone habit given to us in the text in the middle of Ephesians chapter 5 that we can kind of latch onto and seek to implement in our life. But to properly appreciate what it says in the middle of chapter 5, we have to really appreciate what's going on in the book of Ephesians. And what's happening in the book of Ephesians is you can really kind of divide it right in half. The first three chapters of Ephesians are establishing the idea that we are saved, that we have the gospel. Chapter 3 is the mystery of the gospel. Paul prays that we would know Christ more deeply. We spent time a couple weeks ago on that beautiful prayer beginning in verse 14, going through 19 of chapter 3. In chapter 2, we're given the most succinct yet complete explanation of salvation that I think there is in the Bible in Ephesians 2, 8, and 9. Then we're told in verse 10 of that same chapter that we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we might walk in them. We have purpose for our life. So he spends the first three chapters invested in this idea that like, hey, we are believers now and the gospel is for everyone. So now that you have the gospel, now that you have faith, the back half of the book is committed to answering a question that we all have. It's a question that we've all asked, whether you're a believer or a non-believer, it's a question that you've asked about the Christian faith. And that question simply is, it's a common question that we've all asked, how should I live? How should I live? You might ask it like this, in light of the fact that I'm saved, in light of the fact that I know Jesus, that I call God my Father and Jesus my Savior, what does God expect of me? Because we approach the text with this question, but there's a lot of stuff in here. It's confusing, at times intimidating, at times it seems impossible, and sometimes it feels contradictory. I'm supposed to do this in this situation and this in this situation, and I don't know how to tell the difference between the two. And so we always come back to this question, how should I live? I think if you're not a believer this morning, but you're here at church, you're kicking the tires, you're trying to figure out faith and how you feel about spiritual things, I think one of the questions you would be asking is, if I do become a believer, how do I live? What's expected of me? What am I supposed to do? To be a believer is to wonder, am I doing this right? How should I live? I think we would all like to get a little bit better or maybe a lot a bit better at obeying God. How should I live? I think that's the common question that we ask after we realize that we are believers. And so Paul dedicates the back half of Ephesians to answering this question. Ephesians 4, 5, and 6 are Paul's answer to this question. I truly believe that if Paul were here this morning and you could ask him, hey man, I'm a believer, how should I live? Like, what should I do? If we could ask this common question to Paul, I honestly believe he would say, well, it's funny that you asked. I actually addressed that in chapters four and five of the book of Ephesians. So let's look. And as I was studying, you might be wondering, why are we in chapter four if we're supposed to be in chapter five this week? As I was studying last week, I realized I was going through chapter four and I'm just, I always open up the Bible when we're going through a book like this and I kind of go, okay, God, what do you want us to know? There's so many things that we could highlight. What's the thing that you want us to know? And so as I was praying through chapter four, studying chapter four, I realized that four and five really go together. That from 417 to 521 is really one big long thought that I'm thinking of as the conclusion discourse. He's been building to this question, how should we live? And he even opens that question in chapter 4. Chapter 4 starts out with a verse that tells us that you should live a life worthy of the calling that you have received. So the question becomes, how do I do that? And beginning in chapter 4, verse 17, he answers that question. So I want you to do this. I want everybody in the room, if you'll do me the favor, of going ahead and opening your Bible. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Grab it and let's go through it. Open to Ephesians chapter 4. If you don't know where Ephesians is, just wait until the person next to you opens their Bible to it and then then take it, all right? They're going to love you and be gracious, and they'll get another Bible, and they'll open it there. So that will be fun. But open to Ephesians chapter 4, beginning in verse 17. 417 through 521 is one long continual thought, one long discourse, and we're going to be interacting with the text today to see how does Paul answer this question of how should I live? How does he back up what he says at the beginning of 4, that we should live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? What's his answer to this question of how we should live? And I want to propose to you this morning that there's two answers, one in chapter 4 and one in chapter 5. The first answer that he gives us in chapter 4 is by walking in our new identity. That's the first answer that we see in chapter 4 of Ephesians. How should we live? We should live by walking in our new identity, and here's how I know that's true. We're going to put up on the screen verse 22, but I'm actually going to start reading in verse 17 so we can understand what's happening in verses 22 through 24. Paul writes this, now this I say and testify in the Lord. Oh, I will also say just by way of, I don't know, being nice that if you have a blue Bible, that's NIV. I'm reading out of the ESV. It's not going to word for word match up, but you'll be able to follow along. Verse 17, now this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. All right, it's worth some clarification here. When he's saying that you must no longer walk, the you there is the church, anyone who calls himself a believer. And when he says Gentiles, that's his way of saying outsiders, people who don't yet have faith. So it's basically, you shouldn't walk like people who don't know Jesus because you do know Jesus. That's what he's saying. So when we see the word Gentiles, just think people who don't know Jesus yet. Verse 18, they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and they have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But this is not the way you learned in Christ. All right, let's pause right there. He says, you must not think and act like the Gentiles do. You must not think and act like someone who doesn't know Jesus. And then he gives us the characteristics, some of the defining characteristics of people who don't know Jesus. And it's a pretty rough list. He says some harsh things about people who don't know Jesus. And so I want to be very clear that people who don't know Jesus are not worse people than people who do know Jesus, okay? The people in your life that you know that are not yet believers, we're not calling them bad people. Paul's not calling them bad people. And I don't want anybody in this room thinking that you're somehow better than the people outside of this room who are still in their sweatpants because we're not. We're all broken and we're all bad at this, okay? So we're not calling ourselves better than them. The difference is people who don't know Jesus are blind to their sin. They're sinning, they're acting outside the will of God, and they don't know that they are. And when they're acting outside of God's will and they don't see their sin, they perpetuate that sin, their consciences get seared to that sin, and eventually they end up encouraging that sin. That's the pattern. And it's not because they're bad or a different kind of person than you. It's simply because they are living in the dark and they do not yet see their sin. And what he is saying is, that's not how you live. That's not you. If you know Jesus, you've seen your sin, you acknowledge Jesus for who he is, you realize your need for him and how he cleanses you of your sin, and so you were taught a different way. Assuming that you have heard, I'm in 21, about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self. This is where we're getting our answer to walk in our new identity. To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. So he presents this idea, don't walk like you used to when you didn't know Jesus, walk like you do know Jesus. He actually talks about this in a lot of his letters, the idea of an old self and a new self. In Romans chapter 6 and 7, he talks about it at length, and he actually, Paul paints for us the picture of baptism, the video that we watched of Jim being baptized. In that baptism, what Paul says in Romans 6 and 7 is that when we are baptized, we are buried with Christ in death. Our former self, our old self who didn't know Jesus, who was blind to sin, is buried with Jesus in the burial and then raised to walk, come out of death into life, raised to walk into newness of life. The very act of baptism is an acknowledgement that the former self is gone and the new self is here. And so if we are going to live life as Christians, then we should walk in our new identity. Romans 8 tells us that our identity is adopted sons and daughters of the king. We're told that we are loved as much as we can ever be loved, that we no longer have to perform or clamor or stretch or claw to get anyone to affirm us, to get anyone to love us, to make ourselves good for anyone, because God fills us with affirmation, tells us that we are good, tells us that we are loved, and then invites us to operate out of that love as we serve as a conduit of his love to the people in the world. We walk in this new identity. In our new identity, Romans tells us that we are no longer a slave to sin. Before we know Jesus, we have no choice but to do evil things because we're blind to them and we don't see them as evil. But as believers, we now have a choice. We're separated from that. And then to help us walk in this new identity, he gives us some behaviors that we should embrace and some behaviors that we should avoid to kind of say, this is what a new life is going to look like. And so he says this on down through the chapter, picking up in verse 25. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each of you speak the truth with his neighbor. 26, be angry and do not sin, which is really hard. I don't know about you, but that's not really how my anger works. Like when I get angry about something, that's not generally the time when I'm making the most rational choices. But what he's saying is there's a way to get angry. And the other thing about anger is you usually don't deserve it. You usually don't have a right to that anger. You think you have a right to that anger because you're being, in my case, a selfish jerk. You usually don't even have a right to that anger. But it is possible to get angry about the right things. And when we're walking in our new identity, we're angry and we do not sin. No more stealing. You guys, in your new life, you can't do that anymore. And then he goes, let no corrupting of stuff. As I read this stuff this week and I realized, okay, I'm supposed to walk in my new identity. What does it mean to walk in my new identity? What are the things that are going to characterize me beginning in verse 25? And I read through that list. I kind of got done reading it and thought like, well, gosh, I don't know if I should be a pastor. I'm not very good at those things. Those are really hard. Those are really challenging things. I mean, to read through that list, man, I do a lot of stuff I'm not supposed to do, and I don't do a lot of stuff I am supposed to do. That's challenging. But Paul doesn't stop there. He gives us the next way that we're supposed to live, because there's two answers. There's one in four, and there's one in five. The first answer is that we should walk in our new identity. And then he gives us a list of behaviors that we should embrace or avoid because of our new identity. And then at the beginning of chapter five, he gives us the second answer. How should you live? You should be imitators of Christ, is what he says at the beginning of chapter five. Be imitators of Christ. Just however Jesus would act, you act like that too. Look at what he says. Therefore, chapter 5, be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Then, just to add some detail, this is what somebody who is imitating Christ looks like, but all sexual immorality and just all impurity in general or covetousness must not be named among you as is proper among the saints. So he says, okay, how should we live? Walk in your new identity. Once you're walking in your new identity, be an imitator of Christ. And so I was thinking this week, what does it mean to be an imitator of Christ? What did Jesus do? How did Jesus love us? Well, Jesus offers us a sacrificial love. Constantly putting others first and himself second, he offers us a sacrificial love. He condescended, he gave up his heavenly form, came down to earth, lived a perfect life on our behalf, we need to love others sacrificially, and we need to forgive others faultlessly, and forever, by the way. And if you want more details on what it means to live as an imitator of Jesus, just keep reading chapter 5, and you'll see more behaviors there that you should embrace and others that you should avoid. And listen, it's entirely possible to get bogged down in these different behaviors and a very worthwhile study. If you know your Bible well, you know that Ephesians five is chock full of things that are tough for a pastor to preach through. I even got texts and emails this week like, hey bro, you doing Ephesians 5? What are you gonna do? Somebody said, somebody emailed me and they said, Ephesians 5 this week, I'm really looking forward to what you have to say about it. And I thought, please don't email me that. I don't need that kind of pressure in my life. And while it's absolutely worthwhile to drill down into these different behaviors and into these different stances, I didn't want us to miss the forest for the trees. The trees and the minutia are worth examining, but if we only have one week to look at Ephesians 5, I don't want us to miss the overall point that Paul is trying to make, which is to answer the question, how do we live? And we answer that question by saying, walk in your new identity and then be imitators of Jesus. Offer other people sacrificial love and faultless forgiveness forever. And here's a list of behaviors that can help you live that way. So at this point, I think we should arrive at our common response. We ask the question, how should I live? Paul answers that question by saying, walk in your new identity, not your former self, walk in your new self, and then imitate Jesus as you live. And I think that we all have a common response. If you're thinking along with me at all, this has to be what you've concluded too. How in the world do I do that? How do I do that? That's a tough list, man. That's hard. Like, I'm not, listen, I'm telling you as a pastor, as your pastor, for most of you, I'm not good at this list. I violate something on this list. I want to say weekly and be nice to myself, but that's probably daily. That's a hard list, man. That feels impossible. And we can treat it lightly and say, surely God doesn't expect me to do that. I mean, He knows that I can't be perfect. In another place in Scripture, Paul tells us, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. And I think we're tempted to read this and go, there's no way I can do that. But I don't think the Bible lets us off that hook. I don't think it makes that space for us to just kind of partly try. I think this is the standard, to walk in our new identity and to be imitators of Jesus. And the great part is this, getting better at these things, to more regularly walk in our new identity, to more regularly be imitators of Jesus, that is a process. It's a lifelong process. I hope that in 2019, you're a better imitator of Jesus than you were in 2018. And I hope in 2025 that you're a better imitator of Jesus then than you are than you're going to be in 2020. I think it's a progressive thing. This progressive growth towards becoming more like Christ is actually called sanctification. It's a biblical word that Paul uses, and it means the process of becoming more like God in character, which is to be better at imitating Jesus. So this is a process that we move through in our, through our whole life. And I think our goal should be that every week we're a little bit better at it than we were last week and be sensitive to the spirit and what we need to do to be better imitators of Christ and to walk more confidently in our new identity. But as we try to answer that question, how do I do this? That's a tall order, man. That's a big task. How am I gonna do that? I think that this is where the keystone habit comes back into play. I think this is where having a keystone habit, if I'm trying to get my life healthy, what's this one thing that I could focus on that might have some spillover into all the other areas of my life that I want to kind of fix or allow God to move in and repair? What's one keystone habit? What's one thing that I could focus on that might help me start nailing some of this other stuff down? I think our keystone habit is our first step. Our first step in this process is to lean into what I'm going to propose to you is our keystone habit that we find at the end of the passage in verse 21. So Paul writes this passage. He writes what I'm kind of calling the conclusive discourse on answering the question, how should we live? He says, walk in your new identity, be an imitator of Jesus. Here's some behaviors to help you know what it is to live that way that you should either embrace or avoid. And then as he caps it off, he says, finally, do these things. And he lands the plane at a really peculiar place, I think. He lands the plane in this verse, in verse 21, because after 21, there's a transition. After 21, he transitions and he starts to give us specifics of how to live. He says, this is how you should organize your home life and your marriage and your work life. And then this is how you should arm yourself for the spiritual life that is a battle. There's a transition after 21. So at 21, he's concluding a thought and this is how he concludes it. Pick it up in verse 15. He says, And then here we have it. Submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. He lands the plane on submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. And I want to propose to you that our keystone habit as we seek to be imitators of Jesus and we seek to walk in our new identity is simply chosen submission. I think the common conclusion of our question, how should I live? How do I do that? I think the common conclusion that we have this morning is chosen submission. And that word submission simply means to submit to somebody is to say that when our wills clash, I'll choose yours. When you have a different will than I do for a certain situation, I will submit to you by choosing your will. I at this church am submitted to the board of elders. The elders might not feel that way sometimes, but I promise you that's technically the case. I'm submitted to the board of elders, which means if I go to the elders and I say, hey, I think we should do this thing, and they go, we do not think you should do that thing, then their will is different than my will, so I choose theirs and I submit to it. That's what submission is. And I want to propose to you that this is a keystone habit that unlocks how we can obey in all of those other areas. I think this is the one habit that can change the way that we obey. And we don't just see it here. At another place, we're told to outdo one another in honor, to honor other people more than ourselves, to outdo one another in honor. At another place, we're told to consider others better than ourselves. So this is not just a one-time principle in the Bible. It's something that's woven throughout the New Testament. Jesus says that the greatest among us must be the least, that the greatest comes to serve. So there's this constant idea in Scripture of considering others before we consider ourselves. And the reason I think that this is a keystone habit to unlock obedience in the rest of our life is this. Go back through four and five. Look at the behaviors that are listed there. Look at the behaviors that are listed in chapter 5, the ones that we should avoid. Sexual immorality and covetousness and all impurity. And ask, would it be easier to avoid those behaviors if I lived every day submitted to the people around me? Would it be easier to avoid sexual immorality if I considered other people's needs more important than mine? Would it be easier to avoid coveting things, wanting things for myself, if I considered other people's needs more important than mine, if I were mutually and had chosen to submit to the people around me? Blaise Pascal had great insight on this passage. He was a French philosopher, and I wondered why sexual immorality and covetousness are paired up together in chapter 5. And he says it's because they fall under the umbrella of lust. Lust is to want things for ourself. And he says that lust tethers us to ourselves. It makes us relentless me monsters. And so the antithesis of sexual immorality, the antithesis of covetousness is selflessness. The antithesis of this is mutual submission. We said earlier that we should be angry, but we should not sin. And I kind of presented to you the idea that there's some things that are okay to be angry about, good, righteous anger, and that's a good thing. And then there's other anger that just results in our selfishness or just reveals our selfishness. Is it going to be easier to become angry about the right things if we live our life mutually submitted to other people? At the end of chapter four, we're told to be kind one to another, be tenderhearted, gentle with one another. If you get up every day living your life for the people around you, is it going to be easier to be kind to them, to be tenderhearted towards them? Pick any of the behaviors in four or five, any of the things that we're supposed to embrace and any of the things that we're supposed to avoid. And for the ones that we're supposed to avoid, ask, would it be more natural? Would it be easier to avoid these behaviors if I were living a life of chosen submission to the people around me? And then look at the behaviors that we're supposed to embrace and ask yourself, would it be easier to embrace these behaviors, to incorporate those behaviors in my life if I were living a life of submission to the people around me? I think it's a keystone habit. I think if you're here this morning and you feel like you're in a spiritual rut, you feel like 2019 has been a little tough. I'm not growing like I should. I wish that I were closer to God. I wish that I could get some traction in my spiritual life. My quiet times have been a little bit difficult or maybe even non-existent. I wish I were closer to the Father. Can I just suggest to you implementing this keystone habit in your life? Can I just suggest to you waking up tomorrow and saying, I'm going to do my best to consider the needs of others as more important than mine. I'm going to do my best to have chosen submission to the people around me and that when our wills clash as best as I can, I'm going to choose theirs. Can I gently suggest to you that if you feel spiritually stagnant, that maybe, maybe, maybe it's because you've been living tethered to yourself and we should live for others. And if we'll do that, the rest of these behaviors will naturally flow out of a heart that now belongs to God and is in tune with Him. Can you imagine the beauty of a church that's mutually submitted to one another? It would be an oasis in the community that it would be the only place on earth that didn't have a caste system. Do you understand that? If we came in mutually submitted to one another, it wouldn't matter how much money you make. It wouldn't matter how old or young you are. It wouldn't matter where you got your education. It wouldn't matter what degrees you had. It wouldn't matter what you've accomplished. It wouldn't matter how charismatic you are or are not. It wouldn't matter how attractive you are or are not. It wouldn't matter how capable you were or you are or are not. All that would matter was that we showed up and we loved one another because we were told to in Ephesians to consider others better than ourselves and to live a life of chosen submission out of reverence for Christ. This is impossible if we don't know Jesus. We cannot just decide to do this and fuel the submission ourselves. We have to have the love of Christ flowing through us so that we can be conduits of that love to others. But if we'll acknowledge that Jesus died for us, that Jesus offers us sacrificial love and faultless forgiveness forever. And he submitted to me when he didn't have to. And out of reverence for him and who he is and how much he loves me and how I love him in return, I'm going to choose to submit to the people around me. We say that our mission is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people. How in the world could we be more effective at that than if we simply chose to submit to the people around us and considered what they needed more important than what we needed? How contagious would that be when people would come and be with us on a Sunday morning? How wonderful a testimony would that community be to people who see all the wrong things going on with Christianity and in the media world to come in here into an oasis of submission where they see a fresh version of how Christ's people love one another. How beautiful would that be? How contagious would your faith be if you carried the submission back into your workplace and back into your circle of friends and simply considered other people as more important than you and simply chose this submission as a keystone habit that would unlock our ability to obey God throughout the rest of our life. I pray that we'll do that this morning. I pray that grace would be a church that's defined by obedience to this verse. And I pray that you would choose to be obedient to that. That you would submit to the people around you in your life even this week and experience the power of this chosen submission and watch as it unlocks your ability and God's ability to work in your life as we seek to walk in our new identity and be better imitators of him. Let's pray. God, we love you. You love us for reasons that we genuinely don't understand. God, I'm so grateful that church can be a place where we can just admit that we don't have it together, where we can admit that we're not good at things, where we can admit that we constantly fall short of who you ask us to be, and where we can be met with your grace and your love and your affirmation that that's okay. And you pick us back up and you send us back out. Lord, if there are people here who are far from you, I pray that you would draw them in. If there are people here who are caught up in sin, I pray that you would just bring your gentle, healing conviction. If there are people here in situations that feel impossible, God, would you show them a light? Would you remind them that you make new paths, that you make streams in the desert? God, would we not shy away from the enormous task that it is to be a Christian? Would we not excuse away what you call us to? Simply have the faith and the courage to try to be a little bit better today than we were yesterday. Help us experience the power of choosing to submit to one another, Lord, out of reverence for you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This morning, I'm going to work with the whiteboard a little bit. I've done this to you once before. So to those of you who enjoyed the classroom, I think you're going to like this. For those of you who didn't, I'm going to work really hard to keep you engaged. But this is where we're going to spend our time this morning. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to go sit on a panel for a thing concerning the Enneagram, which is the personality typing du jour going on right now. If you don't know what the Enneagram is, I would say don't worry about it, except that I really believe in it, and I think that you should research it because it's really great. If you do know what it is, then tell me afterwards. We'll nerd out about types and wings and all the other things and where you move in health and unhealth, and it's really great. But I think that we in general care for these personality type things. We like, one of the reasons we like doing things like the Enneagram is we like taking the test, finding out what we are and then reading about ourselves. If you've done Myers-Briggs or DISC or like the color profile, are you red or are you blue or whatever you are, we like to take the test, get our results and then read about who we are. This is why we click on the things on Facebook when it's like, which jungle animal are you? And you're like, well, I'm really hoping for gorilla. And then you get newt and you're super bummed out. So you don't put that on your Facebook profile, right? We're interested in learning about ourselves. And I say that because this week we arrive at the portion of a text where we're given five gifts of Christ, five spiritual gifts that Jesus himself gives to his children, his people. And we're going to spend some time talking about what each one of them are. And I hope that you can at least leave with an idea of a way that you may be gifted. Another reason I chose to camp out here on this passage, because if you read Ephesians 4, there is three different sermons that I wanted to do, and I had the hardest time figuring out which one to do. But I landed here because after we talked about Ephesians 2 in my small group, a couple weeks ago I preached on Ephesians 2, and we looked at the 10th verse of that chapter that says, for you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. And so the big question that Sunday was, what are my good works that God created me for and how do I walk in them? And so when I went to my small group the next day, we had a great discussion. And what I saw was a theme of a bunch of people going, I want to walk in my good works. I'm really not sure what they are, and I don't really know how to tell. And so this can be kind of an answer to that question. What are my good works, and how can I walk in them? Well, what we're going to ask this morning is, God, how have you gifted me? How have you purposed me? And then what can I do in that purpose? So what I would say before we dive into these is that these are gifts from Jesus. If you know your Bible, if you've spent time in church, you've probably heard the phrase spiritual gifts, and you may even know that they're gifts of the Spirit that come out of Corinthians and Romans typically. Gifts like tongues or healing or discernment or things like that. Those are gifts of the Spirit. These are gifts of Jesus that He Himself gives to all of His children to do the ministry of the kingdom. We're going to see in the text why He gives the gifts, but what I would say to you is, if you're here this morning and you're not a believer just yet, you're considering it, then this is a good morning for you to just kind of peek on the other side of the curtain and see what it is to be a Christian and see what happens and what we live for once we become believers. But if you are a believer, then what I would tell you without any shadow of a doubt is that you are one of these five things. Because the text makes it pretty clear that all the saints are equipped in some way. And so we're all one of these things. So let's look at what is said in Ephesians chapter four, beginning in verse 11. It says, and he, he there is Jesus, okay? And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers. So these, these five gifts, he gave these to equip the saints for work of ministry. And so when we see that word saints in the Bible, that's not Catholic saints. That's not like two verified miracles and then a smoke vote by the council and now you're a saint. That's not what that is. This is to be a believer. If you are a believer, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then biblically you are a saint. And so it says that Jesus gives us one of these five gifts to equip the saints for the work of ministry. What is ministry? What is the work of ministry? For the building up of the body of Christ until we attain to the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to mature manhood. And if you were here last week when I preached on the prayer in Ephesians 3, where Paul prayed that we would be filled with the fullness of God, then this next phrase will be very familiar. It says, So Jesus gives his saints, his believers, one of these gifts. He gives us one of these gifts, and it's for the purpose of building up the church, for the purpose of building up his kingdom. If you are a believer, the only reason you are still on the planet and not in heaven is so that you can build others up and build Jesus' church. That's why we all exist. I actually believe that the Christian life is a progressive revelation of just what our life is really all about. It's progressively realizing more and more, I'm here to build the kingdom. I'm here to build the kingdom. I'm here to build his kingdom, not my kingdom. And it's a tough road to get that maturity. But we're to build the church so that all the saints may reach the fullness of Christ. And so that's really everything that we're building towards is the fullness of Christ. This is the point. All of these gifts are given to you so that you can help other people reach this point of spiritual maturity. And as you help other people reach spiritual maturity, then you are taken there as well. You grow into the fullness of Christ as well. So what I want to do, the other thing I would say is if there's no place for notes or there's no outline on your bulletin, it's just a blank piece of paper. So as I get to the one that you think you might be, maybe you write that down. Don't feel like you have to write all of this down. Once we take it off of the stage, you can take a picture of it afterwards so you don't have to write anything down at all. And some of you are like, buddy, I wasn't going to write down anything to begin with. So assuming this is valuable to you, it'll be over there. If it's not, I'll be in the lobby. I won't know if you take pictures of it or not. But don't feel like you have to keep up with everything. So let's jump in and talk about each of the gifts, what they are, and you can be processing which one of these am I, and then how can I use it? That's what we'll come back to at the end. So we'll start with the apostle. The apostle, we hear apostle, we think apostle Paul, we think missionaries, we think things like that, but really an apostle simply our terms, is an entrepreneur. I also apologize for my penmanship and spelling. I briefly typed this into my phone before I came up here to see if that was the right way to spell it. I think it is. I don't know. But hopefully you can read that. Apostles are entrepreneurs. They start things. They're pioneers. They're kind of hard chargers. They don't mind being leaders. They're out in front of everyone else. A longer way to think about an apostle is an apostle sees a need and then builds something to fix it. That's what an apostle does. An apostle sees a need and then builds something to fix it. A biblical example of an apostle, the most famous one, you guys can probably fill in this blank already, is Paul. Paul's the most famous biblical apostle. The need was that the word of God would spread and that churches would begin to exist, that Gentiles would come to faith. And so he built churches to meet that need. He traveled around, spent his whole life building churches to meet the need. Now, what's interesting to me about the apostle is, for the apostle, they love starting things. But once it gets to healthy maintenance, they're bored. Okay, they move on. So if you have a spouse that constantly has new ideas and never sees them all the way to fruition, that could be an apostle. Like the next time they open them up, like, hey, I've been thinking. And you go, oh, geez, what have you been thinking about? They may just be wired to start things. I want to try to have a contemporary example of each of these. One of these examples that's going to embarrass her to know that I said her name and she wasn't around to defend herself is Suzanne Ward, a girl that goes to the church. If an apostle is somebody who sees a need and then builds something to meet that need or to fix it. Years ago, she went to Ethiopia. And when she was in Ethiopia, what she discovered is that they have an enormous orphan crisis going on over there. There's so many kids without families. And in these orphanages, they're ill-equipped to train and to educate these kids. And so when they release them at 18, they age out of the orphanage, they don't have any options. And a vast majority of the girls go into sex work. And it broke her heart. And she didn't do what most of us would do. She didn't do what I would do. I would come home and be bummed out about it and sad for a couple of weeks. And then I move on to the next thing. She came home and was so moved and disturbed by it that her and a friend started a ministry called Addis Jamari. They bought a house out there, and now when girls age out of the orphanage, they move into that house, they disciple them, they move them closer to the fullness of Christ, they give them a trade and release them out into the world, hopefully as godly young women who are now self-sustained. She's so in need, and she built something to fix it. That's what an apostle does. Apostles see that we don't have a certain Bible study in the church to reach a certain demographic, and they go, I'll do that. Apostles see something at the workplace that needs to happen, and they say, I'll head up that program. They see a need, and it burns within them so much that they're willing to build something to fix it. If you're a starter, if you're constantly seeing needs and you think of ways to meet those needs, you might very well be an apostle. It doesn't mean you have to go plant a church. It means you start things for the kingdom. Then we have evangelists. Evangelists are fun. Evangelists, really, when we think of evangelists in church terms, we think of somebody that's out sharing their faith. I went to the NC State game last night. I guess it's probably better said I went to the Clemson game last night. I went to the Clemson game last night, and on the way there, there was a guy up on the corner preaching the Bible to the people passing by. Somebody yelled, go Tigers, at him. I'm not really sure that either of them understood what was going on in that moment. But we think of those kinds of people. We think of people that are going to share the gospel with their waitress every time they go out to eat. Or if you're sitting next to them, I know a guy, if you're sitting next to him on the plane, you're going to hear the gospel on that plane ride. And that's great if you do it well and you do it with sensitivity and you're not obtuse about it. That's great to have that gift. But when we think of evangelists, we think of people who are constantly out sharing their faith. And that's true, but to me, that's too narrow of a definition. Evangelists really are recruiters. They recruit people. They go out and they get people to sign up for something. They go out and in their infectious enthusiasm or in their convincing way, they grab people and they bring them on board. Really, evangelists gather people for a cause. Evangelists gather people for a cause. Sometimes we evangelize about dumb stuff. We're watching a new show on Netflix. It's the greatest show ever. You've got to see this documentary. It's amazing. I just watched In the Mind of Bill Gates. It was really good. Maybe you watched it too, and you're telling all your friends at work, this is amazing. You've got to see this. You're evangelizing that thing. Maybe you hear a podcast, or you read an article, or you read a book, and you're telling all your friends about it. One of the jokes that I make with a buddy of mine who goes here, a guy named Keith Cathcart, he's been going to Mexico for years and years and years. He's a huge Steelers fan. And so every time he goes down, he takes Steelers gear and he gives it out to any of the local Mexicans that work and they're wearing it every year. He's a stealer's evangelist. I hope he listens on time and is convicted by it. What a waste of time that is, Keith. But no, that's what an evangelist does. They recruit people to a cause. And what I think in the Bible, an example of this is John the Baptist. That's what John the Baptist did. He was a voice that prepared a way for Jesus. He got people ready. He recruited them to the cause. He got them to come in. He prepared a way for Jesus so that when Jesus arrived, they were ready. They were there. When I think of it in a church context, not a Pittsburgh Steelers context, I think of Kyle, our student pastor. Kyle has this infectious excitement where he imposes his fun on the room. It's why under his leadership, when he got here, we had about 14 kids coming every week. And then within a year's time, we had about 40 kids coming every week because he's out in the community all the time. He told me he was at Millbrook on Friday night, went to the football game and he started out sitting by himself. And then a kid wandered over. It was like he was probably the apostle of the situation. He championed and pioneered and went and sat next to Kyle, decided that this is an okay place to be. And then within, by the second half, he had 15 kids around him. That's what an evangelist does. An evangelist is a people gatherer. If you throw a party and you can get people to show up, you might very well be an evangelist. You might very well have that gifting. It's possible that we're using it for things that don't matter and we need to attract people to a different kind of cause, but you may be that. Then there's different ways to do it. I know a guy who you wouldn't say his enthusiasm is infectious, but he's at the Y all the time. And I guarantee you, if you work out near him, you are going to get invited to Grace Riley. You absolutely are. We've got two of them. I've got two people at the Y that are recruiting everybody in that gym, and one of them got recruited by the other one. That's evangelism, okay? That's what that is. So if that's you, you're a people gatherer. It doesn't mean that you have to convince people to believe in Jesus. The first conversation you have, you're recruiting them to a cause, to a place where God can begin to work on their hearts. Okay, next we'll look at profit. We think of profit, we think of people who can tell the future, right? We're thinking about people who are talking to us about revelation. Maybe we think about Isaiah who predicted that Jesus was going to come and these are the true things about Jesus. But really, really, that's an overly simplistic view of prophecy. Really, a prophet is just a mouthpiece. A prophet is a mouthpiece. Another way to think about a prophet is they have a message from God. God has laid something on their heart, and they have a responsibility to share it with the people. So the way I think about a prophet is ear to God, mouth to the people. That's what a prophet does. The biblical examples that we'll be familiar with in the church, I mean, obviously, there's five major prophet books and 12 minor prophet books, and then there's other prophets in the Old Testament that are sprinkled in there, like Elijah and Elisha, that we don't get a book from. So there's a lot of prophets in the Bible, but we might recognize Samuel or Nathan. You know, Samuel was like eight to 10 years old. He gets, God wakes him up in the middle of the night and he says, hey, I need you to tell Eli, the high priest, that because his sons are sinful, I'm actually going to take their lives. And so Samuel has this word from God and he wakes up the next day and he has to tell Samuel or Eli, the most powerful man in Israel, what God told him. Hey, God's going to take the lives of your sons because they're sinful. That's an ear to God, a message from the Lord and a mouth to the people. Nathan had to do the same thing. David got into some bad sin with Bathsheba and Nathan had to go confront him. He had a word from the Lord. He had to go deliver it to Nathan, God's people. To me, profit is like the least desirable gift up here. It's a hard road to be a prophet. The Old Testament, there's a prophet named Jeremiah. He wrote this book called Lamentations, which is just super sad. Jeremiah was called the weeping prophet because everything he had to deliver was negative. He constantly had to give bad news to God's people. It would be, and people didn't even, people never even wanted to hear from him. It would be like he would show up at synagogue or what we would recognize at church. And he'd be like, hey, pastor, I just have a word that I want to share with everybody. And literally all of you would be like, why don't you stuff it, Jeremiah? We're tired of this. Like, go kick rocks, man. Leave us alone. And Jeremiah would come up and he'd be like, okay, listen, I know you want to hear this. You're sinful. Like, God's really mad at you. You need to get it together. I'm sorry. And then like leave. Get out of here, Jeremiah. Like they did not like the guy and everything that he was trying to shake them awake, but they didn't want to listen. Their hearts were hard. It's hard to be a prophet. My dad, I think, has this gift. I've watched my dad over the years sit on boards of organizations or of churches or with his business or even with me and wrestle with feeling like God has laid this thing on his heart that maybe only he sees that he needs to share. And it's hard to be willing to go in and say the hard things. But we need the prophets because the prophets guard the church against mission drift. The prophets guard us from getting too far off track. The prophets will come to me and go, this is totally hypothetical because I'm not sure anybody would say this. They would come to me and they would say, hey, Nate, listen, the last four sermons have been great. Fun, entertaining, engaging, they're wonderful. You really haven't talked about the Bible that much. You should probably think about that. That's what a prophet says. That's hard to hear, but they keep the church from mission drift. That's their role. The church needs prophets. So if you are a prophet, lean into that. Be sensitive with it. If you're not a prophet, you have somebody in your life who is, I would tell you to try to honor them and be kind to them and understand that they carry a burden that can be difficult at times. Okay, next I want to go down here to teacher. Okay, a teacher simply is an explainer. That's what they do. A teacher is an explainer. While I'm down here, I'm just going to write all the things. What they do is that they make the text makes sense. And the biblical example of teacher is Jesus. He was a master teacher. And I know that you're thinking like, that's a pretty neat trick you just pulled there, Nate. Wait till you get to your gift and then say Jesus is the example of it. So it looks like you're the best. Okay, listen, listen. Jesus is all of these, okay? He's all of these. He's the only person who's ever lived who's all of these. It's not like I would say like, you know who's a great evangelist? Jesus. And then somebody's in the audience going, I don't think so, pal. Come up with a better one. Like, he's all of them. But when I think about master teachers in the Bible, Jesus has to be the one. He was wonderful with his short parables, his short stories. In the spring, I'm excited. We're going to do a series going through the parables of Jesus looking at his teachings. He was incredible at helping people identify with cultural things going on and then comparing them to God's word. If you read the Sermon on the Mount, what you see right away, it begins with the Beatitudes. He met the people where they were. He read the room better than anyone who's ever existed. He was a master teacher. And ultimately what Jesus did is he made the text make sense. He said, here's the text you've been taught your whole life. This is what it really means. And a good biblical teacher makes the text make sense. So if you are somebody who loves to study, you like to learn, you like to read, you like these aha moments, you want other people to have it. Teachers love aha moments. We live so that other people go, oh my gosh, I never thought about that before. That's like, yes, that's a home run. When people say that to me in the lobby, you can say, hey, nice sermon or whatever else. But if you say like, you know what? I've heard that my whole life. I've never thought about it in that way. That was really great. That my teacher heart wants to explode. Oh my gosh, that's wonderful. Teachers live for those aha moments. So if you're one who likes that, you like to study, you like to learn. And then once you do, you feel like, oh my gosh, I have to tell somebody about what I just saw in the text. You could very well be a teacher. Now here's the thing about teaching is we tend to think that it has to happen in context like this, that if you can't convince people to show up once a week and write down the things that you say, then you shouldn't be a teacher, but that's not true. We think that maybe it should happen in Bible study, and that's not true. We teach the people in front of us, and the more faithful we are to use our gift, the more God will allow us to deploy it in other places. We teach the people who are in front of us if we are teachers. Last, we have shepherds. Shepherds are the caretakers of the church. They are the behind the scenes folks. They are the ones making sure everybody's good. They're the ones making sure everybody has all the things that they need. They're the ones that are going to recognize the needs of others before anyone else. That's why I put them last because the caretakers in the room are the most cool with going last. The apostles had to be first because if I didn't hit them first, they're going to get tired of this and not pay attention at all. And the shepherds are like, listen, as long as you take care of everybody else, I'm squared away. They have a heart for others, a heart for care. They are the caretakers of the church. What shepherds do is tend God's flock. They take care of people. A biblical example of a shepherd is Barnabas. Some of y'all might know who Barnabas is. He traveled with Paul on his first missionary journey. He was known as Barnabas the Encourager. And at the end of that journey, there was a conflict between Paul and Barnabas. The Bible says it was a sharp conflict because there was this guy traveling with him, a younger guy named John Mark, who was a pastor in training. And John Mark did something he wasn't supposed to do. He didn't show up when he was supposed to show up somewhere. And Paul, the apostle, who's rough and gruff and has things to do, says, forget it, leave him behind. He can't come. He's not qualified. He's not fit for the service. And Barnabas says, now, Paul, you're being too hard on him. We need to support him and build him up. This can be a teaching moment for John Mark. And then they get into it and Paul goes his way and Barnabas goes his way. Paul goes and plants churches. He goes and he's the apostle and Barnabas stays and he takes care of John Mark and nurtures him back to health. And then when Paul comes back around, guess who reunites with Paul? Barnabas and John Mark. And they both did what they were supposed to do. They both lived out their gifting. When I think about this in a present day context, I think of one of our elders, a guy named Bill Reith. There's tons of shepherds at Grace, but Bill Reith is so passionate about care, about care ministry. He actually runs something for us called Stephen Ministry. Stephen Ministry exists to sit with people who need care. Because basically how it goes at the church is, if you go to the hospital, I'm going to come visit you one time. I'm going to say insensitive, dumb things. I'm going to pray for you, and then I'm going to leave. Okay, that is not my gift. I like to do it. I like showing up to the hospital. I like seeing and talking to people, but it will not surprise you to learn that my bedside manner could use some improvement. So I come one time, and if you need more than one visit, if you need me to come more than one time, then we have a Stephen minister who will come sit with you as many times as you need. If you need the counsel, come to me and come to the pastor and talk about something that's going on in your life that you can't figure out. I can talk with you once or twice, but eventually it's going to be beyond what I can continue to contribute to. And so we have Stephen ministers that will walk with you through that. They're the caretaking arm of the church. The church needs people to care for one another. We need shepherds to clean up the messes of the apostles and the teachers and the prophets, right? We need those people. So if you're behind the scenes meeting the needs of other person, you might be a shepherd. So those are the five gifts. I hope that you can begin to at least identify with some of them, but a couple closing thoughts about these gifts. They're all pointed at the fullness of Christ. That's the point. They're all driving us as a church, you as individuals and the people that you're pouring into, into the fullness of Christ. The point is spiritual maturity. But what's interesting to me is these gifts here, they go deep, or they go wide, rather. These gifts go wide. The apostles and the evangelists, they grow the width of the church. They go start new things, start new churches, start new ministries. The evangelists recruit people to those things. They grow the numbers of the church. They attract people to the church and to what God is doing. They grow the width of the church. But these gifts here, they grow the depth of the church. They grow it deep. They're focused on spiritual maturity. They're focused on helping you understand the Bible better. They grow the depth of the church. And here's the thing is we need both sides, right? We need to grow wide and we need to grow deep. If we just grow wide, if we just fill everybody, if we fill leadership and we fill staff with apostles and evangelists who just start stuff and gather people to the thing, we're not gonna mature anybody. We're not gonna disciple anyone. We're going to see the kind of spiritual growth that we want. We're not going to get to the fullness of Christ. If we just lean over here, we just want to go super deep all the time. We want to do deep 60-minute sermons every Sunday morning, exegetical studies in the book of Hebrews. We want every discussion that we have to end with like weeping and vulnerability. We only ever want to go deep. And listen, those things are necessary. But when we tilt the scales too far in this direction, we have no ability to attract anyone or to grow the width of what we're doing. You've probably been a part of a church that swung the pendulum too far in one of these directions, and you've seen the fallout that happens when we get the balance wrong. It's a challenge that every church faces to have to get the balance of these things right. But the whole church needs all of these gifts. Which is why, as a closing thought, I would add, I have kind of three closing thoughts for you on these, is the first one, these gifts go hand in hand. They go hand in hand. You need them all. You need the apostle to start the thing. You need the evangelist to recruit the people to the thing. You need the prophet to make sure that we stay on the right path to help us avoid mission drift. We need the teacher to take us deeper into the meaning of the thing. And then we need the shepherds to clean up the messes that everybody else made and who we stepped on as we were doing the thing. We need all of these people in the church. They have to work hand in hand. The prophet needs to know his or her role and be able to hand things off. If I get insistent on like, no, I need to shepherd too. This needs to be what I need to do. No one's getting visited in the hospitals. I'm going to forget to make condolence calls. It's going to be a disaster. But by me, the teacher, working with Bill, the shepherd, hand in hand, the church works as it should. These gifts work hand in hand with one another. The other thing that I would say, and this one to me is important, is that one is good. Okay? One gift is good. I think in the Christian world, if you've been in church for any amount of time, you've probably felt pressure to be all of these. Maybe there's something that you identify with. Maybe there's something that you feel like is your strength, but some of these are your weakness. I've shared already, this one is not my strength here. I don't go through this list and go like, I feel like I'm a shepherd. That's not what I do. But I've felt over the years as a pastor, a lot of pressure to be better at that. And this has taken me some time and some work to get comfortable with the fact that, no, God's wired me to do this. And he's wired me to do a little bit of this. But he hasn't wired me to do that. So I don't ignore that. We put people around us who are good compliments to who we are, but we need to stop feeling the pressure to make ourselves all of these things because we tend to have a strength and we go, I'm good at starting things. I don't finish them well. I don't do the other things well. And then we beat ourselves up because we're not enough of an evangelist because we don't speak truth to power and worry about mission drift because we don't feel like we're a very effective teacher. And I want you to be freed up to know that one is good. Jesus is the only one who is all of them. So don't allow yourself to feel the false pressure of being more than just one of these things. You don't need to be. God didn't design it that way. The last thing that I would say is this, and I would just write it simply like this, is that none equals lies. If you're here and you're looking at this list and you're a believer, if you're not a believer, it's a different story. But if you're a believer, you would call yourself a Christian, God, your Father, and Jesus, your Savior. And you're looking at this list and you're going, gosh, I don't think I'm any of those things. I don't identify with any of that. I don't think I could do any of those five things. But I would tell you this. I think you're believing lies about yourself. If you think you're none, if you're a believer and you think you're none of these, then I think you're believing a lie about yourself. It's possible that God wired you to start things, that you have ideas, that you see needs, and that you want to address them, but you have this voice in your head that tells you that you're too young, or you're too inexperienced, or you're too old, or that nobody's going to listen, or that nobody's going to follow, and you talk yourself out of it, and you go, I'm not an apostle. Or maybe you do have a fire to communicate the text to other people. Maybe you do enjoy learning, and you want to share what you learn with other people, but you have a voice in your head that says, no one's going to listen. Start that Bible study. No one's going to come. You can't do that. Maybe you feel like you're any number of these things, but you've got a voice in your head that tells you that you're not, or you've got people around you who are poisonous, who are telling you that you're not. But what I'm telling you is based on scripture, all the saints get one of these. So if you're a believer and you feel like you don't have one of these, then you are believing lies about yourself. So here's what I want you to do. Okay? A little homework assignment. I want you, if you're in a small group, I want you in your small group to be talking about this. Our small group discussion this week needs to be, which one are you? And then practically, how can I begin to exercise that gift? And maybe we can talk about, how can I know? Maybe you can ask some people to affirm in you what you might be. If you're not in a small group, have the discussion with whoever you came to church with or somebody else who may have heard this in the other service or whatever, but have the discussion with somebody this week, what do you think I am? And then follow that up with, how can I begin to apply that? Because when we'll become really serious about that, we will start to work towards fullness of a knowledge of Christ and get to be a part of God's plan and bringing other people to that fullness as well. And I would even say that our path to maturity in Christ cannot avoid knowing what we are and leaning into that gifting and allowing him to use that gifting in us, in his kingdom. So I hope that you'll go home, you'll consider these, you'll think through these, you'll ask people who know you well and that you'll begin to think of practical ways to apply these gifts as we seek to build God's kingdom together. All right, I'm gonna pray, and then we're gonna move into a time of communion. Father, thank you so much for this morning. Thank you for the service. Thank you for a place where we can come and focus on you and worship you. Lord, I pray that you would give us the clarity, and in some cases, the courage, Lord, to acknowledge what our gifts might be. God, put people in our lives who can advise us and tell us what we are. Show us ways that we can begin to apply our gifting. Lord, I pray that we would be a church that is reaching for fullness with you, that is reaching to know you, and who would be thrilled to be a part of other people coming to know you as well. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to be up here again. I usually start with my name is Nate, but I think we covered that earlier in the announcement, so I'm just going to jump right into things. This week, I had the opportunity to do two things that I think are kind of a special part of the experience of being a pastor. On Tuesday, I got to go visit a couple in the hospital who goes to the church who just had their new baby, Hudson Harper, the grandson of John Susan Turnburg and then the son of Lauren Harper and Brandon Harper. And it was a sweet, sweet thing to go there and to visit with them and to see this tiny little baby that could barely open his eyes and have the opportunity to talk to them and pray with them. And you kind of get invited into these special spaces that you might not always get to experience. I got invited into this hospital room with them, and it was a really great thing. And then Friday, I got to do a wedding for a couple. They were a sweet couple. He was 34. She was 31. This is their first marriage. They waited for each other. They found each other. They dated for two years. And I got to stand there and do their wedding and be a part of that. And that was a neat experience. And then as we're doing the vows, dude can barely choke through them. Like he is so choked up. He's so moved with love for this woman that he is going to marry. It was a really, really sweet moment. It really was. And what strikes me about those moments is they're both so very full of hope, right? They're both so very full of hopes and dreams. If you know, if you've had a kid, then you know what it is to hold that kid and realize, oh my goodness, all the things you hope for them, all the things that you want for them, all the things that you hope are true of them in their adolescence and into adulthood. And if you know Jesus and you believe in prayer, then you pray for them, you hope for them, you dream about them. And when you get married and you stand at the altar and you look at the person that you're giving your life to, you have hopes and dreams about that marriage as well. You have things that you want to be true, stories that you hope God writes in your life. And those are two really hopeful moments. And they remind me that we all have hopes and dreams. You carried hopes and dreams into this room. We all have things that we want. We all have things that we hope are true one day. That's how we are wired. And sometimes life changes those hopes and dreams. If you go back to when you had a kid and then you look at him now, you're like, that's not what I was hoping for. God adjusts those. Sometimes marriage doesn't go the way that we hoped that it would go. But we change them. We augment them. We still have these hopes and we still have these dreams. We have things that we want for ourselves. And it makes me wonder, if we have hopes and dreams for our children, and we believe that God is our Father in heaven, then he has hopes and dreams for us. And I wonder what those are. I wonder what God hopes for us. I wonder what God's will is for us. I wonder what he wants for each of his children. I wonder what he wants for his church. I wonder what he wants for you. I wonder what he wants for the people that you love the most. And I think that we actually arrive in Ephesians chapter three, as we go through the book of Ephesians in our series, I think we actually arrive at a place where we see God's hopes and dreams for us. I think they're articulated through the person of Paul in this prayer. We're going to be looking at Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 through 19. In that span of verses, I tweeted out or sent out on social media this week that this is my favorite passage in the Bible. Aaron, our children's pastor, was laughing at me because apparently I have a lot of favorites, but this is like my favorite favorite, okay? I love this prayer. It's a prayer that he prays to the churches surrounding the ancient city of Ephesus. He prays this prayer, a very similar prayer, over the church in Colossae, in the book of Colossians. We find it there. We find it in the book of Philippians that he prays over the church in Philippi. This prayer has made such an impact on me and the way that I think about things and the way that I hope for the people that God entrusts to me that the very first sermon that I was able to choose when I came to grace, I came to grace in April of 2017. And the first two Sundays were Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. And so those had already kind of been determined what was going to be preached that day. But the first passage that I got to choose to preach to my new church was Ephesians 3, verses 14 through 19. When I go and I visit a kid in the hospital that's born, I pray the ethic or the ethos of this verse over them. The takeaway from this prayer, I pray over them. When I pray for Lily, my own daughter, every night, the first prayer I prayed for her was this. The first thing I pray, the thing I pray for her every night, I try to, is this, that she would know God. And when I pray for the marriages that I do, I pray that they would know God. And that's what we see in this prayer. But I don't just expect you to care about this prayer because I do. I don't just expect you to think it's a big deal because I think it's a big deal. And I don't just expect you to accept that these are God's hopes and dreams for you without a little bit of work or a little bit of background because I say they're a big deal. And I think that fundamental to this prayer is really understanding Paul. I think to appreciate the prayer, we have to appreciate the person who prayed it. Now, if I had made these notes later in the week when I was really on my game, I would have said to appreciate the prayer, you have to appreciate the prayer. Yeah, that's better. But this is fine. You have to appreciate the person who prayed the prayer. So who is the person of Paul? I feel like in church we talk about Paul. You've heard me say Paul before, and you know that you're supposed to acknowledge that he's a big deal. But I wonder if sometimes we don't know bits and pieces of who he is, and we don't really know the whole person of Paul. Maybe Paul to you is kind of like Bruce Springsteen to me. I have to confess to you, I don't really know anything that he sang. I don't, I'm sorry. I grew up in a cruel regime that didn't allow me to listen to secular music. And so the 70s and the 80s are totally lost on me until I could start sneaking like Offspring and Dave Matthews in the 90s. Like that's when I started listening to music. Before that, it was just just the Bill Gaither vocal band, which is awesome. I mean, don't hate on them. Some of you are not laughing. You're like, I don't get this. Don't. Google it. You're going to have a great afternoon. But like, I don't know who Bruce, I don't know what he's saying. I'm pretty sure he's called the boss. I think he's from New Jersey. I don't know. You don't have to tell me. I don't really care. And like, this, I was trying to tell the staff, like what songs did he sing? And my first two guesses were Born to Be Wild. No. And Summer of 69. No, that's not true. I think Born in the USA. Is that one? That's literally all I know. They taught me that this week. That's all I know. But my whole life, people will mention Bruce Springsteen. I'm like, yeah, the boss. He's the man. I don't know why. I don't know why. I don't know anything about him. I just fake it because by this time it's too late to ask any questions, right? I think sometimes we do that with Paul. We mention him in church. Last week you heard me say that he has these things called epistles. That sounds very fancy. Letters that he wrote to the churches. We know that he went around planting churches. We know things about Paul, but I wonder if we really know this person and who he is. Maybe some of you do. Maybe some of you know the deep cuts, like you know the bootlegs, like you know that there's a third Corinthians floating around somewhere out there that we haven't read before. That's actually a true thing. That's a thing that exists. Maybe you know that. Maybe you don't, but I thought we could kind of piece together our knowledge of Paul so we can really appreciate the person that prays this prayer over the church in Ephesus and ultimately over us. Paul was born, Saul, in a city called Tarsus. And he grew up as a Jew's Jew, man. He came up, he was in training, he had just become a Pharisee. And one thing to know about Jerusalem and Israel at the time is that every civilization has a celebrity culture. Every civilization has people that they look at and go, those are the ones that we want to be like. And in Israel, it was the religious leaders. It was the Pharisees and the Sadducees. And so to grow up becoming a Pharisee was to be a part of the celebrity culture of Israel. It was to be young and up and coming. It was to be known. And he was the cream of the crop. He was at the top of the heap. He was the guy. He was the guy with all the potential in Israel. He was a Jew's Jew. And then when Jesus was crucified and his followers, known as simply the way, began to multiply, he said, this is a threat to Judaism, to what I believe in. It's my job to stamp it out. So he took it on his own shoulders to stamp out this young religion of Christianity. And he began to persecute the Christians in Jerusalem. And then he got a special order to go to the next nation over to a city called Damascus and stamp out the Christian movement going on there. And on the way to Damascus, Jesus appears to him and he says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? He blinds him and he sends him to a place. He says, you stay here, someone's going to come to you. And then God goes to Ananias, this great prophet that lives. And he says, I want you to go to Saul, and I want you to heal him of the blindness that I'm struck him with. And Ananias says, I don't want to do that. If I go to see Saul, I'm going to get killed. No way. You can find some other sucker. And God says what I think is maybe one of the most ominous lines in the New Testament. Saul is my chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. For those of you who think that the Christian life, that once I become a Christian, there's no more suffering and God fixes everything that hurts me, I will show you how much he must suffer for my name. That's not in the Bible, this idea that we don't experience hardship once we know Jesus. The one who followed him maybe the best had some of the hardest trials. So Ananias goes to Saul, now named Paul, and he takes the scales off of his eyes. Paul is infused with his purpose. He is the chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles, okay? Gentile is anybody who's not a Jew. So that's almost everybody in this room. And Paul was the guy that God took his infant church that was birthed in Jerusalem, that had a couple thousand followers in this one city, and he handed, I think, this infant church to Paul, and he said, here, I need you to bring this to adolescence. He entrusted it to him. Carry my word, carry the mystery of the gospel, the thing that happened here with Jesus when he died on the cross. Take that to the other church, to the other cities surrounding us in Asia Minor and spread the word of this church. And Paul did his job well because here we are, another continent 2,000 years later. He went off into the wilderness for a number of years. When he felt like he was ready, he presented himself to the council, to the church council in Jerusalem, populated by the disciples and Jesus' brother, James. And he said, hey, I think I'm ready to do my job. I think I'm ready to go tell the Gentiles about this Jesus. Can I go? And they said, yeah, you have our blessing. So he went for the rest of his life on four missionary journeys. Some scholars say it was three journeys. some say four. The reason there's a debate is that his last journey, he was arrested and then put on a ship and taken to Rome. On his way to Rome, they shipwrecked on this island of Malta, and then eventually they got to Rome. And the whole time, Paul, because he's Paul, was sharing his faith and inspiring churches and writing letters. So some consider that his fourth missionary journey. The important thing to know is for his entire life, he traveled around and he planted churches and he inspired people and he brought people to the gospel. He had what was called a traveling seminary. It wasn't called that then, but we call it that now. He always had people who were younger than him, men and women that he was training up so that they could lead churches too. Timothy is his most famous disciple. He actually, the books of 1 and 2 Timothy were written letters from Paul to Timothy when he made Timothy the pastor in Ephesians. He sent Timothy to Ephesus and he said, that's going to be your church now. Here's some letters to guide you as you lead them. Paul was a great man. He is the most influential Christian to ever live. Paul literally said, and he meant it, to live as Christ and to die as gain. He wanted to be with God so badly that he considered it a good thing if he were gonna die. But he understood that to be here was to serve God, to live as Christ and to die as gain. He wanted death, not in a morose way, not in a suicidal way, not in a depressed way, but in a way that he said his picture of what eternity was was so great that he wanted that more than whatever this life had to offer. I spent a lot of time over the years, I haven't done it lately as much to my detriment, but for a while I was reading a lot of biographies. I love reading biographies about people that have done incredible things, men and women that have impacted history through the years. And whenever I read these biographies about good and bad people, people that did great things, people that did terrible things, I try to look for the commonalities. What is it about these people that make them great? What do they have in common through the years, whether it's Genghis Khan or whether it's George Washington or Steve Jobs? What do they have in common that helped them do these great things? And the one thing that I found in the biographies that I've read is that the thing that these great people have in common is this remarkable singularity of focus. They have this ability in their life to be laser focused on this thing that they think is so important. Above and beyond everything else, often to the detriment of other things that most normal people prioritize. A lot of times what they did, the great thing that they do, costs them all kinds of things in their personal lives. But they have the singularity of focus. And as I study Paul, without a doubt, he has the singularity of focus on God's church. He will not be distracted. All he ever cares about is building God's church and the people in God's church. And Paul had hopes and dreams for you too. He had a desire for you. And he had a desire for grace, just like he had a desire for the church in Ephesus. And if we wanna know what Paul prioritized, I think you can look at his prayers. This prayer is important because it reveals what Paul most values. The reason this passage is important is because it's revelatory to us. It tells us what Paul most values. If you were to go to Paul and you were to say, what's the, to you, if you could only ask for one thing for a church, what would it be? If we went to him and we said, if you could, Paul, if you could only pray one thing over grace, what would it be? I think it would be this. If you said, Paul, what, if you could only pray one thing over my marriage, over my kid, over me, over the people that I love, what would it be? I think it would be this passage. I really, truly do. And I think what's said in this prayer reveals his priorities for us. So let's look at what Paul prays over the churches around Ephesus, and I think over the New Testament church of which we are a part. He says this, That's Paul's prayer for you. If you were to say, Paul, what do you want from me and my family? This is it. This is what he wants. And I think it's worth going through sentence by sentence and making sure we really understand what it is that Paul's asking for us here. So if you look at verses 14, and I've actually asked Lynn running our slides today to just leave it up on the screen so that we can look at it together. If you look at verses 14 and 15, for this reason, I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family on heaven and on earth is named. Paul is saying, listen, Ephesus, I want you to know, church, I want you to know, I pray for you. I pray for you. And when I do, here's what I pray. Now, it's interesting to note he gets on his knees. It's a posture of submission. God, your will be done, not mine. It's acknowledging that God is Lord over the whole earth, that all the churches are his. But really, the heart of this is Ephesus, church, I pray for you regularly. And when I do, let me tell you what I pray for. We see in 16, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being. And there's a purpose to that prayer that he wants to be strengthened you. He wants you to be strengthened in your inner being by his spirit so that there's a purpose to that prayer. Okay. That's not just one thing that he wants. He wants that for you because it leads to something else. And the thing that it leads to is so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, okay? Those first two things there, that you would be strengthened with power in your inner being by his spirit so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. That's salvation. That's what he's talking about. To understand what it means to become a Christian is for the Holy Spirit to open your eyes to spiritual truths that you had not yet seen. If you're a believer, then what's happened in your life is at some point or another, your eyes were opened and you realized, oh my goodness, because of choices I've made, I'm at odds with my creator. I have no way to repair my relationship with my creator, and I need something, some supernatural action so that I can be reunited with my creator. And then you realize through the Holy Spirit, because he's working in your heart and in your mind, that that's Jesus. The Holy Spirit's first work in your life is to turn you on to your need for a Savior, and then to open up the doors of your heart so that Christ can take residence in your heart, that Christ would dwell in your hearts through faith. This is a salvation experience. The very first thing that Paul prays for all of us is that we would be Christians, that we would be saved. If you're here this morning and you're not a part of a church and you're not a part of the church because you're not yet a believer, you just came with somebody or you wandered in, we are so glad that you are here. And I want you to know that Paul prays for you. He prays for you that you would become a believer. And not just mental ascent, not just, yeah, I think so. But that you would be strengthened in your inner being. And that phrasing, that denotes your heart, your guts, your core, and your bones down to the fiber of who you are. Be strengthened with the Spirit, I think, so that you won't doubt. So that you'll know that you know that you know that Christ has you. That he will take up residence in your heart, and that you know that you are a believer, that you will be strengthened to your core and have this confidence in knowing that God has you. He prays that for you. But he doesn't stop there. He doesn't just want you to be a believer. He doesn't just want you to know Christ and for Christ to take residence in your heart. But the result of that, and I think this is a beautiful thing, it says that Christ would dwell in your hearts in faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love. I love that phrase. When we're confident in the work that the Holy Spirit has done, we've been strengthened in our core. When Christ has taken up residence in our heart, the result of this, of knowing that we are saved, is that we are rooted and grounded in love. And as I thought about this phrase, I thought, man, this is a really appropriate phrase for 2019. Because we are a people and we are a culture that is becoming more and more aware of the idea of health. All of us, we express it in different ways. Some of us are old school tough guys and we would never really admit this. We just have other ways of saying it, but it's the same thing. We want to be mentally healthy. We want to be physically healthy. We want to be spiritually healthy. We want to be emotionally healthy. We want to be healthy people. Now, some of you, the best way that you have to be emotionally healthy is just to convince yourself that you don't have any of those and then go through life, okay? So that's how some of you have achieved emotional health. If it's working for you, I don't want to mess you up, but we all seek it. We even have little phrases that kind of tip us off and remind us that not everyone's healthy and that's why life happens this way sometimes. Sometimes somebody will say something to hurt your feelings and you'll go to someone who loves you and you'll say, man, so-and-so said this and gosh, it really bothered me. And they'll remind you that, you know what? Sometimes hurt people hurt people. You ever heard that? Sometimes hurt people hurt people. And that's true. Sometimes people who are unhealthy get their unhealth on you by saying regrettable things. Sometimes we see behaviors in others that are gross to us. Just last night, I wasn't gonna use this, but I am now. This will be fun. Jen and I got to go out on a date. It was nice. We went to Second Empire. It was a good restaurant. There's a six-top next to us, and there was a guy there who his voice was loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear all night. He was an insufferable cuss words. And he went on and on about how, I'm not kidding you. He was like in his fifties. We learned how much he could bench. We learned what kind of car he drive. We learned what he did for a living. We learned the people that he knew. We learned the resumes of everybody at the table. It was, he almost ruined our dinner. If my date had to been so pretty, it would have been a waste of a night. Let's pray. But here's the truth. That guy, he's pretty insufferable. He was a me monster. He needed people to like him. He's just not healthy. He hasn't found his true value and his true worth. So he wants you to know those things about him so that you go, you're something. And if you're smart, if you're empathetic, when you're around people like that, and I didn't do it last night because I was neither smart nor empathetic, but right here I can figure it out. You offer those people grace and you go, they're not healthy. They haven't yet found their worth, their sense of being and belonging. And what this verse is telling you is, once the Spirit has moved in your life and strengthened you, once Christ has taken up residence in your heart, man, you are loved by your creator who sent his son to die for you. And you have all the sense of worth and value that you'll ever need if you'll trust it. He gives you your identity. He imbues you with purpose. He tells you every day that he loves you and that you're enough. And if we believe that, if we hear it, and if we walk in it, then we can be rooted and grounded in love. We can be spiritually and emotionally healthy people, and then out of that help, love others. That's the picture of what it is to be a believer, is to be somebody who's healthy enough to know, I'm loved. I don't need affection from other people. I'm affirmed, I don't need other people to tell me I'm special because God does. And then in that freedom and in that confidence, move and love other people. That's a picture of what health is. And I think so often our lives are not rooted and grounded in love. They're rooted and grounded in a myopia or in a narcissism. They're rooted and grounded in anxiety or in things that we can't control. They're rooted and grounded and characterized by a depression or by places where we're not trusting. They're rooted and grounded in ambition and greed and self-consumption. And Paul's prayer is that we would be people who are healthy, who know Christ, who are rooted and grounded in love. Once we are rooted and grounded the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. Then he prays, I want you to go deeper into this love of Jesus. I don't want him to just take up residence in your heart. I don't want you to just express his love to other people. I want you to go deeper and deeper into this love that Jesus has for you. I kind of think about it like the ocean. If you go to the ocean and you walk up to it to your knees just before your shorts get wet, you can technically say that you've experienced the ocean. But have you experienced the depths of the ocean? You can walk out there until the waves are breaking over your head and you can feel it kind of swirling you around a little bit. You can feel the power of the ocean. Have you experienced the depths of the world's oceans? When I go to the ocean, what I like to do, and I know this is a terrible choice, and one day I'm just not going to come back, and that's how it goes. I swim out until I get scared. Every time I go to the ocean, I do it. I like to do it. I don't know what's wrong with me. I swim until I get scared. And then I turn around and swim back. Now, I never get scared because, oh my gosh, I'm so far out. I'm not going to have the energy to get back. I become acutely aware that I'm at shark depth and that they've seen me. And I cannot, as much as I try to get that thought out of my head and they're not interested in me, there's other things to eat. they don't want me. As much as I try to reason with myself, I just, there's sharks here, man, and I swim back. But even swimming out as far as I can until I get scared, have I experienced the depths of the ocean? If you've been on a cruise ship and you've had the opportunity to look in every direction and see nothing but the ocean. If you are a marine biologist, a maritime explorer, and you get in a submarine and you go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench seven miles down in the Pacific Ocean, have you experienced all that there is to experience in the ocean? No. You can devote your life to exploring it and you will only ever scratch the surface of what it has to offer. This is the love of Christ. Just because we've been up to our waist, just because it swept over us and we felt the power of it a couple times, just because we were able to venture out far enough so that we got scared does not mean that we have experienced all that the love of Christ has to offer. And Paul's prayer is that your life would be this experience of an ever-deepening understanding of the love that God has for you, understanding that until we get to eternity, we will only ever scratch the surface. You could devote your life to understanding the love that Jesus has for you, and we still won't comprehend it. And then finally, he says, for all of this, that you would be filled with all the fullness of God. Thanksgiving's coming up around the corner. And when it does, we go to Dothan, Alabama, and we have the best meal of the year. It's phenomenal. And about 10 to 15 minutes before that meal, every year, what do I start doing? I start going through the kitchen. There's the turkey, and I pick up a little piece of that turkey and have some turkey. There's a deviled egg. I'm going to sneak like six of those, and I'll have a couple of dev you know? I start to kind of pick at the food. But I'm not full yet. Because what's going to happen is we're going to pray, and everybody's going to get a plate, and they're going to go. And I'm always going to go and wait and let everybody else go first because I don't want to have to worry about portion control when I get there. And when I get up to that food, I'm even thinking this year, I'm going to go to Walmart and buy some of those khakis with like the elastic waistband here. So I got some Thanksgiving pants, you know. I'm going to make some irresponsible choices at Thanksgiving. I'm going to have a big old food baby. And I'm not going to stop until I get the meat sweats, right? That's what America does, man. Yeah. That is full. That's full. When we taste on Sunday morning and we get another taste at small group, we get another taste when we get up in the morning, we get another little taste when we listen to something in the car. Let us not be satisfied with that. Let us be filled with all the fullness of God. That we would know him. And that's the heart of the prayer. All of this, if you had to sum it up, what does Paul pray for us? If you had to sum it up in one sentence, what does Paul want for us more than anything? That you would know God. That you would know Jesus. That you would be filled with the fullness of him. That you would have an inkling of the height and the breadth and the depth of his love for you. That you would be strengthened with power in your inner being. That you would be healthy from that health that you would love. That you would be overwhelmed by God and be full of him every day. That's the number one thing that he prays for you. I think that's remarkable. I think it's remarkable, particularly when you think about the things that he didn't pray. If you look at these churches, these churches in the ancient world, life expectancy was like, what, 40, 45? I can't back that up with paperwork, but I feel pretty confident with that guess. Sickness was very much a part of these churches. Loss was a part of the lives of all the people in these churches. Yet Paul does not pray for health. He does not pray in this prayer. He does in other places, but in this prayer, if he can only pray one thing, he doesn't pray for healing or spiritual health or physical health rather. He doesn't pray, even though he planted this church, he wants it to grow. He wants to see them add numbers day by day. He wants to see this church flourish and be bigger in five years than it is this year. He wants that for this church. He doesn't pray it. He doesn't pray, may your ministry be successful. May God give you favor in your community. He doesn't pray for prosperity or wealth or success or health. He prays that they would know God. Now, does Paul want all of those things? Sure, absolutely he does. And at other places in the Bible, he prays for some of those things. But what's the first thing that he wants? That they would know God. It makes sense to me that he doesn't pray for church growth. Because if your church is filled with people who have mined the depths of the love of Christ, who are filled with all the fullness of God. You don't think that church brings in other people? You don't think that church is a powerful force in the community in which it sits? You don't think that person who is filled in that way isn't an influencer at their place of work? He doesn't have to pray those other things. He prays for the fundamental thing. He doesn't pray for health. I think he doesn't pray for health because he doesn't want to be a party to trying to pray away the very situation that is going to bring about the answer to this prayer, which is to make you closer to God. He doesn't pray for prosperity because he doesn't want to be a party to trying to pray away the very struggle that's going to bring you closer to God. And earlier I said that Paul's prayer reveals what he most values. Our prayers reveal our priorities. And if our prayers reveal what we most value, what do your prayers reveal about you? And the times that you pray, for some of us, it's every day. For some of us, it's for our meals. For others, it's when we're at Bible study and someone asks us to pray. We go, well, here we go. For others, it's rarely. It's in dire situations. But when you pray, what do you pray? When you go to God and you ask for something, what's the first thing you ask for? What have you prioritized above everything else? Is it situational? Or does it transcend that? I think the first thing that we should pray in every situation based on this prayer is, Father, let what's happening now conspire in some way to bring people closer to you. When we get the diagnosis, I think first we pray, God, we don't understand this. We hate this. This breaks our heart. Let it conspire to bring people closer to you. And then we go, and if it's still your will, God, could you please get rid of this because this stinks. When we find ourselves between jobs or between purposes, our first prayer should be, God, in this time, when I try to figure out what's next, I pray that the events of this time would conspire to bring me and those around me closer to you. And then the next thing. When something happens in the life of our child, God, I pray that whatever's going on right now, even though I don't understand it, will it please conspire to bring them to a place where they know you better? Will that please be the result of this? And then, Father, do these things. The question I want to ask you is, how should Paul's prayer shape our prayers? How should what he prays for shape what we pray for? How should what he hopes for shape what we hope for? What are your wildest dreams for your kids? Do they start with that they would simply know God? I pray for Lily. I pray that she'd marry a nice man that loves the Lord, that takes care of her, that loves her better than I ever could. I pray that she knows God better than I ever do. But the first thing I pray for her above anything else, any of her character traits, where she goes and what she does, the first thing I pray for her every night is she would know God. When we pray for ourselves and we pray for others, what do we pray for them? When we respond to tragedy, what do we pray in the face of that tragedy? When we respond to triumph, this is where we need to be the most careful. Everything's going great. What do we pray in the face of that triumph? Because we all have hopes and dreams and things that we want in life. But God has those for us too. And I don't know about you, but I want my hopes and dreams to align with his. I want our hopes and dreams as a church to align with what God wants for us. I want us to be people who more than anything else want us and those we love to know God. Let's pray. Father, we love you. You pursue us with a reckless love. You fill us with that love. You offer it to us freely. And God, you call us to it. I pray that we would hear that call, that we would feel it, that we would give into it. Lord, I pray over grace that we would be people who are strengthened in our inner being through your spirit, that Christ would dwell in our hearts through faith, that we would be healthy people who are rooted and grounded, God. And because of that, because of that health, because we know your love so much, that we would mind the depths of the love of Christ that he has for us, that we would know with all the saints exactly what that is, and that we would be filled with all of your fullness, Father. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.