Sermons tagged with Easter

Happy Easter, Grace. This is the weirdest Easter ever, isn't it? None of us have ever experienced an Easter like this before, and I don't think we ever will again. It makes me so sad because Easter is my favorite holiday. I love Easter. I love getting to see everybody. I love the energy in the lobby and in the auditorium. I love getting to hug everyone's neck and seeing how everyone is dressed and meeting children and parents and grandparents and family. It's just, it's such a great holiday. And Easter is a boisterous holiday. It's celebratory. It's exuberant. It celebrates the victory of victories. But it just doesn't feel like Easter right now. It doesn't feel like Easter at this time in our culture and in our community. We don't feel exuberant. We don't feel boisterous. We feel anxious. We feel unsure. For many of us, it's hard to see a path forward on the other side of COVID and quarantine and economic depression. To have a job right now, if you have one at all, is to have done the mental math of how long can my company continue to pay me? And once that money runs out and they have to make cuts, where do I sit in the spectrum of people in my office? We look over the cubicles and think I'm more valuable than that person. That person's probably going to have a job longer than I do. I think to be employed is to have had to have done that math. I talked to a buddy just last week who said, yeah, man, I have a job now, but I really don't know how much longer they can continue to pay me. That's a difficult stress to be in. And then I think of the people on the other side of that stress, the folks right now who own businesses, who are running companies. And I think, gosh, that's a difficult decision that they have to make. They're walking down that path as well, trying to figure out who can we keep and how long can I keep them and how long can we keep things afloat. Others are furloughed and that's fearful and that's fraught with uncertainty. We may not see a path forward there because will the job that we were relieved of be there when things go back to normal and what will normal look like? Or if you're just unemployed and you're facing the idea of trying to get a job once the economy can get turned back on, man, we're facing job loss at an unprecedented rate. The unemployment rate is close to that of the Great Depression. So a lot of us are thinking, even if I can get back into the job market, what is the competition for those jobs going to look like? These are very real stresses. These are very real fears and sources of anxiety. And then if we think about a path forward, that's uncertain too because what does it look like when we just turn the spigot back on and we can all come out of our caves and get haircuts and see each other and not wear sweatpants anymore? What does that look like? I've talked to parents that are concerned about how this is impacting their kids. I know for me, my daughter Lily is asking questions like, Dad, what is a virus? What do viruses do? There's caution tape over our neighborhood playground right now and every time we go by it, she says, it makes me so sad that the playground is closed. And she doesn't understand, and she's sad that she can't see her friends. I'm sad I can't play with my friends. And what's it going to look like when things are normal again? I think a lot of us are facing the reality that the impact of COVID and what we're walking through right now is going to be more protracted than we ever anticipated. And so the truth of it is right now we don't feel like Easter. It doesn't feel like spring. We feel a lot more like the people of Israel that Isaiah is talking to in the book of the Bible that he wrote. In the Old Testament, there's a book called Isaiah. It's one of the greatest books of prophecy ever written. It's a phenomenal book. And he's writing it to an Israelite people who are God's chosen people. They're God's children. They're his chosen ones. And they wear that like a badge of honor. And they should because God has promised them His protection. And in those promises, He's also promised them that He would grant them land, that it would be what we know of as the modern nation of Israel. That would be theirs forever. Yet in the time of Isaiah, several hundred years before Jesus comes on the scene, they do not inhabit the land of Israel. They're actually enslaved by the Babylonians. They're enslaved, they feel abandoned, they feel forgotten, and they're abused. And for many of them, they were hopeless. They're thousands of miles away from the land that was promised to them. Many of them feel abandoned by their God. God, if you're so good, if you're so real, if you're looking out for us, then why are we here? Why are we growing up as generations of slaves? They felt hopeless. They felt anxious. They were very unsure of their path forward and they didn't even know what normal could potentially look like. And so as I thought about the Easter message, I thought it was more appropriate to look at this verse in Isaiah than it was to start off with the resurrection story and the victory that it celebrates because we feel a lot more like the people in Israel or like the Israelites than we feel victorious right now. And it's to these people, these people who felt hopeless, these people who didn't see a path forward, that God gives this great chapter in Isaiah 43. I would encourage you to read the whole chapter of Isaiah 43 and see the heart and the promises of God brought forth in that chapter. But in the 19th verse, God makes this promise. He gives His children this assurance that I think is so comforting and so powerful and so wonderful that it's where I wanted to land for us this morning. And I can't speak to the posture of God during this passage. I can't speak to his emotions because the scriptures don't reveal much about it. But if you'll allow me the license to make a guess, I picture God in this passage as a good and kind and loving father. I know that when I comfort Lily, I bring her up into my lap and I bring her close to me and I tell her that everything's going to be okay and I try to, I use a calm voice and I try to reassure her and I kind of picture God collectively doing that with his children in this verse. In Isaiah 43, verse 19, God says to his children who are hurting and broken and scared and unsure. He says, behold, I am doing a new thing. Even now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it? I will make paths in the wilderness and streams in the desert. I love that verse. What a wonderful verse of comfort to his children. To bring them up onto his lap, to comfort them, to embrace them, to bring them into himself and say, I know that you feel hopeless, but I'm going to give you hope. I know that you feel forgotten, but I see you and I remember you. I know that you feel abandoned, but you're not abandoned. Even now, even though you don't see it, I'm working for you. Don't you see it now? If you look carefully, can't you see the work that I'm doing for you? Even in a very practical way, they were surrounded by thousands of miles of wilderness. There was all this uncharted territory between them and the land that God had promised to them. And God says, I will make a path through that wilderness. And even though that wilderness is surrounded by desert, I will make streams in that desert to sustain you. I love the message there in Isaiah 43, 19, where God says, hey, I'm doing a new thing. I'm going to make a path for you. I'm going to make streams in the desert. I'm going to make the impossible possible. I know you don't see a way out. I know that you feel forgotten. I know that you even feel betrayed by me, but I have not forgotten you. I remember you and I see you. And I think it's important to note that these people have every right to wonder, man, has God forgotten about us? Has God forgotten about me? He made me these promises. I've done all the right things. Is he still looking out for me? And God in Isaiah 43, 19 says, yeah, I am. I still care about you. And I heard one time that a good book or a good verse is 50% content and 50% timing. It depends on when it encounters you in your life, what's going on in your life. And that's maybe why this verse is so powerful for me because I remember when I encountered this verse and when God made a new path for me in my life. I have proof that this verse is true and that the heart of God stays true for His children. In October of 2014, and I've told this story to grace people before, so I won't belabor it, but for those of you who may not be aware of this part of my story, in October of 2014, Jen and I found out that we were pregnant. And we had struggled for many years to get pregnant. It was the prayer and the cry of our heart that God would allow us to be parents. And we had people and communities praying around us. It was an incredible movement of God and always encouraging to know that these people were looking out for us. And in October of 2014, we found out that we were pregnant. And we were exuberant. We were so happy. I can't remember joy like that. But in early December of 2014, we learned that we had miscarried. And in our life, the way that things have gone for us, that was the deepest, most profound sadness we'd ever had to walk through. I felt broken. And even though I wouldn't have admitted it at the time, I was mad at God. I felt abandoned by him. I was looking at all these other people who had kids and had families, and I would think arrogantly, why did they get a family? What have they done? I've organized my life around you, God. This isn't fair. But I was just mad at God, and I was just flailing and thrashing. And in the midst of that, I got asked to preach a sermon. I was on staff at a church, and the new year was coming, and that was typically a time when I got asked to preach. And so I got asked to preach in the beginning of January. And I wanted to be a good soldier. I wanted to do my part, and so I agreed to do it. But I didn't want to preach. I was mad at God. I don't want to get up there and start talking about his truths. And so in all that, I went to Jen, my wife, and I said, hey, I have to preach in a couple of weeks. What should I preach about? And she showed me this verse in Isaiah. She pointed it out to me in her Bible. And she said, I need you to preach on this verse. I need you to preach on a new thing because that's what I need. And I said, okay. And I wrote her a sermon. And it's the only time in my life that I can remember writing a sermon for one person where I thought, I hope the rest of you get something out of this. But for me, I just hope that this encourages my wife. And I wrote it for her. And even, can I just tell you, even as I preached it, I didn't believe it. I didn't, I didn't, I was preaching about God doing a new thing and I didn't want a new thing. I wanted my old thing back, that baby that we had. I was convinced it was a boy and his name was going to be Sam. And I didn't want a new baby, I wanted Sam. But I preached it. And I got through it. And we just kind of muddled on. But around Mother's Day of that year, we found out that we were pregnant again. It was joy of joys. And that pregnancy is what gave us Lily. This is my daughter Lily right here. This week, I taught her to ride a bike. She looks amazing in that helmet. I wish all of you could have heard her screaming and laughing and exclaiming and giggling at her ability to ride a bike. It was incredible. It was one of the gifts of this COVID time that we have that part to ourselves where she can learn. And you know, every time I look at Lily, I'm reminded that she's my new thing. She's my new path. Every time I hold on to her, every time I help her fall asleep, every time I pray for her, I remember how I felt in December of 2014, and I hold on to this new thing that God did for us. I hold on to this new path that he made for us that I would never not choose, that I'm so grateful for. Lily is my reminder that God continues to make new paths. And it may seem weird that this is what I'm talking about on Easter, that it's some obscure verse in the Old Testament, but I wanted to help you see how Lily is my reminder that God still makes new paths because I believe that Easter stands out throughout all of time as God's yearly reminder that he continues to make new paths. Isn't that what Easter is? Isn't that what the disciples stumbled upon? The story of Easter is that Jesus was crucified on Friday and he was put into a grave And as the body of our Savior went into that grave, all hopes of a future went into it with him. That grave, that tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea was a dead end. There was no paths out of there. It was it. There was hopelessness in that tomb. And as the disciples sat around quarantined, ironically, on Saturday, they had no hope. They sat in the middle of a dead end. They were anxious and unsure of a path forward, just like us and just like God's children of Israel in the nation of Babylon when Isaiah was writing. And then on Sunday, on Easter morning, Mary goes to the tomb and she hears maybe the greatest sentence that's ever been uttered in history by the angel of God who is at the tomb. And he says to her, why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen. Jesus is risen. And in that moment, what we see is that all of history turns on its axis and God has won the victory of victories. He has conquered death and hell with the resurrection of his son. He has restored us to a relationship with him. What our sin broke, that death and resurrection repaired. And because of Easter, there are no dead ends. Because of Easter, there are always new paths. Easter itself is a new path where Mary walked into that tomb feeling as if she was entering into a dead end, into a hopeless situation with no path forward. And God, in that moment, I can almost hear Him whispering, Behold, the new thing, the new path, the stream in the desert. And because of Easter every year, we're reminded death has no sting. Because of Easter, we have my favorite quote that says, for we are not given to despair, for we are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song. There is no pandemic. There is no death. There is no disease. There is no bad news. There is no tragedy that can overcome the victory and the joy of Easter. And isn't it great? Isn't it remarkable? I wish that we could be together for Easter. I wish that we could celebrate this as a family. But isn't it wonderful that in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, in the middle of isolation and global uncertainty and anxiety, God has placed this most holy and high of holidays to remind us, I still make new paths. I still do new things. You may not see a path forward, but I do. You may not know what's going to happen next, but I do. You may feel abandoned by God. You may feel let down by God. You may be looking around going, God, I've done all the right things, man. I've tried to be nice to my wife. I've tried to be nice to my kids. I've tried to support my husband. I've tried to give when I can. We try to be generous people and my life feels like it's falling apart. And where are you, God? And Easter is his reminder for us that he's right here. Can I also tell you that that message, that simple message that God still makes new paths, he still makes old things new, he still makes beauty out of ashes is why we're filming here in this place. It's why we've chosen this park, not just to make it springy for Easter, not just to remind us of the promises that nature brings in at the end of every winter, but because this park used to be a city dump. This is the park that used to be the landfill for Raleigh. This place, where I am, everything here used to be filled with trash and fire. It was undesirable. It was the last place anyone or anything wanted to end up. This place was one big dead end. And God, in His goodness, has made it beautiful again. He has literally laid new paths in this place that families walk on and enjoy. There's a playground that children play on. This has become one of the prettiest places in the whole city. And to me, it's a reminder and a symbol of the fact that God still makes new paths. So if you need a reminder, if you need some encouragement during this Easter season, come out here, walk around, look at the greenery, experience the beauty, and be reminded this Easter that even as you sit at home, even as some of us are fraught with uncertainty, even though it might feel silly to be all dressed up for Easter and still sitting on our couch, just remember, God still makes new paths. The same God that made one for Israel, that has made one for you in the past, that has made this place beautiful, will make a new path for you too. And isn't God good for placing that yearly reminder in the middle of our uncertainty? Let's pray. Father, you're good. You're good even when we don't know how. Even when we don't know how everything's going to work out. Even when it's hard to see that goodness sometimes. We know that you're good. Father, thank you for conquering death for us. Thank you for conquering tragedy for us. God, I lift up anyone who feels uncertain, anyone who feels anxious, anyone who might be saying, I don't want the old, I don't want anything new, God. I just want things to go back to the way they were. I pray that we would take solace and comfort in your word. I pray that we would take solace and feel peace from your promises. And that in the gentle way that you do it, that you would draw us into you and you would remind us that you are still the God who makes new paths. It's in your son's name we pray, who died and was risen for us on this day. Amen.

Hey, Grace. Shocked? I bet you are. I'm sure you were expecting Nate, but instead it's me, Easter Kyle. Why am I here? I'm here to tell you that I am downright bummed. Why are you bummed, you ask? I'm bummed because I'm not going to be able to see my entire church family on Easter next week. Now, sure, I'm upset because I'd love to be able to shake hands and give hugs and just see everyone, but I'm mostly upset because I wanted to see those Easter threads. Personally, I just got this suit for our Easter service. Now, I bought it, and I was like, well, if we're not going to meet together, we've got to make a video because people need to see this. Now, not only do I have my Easter clothes, but I know that you do too. I know you guys prep months in advance for what you're going to wear. And so we don't want that to go to waste. And so what we have decided to do is next week, we would love for you as you wake up, to wake up a little bit earlier for our 10 o'clock service, get dressed in your Sunday and your Easter best. I want to see dads wearing pastels. I want to see daughters wearing their dresses. I want to see everyone looking fresh to death. Now, once you've done that, I want to be able to see it. So we need you to throw it on Instagram, throw it on Facebook, and tag Grace Raleigh. I can't wait to see everyone looking their Sunday best. Good morning, Grace. Thanks, Kyle, for that announcement. I do hope that next week you'll get up, put on your Easter best, and share that with all of us so that we can see it. I think that'll be a fun way to make the best of spending Easter together. I'm so glad to have this time with you on Sunday mornings. If you're watching this on delay, again, I understand schedules get crazy, but my hope is that we're all watching this together on Sundays at 10 o'clock so that we can experience being together. Hopefully you are in the lobby on the YouTube website talking with people, saying hello, and engaging with some of the folks from the church. If you're watching for the first time or for the first couple of times, thanks for being here. We're so glad that you are. We are in the middle of a series called Storyteller, looking at Jesus and the stories that he told called parables. You'll remember that a parable is a short fictional story that's used to make a moral point, and Jesus was the master storyteller. He was the master storyteller and used these to make these incredible points. And this week, we arrive at what I believe is the most famous of all the parables, the parable of the Good Samaritan. And you know, a few years ago, I was reading a book, and I did some research this week to try to figure out what the book was and to get the quote exactly right. But after about 10 minutes of some really intense Googling, I just decided to give up because I remember the main idea that I took away from this book. And one of the things that the author said was, you know, in life, to go from competency to mastery, you have to learn to find joy in the nuances of a particular subject or a particular topic. And I thought that that was a really interesting point that we can kind of get to this place of competency relatively quickly by learning some of the basics around whatever discipline or topic that we're pursuing. But if we want to master it, we've got to learn to find joy in the nuances and the little things. And I think the same is true of Scripture. I think if we want to be masters of God's Word, if we want to understand it well, if we want to be able to explain it to people and really take hold of it, then we've got to learn to find joy in the nuances of Scripture. So even though this is a well-worn parable, most of you probably know it. Most of you at home, if you pause this right now, you could probably tell it to the other people in the room. Even if you're watching this and you're not necessarily a church person, you didn't grow up in church going to Sunday school where they taught you these stories, you probably still at least have heard of the parable of the Good Samaritan. And we think that we know the point of the story. The point of the story is that everyone is our neighbor, and that's one of the points of the story, and that's a great point. But I think if we sink into the nuances of this parable, what we'll find is that there is a greater point waiting on us. This parable is found in Luke chapter 10. It begins in verse 25. So if you have a Bible there with you, and I hope you do, go ahead and turn, open that Bible to Luke chapter 10, and you can follow along with me as I tell you this story. So Jesus is teaching, and it says that a young lawyer asked him a question. So we need to understand right away that a young lawyer is not necessarily how we would think of a lawyer, someone who's gone to law school. A young lawyer in that context, in that culture, really had been going to seminary because the law was based on God's word, on what we call the Old Testament, what they call the Tanakh. The law was based on the law of God. So a young lawyer was really kind of a young theologian. And he's presumably talking with some friends, having one of those debates that you normally have. I went to Bible college, and there was all these different debates. In your college, whether it was Bible college or a liberal arts school, you engaged in debates about philosophy and about politics and about life in general, and you solved the problems of the world. It's one of the great things about being that age is the different conversations and ideas that you exercise. He's probably doing this with his buddies, and he sees Jesus, this well-known teacher, this rabbi, and he asks him a question. And so he said, teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? That's his question to Jesus. What do I have to do to inherit eternal life? Another way of thinking about that is, what does God want from me? What does our Creator God expect from us? What does He want me to do? When Jesus responds like a rabbi does, He responds in the form of a question. And rabbis often did this. They didn't just come out and say the thing. They didn't just come out and make the point. They asked questions. They wanted to lead people to their own truths. And so rather than just coming out and answering him, he says, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, well, what do you think? What does the law say? How do you read it? Which is a way of saying like, you're a student. You've studied this. You ought to know the answer to this question. What do you think it is? And the lawyer refers back to a well-worn passage in Deuteronomy, Shema Israel, and something that they repeated before every time they had synagogue or temple. And he repeats that and he says that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. Amen. And Jesus says, that's right. And he says, and you should love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, you have read it correctly. And we know that in other places in scripture, Jesus says these two things, love God and love others, sums up the whole Bible, the whole law and the prophets. And so, so far, this young lawyer is tracking right with Jesus. He's doing really good. But then he says, the Bible says, in order to justify himself, he asked. So the lawyer is having this conversation with his buddies. He's talking to his friends. He's debating over here. He's making a point. He's asserting something about who his neighbor is. And then Jesus is there. And so to kind of show off in front of his buddies, get Jesus to justify his answer in front of his friends, we presume, he says, yes, and who is my neighbor? Apparently that was the discussion or the debate of the time. There's a little bit of uncertainty. Is it just Israelites, the people of Israel? Is it the friends of Israel? Is it the people in my immediate neighborhood? Is it the whole nation? Is it the surrounding nations? Is it even people that I don't like? There was some debate about that question. And so this young lawyer invites Jesus into that debate with his friends to justify himself. And Jesus, rather than just answering his question, begins to tell a story. He says, and who is my neighbor? And Jesus replies in verse 30, he says, a man was going down to Jericho. He starts in on the story. And it's at this point where I can almost feel the countenance of the lawyer shifting. He's bold enough to ask Jesus the question. Jesus asks him a return question. He nails it. He gets it right. Love God, love my neighbor. And Jesus says, that's correct. And he's like, you see, I told you I'm right so far. He's feeling pretty good. And he says, and who is my neighbor? And Jesus says, there was a man on his way down to Jericho. And you can almost see the lawyer going, oh no, what have I gotten myself into? I can see the disciples over to the side. I can see James elbowing Peter. Peter, Peter, shut up, man. Listen, this guy's stepping into it. As Jesus starts into his story, that's when everyone begins to lean in and go, oh gosh, what's the point that he's making? And so Jesus says there was a man on his way down to Jericho. This is a well-worn road. It was very traveled. Jerusalem is in the mountains and Jericho is on the coast of the Dead Sea. And so people would often walk down to Jericho. And so that's where this man was. And he was attacked by robbers. There were some robbers hiding out in the nooks and crannies of the road because it goes through valleys. Incidentally, the road to Jericho goes through the valley of the shadow of death that David refers to in Psalm 23. That's a freebie. I'm just giving these things out. So he's walking down this road, and he's jumped on by the bandits, and he's attacked. He's robbed, they strip him of all of his things and they leave him on the road half dead and dying. And Jesus says, after that happens, a priest comes walking by. And they would expect, like we would expect, a priest to know what to do. A priest is going to do the right thing. A priest is going to care for this man, but he says the priest just walks on by him. Then Jesus says a little while later, a Levite walks by. And we would again expect, or that audience would expect, a Levite to know the right thing to do. And to help us understand what a Levite was and why they would have this expectation, To be a Levite was to be a part of a tribe of the 12 tribes of Israel. The 12th tribe was the tribe of Levites, and they were the priestly tribe. To be a priest, you had to be a Levite, but not all Levites were priests. Some were assigned duties in the temple. So the easiest way to think about it for us, because this is a priest who had leadership in the temple or in the church, and then a Levite who had duties and other leadership in the church, the easy way to think about that for us would be a pastor and an elder walked by. And so in our context, we would expect, like they would expect, that a priest and a Levite or a pastor and an elder would know the right thing to do, would do the loving thing. But in both cases, the priest and the Levite walked by the man and left him to die. And for years and years, I thought that they did this because they were jerks. I thought they did this because they were hypocrites, because they got up on Sunday and they said the stuff they were supposed to say, and they shook the hands they were supposed to shake, and they hugged the people they were supposed to hug, but then during the week they didn't really practice what they were preaching. I thought maybe they thought they were too important or too good, or that his case was hopeless, and so they just walked on by. And my whole life, I've judged the priest and the Levite for being terrible examples of love. But someone pointed out for me a couple of years ago a tension that was going on there that I didn't notice when I was a kid and encountered this story for the first time. You know, the man on the road was dying. He was essentially dead. And the priest and the Levite are not allowed to touch dying things. They're not allowed to touch something that's dead or dying. If they did that, they would become unclean. It's a violation of the law that they uphold to reach down and to help this man. Because they can't do it without touching him and without getting messy. They can't do it without getting unclean. So it's entirely possible, it's entirely possible that they saw this man, they wanted to help him, they felt genuine empathy and sorrow for him, but knew, I can't do this. I will become unclean. I am a priest. I am a Levite. I have duties in the temple and I need to be able to perform those, so I can't help this man, and they walk on by. Then Jesus introduces a Samaritan into the story. And you've probably heard that there was tension between the Hebrew people and between the Samaritan people. And maybe you don't know why that tension existed. Maybe you could perfectly articulate it, but for those who can't, this is why there's tension between Jews and Samaritans. The Jews were God's chosen people. They were descendants. The Hebrew people were descendants from Abraham. And throughout their history, by edict of God, they had taken great pains to maintain the ethnic purity of the line of Abraham. They were forbidden to marry people from other nations. They had to protect and maintain this line. And the Samaritans were a race of people from folks who had intermarried with other countries and other nations and other ethnicities. And so they had lost the purity of the race of the Hebrew people. And because of that, they were ostracized and forced to live in their own cities and their own towns. And so there was racial tension between the Jews and the Samaritans because the Samaritans weren't pure like they were. The other thing that deeply offended the Jews about the Samaritan way of life is the Samaritans claimed to worship the same God. They claimed the same lineage. They claimed that they were just as good with God as the Hebrew people were and that their forefathers went back to Abraham as well, just like the Jewish people did, and that they worshiped the same God and that they executed the same religion. But their religion actually gets traced back to a split in the kingdom between Jeroboam and Rehoboam when Jeroboam instituted his own religion to make money and keep the tax dollars there. It was this political maneuver that he made, and the Samaritans are the descendant of that fabricated religion that is kind of part of the Jewish faith, but not the entire Jewish faith. If we wanted to understand it in our context, it would be this religious division that we see between Christians and maybe Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses. Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses claim to worship the same God that we as believers do, but they believe different things about Jesus than what we do. And so while the claim is that everything is the same, what we as Christians believe is there are nuances there that actually make those very different. And so there is ethnic tension between the Jews and the Samaritans, and there's religious tension between the Jews and the Samaritans. And they didn't live in the 21st century with political correctness where we sweep over all of those things and be nice to everybody anyways. They lived in an era where hate was perfectly fine, and so they hated each other. Jews despised the Samaritans. They wouldn't even walk through their towns. They would inconvenience themselves and walk around them. And the Samaritans likewise were justified in despising Jews. They were justified in disdaining them, in there being tension between those two groups of people. And so when Jesus introduces the Samaritan man into the story, he's doing it on purpose. He's making a radical statement. And this is where everyone can feel the story begin to turn and the lawyer has to be going, oh no, what am I going to do? He's going to make me look like an idiot. And this Samaritan has every reason to leave this man dying on the road because this man is likely a Jew and he has every excuse to not help him. But look at what he does. We pick this up in verse 33. It says, but a Samaritan as he journeyed came to where he was, the man who was injured and dying. And when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and he bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper saying, take care of him and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back. Look at the remarkable love of the Samaritan. He doesn't just kneel down and give him some water. He doesn't just kneel down and bind up his wounds and give him oil and wine. And if he's making a journey, he likely needed that oil and wine for himself. He didn't make provisions to help someone convalesce, to heal someone, and to patch someone up. He didn't make provisions for those things as he went on his journey. He needed that. And it would have been enough if he knelt down and gave up his oil and his wine and bound up this man's wounds, touched him, becoming unclean, and the Samaritan understands the same rules that the priest and the Levite do. He just decides that this is more important than remaining ceremonially clean, spiritually clean. And so he kneels down and he touches him and he binds him up. And that would have been enough. That would have been love, but he doesn't stop there. He picks the man up and he lays the man on his animal. Presumably, he gave up his seat and now he has to walk the rest of the journey while this man rides on his animal. And he takes him to an inn. And it would have been enough to take him to an inn to drop him off and go, hey, this guy's dying. I need a room. And just leave him there and let it be the innkeeper's issue. But he brings the man to his room and cares for him overnight. He has a sleepless night to care for this man. And I don't know about you guys, but I have a four-year-old in the house. So every now and again, we have sleepless nights, and I would not choose them. I like to sleep. This man gave up a night of sleep to care for this man who was dying, and that would have been enough. But then he leaves some money with the innkeeper. He says, I have a thing to do. Here's two denarii. Here's 200 bucks. Take care of him. I'm going to come back through town. When I come back through town, you spend whatever you have to to help him get right. And when I come back through town, I'll pay you back for whatever you have to spend. Remarkable love by the Samaritan. And Jesus finishes his story and he looks at the young lawyer and he says, now you tell me, which of these three love their neighbor? And the young lawyer can't even bring himself to say the word Samaritan. He simply says, the one who showed him mercy. And Jesus' response is remarkable. He says, yeah, now you go and do likewise. You go and love like the Samaritan did. Often we make the point of this parable that our neighbor is everyone, even somebody that we should justifiably dislike or have disdain for, even people who are mean to us, even people who are different than us, even people who are different ethnicities or backgrounds or heritages than us. We should love everyone, and we kind of make that the point of this story. But I don't think that Jesus makes that the point of the story. I think when we sink into the nuances of the story, what we see is that there's a lot more going on there and that the way Jesus ends it, the point that he's making to the lawyer is not trying to define the neighbor, it's trying to define love. And the way that Jesus defines love is very simple. I'm stealing this from a speaker and an author named Bob Goff who has a book by this title, and I think it is the point of this parable. And I think the point that Jesus is trying to make is that love does. Love does. Love acts. Love doesn't make excuses. Love doesn't walk past. Love doesn't explain away. Love is not convenient. Love does. Love helps. Love is my father-in-law. He's driving down the road in the middle of winter. He stops at an intersection and there's someone spinning a sign on the side of the road on a particularly cold day. And this person doesn't have a jacket. And a lot of people might just pray, God, help that person feel better. I hope that shift is done soon or give them genuine empathy on their way by. But my father-in-law pulls over his car, gets out, takes his fleece off and hands it to him and says, here, you need this more than I do. That's what love does. Love acts. I think so often we think loving thoughts. We want to do loving things. We have loving ideas, but we don't put them into action. And Jesus' instruction to the young lawyer is not to say, hey, everyone's your neighbor. It's to say, you go and you love like the Samaritan did. And so what we see in this story is that loving our neighbor is easily excused away, but love doesn't make excuses. Loving our neighbor is easily excused away, but love doesn't make excuses. I have a friend whose wife is a nurse. She's been a nurse their whole marriage. They have three boys, one's in sixth grade, and then they go on down. And she only works at the hospital about once every two weeks, whatever the minimum amount of time is to keep up with her licensing and her employment and all those different things. And in the midst of COVID, it came to be her turn to come in and do a shift. And she could have very easily excused away, I've got boys to think about, I've got a family to think about, my mom and dad live in our neighborhood, we see them sometime, I don't want to expose myself and expose them. She could have excused away what she needed to do, but she felt at the end of the day that loving her neighbor was to go in and care for the community that needs care right now more than any other time in our life, was to go in and give a break to the nurses that have been exposing themselves to this danger and to this threat on a daily basis. She could have excused away what love was and stayed home and no one would have blamed her. But love does. Love acts and it doesn't make excuses. We've all done this. We're driving down the side of the road, we're walking on the sidewalk, someone asks us for money and we think, we feel a tinge that we should give them something, we should care for them in some way, but then we excuse it away and we explain it away and we say, well, they're just going to use it to make poor choices. We're on the way home. Somebody's on the side of the road and it looks like maybe they need some help and we think that we could pull over, but then we remember, well, you know, dinner's on the table. The kids are expecting to see me. The family's ready. I don't want to inconvenience them, so I'm going to go on. And the parable of the Good Samaritan reminds us that, yeah, love is easily excused away. We can explain those things away if we want to, but that love doesn't make excuses. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, we see that love is messy. Loving our neighbor is messy, but love gets messy. Whatever, I don't know what the Samaritan was wearing that day, but they were good. They were probably decent tribal clothes, and what he didn't want on them was dirt and blood and grime. But he knelt down, and he cared for this man that was beaten to within an inch of his life, and he got messy. He lost a night's sleep. He got down into this person's problems with them. And we know that love is messy. When you're sitting in your office and you ask someone who passes by, hey, how you doing? And they come sit down in a chair and they go, well, we kind of internally go, oh, I did not bargain for this. I have a lot of things to do because we know that we're about to get messy. We know that they're about to start telling us some stuff and we're about to get in the middle of this thing. And so often we kind of refrain and we go, I don't want to make their problems my problems. I don't want to get in their business. I don't want to make this messy. I don't want to get involved in that. And so we kind of keep to ourselves. But what loving our neighbor means is acknowledging that loving our neighbor is messy and that love gets messy. This is why I love our Stephen ministers so much. At Grace Raleigh, we have Stephen ministry, and we have different people in the church who are Stephen ministers, and that's what they do. They get messy with people. Stephen ministers are trained to go in during hardships, during difficult diagnoses, or during losses, or in the face of addiction, or in the face of depression, or just times of high anxiety. And they go and they sit with people week after week, hour after hour, and they get in this mess with them, and they trudge through life with them, and they love them back to wholeness. They get messy with them. It may be that you feel that you need a Stephen minister right now. You need someone to talk to. You're anxious, and you need to share that. If you'll go to our website, graceralee.org slash care, you can find everything you need there to raise your hand and go, hey, I need to talk to somebody. Or if you want to love your neighbor by joining the ranks of Stephen ministers, you can sign up there and email our leader, Bill Reith, and get involved in loving your neighbor that way. But this story of the Good Samaritan shows us that loving our neighbor is messy and that love gets messy. Finally, in the story, we see that loving our neighbor is costly, but that love invests. Loving our neighbor takes something from us. It took the Samaritan's oil and wine. He gave him 200 denarii and said, I'm going to come back and pay this man's debt. Sometimes love costs us something. I remember when this lesson smacked me in the face a couple of months ago. We just recently moved, but before that we lived very close to the corner of Falls and Spring Forest. And there's a Harris Teeter Shopping Center in there. And there was somebody opening up a store for pets, I think called Pet Wants or something like that. And there was individuals who had been working in there for several days. It was late at night. It was like nine o'clock at night. And they're still in there trying to get ready. And I always root for locally owned places. I always root for people who have invested all of their savings and their hopes and dreams and opening up this thing. And it really kind of pulled on my heartstrings to see them in there working late and pouring their hopes and dreams into this place and their misguided affection for pets. And so I thought, man, I really want to encourage these people. So on my way into the grocery store, I knocked on the door and they kind of looked at me and I just kind of waved and they opened the door and they said, hey, we're not open yet. And I said, no, no, I know. I just want you guys to know that I'm rooting for you. I hope this goes well. I know that you've poured a lot into this. I've seen you working hard and I'm really rooting for you in this. Just wanted to encourage you. And they said, wow, great, thanks. They said, we're gonna open tomorrow. You can come back. We're giving away free yada, yada, yada. And I said, yeah, okay, great. And I walked away and I thought, I'm not coming back tomorrow. I'm not buying stuff for my dog. That's Jen's department. But I got to feel good because I was a good neighbor and I wished them well. But by the time I got back in my car and drove off, I thought, if you really love them, you'll go in there and you'll buy some dog treats. If you really want to support them, you'll go in there and you'll spend some money. If you really want to show them love, then it's going to cost you something. This is not about your ego boost and feeling good about yourself. This is about actually doing what they need you to do to love on them. And now, in light of the story of the Good Samaritan, I realize that love invests. Love is costly. It takes from us. But Jesus says that if the Samaritan was the one in the story that showed love, that we ought to go and do likewise. So grace, we're called to be good Samaritans. And that doesn't just mean that we're called to love everyone. That means that we're called to a love that acts, to a love that does, to a love that doesn't excuse things away, to a love that gets messy, to a love that invests. And now some of you, you may feel like the person that was left for dead. You may feel like COVID and the economy and the markets have just attacked you and robbed you and left you. You may need some people to love on you right now. And I would say this to you, if you are a part of Grace or you're watching this at all, and you feel like that person who's just been left on the side of the road, you're feeling beat up, if you're facing joblessness, if you are anxious because some of the jobs that you had lined up are getting canceled or are getting deferred and you don't know if you're gonna make up that income, if you're worried about being able to pay your bills, would you please let us know? Would you please tell us? If you're watching this on our website, on the live page, at the bottom, there's a space where you can submit a prayer request. Please tell us. On our website, you can find the email addresses of the staff. Email us. I don't want anybody, listen to me, I don't want anybody in our church hurting, facing job loss, not knowing how they're going to pay their bills, facing this time by themselves. I don't want it to be a secret that you've lost your job and you don't know what you're going to do and you don't know how you're going to care for your family, tell us. Let your church love you. Let us invest in you. Let us wrap our arms around you. I would hate to know that any of you are carrying a private anxiety or a private stress and we aren't able to do anything about it. Please let us love you if you feel like the person who's been beat up and left behind. For the rest of us, what a unique time to love our neighbor. If you have the means and you can, go support, go spend money at local places, go do the curbside pickup things, go get meals that you could just make at your home if you can afford it, if you can support in that way, go and do it. It doesn't seem like this is going away anytime soon, so we've got weeks to think about how we can love our neighbors and what love can do in the midst of this crisis. Let's right now, Grace, in whatever capacity we have, be the good Samaritans that love our neighbors well. And let's remember that love does, it goes, it acts. And let's take action. Let me pray for us. Father, we understand that you have made us conduits of your love, that we are able to love others because you love us, because you invested in us. Your love for us was costly and you paid that cost. Your love for us is messy and you got messy. Your love for us could have been excused away, but you didn't do that. You didn't make excuses. You came down here and you loved us and you continue to love us. And God, give us the power and the faith and the courage and the vision to love people like you love us, to love people like the Samaritan loved that person that day. Give us eyes to see the needs around us. Give us the courage to meet those needs. Let us in this time be defined by being a church that loves well. Be with us throughout our weeks, God. Be with our families. Give us grace and patience with each other. And it's in all these things, in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Happy New Year, and thank you for choosing to spend your first Sunday of the year in church here at Grace. I'm excited for this year, for all that it holds for our church and all the things that hopefully God has for us this year. I think 2020 is going to be a huge year in the life of Grace. As we launched the year, I wanted to start with a series that would be helpful for everybody. So if you're here this morning, wherever you are on the spiritual spectrum, if you're one who would say, you know what, I'm not even really sure that I'm a believer or that I want to be, but I want to try the church thing. I want to try to understand faith a little bit more. If you're here as a representative of a New Year's resolution to attend more regularly or whatever, or if you're somebody who has really highly prioritized your relationship with God for a long time, my goal for this series is that it would be practically useful for all of us, that you'd be able to take things home every week and really kind of assess, how do I implement these things in my life? I'm hopeful that this can be a very helpful series. That's why it's called I Want a Better Life. I don't think anybody, if we said like, how's your life right now? Is there anything that you want to be better? Very few of us would say like, I'm killing it. I mean, there's nothing else that I could find. Like, Kyle Tolbert's the only person I know who'd be like, nope, totally happy with everything in my life right now. This is fantastic. Kyle's our super energetic student pastor, for those who don't know. So we all want a better life, and so next week, we're going to look at, I want better kids. We're going to look at parenting. Then the week after that, I want a better marriage, which I know that there's only a couple of marriages in here that really want to be better. The rest of you are doing great. For those few, we're going to talk about wanting a better marriage. Then the last Sunday of the month, I'm really excited about, we're going to talk about, I want a better me. Mental health has come to the fore of our culture, and I think as a culture we have an increasing awareness of that. And so I want to take a week and look at mental health and what it means for a believer to be mentally healthy and how the church can accept and embrace and rally around the mental health of us individually and of the people in our lives. So I'm excited for that week. This morning, I wanted to start 2020 by talking about our schedules. So this morning is I want a better schedule. I wanted to talk about our schedules because I feel like as a culture, we are busier now than we've ever been. I feel like there are so many pulls and so many pressures and so many different things and obligations and senses of ought that pull us into things that we just give our days and our mornings and our evenings away to, that as a group of people, as a culture, a society, I think we are very likely busier than ever. I remember when I was a kid, which was in the 80s, which for me feels like a long time ago, I saw somebody tweet the other day, or I guess it was on January 1st, that we are now as far away from 2050 as we are from 1990, which is super depressing. But in the 80s, when I was growing up, man, Sundays, I just saw somebody over there doing the math like, they're very slow. I saw, in the 80s, you didn't schedule anything on Sundays. Sundays was a blackout day. There's no nothing on Sundays because Sundays was church day. I even remember growing up, you didn't have practice on Wednesday night. Nothing was scheduled on Wednesdays. That was a sacred day too. And now, man, like all gloves are off. Everything can be scheduled at any time. And people will obligate you to things so quickly. We took Lily to preschool to start that. And on orientation night, there's a large sign-up sheet that everybody just stares at you as you stare at it. And they're watching you. Where are you going to write your name? Surely you're not going to walk out of here without writing your name on something. And I thought, bad news for you guys. I'm not volunteering for anything. And I didn't. But my wife is sweet. Jen is so nice. So she signs up to be library mom, not knowing that it means like once a week she has to pick up books from the classroom and then take them to the library and then check out all the other books that the preschool now wants, which is funny because the amount of money we give the preschool every month seems like they can afford books, but what do I know? So that's what Jen does like every other day, but she loves it and she's continued to do it, but there are opportunities and things that get our time so frequently. I actually hold, I don't think that there is a busier season of life than that of parents of elementary and middle school kids. From a pastor's perspective, I get to see kind of all seasons of life and which groups of people can engage in which activities in the church. And the hardest ones to grab a hold to are parents who have kids in elementary and middle school. And it's not because they don't care about spiritual things. It's because they legit don't have time for anything. I had some of the moms in the church who have kids in that demographic. I emailed them and I said, hey, can I have your schedules? I just want to get a sense for how busy your lives are. Y'all, it was crazy. It was crazy. As I read through their schedules, literally stem to stern every day. The thing that stuck out to me most was one of the moms who has three kids put, I'm just reading her schedule every week. These are the consistent things every week. And it was all the time. And then she said, there's an asterisk, and the asterisk says, these are the activities that we can predict. There are unpredictable activities such as all these things, right? Swim meets and committee meetings and mom things and dance recitals and all the other stuff that fill up all the time. And she had a note on Friday afternoon. The schedule on Friday afternoon was from four to six o'clock, free time, nothing to do, smiley face emoji. For two hours on a Friday. That's it. That's the free time that the whole family has together. And I thought, my goodness, that's so busy. And some of us can relate to that. So listen, I'm not here this morning to demonize busyness. It's not inherently wrong to be busy. As a matter of fact, in defense of the moms that sent me their schedules, they made each of those decisions as a family. And sometimes you're just in a busy season or a season of hustle, and that's all right. So I don't want to demonize busy, but I do want us at the beginning of this year to think critically about how we assemble our schedules. How is it that we allow things to be put on our schedule? I also want to say up front that in our culture a little bit, we wear our busyness on our sleeve like a badge of honor, like being exhausted is a thing to be respected. That's stupid, right? That's all I have to say about that. That's a dumb thing. We shouldn't be proud of how busy we are. We should accept it if we choose to be busy, but it's not a thing to be admired that someone else is so busy that they can't wake up and look in the mirror and think, I feel rested. That's too busy maybe. But I think a bigger reason why we end up so busy with our time so obligated is that we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's builds a menu. Okay, we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's, the restaurant, builds a menu. Now, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know how much fast food is a part of your world. Fast food is a large part of my world. It always has been. It is near and dear to me. I'm in a weight loss bet with my dad and my sister right now, and so it is not a part of my world, but I think I'm going to lose the weight by about March, which means come April, back to Hardee's, baby. But if fast food is not a part of your world, then you don't know that in the early 2000s, Hardee's, as a restaurant, just completely forgot who they were. They did breakfast. They did biscuits. We know about biscuits. The rise and shine biscuits or whatever they are. Those are delicious. But then they said, let's get into burgers and let's do roast beef sandwiches and let's have curly fries and let's do chicken tenders and let's serve fried chicken. And how about soups? I'm pretty sure at one point there was an experimental deli counter at a Hardee's somewhere. I would have loved to have been in the boardroom just listening to these meetings where some intern says, you know, I think Arby's is making some real hay with that roast beef sandwich and curly fries. We need to get into that market share. And the rest of the really smart executives around the successful restaurant board went, yeah, sounds good. Let's do a roast beef sandwich. Let's figure it out. And they just started adding things to the menu. If you were paying attention, it was just this total hodgepodge. They did everything. I can't imagine what their inventory looked like. And then when that failed, they just went to, let's just do really ridiculous attention-grabbing commercials, and nothing worked. And the thing is with the Hardee's menu is none of the things were bad, right? Roast beef sandwich, that's good, but let's just let Arby's do it. Fried chicken, that's great. Let's leave that to Popeye's. They didn't do that. They just kept adding all the things. Anytime anybody suggested a good thing, boom, got put on the menu. And it led to disorganization, and it's not a very good restaurant. So I think that what we need to do is we need to build our schedules a little bit more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's. We need to build our schedules more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's because I think that we do what Hardee's does sometimes. Somebody suggests something that seems like a good idea, and we're like, yeah, I mean, I guess I should. We go to preschool, and there's a sign-up sheet, and everyone's staring at you, and my sense of awe is going to make me sign up for something. I can't leave here disappointing these strangers that I don't know again. Or we do the same thing with PTA, or it's time to coach ball, or it's time to be on the committee, or Nate called me and asked me to do this thing, and I really don't want to do it, but it's the pastor. I feel like I have to. So we just, when we get good ideas, we put that on the calendar, we figure it out, and we build it like Hardee's builds their menu, and maybe we need to build our schedule more like Chick-fil-A. Now, we know about Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A does one thing, chicken. That's it, chicken sandwich. And then they grilled it. And then with an act of Congress, they made it spicy. That's it. That's all they do. And you know that there's been some pretty good ideas in the boardroom at Chick-fil-A over the history of the restaurant. You know people have suggested some really good stuff. Why don't we do rotisserie chicken? No. We do chicken sandwiches. This is all we do. And the other thing I love about Chick-fil-A, if they put something on the menu and it's not working, get it out of here, man. They're ruthless about it. They really streamline what they allow there. They don't have a chicken salad sandwich anymore because they got away from the old one that was mashed down and in the warm bag and was delicious and they tried to go fancy and that didn't sell. And so now they don't have one because if it's not doing what it's supposed to do, get it out of here. They really streamline their menu. And I think that we need to build our schedules like that. So the question becomes, how do we build our schedules like Chick-fil-A builds a menu? How do we streamline it according to what's important to us, so that we don't live our life by default, so that we don't look back on the last year and go, how in the world did I invest my time? How do we do that? Well, I think that there's a biblical principle to help us, and we can find it in Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible and you want to turn there, go ahead. The words will be up on the screen in a minute. Matthew chapter 6 is the Sermon on the Mount. It's in the middle of it. It's Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. It's Jesus' first recorded public address. I love it so much that we did a whole series on the Sermon on the Mount one time. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is just dispensing wisdom and instruction for life. And in chapter 6, he says this. Verse 19, the words on the screen are going to start in verse 20 don't matter, that are temporary. And the purpose of this morning, don't invest your lives, don't invest your time, don't invest your effort and your energy and your talent and your resources in things that don't matter, but rather treasure up for yourselves, make priorities of the things that will matter for eternity, of the things that will matter after you're gone. Orchestrate your life around those things, treasure those things. And so, to me, the very obvious question in light of, in thinking about our schedules and in light of this passage and this principle is what are my treasures? What are my treasures? And normally when I do a note like this, I say, what are your treasures? It's me talking to you, but I really want you to internalize it this morning and think through what are my treasures? What are the things that are most important to me? What are my biggest priorities? And I was always told growing up, if you want to know what someone treasures, look at their bank account and look at their calendar. Look at how they invest their resources. How do we spend our time and how do we spend our money? And so if we think about time, if I were to go home with you or grab your phone and look through your calendar from 2019, what would your calendar say about what your treasures are? Because you can't fake that, right? We can say, oh, God's most important to me, my family's most important to me, or my friends, or whatever it is, my job's most important to me. We can say whatever we want is most important to us, but all we have to do is look through our appointments and the way that we spent our time, and we'll know what we really value. If we could follow each other around on the weekends, what would we learn about each other that we value? If we could see each other in the evenings during our discretionary time, that one family in the hours of 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday, what would we learn about what they value? If we were to look at our schedules and our calendars from 2019, what is it that we treasure? And so what I want us to do this morning is a little bit of homework. In your bulletin there, there's the question, what are my treasures? And there's five blanks, okay? I don't want you to fill those out here. What I'd love to invite you to do is take the bulletin home with you and prayerfully think through, God, what are the things in my life that you want to be most important to me? A better way to ask the question is, God, what are my God-ordained treasures? What would you have be important to me in 2020? How would you have me prioritize my life? I think it's a worthwhile exercise at the beginning of the year to take that home and sit down and prayerfully say, God, what do you want to be important to me? What have you placed on my heart that I need to value? And it's actually a helpful exercise. I did it this week. I just sat down and I thought, if I'm going to ask everybody to do this, I need to do this for myself. I haven't written down my priorities anywhere. I just kind of go. And a lot like Hardee's, my schedule by default just kind of happens. And so if I were to be intentional about building my schedule and listing my priorities, how would I list them? And so I'm going to share them with you this morning, not because they need to be yours and not because you need to copy my list, but just as an exercise of trying to figure out what should be important to us. And then how do we organize our life around those things? So these are my top five priorities in my life as I thought through them this week. You see, the very first thing up there is spiritual health, my relationship with God. The Bible has a lot to say about pursuing God. David writes in Psalms that as the deer pants for the water, so his soul longs after God, that that's how much we should long for God. I almost preached out of a passage where Jesus is interacting with Martha and Mary in Luke, I believe chapter 10. And in that story, Jesus is going to Martha and Mary's house. And Martha is doing what most of us would do and is scrambling around getting everything right, making sure the table's set correctly and that the napkins are folded and that the room that Jesus is never going to go in in a million years is vacuumed and that the curtains are just right. She's doing all the things that you're supposed to do. This is the Messiah, after all, and he's coming to my house. I'd like for it to look nice. And she gets upset because Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus. Mary's just sitting there soaking in Jesus's presence. And Martha thinks she's lazy and she gets on to her. Hey, you should help me. And Jesus actually defends Mary and says, Martha, Martha, you are concerned about all of these things, but only one thing matters, and Mary's figured it out. So I believe that if you're a believer, this is the one where I would say you should really write this down too as your top priority. But don't do it unless you mean it. Our spiritual health has got to be our most important thing to us. Because here's what I know about myself. I don't know what you've learned about yourself as you've pursued spiritual health over the years or as you've considered it, but for me, I'm a better everything when I'm walking with the Lord. I am more gracious with my time. I'm more magnanimous with other people. I'm more patient with inconveniences. I'm more considerate of Jen, my wife. I'm more present with Lily, my daughter. I behave better in elder meetings. I'm nicer to the staff and don't want to get out of meetings as quickly. I leave my door open a little bit more often so I can chit-chat, which is not really a thing that Nate loves to do. But when I'm walking with the Lord and he's filling me up, I become a more gracious and more kind version of myself. And I become a better husband and I become a better father and I become a better pastor and I'm walking in a sense of joy and contentment and completeness that I cannot experience away from the Father. So I would be a very strong advocate to putting as your number one priority your spiritual health. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, you're thinking things through, I would still submit to you that probably the most important thing in your life is being spiritually healthy. I think if you go down that path, it will lead you to serve the same God that I do. But I think for all of us, this is a pretty compelling top spot. Next for me is Jen. It's my wife. In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about marriage, and he says that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who gave himself up for her. So if we look at Jesus, his first priority was to God and being obedient to him, and then his next priority was the church. And husbands, that's how we are to love our wives. We're going to talk about this in a couple weeks, so I'm not going to step on that too much. But my Bible tells me that I am to sacrifice my life for my wife. I'm going to lay myself down for her, and I will, listen, I'm up here preaching this to you. She's sitting right there. She knows I don't do this all the time, all right? So let's not act like you should be like me in your marriages. No, we should work on this together, right? No, we don't want any liars up here. We're doing our best. But I know that this is how I should prioritize that. And what does it look like to prioritize these things? If we're to say that spiritual health is my number one priority, then what does it look like as far as building our schedule to do that? Well, first we have to identify the things that make us healthy. I think it's time in God's Word and time in prayer. And so for a lot of us, that might mean adjusting our schedule and going to bed a little earlier so we can get up a little earlier. Cutting out that last episode of whatever it is. Being willing to not see the end of the game, which by the way, go Titans last night. So that we can get up earlier the next day and invest in spiritual health. Maybe it means next week signing up for a small group and prioritizing that in our schedule. Maybe it means not committing to the things that are going to require our time on Sunday morning or some other time where it can be spiritually helpful to us. Maybe it means paring down some of the things in our schedule so that we can have more time for God. And if we think about prioritizing our marriages, I think anybody who's in here who's married, their spouse would be in the top at least three, okay? If that's not it, come see me. But how do we practically schedule for that? I know for us, it's going to mean me being more intentional about finding babysitters and getting out to spend time together. It's intentional about getting home for meals, not stopping by in the middle of the day if it's a full day. We can't just say that these are our priorities. We have to think practically about, okay, if those are my priorities, then how does my schedule mirror that? After Jen is my daughter Lily. I think she has to be after Jen. And if parents, if we're not careful, we'll let the kids sneak up over our spouse, won't we? But I think one of the best things I can possibly do for Lily is to love her mom in such a way that she wants what we have when she grows up. What a thing to say about your parents that they might want that. I think one of the best things for Lily is to grow up in a house where her parents love each other. And listen, we don't have a perfect life or a perfect marriage. I'm just saying that this is what Lily is supposed to see. And it's what I want to give to her. I want to love Lily so well that when guys try to date her, she knows. You're not going to love me anywhere like my dad does. Forget it. I want to love her so well that she doesn't put up with dummies when she's in high school and college. I really do. And I have her listed above the church. And I'm just going to tell you guys this right now because I want her to know as she grows up and we lead this church together that she means more to me than you guys do. I want her to know that. I want her to never think, man, my dad loved those church people, and sometimes it felt like he didn't love me as much. I don't want her to feel that. I don't want her to feel like she's taking a back seat to my job. I do want her to feel like she takes a back seat to my wife because I want her to marry a guy that does that too. And we're going to talk about this next week, but Lily's got to be on there because God's called me to disciple her and to train her in spiritual health as well. After that, for me, are my family and friends. My immediate family and my friends, I lump those together because for me, friendships are super valuable. I believe what Solomon says in Proverbs when he says, the companion of the fools will suffer harm, but the companion of the wise will become wise. I believe in the adage, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. We believe passionately that you need people in your life who love you and love Jesus and have permission to tell you the truth. And so for me, I prioritize friendships. And I prioritize them sometimes over my job because I believe that we all need safe spaces where we can be completely ourselves and completely vulnerable and still completely loved and accepted. That's a picture of godly biblical love. It keeps us sane. For me personally, I want to be your pastor for 30 years, not three years. And part of that and the help for me is having good friendships both inside and outside of the church that give me life where I can just be myself. So for me, I prioritize those. And then my job. You guys. I put it there because I think the tendency is, for any of us who have careers that we care about, is to allow that to leapfrog everything else in our life. Is to allow that to steal time from other things. And I hear often from people who are retired that one of their biggest regrets is working too much. And I don't want to say that. So on the front end, I try to constantly remind myself because it will eat me up. You guys know how it is with work. There's always more to do. There's always more to think about. There's always something else to be done. There's always the next hill to climb. There's always something urgent. There's always the phone call and always the email and always the thing to respond to. It's not going to go away just because you choose to respond to this one. The next wave is coming. So at one point or another, you have to draw a line and you have to say, these are my God-ordained treasures, and I'm not going to let this one overtake ones that it shouldn't. So we have to measure how highly we prioritize our jobs or whatever else may go there that tends to eat away at your time. So my hope is that you'll go home and you'll say, God, what are my treasures? What are my God-ordained treasures in my life? That you'll physically write them out and then ask this question, what would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? What would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? If I say these are the most important things to me in 2020, then what's it going to take to organize my life around those things? What am I going to have to give up? What am I going to have to reprioritize? Who am I going to have to willingly disappoint and say, I can't do this thing anymore because I'm going to prioritize these things? And if we ask that question, what's it going to look like if we radically reprioritize our life around these God-ordained treasures, I actually have an example of what that could look like. As I was thinking through this this week, there's a family in our church, Wynn and Elisa Dunn, and they've got two kids, one in elementary school, one in middle school. I think the daughter might be in middle school now too. I got to figure that out before they come in the second service and I offend her. But I noticed on their Facebook feed is a lot of pictures like this. I think, Lynn, we have a picture of their family. Yeah, that's them doing something involving harnesses. It seems very fun. They do stuff like this all the time, all the time. They are forever going on little family outings and vacations and retreats. As a matter of fact, listen, I don't check up on you when you don't come on Facebook, but often if I don't see them on Sunday, on Sunday afternoon or Monday, I'll see a picture of their family together somewhere. Family time is big for the Dunns. And so I called Wynn. I said, hey man, this might sound weird, but I'm doing a sermon on this. I kind of explained it to him. And I said, you guys seem to be hanging out as a family all the time. Your kids are in middle school, and they seem to still like you and want to be seen in public with you, which is a big win for Wynn. And so I asked him, like, what's your philosophy around family? Like, what led you to value it this way? And he goes, well, do you know my full story? I said, I guess I don't. And he told me that years ago, he had a really lucrative job. It was a very high-paying job, but it was a high-stress job. And it consumed him. This was in the days of Blackberries, and he was forever on it. It was ever-present. Dinners, weekends, vacations, it was always, when can you do this one more thing? When can you just take this call real quick? Can you just close this out? Can you just put out this fire? It was always a part of him. And he says it was causing a lot of stress in his marriage, particularly as they invited kids into this marriage. And now his wife is home caring for the baby and he's never present. And it was causing tension and it made things difficult. And the kids began to notice how committed he was to his phone and his job too. So much so that he told me that, I think it was about 10 years ago, they went to Busch Gardens as a family. And as he was getting out of the car, he said, you know what I'm going to do? And he took his BlackBerry out and he put it in the car and he shut the doors and he locked it. And he said, when he did that, everybody in his family started crying because we've got our dad. He's going to be present with us today. I'd love to be the ticket taker at Busch Gardens that day. What's the matter with you guys? Like no one made you come. You can go back home. But his family cried because now we get dad. And it didn't take too much longer after that until he looked at his life and he said, man, I'm prioritizing things that I just don't want to prioritize right now. And so he changed careers. He called an audible, left the very high paying job, changed careers and chose a career, chose an industry that would allow him to have more time with his family. Made an intentional choice to radically reprioritize his life around what he believed to be God-ordained treasures. He said that was nine years ago. I said, as you look back on that, do you have any regrets? Or was it just best decision you ever made? And he said, you know, I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I think about the money and what would be possible if I had it. But no, there are no regrets. I love my kids. My kids love me. I have a good family, and it's so much more valuable to me than any resources that I could have. And so I'm praying that for some of us, this is just the nudge that you needed because there have been things going on in your life and you're too busy and you're too caught up and you see things slipping away from you that are important to you. And maybe the Holy Spirit's just working in your heart right now to say, hey, why don't you let some things go? Maybe this needs to be the year that you get okay with disappointing people. Where you realize, you know what? If the stranger's disappointed in me for not doing the thing that they want me to do, I'm going to be okay. Maybe we need to step away from things. I'll even say this. I want to be your pastor before I run the business of the church. If you need to step away from church things, sorry Aaron, for your own health, do it. Claim your schedule around your priorities. And in 2020, let's make some changes and reprioritize our lives around these God-ordained treasures so that when we get to the end of this year and look back on our schedule and we look back at how we invested our time, we go, yeah, I invested these things in treasures that matter for eternity so that we had a better year this year than we did last year. So I hope you'll do that. I hope you'll take the list home. I hope you'll pray through your priorities, and I hope that you'll have the courage to reprioritize your schedule around the things that you and God agree are super important to you in 2020. All right, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, I'm going to pray over the year, too, as we kick it off together, and then I'm going to dismiss and we'll go out into the world. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you so much for you, for your presence, for your goodness, for how big and marvelous and miraculous you are, for how much you care about us, for how much you care about how we fill our time. Lord, I pray that we would be courageous in naming our priorities. I pray that we would be courageous in building our schedule around those. God, if we have to say no to some things, then give us the audacity to do that. If we need to say yes to some things, give us the discipline to do that. God, we know that decisions that we make and things that we resolve to do often falter and flutter. God, I pray that you would be with us and give us your strength to see these things through so that our lives might change in profound ways, God, if that's what you would have. Lord, I pray over this year, may all the events of this year conspire to draw every one of us closer to you. Will you overcome doubts? Will you overcome fears? Will you overcome hesitation? Will you overcome hurt? Will you speak to us in the triumphs so that we don't take credit for those? Will you speak to us in the tragedy, God, so that we don't get overly angry at those? Will you please conspire everything in our life to draw us more closely to you so that we might know what it is to walk with you? For many of us, God, make this the year where we finally break the chains of the old habits and walk in new habits. God, please bless this year and bless us as we walk in it. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

It's good to see all of you this Sunday. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. I appreciate you being here on this December Sunday as we continue to gear up for Christmas together. I'm really excited about what we have in store for you, not only for Jingle Jam, but also for our Christmas Eve service. This is our series called Joy. Kyle, our student pastor, opened up the series talking about the joy of the light, of knowing Jesus and of sharing that light with others. Last week, I talked with you about the joy of forgiveness, and I really hope, my sincere prayer is and was, that God used that to bring about maybe some reconciliation in your life and in some of your relationships. I hope that you found that to be a helpful way to think about forgiveness. This morning, I want to talk about the joy of gratitude, the joy that we get when we can be people who are thankful, who are grateful people. The Bible has a lot to say about gratitude in the same way that it has a lot to say about forgiveness as it encourages us to forgive over and over and over again. The Bible encourages us to be grateful many, many times in many ways in many different places. In the Old Testament, David tells us that we are to enter God's courts with thanksgiving in our hearts, that we enter his gates with praise. And so it's kind of gratitude is the posture through which we approach the Lord. In the New Testament, we're told over and over again to be thankful in all things, be thankful always, pray without ceasing, and be grateful for everything. Everyone tells us that. As Jesus tells us how to pray in the Lord's Prayer, He models for us a daily gratitude, thanking God for the blessings that we have in our life. We're even told by at least three different authors in the New Testament to be grateful when life is hard, to be grateful when we are in struggles, to consider it pure joy when we endure trials. So the Bible has a lot to say about gratitude. And I think it's because gratitude is one of the more underrated things or character traits that we could have. Fostering a spirit or a heart or a character of gratitude, I think, is something that we forget to do, but it's underrated in its power and efficacy in our life. And I hope today, as we leave, as you guys go back out into your week, that you have a new appreciation for what it means to be grateful and to have a grateful heart. To do that, I want to first talk about a picture of ingratitude, what the opposite of gratitude looks like. So last week I was doing my weekly Sunday tradition, particularly in the fall, which is to kind of go home and collapse. My whole week, the rhythms of a pastor kind of build up to the sermon. You're stressed about the sermon all day. I hope it doesn't suck and that people aren't disappointed who brought their friends and the whole deal. And I hope this honors God. And I hope that I'm not an apostate and the whole deal. And so you just kind of, you focus on the sermon all week and then I give it and I go home and I'm like, ugh. And I just kind of want to shut down for a while. And so in the fall, it's perfect because I get to watch TV. And so last week I'm watching football and the four o'clock game comes on. It's the Chiefs and the Patriots. And something incredibly interesting happened at halftime of this Patriots game. Now, for those who don't know, you may not know who the Patriots are. You may not be, that's football, by the way. You may not be into football, and that's all right. You don't have to know football to appreciate what I'm about to say. I'm going to kind of lay some groundwork for you, all right? So for those who don't know, the Patriots have had what I think is the best 20-year run of any sports team in the history of sports teams. I'm not talking about the best 20-year run in the last 20 years. I'm talking about besides maybe the 1920s Yankees have had the best 20-year run of any team in the history of teams. It's been amazing. It's been absolutely historic. I went back and counted. In the last 20 years, the Patriots have made it to the Super Bowl nine times. They've played in almost half of the Super Bowls. The other years, they came almost just one game short almost every year. To be a Patriots fan is to over and over and over again get to cheer for a winner. It's an incredible privilege to be a Patriots fan. I know this because I'm a Falcons fan. Okay? It is not a privilege to be a Falcons fan. I'm from Atlanta, and statistically speaking, if you combine all of the seasons without a championship, so you take in Atlanta at one point, that was four seasons in one year, hockey, baseball, basketball, and football going consecutively without a championship. Atlanta is the losingest city in the country. And that's statistics. That's not hyperbole. I have longed to be a Patriots fan. I wish that I could celebrate that sort of success. During those 20 years, they've been to nine Super Bowls. They've won six of them. There's only one other franchise that's won six Super Bowls, and they would even trade their last 20 years for the Patriots' last 20 years. They have the best coach to ever coach a sport. They have the best quarterback to ever play the game, and that pains me to say because Peyton Manning's my favorite football player of all time, but Tom Brady, man, you can't argue with rings. To be a Patriots fan has been an incredible privilege for the past 20 years. Yet, on Sunday, the Patriots are playing, playing the Chiefs, and the Patriots this year are having a good season, not a great season. There's some rumblings in their fan base that they may not be as good as they once were. It's looking like they may not win the Super Bowl this year. And at halftime, the Patriots are running into the locker room down two scores, 21 to seven. And as they're running into the locker room at Gillette Stadium, do you know what those Patriots fans did? Booed. They booed them. Can you believe this? After one bad half of football, and it wasn't even that bad, they booed them. They let them know loudly and clearly, you stink and we're dissatisfied and we deserve more from you. And I sat on my couch in shocked disbelief and I thought, and I'm sorry, you bunch of entitled jerks. Do you have any idea what I would do for the last 20 years that you've just gotten to enjoy as Patriots fan? If you're a 10-year-old Patriots fan, you just figure that they win the Super Bowl. That's just what happens. It's your birthright. Do you know what I would do to trade places with you? Try being a Falcons fan for like a season, you jerks. Like, it made me mad. They were so entitled. And as I thought about that, and listen, we have some Patriots fans at the church. They're lovely people. Steve, our worship pastor, he's kind of a Patriots fan. He's not really a sports guy, but if he were, he claims to be a Patriots. From everything I can tell, he seems to be a great guy. And so I'm not trying to run down all Patriots fans, but the ones in that stadium that day, my goodness, the entitlement on them. And I sat on my couch and I was kind of stewing and calling the names in my head and couldn't get over the audacity of it, texting my friends, did y'all see that? But of course, as I sat there, anytime you cast blame on somebody else, my mind begins to go, well, am I guilty of the same thing? And I realized we all are. We're all of us in that way, this pains me to say, we're all in that way Patriots fans. We all act like that because they were simply entitled. And to be entitled is to be forgetful of the past and desirous of the future. To be entitled is to forget everything that got us here, is to forget all the blessings and all the things I've enjoyed up to this moment, and then to not be aware or cognizant in this moment and just desire us of the future. And isn't that what they were? As they're in the stands and they're watching this one singular bad half of football, totally forgetting the last 20 years that they've had, that they've gotten to enjoy being a fan like nobody else on the face of the planet. In that moment that they booed and expressed their displeasure, aren't they simply forgetting all the things that they've enjoyed up to that point and only thinking about what they want in the future? Haven't they forgotten their past and become desirous of the future? And isn't this what we do? Haven't in our lives, all of us, at different points, been entitled jerks? If you don't think you have, look at your kids at Christmas. Come on, your kids expect stuff, right? They're not like hoping that maybe they get a present. They gave you a list in September. My three-year-old already has this figured out. Everything she saw over the course of the list, can you make sure and tell Santa that that's a thing that I want? Our kids grow up entitled. Entitlement says, I deserve this. It's my birthright. This is something that I've earned. You should give it to me. I don't have to be grateful for it because I deserve this anyways. That's what entitlement is. If our kids aren't enough to help us realize that this is a path that we are all on, how long does it take you and your life right now to get tired of the new shiny thing? How many weeks or months after that promotion, you finally get the job, you finally get the promotion, you finally get the thing, you get the position that you wanted, you've closed the sale that you've wanted, you're so happy about it, praise God, this is great. How many weeks does it take you to resent those coworkers too? How long does it take you to think, I wonder what's next? How long does it take you to forget what got you there and be desirous of what's ahead? How long does it take for the new car to become the one that you want to sell? How long does it take after we buy a new house to put the Zillow app back on our phone and just see what's out there? How about this? How long did it take you after you got married and all the happiness and all the pomp and circumstance around that day to have an evening where you looked across the living room and you thought to yourself, I could have done better than this. For Jen, it was about three days. How long does it take us to be dissatisfied with the blessings that we have, to forget our past, to be totally lost to the present and be desirous of the future and in our own way be booing our life because of a simple bad half? To be shaking our fist at God and saying, God, why do I have to deal with this? Why do I have to go through this? Why can't I have that thing with no mind at all to everything that he's already given us? How long does it take us to become entitled? And the problem with entitlement is it's the antithesis of gratitude. If the Bible tells us to be grateful, to be thankful, to give thanks in all things and at all times and in all circumstances, if that's a characteristic that we're supposed to embody, then we should acknowledge that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. It's the exact opposite of gratitude. And we should also acknowledge that there is a natural drift towards it. You haven't all been entitled jerks because just in your soul you're a bunch of jerks and we're a bunch of brats. It's all us. We're all that way. Gratitude is something you have to choose on purpose. We don't naturally drift towards gratitude. We naturally drift towards, I deserve, I earn, this belongs to me. We naturally drift towards being forgetful of our past and desirous of what's in the future with no mind to what's going on in the present. That's a natural drift that we have. I don't think, and I'm not here this morning so that anybody feels badly about it. I'm just here so that we will acknowledge it and understand that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. Because entitlement says, I deserve this. And gratitude actually confesses something. I learned this in my research from an Irish monk, and I thought it was a good way to think about gratitude. Gratitude is a confession. To be grateful for something confesses that this is a gift that I do not deserve. Gratitude says, this thing that I have in my life, this person, this relationship, this material possession, this house, this opportunity, this skill set, this location in time and in space and in geography, all the things in my life, gratitude acknowledges this is a gift that I do not deserve. To go back to our original illustration, those Patriots fans have not done anything to win those Super Bowls. Nothing. They've not done anything that any other fan base hasn't done. They just have the luxury of being born in New England and getting to cheer for Patriots. And good for them. But it's a gift that they got that they did not deserve. Being a Falcons fan is a punishment that I've received that I do not deserve. God and I are still working that out. But to be truly grateful for something is to confess, this is a gift that I've received that I do not deserve. If you feel like you deserve it, if you feel like you've earned it, then you can't be grateful for the thing. If you're a salesperson and you go out and you slay the dragon and you get the big commission check that comes from slaying the dragon, you don't walk into your boss's office and go, thank you so much for this check. This is such a sweet thing for you to do. No, it was negotiated. You earned that. You deserve that. The gratitude comes in when we reflect on the skills and abilities that got that deal done, and we thank God for blessing us with those. But gratitude has to confess that the thing that I'm grateful for is a gift that I do not deserve. The other thing that gratitude does that I think is so very powerful is it anchors us in the present as we remember the past. Gratitude anchors us in the present as we remember the past. We're not fast-forwarding ahead. We're not looking to the next thing. We're not anxious or desirous about the future. We haven't forgotten the past. We're reflective on the past, the moments that conspired to bring us here. We're anchored in the present, and we remember the past. The best example of this I've seen that I think of often is, I call him my Uncle Edwin. He's really Jen's Uncle Edwin. Jen's dad, John, has a twin sister named Mary. She married a guy named Edwin, and they live in Dothan, Alabama. If you didn't follow that, Jen's aunt and uncle live in Alabama. And every Thanksgiving, we go down to Dothan, Alabama, and we have Thanksgiving with the Morrises. Jen's family, the Vincennes, go down with the Morrises, and we get together and we have Thanksgiving. And Edwin and Mary have three daughters that are about our age, and they have kids now too, and it's just a really great, sweet time. It's one of the great gifts in my life to have been grafted into that family. I'm very grateful for that. And when we go to Thanksgiving, we have the meal. It's a big, good meal. It's one of the best ones I have of the year. There's still an adult table and a kid's table. The parents sit at one table, and the average age of the kid's table now is like 36, but it's still the kid's table. And we have way more fun at the kid's table. There's always much more laughter going on as we swap stories and catch up and reflect on old ones and things like that. And at one point or another, I've caught Edwin doing this several times. He comes into, he leaves the adult table to have his cup of coffee or a camera or dessert or something, and he'll stand off in the corner. He's not trying to be noticed. He's not trying to speak. He's not trying to get anyone's attention. And he'll look at what's happening in his kitchen, And he'll just grin from ear to ear. And sometimes I'll watch him kind of wipe away a tear. And I've never spoken with him about those moments. But I know that Edwin is a man that loves God very much. And I'm certain that in those moments, he's standing there and he's just soaking in what he considers to be one of the great blessings in his life, of the family that he has. He's anchored in the present and he's thankful for the past. And in that moment, he's grateful, acknowledging this family is a gift that I did not earn. And it's tempting to jump ahead. It's tempting to be desirous of the future. It's tempting to be anxious about what could happen. And there's different times and different seasons of life with the Morrises that he could have jumped ahead. During one of those Thanksgivings, he had a daughter that was going to vet school who dropped out to go to art school, which no parent wants to hear. Now, fast forward that, and it worked out really well for her. Another time, he had a daughter who was dating a guy that he was actively praying against every day. Not in a funny way, even though it is funny, but in a very serious, concerned dad kind of way. And God answered those prayers too. But in that moment, when he's standing there, grinning from ear to ear, grateful for what's going on in front of him, he's not anxious about the future. He hasn't forgotten the moments that have got him there. He's anchored in the present, and he's grateful for God's gifts. But more than those things, more than humbling us so that we acknowledge that things in our life are gifts, more than simply anchoring us in the present and helping us reflect on and be grateful for the past, I think there's something far more powerful that gratitude does. And I think we see that in a story tucked away in one of the gospels, in Luke chapter 17. If you have a Bible, turn to Luke chapter 17. I'm going to start in verse 11, and verses 16 through 19 will be up here on the screen. I want to read it for you. On the way to Jerusalem, he was passing between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by 10 leopards, talking about Jesus, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices saying, Jesus, master, have mercy on us. Okay. So I want to say something very, very clear right here. He's going through Samaria. There's racial tension going on. The racial tension going on there. There's a whole separate set of issues that we could talk about. But there's 10 lepers. And in the ancient world, leprosy was the death knell. It was the death knell. It was the worst possible disease that you could get. It was the worst possible diagnosis that you can receive. If you received leprosy, it was contagious, so you were ostracized. You had to go live in a colony with a bunch of other depressed people who were losing their skin and their limbs and their digits all at once and just marching towards death together. It was a really, really difficult diagnosis. And so there's 10 lepers, and they cry out to Jesus. And look what they cry. They say, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. So what do all 10 of them already know? That's Jesus. He's the Son of God and he has the power to heal us, right? They already are acknowledging that that's Jesus and we believe he's the Son of God. They've admitted that. Then Jesus answered, were not 10 cleansed? Where's everybody else? Didn't I heal 10 of you? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? Look at this, this is so powerful. And he said to him, rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well. Let's not miss what's happening in this story as we reflect on gratitude together. These 10 lepers looked at him and they said, Jesus, Master, we believe in you. We believe that you are who you say you are. We believe that you have the power to heal. Will you please heal us? He says, yeah, go and show yourself to the priest and you'll be healed. And so they run off to go to the priest and on their way, they are healed. And as they are healed, we can only assume. Now, we don't know. There's not a lot of details. This is conjecture. But something happened in the minds of nine of them that they didn't think it was important to go back and thank Jesus for what he did. I like to think that their minds immediately became desirous of the future. They became desirous about who they were going to tell and what they were going to do and who they were going to see and all the next things that they wanted to do in light of this healing. Maybe in their head, they went, gosh, that Jesus is a great guy. And they went on and they did their thing. But what they didn't do is express gratitude. What they acted like was that they were entitled, was that they somehow deserved that healing. Jesus is the Savior of the world. He's the Son of God. He has the power to heal. He sees us. He should heal me. He owes this to me. That's what God does. God heals, so heal me. Thanks, great, and then they move on. Only one of them was so moved by his experience with Jesus that he went back to him and he said, thank you. Thank you for healing me. And in that moment, we see gratitude. We see an acknowledgement. This gift of healing is a gift that you gave me that I did not deserve. Thank you. And Jesus' response is fascinating to me. After he notes what the others did, he said, your sins are forgiven. Your faith has made you well. That dude just got saved. You understand that? We call it getting saved when someone is returned to harmony with God. Our souls were created to be in harmony with our creator God. They were designed to be in union with him. Our sin breaks that union. It is forever broken. There is no way to restore us into that union. So God sent his son to die on a cross so that we wouldn't have to, so that by placing our faith in him, we can be restored into union with our creator God. Your soul longs and clamors and claws for harmony with your creator God. That's what it does. If you're here this morning and there is an unease in your soul, if you're not a believer yet, but there is something that you just can't seem to wrap your mind around, if you've clawed for happiness in your life and then gotten there and found that it was empty, it's because your soul was designed to claw for harmony with our Creator God. And Jesus restored the soul of that leper. Gave him what his soul really longs for. And why did he do it? Because the leper was grateful. Don't you see? It wasn't enough to just go, hey, you're Jesus and you can heal me if you want to. Thanks, see you later. No, the leper came back and was grateful. Thank you for what you've done. And Jesus says, your faith, he doesn't say gratitude. He says faith because the faith is implicit in the gratitude. To be truly grateful, you have to admit, you've done something that I couldn't do for myself. Thank you, Jesus. Your faith has made you well. I'm worried as I read this story that we don't understand that gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God. Gratitude is the gateway to harmony with God. Don't you see that these nine lepers did what so many of us do, particularly in the South, just give mental assent, acknowledge, you're Jesus, you're the Son of God, and if you want to, you can do these things for me, but it never goes beyond that. They had the beginnings of faith, but they weren't truly grateful for who Jesus was and what he did. And because of that, they never received the actual blessing that Jesus came to give them. He didn't go through Samaria that day to heal people of leprosy. If he did, we would have seen him healing a lot more people. He walked through Samaria that day to bring some souls back into harmony with God. He walked into Samaria that day to save people. And the only one that got saved was the one that expressed gratitude for what he did. And I worry about how many of us can sometimes be like the lepers. And once we receive the blessing from God, once we receive the taste of Jesus, once we receive a little bit of the blessing, we go, thanks, that's good. And we don't stick around for the true blessing that God has for us because we're entitled. I don't want us to miss the power of gratitude. This guy didn't have to pray the sinner's prayer. He didn't have to have everything figured out. He didn't have to understand the ins and outs of the New Testament. He was from the priest that Jesus sent him to go see wasn't even a Jewish priest. It was a hybrid religion. He didn't even understand what it meant to have faith or to be a believer. He was simply grateful to Jesus for what he did. And to Jesus, that was enough. Your faith has made you well. We cannot miss the power of gratitude. It's a gateway to harmony with God. And I really think that what happens when we're grateful is that all paths lead to God. I think gratitude always leads to God, which in turn always leads to joy. I think gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God, is a guaranteed pathway to joy. That if we can begin to express gratitude in our lives for anything at all, that what that will ultimately bring us to is gratitude. It doesn't take me very long to do that in my life. If I look at the things I'm grateful for in my life, I look at Jen and I look at Lily. It doesn't take me very long to end up thanking God for those things and to find joy and harmony with God. If you look at the things in your life, it doesn't take you very long to think of the things that you're grateful for and find a path that leads us back to God. I think it actually kind of works like this. As I was thinking about it this week, I thought of this map that I remember seeing online. If we can put it up there. This is a map of all of the streams and rivers in the United States and how they all lead to the ocean. Every last one of them. You can pick any tendril that you want to and at one point or another, it's going to end up in the ocean. A brook is going to lead to a stream, is going to lead to a creek, is going to lead to a river, is going to lead to a bigger river, is going to lead to a basin, is going to lead to an ocean. And I think that gratitude works the same way. Even if you think about the things in your life that you think you've done, the accomplishments that you think you've made, the businesses that you think you've built, the children that you think you've raised, who gave you the gifts and abilities to do those things? Who decided in his sovereignty that you were going to be born in the United States in a first world and even have the opportunity to exercise those gifts? Who decided that you weren't going to be born in the slums of Delhi and instead were going to be born here? God did. Our very gifts, our very location, our friends, all of our blessings are a result of God's goodness in our life. That's why I think that all gratitude is simply a path that leads us back to God, that leads us to joy. That's why I think that the Bible tells us over and over again to be grateful in all things, even in the hard things. I think that even if Christmas is difficult, because for some of us, Christmas is a reminder of loss. If we want to find a path to gratitude, even in the midst of a Christmas that reminds us of loss in our life, that loss hurts so much because there were times that were so sweet. And we become grateful for those times. And we see God working in them. And it serves as a pathway that ultimately leads us back to God where our souls will find harmony with Him and we will find joy. Gratitude is incredibly powerful because it is a gateway to harmony with our creator. All paths of gratitude lead to him. And I am convinced that once we are in harmony with our God, once we are grateful to him, all those pathways lead to joy. So let's go and let's be grateful together. Let's be anchored in the present, remembering the past, and be grateful to our God for the things that He has done in our lives. Let's pray. Father, we love You. We truly are grateful to You. We're grateful for the memories that we have. We're grateful for the scars that we bear and the lessons that we learned as a result of those instances. God, we're thankful for all the different blessings that you've placed in our life, for the relationships, for the possessions that bring us joy, for the places that make us feel safe or cozy or happy. God, we're so grateful for all of those. We're thankful for the means to earn those things, to make the sale, to close the deal, to figure out the account. We're grateful for the discipline to go to work and to learn more and to sharpen our sword. We're grateful that you built us all with our gifts that allow us to go out and serve you and enjoy the blessings that you've given us. God, may we actively fight against entitlement. May we be people who acknowledge every day that the things in our life are gifts from you that we have not earned and acknowledge that in your goodness, you've given them to us anyways. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

My name is Nate. There we go. Good. Sorry, this is my first Sunday. I'm the lead pastor here, believe it or not, and this is the fifth part of our series called Feast. And as I prepared this week, these movies were brought to mind. I think some of the best movies are the kind that are taking you one way for the entirety of the plot, and then at the end, there's this line or a thing or a scene, and it twists everything on its head, and you realize, oh my goodness, there's this plot twist at the end that makes you want to go back and re-watch the whole movie. I think maybe the most famous example of this is probably Sixth Sense from way back. It's probably in the 90s, okay? If you haven't watched that yet, it's been like 30 years, so spoiler alert. I don't feel bad for you that I'm about to ruin this. But what happens in the movie is there's this young guy. I don't know who the actor is. And then there's another guy played by Bruce Willis, right? And they're buddies in the movie. And they're telling you a story, and there's some interactions, and the world kind of interacts with Bruce Willis' character a little bit differently than the young child interacts with the character. There's somebody that he's in love with, and she won't really give him the time of day. There's something going on there, but you don't quite know what it is, and you're really wrapped up in the story because it's very well written. And then at the end of the movie, the little boy utters his famous line from the movie that you know, right? I see dead people. And then the back of your head just blows off right against the wall and you think, oh my gosh, this makes so much sense now. And then you immediately flash back through all these scenes that now make. And all the other interactions that this boy seems to have with the other characters that are a little bit different than everybody else. And all of a sudden, like, it's just this, oh my goodness moment where you realize. And all you want to do is rewind and watch it again. Or for the millennials, you just want to hit restart and watch it again all the way through because now you know this kid is seeing dead people and the whole movie takes on a different color for you, right? I love movies like that. And so this week as I was studying the festival for this week called the Feast of Firstfruits, I kind of had one of these moments, one of these moments where in my studies I realized, oh my goodness, I think I see what's going on here with all these festivals. So like I said earlier, this is the fifth part of our series called Feast, where we've been looking at the holidays that God himself instilled in the Jewish calendar in the Old Testament. Every week we've been seeing that they point to Jesus, that they paint a little bit different picture. And this week we're going to have the opportunity to kind of go back through them. So if you haven't been in a little while, this is a great catch-up Sunday. If you have been here for every one of them, because man, you love festivals, then this will be a good chance to see if you've been paying attention and you actually know what's been going on. So everybody wins. But this week we're looking at the Feast of Firstfruits. And when you first approach it, as I began to research it, I grabbed the books that I've been using and started to see what smarter people than me have to say about it, I really expected it to be a sermon and a festival focused on the idea of stewardship. Stewardship is this idea that everything that we have is God's. All that we have belongs to God, our time, our money, our resources, even our family, our relationships, our abilities. Everything that we have really is God's. And so stewardship acknowledges, God, everything I have is yours. I'm simply a steward of the things that you've given me, and I'm to leverage them for you and for your kingdom. That's what stewardship is. And I thought that this is what First Fruits was going to be. And it is a little bit. We'll talk about it. We'll just kind of stop and highlight something that's worth saying and then move on. But as I studied, I realized, man, that's really not what God was going for here. And I kind of had this moment where everything kind of tied together for me. And I want you to have that too. It's not as good as Sixth Sense. I mean, maybe one of the dumbest things to do is to start with a Sixth Sense example and then promise to deliver on that amount of drama. Okay, let's lower the expectations that will not happen, but I think that we will tie it together in a way that's really helpful. So first fruits falls on the heels of Passover. Last week we talked about Passover, the festival of Passover, which celebrates the 10th plague in Egypt when God freed his people from slavery to the Egyptians and Pharaoh finally let his people go. There was an angel of death that moved over the nation of Egypt, and if you had the blood of a spotless lamb on your doorframe, presumably in the shape of a cross, and the angel would pass over your home and your firstborn would not be taken because the lamb had died the death that the sin demanded. And so the lamb is the provision for the people, and it's a picture of Jesus being the provision. That's what we talked about with Passover last week. And it's so interesting to me that Passover is what Jesus was celebrating thousands of years later the night that he was arrested. And Passover historically begins on a Friday night. It's the beginning of the Sabbath. Sabbath starts about 6 p.m. at dusk when it begins to get dark. That's the Sabbath. And so it starts Friday night. That's when you have your Passover meal. And so first fruits falls on the Sunday after Passover Friday, after Passover Sabbath. So you have Passover Friday, then you have the Sabbath, Saturday you wait, and then Sunday you celebrate the Feast of the Firstfruits. And the way that this was done is the farmers would go out and they would get their springtime harvest. Most of the time it was wheat. They would go out into their field and they would take the first and the best stalk of wheat, the most ripe piece of wheat. I don't know anything about wheat farming. You're going to see a lot of ignorance in the next three minutes, but I think we can all move through it together and understand what's happening here. So you go out into your field and you'd get the best looking bit of wheat and you would take that to the high priest. And then the high priest would burn your wheat along with everyone else's and wave it to the Lord, and the smoke would rise off of the wheat as prayers to the Lord, and the prayer was for the rest of the harvest, and really the sacrifice was so that the rest of the harvest would be acceptable to the Lord. That's what's happening at the Feast of Firstfruits. And there's an element of faith here that we may not realize, because to walk out into your field that you've painstakingly worked in for months and take the first bit of this harvest that you're going to need for your family for the rest of the year, either to eat on or to live off of by selling or trading, and you take the first bit of it, the very first, the best-looking stalk of wheat there, and you grab that together, and you take that into the high priest, that requires some faith. Because you don't know how the rest of that harvest is going to go. They're not going to all ripen and be ready at the same time. There's days or weeks of harvesting yet in front of you, so you don't know how it's going to go. There could be a frost that night that could ruin the rest of your crop. So it really takes a bit of faith to take your first and your best to God in this instance. And I think that when we think of farms, because the only farms we see in America are these huge monolithic farms with hundreds and hundreds of acres and like a bunch of wheat. I don't know how to quantify wheat, thousands of wheats. I don't know what you say, bushels. There's a lot of it. And so we think to take a little bit of that and carry it over to the church or to the high priest isn't really that big of a deal. But what about the guy who's farming by hand on his acre lot or his quarter acre lot, and he's just got this little field, and that wheat has to last, and he needs every last bit of it? What about that family? What about the ones that really need this crop this year? It takes a lot of faith to pick the first and the best and to go and to carry that to God. And that part I do think is about stewardship. And I think it is worth pausing, kind of coming over here. This is not helpful in the sermon proper, but this is a helpful point to make. There's a good lesson in first fruits. Because what would make the most sense is to harvest it all and then take what you could afford to God, right? And this is typically how we approach life. Listen, I'm not supposed to say this because I'm the pastor. And we all give our 10% or whatever we're compelled to give. 100% giving, I know for sure. There are some months when things are tight. And I know what I'm supposed to give. But you know what I do? Please don't tell other churches. I wait to the end of the month to make sure I can afford it. That's not the idea with giving. It's not right of me to do that. We give at the beginning. We give our first. We budget on the rest. But we have a tendency to do this, don't we? With our time, with our energy, with our money, with whatever it is, we kind of invest it in our life. We make sure we're good. We get the whole harvest. And then the parts we can afford, we take and we offer to the Lord so that in some ways he gets the fringes or the leftovers. And firstfruits tells us, no, we offer our time and our resources to God first and then we allow him to orchestrate the rest. But that's stewardship and that's what we see. And it seems like as you study through it that this really is a lesson, a reminder that, hey, all the harvest is God's, and he's going to provide if we're faithful, right? But the more I read about it, the more I realized that's really not what God is getting at. Because one of the authors pointed me in the direction of this verse, in 1 Corinthians 15, verse 20. You can open there if you want. The verse will be on the screen. It's this curious verse, and Paul, the author of Corinthians, writes this. He says in verse 20, but in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. In fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. Now listen, I am one who believes that words are not in the Bible on accident. And Paul knew that there was a Jewish audience here in the church in Corinth. And they would know what that meant. That when you say first fruits, the Jewish mind jumps back to the festival of first fruits and acknowledges what it means. Where you take the first of the crop and you offer it to the Lord and that crop makes the rest of the harvest acceptable. And then things start firing off in, as Doug so eloquently put it, our dim-witted little brains. And I realized, oh my goodness, First Fruits is a picture of Jesus. First Fruits follows on the heels of Passover. Passover, the lamb dies. Then he's in the grave on Saturday. Then on Sunday, when First Fruits is celebrated, when it has been for thousands of years, Jesus rises from the dead. This is why we celebrate Easter on Sunday in the spring. He rises from the dead on a Sunday, and he offers himself to God as the high priest. He goes to God on our behalf, and he presents himself as the first fruits of the harvest that is to come. And then I realized, oh my goodness, there's all this harvest language all over the Bible. We're told that God is the Lord of the harvest. And that doesn't just mean the physical harvest that's too small. We're not trusting him for those crops. It means the harvest of souls to heaven. It means the things that are to come. If you're a believer, then one of the things you cling to is the hope of what we call the rapture. When one day Jesus comes down in the clouds, as is talked about in Corinthians, and the trumpet sounds, and the workers are called in from the harvest, and the harvest of souls is gathered to heaven. That's what it is when we go to heaven together. It's the harvest. And Jesus, when he dies, goes to God as the high priest and he presents himself as the first fruits of the harvest that is to come. It's not about stewardship. It's a picture pointing to Jesus. And then I started to realize in this festival of the firstfruits are all these different pictures of Jesus that have already been painted by the other festivals. And I started to realize that in firstfruits we have this tremendous picture of who Jesus is as he's presented by all the other festivals that we've already gone through, by all the other festivals that God has had his people go through every year. And I started to realize these are all tied together and brought together in the Feast of Firstfruits. I remember that the very first one we celebrated, the Feast of Trumpets, as we started off our new year, we had one of our great partners, Brandon Reese, come up here and he sounded the shofar at the beginning of the service as they did to inaugurate the new year. And what we learned is what I've just talked about, that one day when Jesus comes to call the workers in from the harvest to gather the harvest, that he is going to sound the trumpet. And so in the Feast of Trumpets, we see a picture of Jesus as sounding the trumpet. And then the very next week, we came back and we looked at the Feast of Atonement, or the Day of Atonement. The day when sacrifices were made to make Israel right with God. And we looked at the grandeur and the majesty around the ceremonies at the temple performed by the high priest. With the high priest really the focal point of all of Israel that day with his duties and everything that he had to do. And one of the things that we carried out of that is this picture of Jesus as the high priest. Next week we came back and we did tents, the Feast of Tents. We set a big one up out there. We all ate under the tent. It was the hootenanny. It was a great Sunday. And that was a reminder to the Hebrew people that their ancestors had lived in the desert for 40 years and lived in those tents. And every day when they walked outside, God had provided for them this thing called manna. And what tents does is gives us a picture of Jesus as God's provision. After that, last week, we looked at Passover. And the picture of Passover, I've already told you, was very clear. That lamb died so that people in that home didn't have to. And when Jesus shows up later, John the Baptist looks at him and he says, Behold, the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world. And so in Passover, we have a picture of Jesus as the lamb. And then this week, first fruits. Seems like it's just about stewardship and resources. But what we understand based on what Paul says is that Jesus is our first fruits, that he makes us acceptable to God. And so it's a picture of Jesus as the first fruits. And as I'm seeing all these different pictures kind of fire off in my head, I kind of have that moment where I tie it all together and I realize this, that first fruits shows us Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away our sin. The high priest who offers that lamb as a provision for our sin. And the first fruits of the harvest begun at the sounding of the trumpet. And in that sentence there, we see how Firstfruits brings together everything. All the different pictures of Jesus that we've been looking at for five weeks, all the different pictures of Jesus that they acknowledge through their celebration and through their culture throughout the year. When you get to Firstfruits, they're all tied together in this tapestry that God has woven. And what I realized is they believed. The Hebrew people that God instructed, hey, every year I want you to acknowledge these things. I want you to do these ceremonies and I want you to celebrate these things and I want you to remember what I've done for you. Every year they got together and they faithfully went through the holidays and the celebrations, and they believed that they were celebrating their past, but they were really pointing to their future. They believed they were celebrating what God had done in the past, the provision that he was, the lambs that came in the past, the time that we celebrated in Egypt, and the rescue of God that came then, but really what they're doing is they're pointing to what's to come. They're pointing to Jesus. And it just blows my mind that tucked away in this often ignored book of Leviticus, in the 23rd chapter, are the details, quickly, for these six festivals that God wants his people to honor every year. And if you were to take the details of those and look at them and then lay the picture of Jesus over top of them, what you would find is a beautifully woven tapestry that God created over the course of history to point to his son and his love for us, to point to his plan. It's amazing to me. You know, a couple weeks ago, I went to a thing called a preaching school, which I understand will set off dozens of jokes in your head, and you feel free to make them. I'm going to skip right over them and just assume that you're making fun of me in your head. And, you know, well, can't tell and things like that. But I went to like a preaching intensive. I wanted to just kind of sharpen the tool and the skill of preaching. I've got a long way to go. But one of the things that they told us that happens in a good sermon is that a skilled pastor, he or she, will drop in bits throughout the sermon that help it make sense when you get to the conclusion. That if I'm doing a good job, I will say words and phrases all throughout the sermon, drop them in at different places so that when I finally say the conclusion at the end, it just ties it all up together in a nice, neat little bow. You just kind of plan and drop things in all along the way to help to prepare you guys to kind of till the soil to be ready for the conclusion. And just so we're clear, that's not happening today. I'm not doing that. Because I sat there and I thought, my gosh, that's so hard. That's so hard to do that. Every week. I have to do one of these every week. This morning, this one was squared away. I thought, okay, good, I'm fine. I think I can preach that one. And then immediately, what's next week? I will drive home thinking about next week's sermon. I really will. It's just, it's the nature of the beast. I don't have time every week to orchestrate little things to drop in for you guys. Are you kidding me? I'm not that good. I think I've done that like three times since I've gotten to Grace. I'm so sorry. And I'm sitting in there in that class going, that would be great. How do you do that? Listen, I struggled to do that over the course of 30 minutes. God has woven history together like that. He has dropped in little things over history, little signposts every year to prepare us for the coming of his son, for the conclusion of his promises. God made Abraham some promises in Genesis 12, and then he enacted this grand plan to bring about his son to save us, to reunite us with our creator. And if it wasn't enough just to enact that plan, he told his people in Leviticus, in this often neglected book, tucked away in the Bible, in the 23rd chapter, he says, every year I want you to celebrate these six things. And they thought those six things were a celebration of their past, but they were pointing to their future. Every year when they celebrated Passover, they were celebrating the provision that Jesus would be. Every year when they offered their first fruits, they were painting a picture of who Jesus would be. Every year when they watched the high priest perform the sacrifices, they were staring at who Jesus would be. It's funny to me that we hear people say, you know, if God is real, why doesn't he make himself more evident? Y'all, he got his people to celebrate things six times a year that pointed to his son. What more do you want him to do? He wove Jesus into all of history. And when I look at that and the way that it all comes together in this beautiful picture, I marvel at the sovereignty of God. At his power and efficacy at weaving together history to prepare us to till the soil for the arrival of his son at the perfect time. And now as we sit and we wait for the return of his son, when the trumpet sounds and he calls in the harvest, what is he weaving together now that we don't even know about? When I look at the tapestry that he's made with just his festivals, I marvel at God's sovereignty. And it reminds me of a place that I love. I've told you guys about this place before, but I think it bears repeating. My in-laws used to own a lake house down in Georgia on Lake Oconee. And we would spend a lot of weekends there. Jen and I were older. We were married. We were in our late 20s. And Jen's sister was still in college. And so most weekends we got invited over there. when we would go Jen's sister her name's Lauren she's immensely likable and charming and so she was like a pied piper and all these people are coming with her all these all these college kids right and they're like on the wakeboard and they're ripped out of their mind and they look like Greek gods and they're like Nate do you want to go and I'm like no I'm gonna keep my shirt on I think I'm I think I'm. They're like doing flips and stuff. Would you like to embarrass yourself and wreck in front of everyone? I'm squared away. So one of my favorite things to do amidst all these college kids and all the noise and everything else, there was about probably 40 yards between the back of their house and the lakefront. And right in front of the lake was this hammock. And one of my favorite things to do was just to wander down by myself, some of you who know me well will be shocked to hear that, and get into the hammock and just rest. Because in that hammock, I can almost put myself there now, all the noise and all the kids from college that faded, everything going on in my life, all the things that I had rushed in there, just coming in on two wheels after a busy week, thinking about what's coming up next, all that faded. And I could just see the sky. I could hear the breeze going through the trees. And I could hear the water lapping up against that retainage wall right there. And it was peaceful. And I could just rest because everything was quiet. And to me, that will forever be a picture of what it is to rest in God's sovereignty, to simply rest in the sovereignty of God, and to know if he can do this with history, certainly he can do that with my story. If he can weave together history to point to his son, to prepare us for him, and then orchestrate our lives in such a way that everything in us claws for Jesus and for peace with our creator, if he can orchestrate everything in that way, then he can handle my story too. If he can orchestrate all of this, then the things that are stressing me out, the things that are making me anxious, the things that make me feel uncertain or unclear or in pain, God can work that out too. And it makes me wonder if for all those years God was weaving this picture to point to his son and the people around it didn't even know. They didn't even realize what they were doing or really celebrating. What are the things that we're pointing to that we don't even understand yet? What are the things that when we get to heaven we're going to look back on this life and we're going to go, oh, wow. What are those moments that we're going to have? So as I think about the festivals and what they point us to, and God's sovereignty, sovereignty as he orchestrates them, it just makes me want to rest easy in it and know that if God can do all that with history, then he can do that with my story. And it makes me want to trust him. Rest easy in that. And I hope that you will too. I hope that whatever's going on in your life, whatever you came in on two wheels thinking about, whatever you're rushing to after this, know that if God can orchestrate all of history, if he can organize the six festivals to point to him and his rescue every year, he can handle whatever's happening with you too. And maybe today we can just rest easy in that. And we can trust that. In a minute we get to sing a song together after we take communion. And we're gonna say, take my whole world, everything in it. I think that when we sing that, it should have special meaning. God, I trust it to you. If you can weave this, then I trust you with me. Let's pray, and then we'll celebrate communion together. Father, you're good to us. We marvel at how you organize history. We marvel at all the different signposts, at all the different symbols that you give us all throughout history, all along the way to point to yourself, to point to your son, to point to how you love us. God, I pray that we would rest easy in your sovereignty. That we would quit believing that we can somehow control the uncontrollable. That we would acknowledge that it's all in your hands. That you would give us a peaceful rest in our trust in you, and that we would watch you come through even today, even this week. Thank you for the pictures that you paint with the festivals that you initiated. I pray that we would see them more and more clearly. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.