Sermons tagged with Faithfulness

All right, well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here with us this morning, especially on a holiday weekend. I always joke around about you being a better Christian if you're here on a holiday weekend, and while I do believe that is true, I also think that it's just really nice and impressive when it is a holiday weekend and you choose to make church a part of that. So that's touching for me and I think good for you on that. And good for you if you're watching online and making it a point to be with us in spirit this Sunday as well. We did it. We made it to the end of the summer. This is the last in our series for this summer called 27. We'll pick it back up next summer when we jump into Paul's letters and finish in Revelation. So this is the last one that we're going to do. We're focused on the book of Jude this morning. And as if you guys needed more evidence that my wife, Jen, is a better Christian than me, when she asked what the sermon was on this week or which one I was going to be writing for this week, I said, Jude. And she goes, what are you going to do it on? And I'm like, I don't know. It's Jude. Like, I don't know the last time I read Jude. And she was like, well, I love this verse. You should do it on this one. And I'm like, of course she knows a random verse from Jude. So that was humbling. And you'd be better off if she were your pastor. But you have to settle for me this morning until she can be convinced otherwise. When I sat down to study Jude, I saw very quickly that it was kind of a microcosm of the entire Bible, of one of the dynamics happening all through Scripture and in the way that we understand scripture. So I'm starting us off here. Jude is a perfect depiction of both the depth and approachability of the Bible. Jude is this kind of microcosm and a picture of both the depth and the approachability of the Bible. Jude in verses 5 through 19, that's 15 verses. I know that's 15 verses because I counted on my fingers to make sure that I would not be wrong when I said 15 verses. In those 15 verses, there are 18 references to other scriptures, to Old Testament scriptures, and even apocryphal writings. Within just those 15 verses in Jude, 18 references to Old Testament scriptures and apocryphal writings. Some of the quotes are from the book of Enoch. For many of you in the room this morning, you didn't even know that was a book. You didn't even know the book of Enoch exists. It's an apocryphal literature. You'll find it, I think, in the Catholic Bible, but you don't find it in the Protestant Bible. But in Jude, there's references to the book of Enoch. There's, again, 18 references and 15 verses. And so if you're looking at Jude and you're trying to understand Jude, which by the way, Jude is probably short for Judah, which was a brother, a half-brother of Jesus. So if you're trying to understand his letter to the churches, how could you possibly understand Jude without understanding those 18 references? And scholars believe that the audience that he wrote this letter to, the churches in Asia Minor, they were people of a Jewish background and had grown up with a Jewish faith. They understood these references. It was like when I would refer to you and I would say, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. You know that, John 3.16. Most of you can fill in the rest of that. These references to them were that ubiquitous and that identifiable. And so as I'm studying Jude, again, I think to myself, how in the world could we seek to understand this book if we don't have any bearing for the 18 references found in the middle part of it that make it come to life and make it understandable. And this, I feel, is a depiction, too, of the depth of Scripture. I'm 42 years old. I've spent almost my entire life studying Scripture. I grew up in a Christian home. My dad was a deacon. He was important and fancy. I went to church every time the doors were open. And this was back in the day, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. I went to the church so often that my pastor felt totally comfortable calling me out in the middle of Sunday night service and telling me to quit talking. And then I would get in big trouble. I got spankings, is what I got. I would get struck with objects when I got home for that offense. Back when we raised kids right, you know. That's right. That's right, Jeffy. Let's let it all hang out here on Labor Day Sunday. Who cares? Beat your kids, Jeff just said. Don't do that. Don't do that. Totally off the rails. Jeff, this is your fault. Shut up, Jeff. But I grew up in church. I did Awanas. I memorized all the verses. I don't know if you guys did that when you were kids, but I memorized verses every week. I memorized them for the test, and then I promptly forgot them because I was eating candy right after that and then playing games. But some of them stick because sometimes I'll start to quote a verse, and it'll be in the King's English, and I'm like, oh, that's from Awana. That's from KJV back in the day, right? I went to Christian private school. I went to Christian high school. I've had a Bible class. I went to Bible college and studied theology. I got a master's degree in more theology. I've studied the Bible my whole life. Now, not as hard as I should have all the time, or maybe ever, I don't know. Not as consistently as I would like to all the time, but far and away, for the balance of 42 years, I've studied God's Word. And I'd be the first to tell you, there are myriad 42-year-olds who know way more about this than I do. But I can also say that I've devoted a life to studying it. And here's what I know. I'm embarrassed by how little I know. I'm humbled by how much more there is in this. I feel like God's word is an ocean and I've waded into it up to my waist and been like, yeah, okay. I think I get the gist. You can spend your whole life plumbing the depths of these pages and you will never get to the bottom. You will never stop learning from it. It will never return null and void. It will never not have more layers. You will never not see more connections, and there's so much of the Bible that's really impossible to fully understand without a grasp of the rest of the Bible. You can never understand the book of Galatians if you don't understand the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. You just can't do it. It's why, it's one of the reasons I say as often as I can, it's one of the reasons that one of the traits of grace is that we are people of devotion. It's why I say that the single most important habit that anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. Because the bottom of this is unfindable. The depths of this are unknowable. And some of you have spent your life studying it too. And you know I'm right. Your heads are nodding the most because you've done it. And it always leaves you wanting more. So there is a degree to which approaching the Bible feels a little bit like approaching Jude. You could read Jude on your own with no background and with no study, and you probably wouldn't recognize but a couple of the references, if any, in verses 5 through 19. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know that you're not getting the depths of it. And sometimes I think people get intimidated by the Bible and how deep it is and how much there is to learn because I know good and well. Not all of you grew up being exposed to scripture every day. Some of us, when I say, and you're good believers, you love Jesus, you love the word, but when I say turn to Galatians, you're like, I don't know yet where that is. I want to know, I just don't know yet. And you go to small groups and there's other in the small group, and they're not professional Christians. They don't get paid to be a Christian like I do. That's all being a pastor is, is I just went pro with my Christianity. I'm still doing the same things that you guys should all be doing. I just get paid for it. I don't know if that's right, but I do. And you're sitting there in your Bible study with the other amateur Christians, and somebody knows way more than you. Right? They just know the Bible. We have them in every small group. And maybe you think to yourself, gosh, I don't know how I will ever understand that much. It just, it can feel intimidating. But that's also why I think it's beautiful that Jude depicts the approachability of Scripture as well. Because sure, the Bible is complicated. It's challenging. It's difficult to understand. It's unmasterable. And yet, some of the messages that come from it are so simple as to make it immediately approachable. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the whole gospel. That's all of Romans compacted into a sentence or two. Right? Jesus says this new commandment I give you, go and love one another as I have loved you. That's it. That's all the law and the prophets compacted into this one commandment. I don't really understand the rest of the Bible, but I believe in Jesus and I can go love people in his name. Okay. Then you get it. And so in Jude, again, we have this depiction of the depth of scripture, but also the approachability. Because even if you don't get the references from verses 5 to 19, there's a simple message in Jude that we can all understand. Sorry, I had to crunch the ice without you guys hearing. And that's what I want to look at now, is this simple message in Jude, and we're going to spend the rest of our time on it. What is this message that Judah, the half-brother of Jesus, wanted to give us, and why did he write this short little note and it get tacked into the end of the Bible as the penultimate book? Well, I think we see the beginning of this purpose in verse 3. This is the simple message of Jude. This is why he wrote the book. And even if we have no context, we can pretty much understand what this means. In verse 3, Jude says this, Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. So here's why he wrote the book of Jude. He says that he had been eager to write to them concerning their common salvation. And so a lot of scholars believe that Jude was trying to write a letter that looked more like Romans or Hebrews, something long and formal where it kind of outlined this faith that they would share. And that's what he was eager to do, and that's what he was working on. But another matter began to press, and he thought it was so important that he put that large work on hold so he could write this short note to them. And what he wants them to do is, I wanted to talk to you about our common faith. I wanted to lay out all the things that we believe to give you some clarity. I don't have time for that now, so I'm just writing to you to urge you to contend for the faith. Why? Well, because in verses 5 through 19, what we learn is that there's false teachers. The early church, they didn't have an agreed upon Bible, an agreed upon book, agreed upon doctrines. They didn't have denominations in theology. They just had their faith and understanding in Jesus, which means that the populace in the church was very easily deceived, very easily misdirected in the wrong ways. And so the churches had false teachers that were entering into them, gaining clout, proclaiming that they knew the teachings of Jesus. And yet the morality of those teachers did not line up with the words that they were teaching. They were teaching a kind of hedonism that's clearly out of step with scripture and with God's will for his people. And so Jude was writing the churches to say, hey, you can't listen to those guys. They're trying to steer you in the wrong direction. They're wrong. You need to contend for the faith. And what's really interesting is I was thinking about it, at least this is interesting to me, is when in churches, especially in the South, you use phrases like we need to contend for the faith. That usually means go out and fight a culture war against the waves of culture that are trying to bash down and beat down the truth of Scripture. But that's nowhere in here with Jude. It's contend for the faith. Where? Well, it looks like, based on what he says, within yourself. Contend for your own faith. Fight for your true and sincere faith. Because God doesn't need culture warriors going out there fighting for the faith. Contend for it in your own heart and then guess what? You're abiding in Christ and you'll produce much fruit. Contend for it here and you will be who you need to be as we operate in culture. So I believe that Jude is telling us to contend for our faith. And the simple message of Jude then is to contend for the faith with your whole life. Contend for the faith with your whole life. And we're going to read the verses that make me think this is true here in a second. And really this is kind of a launching pad into what I'm going to preach about next week when we do our big reveal Sunday. Next week, we're going to show the plans for the new building. If it's your first Sunday with us, then you have no idea what we're talking about. But we have four acres over off of Litchford Road, and we're looking to build there. And so we're going to share the plans with the church next week. And I'm very, very excited to do that. And the message that I'm going to preach is basically this. We have to contend for the gospel with our whole life. Contending for the gospel, contending for your faith, takes everything you got, and you can't let up. And that is the simple message of Jude. It's interesting to me. Sometimes, I don't know if you guys get to see this from your perspective, but from my perspective, as I just kind of, we map out series and what we're going to teach and what we're going to cover. There's so often that God has woven things together and woven themes in week in and week out to kind of prepare our hearts for things that are coming and help our hearts respond to things that have happened. And I see him weaving things together as we approach next week as well. But I believe that's the simple message of Jude. Contend for the faith with your whole life. And I believe it because of what he says at the end. So he says, contend for the faith. Here's why. Here are the threats. Verses 5 through 19. And then he says, if you're going to contend for that faith in yourself, here's how you do it. But you, beloved, verse 20, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life and have mercy on those who doubt. So Jude says, contend for the faith. Here's what's threatening your faith. Here's what you need to protect yourself against. And then he ends with, and here's how you do it. And he gives us four things that we can do to contend for our faith. Now, here's the thing. If you're here on a holiday weekend, you didn't accidentally come to church. All right. Labor day Sunday is typically not the Sunday when non-church people decide, you know what I'm going to do on a holiday weekend? I'm going to try church. That's not normally how that goes. If you're here, chances are you are probably a church person. If you're here, if you're listening, chances are your faith matters to you or you're visiting people that drug you to church. Either way. But I'd be willing to bet that your faith matters to you. I'd be willing to bet that you are a people who want to contend for your faith. That when Jude says this, if we are believers, we lean forward and we go, yes, how? So I'm going to give you four ways that we contend for our faith directly out of scripture. But here's what I would say to you. I don't think that any of us, and maybe you will, and if you do, that's wonderful. But I don't think that any of us are going to take all four of these things, keep them in our heads and work on all four of these things this week. So here's what I'm going to ask you and challenge you to do. Pick one, one of the four things that I'm about to mention that we can do to contend for our faith. My hope and my prayer is that one of them will resonate with you, that one of them will move you, that you will lock into one of these as you move into your week. And between now and the 10th, you will turn the dial on this in your life in such a way that you are responding to the simple message in Jude and beginning to contend for the faith with your whole life. So like I said, there's four things that Jude tells us to do to contend for the faith. And the first one that we see right there at the very beginning is to strengthen your faith. When I contend for your faith, you need to strengthen your faith. This is an interesting idea to me. How do we strengthen our faith? I don't think our faith is too much different than like a muscle or a muscle group. I've joked before, and I do think it's true, that I've probably had more first days in the gym than just about anybody in history. I've had a lot of first days. Some of those first days were also my last days, and I just didn't know it yet. But I've had a lot of first days in the gym. And one of the things I like to do when I go to the gym is I like to do squats. Big muscle group. I like to do squats. I think it's important. I don't know anything about anything, but I see people in better shape than me. They do squats and like that seems smart. So I do squats, right? And I don't know how much longer my knees are going to hold out and let me like do this. I don't know how many more of those I have in me because I'm aging more like a light beer than a fine wine, but that's how it goes for me. And one of the things I notice when I go back to the gym on the first day, especially if my last day was the last day after like a lot of days and I was actually kind of like in good shape, when I put the weights on the rack and I go to do what I think is going to be a warm-up set. Okay, for those of you who don't work out a lot like me, a warm-up set is when you do a little bit less weight just to get the muscles going and then you put on the actual weight and then you do the exercise. So there's been a couple of times on my first day where I've put the weight on, you know, just like 375, 400 pounds, and I'm just doing a warm-up set. And I go down and I'm like, yeah, this ain't no warm-up set, man. I only got about four of these in me. This is the real deal. This is the real set that I'm doing right here. Because my muscles have atrophied. Because I haven't done that in a couple of, they go into atrophy and they shrink and they get weaker if we don't continue to use them. I think our faith works the same way. If we're not using our faith, living a life that requires faith, then the faith that we have, I believe, can begin to atrophy so that it's not even as strong as it once was. So Jude tells us to strengthen our faith, acknowledging that this requires a regular use of our faith. And I did not come here this morning with the intent of convicting you or making anyone feel bad, but I do just want to ask the question, when is the last time that your life required faith? When is the last time you took a step of obedience, knowing that if God doesn't come through and deliver, this is not going to go well? If we're not taking those steps, if we're not living a life of faith, then our faith is going into atrophy, and it's not being strengthened. It's being weakened. I thought back to 2015, December of 2015, Jen and I were pregnant with Lily and we were, uh, we were not wealthy people. I was an associate pastor at a church. She was a part-time office manager. Uh, we did not have a ton of money, but because Lily was due in January, we had about $5,000 set aside for medical expenses and all that stuff. That's what we figured would work and cover it. And at the beginning of December, her car, her 4Runner, started to make weird noises, and so we took it to our guy who goes to the church, a guy named Kelly. And Kelly called me one day, and after I took the car in, he said, hey, man, how you doing? I said, I'm pretty good. How you doing? I said, hey, Kelly, how are you doing? And his first words were, better than you. And I went, oh, geez, what's going on, man? And he goes, we have to replace the engine. And I said, ugh, this is terrible. How much does that cost? He said, $5,000. Which apparently is super cheap for an engine now, but back then it was not. He says, $5,000. And I'm like, well, you got to do what you have to do, I guess. So make it happen. And there goes our new baby cushion. And we're just looking at each other like, great, what do we do? And that same week, a little bit prior to that revelation, we had committed to giving a certain amount of money to the Christmas offering that year. We had talked about it, prayed about it, and there was an amount that God had laid on our heart to give. And so I went back to Jen and I'm like, I don't think we can afford to give that anymore. We just lost all of our cushions. Certainly God would understand that. But the more we talked about it, and mostly Jen thought this, I was against it. The more we talked about it, the more we thought, no, God put that on both of our hearts. He did it knowing that we would have to pay for an engine. And we should be faithful to that. We should walk in obedience. Okay. So we did. We gave the amount that we had agreed to give. The very Sunday that we gave that amount, some random person walked up to me in the lobby and just said, hey, just want to say thank you. You and your family have been such a blessing to us. And they handed me a Christmas card. And then the Christmas card was a check for the amount of money that we had given to the church that morning. And it was like God was winking at us going, I'm going to take care of you. All right, don't worry about it. Now, do you not think that my faith got stronger after that? When I took this step of faith and obedience, God, I feel like this is a thing that you want me to do. I'm going to do it. And then I watch him come through for us. That strengthened my faith. My faith got stronger. We made a decision that required God to come through in an incredible way. And he did. And so for many of us, I think it's very possible, particularly in our affluence and in our abilities to live lives that do not require faith. And so maybe what you need to take this morning is this little nudge from God to make that decision that requires some faith. To step out in obedience and trust him to come through. That's the first thing Jude tells us to do. Strengthen our faith. The next thing he tells us to do is to pray in the Spirit. I love this. Pray in the Spirit. He doesn't just say to pray. He says to pray in the Spirit. Now, why does he say to pray in the Spirit? And what does it mean to pray in the Spirit? We get an insight into this in Romans chapter 8. It's so funny to me that God laid Romans 8.28 on Aaron's heart for worship. And now just this morning I added in Romans 8.26 for the sermon because there's just so much good truth there. And God often speaks in stereo. But in Romans 8.26 it says that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. Meaning the Holy Spirit hears what comes out of our mouths and then communicates to God what we really need because we are spiritual babies and we don't really know how to pray for what we actually need. I don't think it's too dissimilar from when my two and a half year old son, John, says he needs a passy. I need a passy. I want a passy. He wants a passy, but what he really means is, I'm tired. What he really means is, I want to snuggle, which, come on, I got plenty of that. He can do that whenever he wants. What it really means is, I just feel a little bit off kilter and I want to be centered and I need some peace. That's what it means. We're praying to God for passes and the Holy Spirit's like, here's what they really need. And so to me, I think if we learn to pray in the Spirit, it's praying with an awareness that the Spirit is going to translate this to God anyway. So how do I change my prayer? How do I have an awareness within my prayer to pray according to what the Spirit will ask for, to pray according to what the Spirit will translate? How do I pray according to the desires of the Spirit and the very heart of God? To begin to put that filter on our prayers. Before we just blurt out what we need and what we want and what we're hopeful for, to put on the lens of, I'm praying in the Spirit, I'm praying through the Spirit, The Spirit is going to translate this to God. What is it that he's going to translate? I think this is why Jesus teaches us to pray by starting off praying for the will of God to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We need to put on this mindset when we pray of Holy Spirit, how would you have me pray for this? Which begins, I think, with praying for things that actually concern the Father. This is appropriate at the beginning of football season. I'm not entirely sure God is very interested in the outcome of football games. I could be jaded because I prayed fervently at the beginning of the Falcons Super Bowl a few years back. And he let me down, which means that he does not care about football at all, because certainly he would have come through for my Falcons if he did. It always makes me laugh at the end of a football game when the athletes and the coach want to give glory to Jesus for this victory. Because I just think like, man, you really lucked out playing that whole team of atheists over there so that God could very clearly pick a side. He had to have been against that football team. And if God really did care about football, how does LSU ever win? Like they're Cajun rednecks. It's the worst combination. And yet they're good. So God doesn't care. It's silly, but often we pray about things and God in heaven just has grace and patience for us. I wonder what the translation is when we pray that a certain team would win. I wonder if the translation is, this one's faith is weak, God. I'm working on it. And it's funny there, but there's other ways in which it applies and it matters. One of the things I've learned over the years and the way that I pray for people who are sick and maybe dying is when I have opportunities to go and pray for families over seemingly terminally ill loved ones. If the family asks me to pray for healing, I will because I think that's an honoring thing to do. So sure, I'll pray for healing. But when I pray privately for that family, I almost never pray for healing. I always pray, Father, help this family see and accept your will. Help them to be comforted by it. And help what they're about to walk through to conspire to make their faith in you stronger, not weaker. God, please don't let this path that they're walking shake their faith to a point where they question it. Would you make everything that's about to happen, whether you heal or whether you take, would you let everything conspire to make this faith stronger in this family? I could be wrong, but I think that's a more reflective prayer of what concerns the Holy Spirit. And I think if we can teach ourselves to pray in accordance with the will of the Spirit, we better acquaint ourselves with the heart of the Father. And we see a lot more answered prayer when we do it that way. So pray in the spirit to contend for your faith. The next thing we do is we walk in God's love. We walk in God's love. Now this is what we talked about last week. How do we walk in God's love? And it's actually in the verse, it actually says, keep yourselves in the love of God. So I probably, I should have said, keep yourself in God's love. How do we do that? That was last week's sermon. That's how God's weaving things together. That was first and second and third John. How do we walk in God's love? How do we walk in love for God? We obey him. Because when we obey God, we admit his expertise and that we trust in it. When we obey God, it proves that we trust him. Right? Obedience proves trust. So how do we walk in God's love? We walk in obedience to God. And some of us may have carried in the same sin and the same weight and the same thing that's entangling us. Last week when we preached a sermon on, hey, if you love God, obey him. Where are we being disobedient? Where do we need to walk in obedience? And maybe we brought that exact same disobedience into this sermon this week, into this place this week, and God is still after us. Hey, when are you going to hand that over to me and walk in obedience there? And so maybe this week is just a reminder for you that God really does care. He really does want you to let that go. And he really does want you to walk in obedience. And that's how we need to respond this morning. The last one I love, and I love that it seems to just be tacked on there, but it's such an important concept as we contend for the faith. Have mercy on doubters. There's not too many other places in Scripture where we're given instruction on how to handle doubt and doubters, but it's really interesting to me that Jude, as he's listing these other things that we would all agree with and expect to be there, walk in God's love, strengthen your faith, pray in the Spirit. Sure, we know that. We hear that kind of stuff every week and all the time. But then after that, just as importantly, have mercy on the doubters. And I love that this is in here because can I just tell you a secret about faith? If you are a thinking person, if you are an observant and thinking Christian, then doubts in your faith are unavoidable and absolutely necessary. They are essential and unavoidable parts of faith to run into places where you are experiencing doubt. And if you have never experienced doubt, you either have the strongest faith of anyone I've met, or you, I would gently say, have not really deeply considered your faith and what it means. Doubts, wondering if all this is true anyways, are an unavoidable and completely essential part of our faith. Why do I say that? Because I know personally from experience that the faith you find on the other side of doubt is more rich and more full and more vibrant than the previous version of your faith could have ever imagined being. I walked through a profound season of doubt in my early 20s as I was finishing up Bible college and doing ministries. And then I walked through another profound season of doubt during COVID in the summer of 2020 while I was pastoring. It felt like reassembling a plane in midair. So I know that doubts in our faith are unavoidable and absolutely essential. And I know that when we do the hard work to learn and to actually answer the questions, not let the questions drive us away. I don't understand this, so I'm done with faith, but I don't understand this, so I'm gonna dig in harder. I'm gonna look from new sources. I'm gonna look new places. I'm going to ask more people. And when we find the answers that actually satisfy the doubt, what happens is we emerge with this firm foundation and this vibrant faith that's more rich and more generous than what we could have ever imagined. And what we find on the other side of doubt is that we actually love God more because he gets bigger and more mysterious and we find out we can trust him. Doubts are good, but we shouldn't stop at doubt. We should work through them and talk through them. The problem in churches with doubt is that often doubts are met with condemnation and not mercy. I shared with you guys weeks ago, and we all know that this is happening, that over the last 12 years or 20 years, 40 million people have left the church or something like that. We know the church in America is shrinking. We are now very familiar with this term deconstructing, which refers to someone who grew up evangelical Christian, who grew up with faith and as an adult walked away from it. We're familiar with that. Why is this's going on in our culture it's something that i think about a lot but one of the big reasons it's happening is because doubts in our churches tend to be met with condemnation and not mercy because our pastors and our leaders are not obedient to jude's instruction to have mercy on doubters And when people raise their hand and they go, hey, what about, or how come, or I don't understand, but how could this be true if this is also true? When people express doubts, sometimes they're met with dismissals. Sometimes they're met with condemnation. When I grew up, you felt like this person with a weak faith if you had any doubts. If you didn't understand. That the people who were in charge, the spiritual leaders, the pastors and the deacons and the elders and all those people, they were the people with the fewest doubts. They were the people with no chinks in their armor. They were the people who had all the answers and understood it the best. And so having doubts made you weak. And I think we need to have a church where having and expressing doubts actually shows some strength because you're trying to fight through those rather than bury your head in the sand. And you have a desire to enrich your faith by working through those and finding answers. So if we're going to be obedient to Jude, we need to have mercy on the doubters, understanding it's a necessary process in faith to move through those and find answers. This means, parents, we create that environment in our homes where our children are allowed to doubt, and they are allowed to ask questions, and they are allowed to wonder, and they are allowed to learn other information that causes them to question things about their faith. And they are allowed to move through that in mature ways that are helpful for them, believing that on the other side of that doubt lies a rock-solid faith. So we give them mercy when they have questions. We create environments in our homes where we can have spiritual conversations, and they don't have to agree with mom and dad about everything. And then maybe most of all, for some of us, we have mercy on ourselves. And we allow ourselves to express those doubts. We allow ourselves to express that uncertainty. We give ourselves some grace and start to seek out answers. Not being afraid of the doubt, but knowing that pushing through it and seeking answers in the doubt is going to lead to a faith that we don't have right now, but we desperately want. So we have mercy on the doubters. That's the simple message of Jude. That's how we contend for the faith. The simple message of Jude is to contend for the faith with yourself, with your whole life, with everything you got. How do we do that? We pray in the Spirit. We walk in God's love. We strengthen our faith. And we have grace and mercy on those who doubt. And we walk through this together. I don't know which one of those resonates with you. But if any of them do, I pray that you'll take it from here and you'll leave and you'll work on that this week. And contend for your faith with your whole life in accordance with the message of Jude. Let's pray. Father, you love us. We know that you do. We feel it and we see it. It's all around us all the time. God, if anybody doubts today that you love them, I pray that they would see evidence of that sometime before their head hits the pillow tonight. Lord, we thank you for the simple message of Jude and ask that we would be people who would contend for our faith, that we would contend with our whole lives and our whole heart. Lord, if we have lived lives that don't require faith, would you help us take steps of faith and watch you come through? Lord, if we need to learn to pray more in the spirit and according to your will, would you make us aware that your spirit is with us as we pray? Make us sensitive to praying according to your will. God, if there are areas of our life we know are not in accordance with your word, that we know we are walking in disobedience, would you help us to walk in obedience and therefore walk in your love? Father, if we are experiencing doubts, would you help us be brave in those? To have mercy on ourselves. And to seek out the conversations that we need to seek out. To help us arrive at a stronger, richer, more vibrant faith. Help us contend for the faith that you've given us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. We've been moving through a series called Big Emotions. This is part six of the series. And within this series, as we kind of planned it, I realized that we needed to have a morning like this morning where we talk about some of the heavier, harder emotions that we can experience in life. In the past just few months, I had a lunch with a young man who was and is a recovering alcoholic, and actually today is his one-year sober anniversary, so we're excited for him today. Yeah, he's not here. That's okay. He didn't hear how much you didn't, how tepid that was. If he were here, I would have. But we're thrilled about that. And he shared with me as I talked with him about a story that part of what led him down that path is dealing with a depression. This creeping sense that he wasn't going to be who everyone expected him to be and who he was. And it was this feeling of not mattering anymore, of not living up to things that sent him into a depression that caused him to seek out some help for that from chemicals. In the past couple months, I've talked with two different dads in our community whose daughters are struggling mightily with depression. You could even call it a crippling depression. And one of them even shared with me that he's learned through her struggle that that's what he's always dealt with. He just never had the words to put around what he was feeling, or it's entirely possible because men are stupid, that he just didn't allow himself to admit that he was sad because we're too manly for that. I've sat with people in the wake of great loss. Sat with a family, and I won't detail the struggles, but they just kind of, life just keeps running them ashore, man. Life just keeps beating them up. I get texts from them, and I'm like, God, you've got to be kidding me with what they're having to walk through, and I'm certain. As a matter of fact, I know for a fact that some of them are staving off bouts of depression and anxiety and deep grief and deep sadness. In my own family, on both my side and Jen's side, Jen's my wife, on both my side and Jen's side, we have depression in our family. We're walking through it. Sometimes it's harder than other times. Sometimes it's more extreme than other cases, but it touches us and it touches our lives too. And I know that each of us deals with or loves someone who deals with depression, grief, melancholy, sadness from time to time, these seasons in life that just feel dark and heavy. And I also know that many more of us deal with feelings of insignificance, like we don't matter. I know firsthand that being, because of walking through it with my wife, that being a stay-at-home mom can make you feel very small. It can make your world feel very inconsequential, that all you are is the nursemaid for a toddler or a shuttle service for your kids or whatever it might be. Being a parent can sometimes make your world feel very small. As you age, sometimes your world can start to feel smaller and smaller and the things you do less and less significant. And some of us have gone from seasons of mattering a great deal to mattering not very much. Some of us have gone from having great identities that we are proud of to these small identities that we kind of wander in and aren't used to yet. And so I know that in our family of faith, in our congregation, in this room, and the people watching online, the people who will hear this later, all of us have dealt with personally or love someone dearly who struggles with bouts of depression, with grief, with sadness, with loss, or even insignificance. And so I thought it was absolutely appropriate to take a Sunday while we talk about big emotions and talk about these. And I thought it would be really helpful for us as we identify with that sadness, with that grief, with that inadequacy, to look at someone in the Bible who also dealt with that and to see how God meets him in this place. So we're going to look at just a part of the story of a prophet named Elijah. Now, many of you were not here years ago when I did a whole series in the summer on Elijah, or if you were here, you were probably at the beach and didn't hear it. So some of this stuff will be reviewed, but maybe not much. I'm not going to tell you the whole story of the life of the prophet of Elijah, but he is one of God's, as Aaron said in the announcements, one of God's great servants. Elijah was so great. In fact, I'm not sure I need to tell you anything else about his life, but at the end of his life, as he was aging and the end was near, he's walking with his disciple, Elisha, and on the west bank of the Jordan River and Elijah decides that he needs to go to the eastern bank of the Jordan River and so he just parts the waters and walks across it like this miracle of convenience. Like the ark stopped the Jordan River so that God himself could move into the promised land with his people and then Moses parted the waters so that God's people could escape from the Pharaoh. And Elijah parted the water so that his sandals wouldn't get wet. That's just okay. He just puts his cloak in the water, parts it, walks through, come on, Elisha, and then they go through. And when they get on the other side, a chariot descends down out of heaven. An angelic chariot comes down and scoops Elijah up and takes him to heaven. Dude was so righteous, he caught an Uber ride to the pearly gates because God didn't want him to experience death. We see Elijah again in the New Testament at the Mount of Transfiguration when he appears along with Moses to Jesus to strengthen him and encourage him. He's a major figure in the Old Testament and a hero of the faith. And when I say it's difficult for anyone to get closer to God than Elijah was, I mean it literally because all of us in here are very likely going to experience death. He did not have to. And yet, in his life, we see pretty convincing evidence that at least in this season, Elijah was low. He struggled mightily with depression and insignificance. And so I think it's worth looking at this part of his story and seeing how God responds there. The part of the story that I'm going to present to you is somewhere, I would guess, about 45 to 50 days of his life. So I'm not even sure you could call it a season. It was just a time of his life when he was low. We don't know if there were other times or not. One would assume that there were. But here we get just a snippet or a snapshot of Elijah's, what I believe to be, depression, at least in this season. We're going to be looking, and not yet, but if you have a Bible, you can turn there. 1 Kings chapter 19. If you don't have one, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Unless you're watching from home, I don't know what's in your seat backs. But in 1 Kings chapter 18 is the big showdown, the big thing that Elijah's famous for, the showdown with the prophets of Baal. And I don't have time to give the full treatment to the story. I wish I did because it's a fantastic story and you should really read it. But the predominant religion at this time was worshiping this God named Baal. The king was Ahab, the queen was Jezebel. They were evil and they supported this idol worship. The followers of God were pressed into the margins and the fringes. And Elijah was by all accounts, essentially the chief priest for God at the time and the head prophet. And so he goes to Mount Carmel and he has this showdown with the prophets of Baal. There's 450 prophets of Baal. And they make this deal that they're each going to build an altar. And whichever God from heaven itself lights the altars on fire first, that's the best God. And the other one has to take his ball and go home. And so they start this competition. And Elijah, I just have to point out, he says one of the best lines in the Bible. He is a sarcastic jerk, which breathed life into me from God himself. And Baal is not responding and lighting the altar on fire. And he's making fun of them. Maybe you should yell louder, yada, yada. And at. And at one point, he's like, maybe he can't hear you because he's in his heavenly bathroom taking a Tuesdays. Maybe that's what's going on, which is phenomenal. It's the kind of stuff you get here at Grace Riley. And after they give up, Elijah prays this humble prayer. God, it's time. God sends fire from heaven, lights the altar on fire, and Elijah has all 450 prophets arrested and put to death. After this, the beginning of chapter 19, Elijah's praying. There had been a drought for three years in Israel, and God told Elijah that the drought's going to be over. Get ready for rain. And then swept Elijah with the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God sweeps Elijah to Jerusalem. So he beats Ahab's chariot back to Jerusalem. When Ahab, the king, gets to Jerusalem, he goes to Jezebel, the queen, and he tells Jezebel all that Elijah has done. She responds by sending a messenger to Elijah that says, everything that you did to my prophets, I'm going to do to you, and it's going to be worse. I'm going to kill you. And this is interesting because a couple chapters later in 2 Kings chapter 1, she tries to send soldiers to kill Elijah. And Elijah says, I'm a man of God, and if you try to arrest me, then he's going to send fire and kill you. And then they do, and then he does. Three times. Dude has nothing to be scared of. He has the protection of God on his head. He has the hand of God on him. But when the messenger reaches Elijah this time and says, Jezebel's wants to kill him. And in fear, he flees a day into the wilderness. He gets done with that day and he sits down and he prays a prayer that I hope none of us have prayed, but I bet some of us have. God, it would be better if I were dead. Please take my life. I'm done. I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give. I'm exhausted. I did this great miracle in your name, won a great victory, and it's like it doesn't matter. She's going to kill me. Do you understand that he was despaired to his point of death? He was despairing for his life. Do you understand that he went to sleep under that broom tree, that he closed his eyes praying, God, please don't let me wake up? You understand that when Elijah's eyes were opened that he was disappointed? I don't know if you have ever gone to sleep and before you went to sleep, you prayed, God, please don't let me wake up on this side of eternity. But I bet some of you have. I bet we know people who have felt what Elijah felt. God, I'm going to sleep and I don't want to wake up. This world has nothing left for me. I don't want to be here. No one cares about me. I don't matter. This needs to be over. It would be better off if I were in eternity than here any longer. Please don't let me wake up when I go to sleep, God. Elijah is despairing unto death. And is at, by all estimations, a very low point. But God wakes him up. He wakes him up with an angel who feeds him, gives him food. I love that that's God's response to the dark night of the soul. Like a loving divine grandma. Here, just eat a little something. You'll feel better after some cookies. Elijah goes back to sleep. The angel wakes him up again. Says, you're going to need this for your journey. You're going to Mount Horeb. So he eats and he travels 40 days to Mount Horeb. And God tells him when he gets there, go up into this cave. I'm going to talk to you there. And when he gets up to the cave, God speaks to him and he says, Elijah, what are you doing? And Elijah says, my part. I've served you well. I've done everything I'm supposed to do. And they've killed all my friends. They've killed all my companions. I, even I, only am left. There is no one left in Israel like me. I am totally alone, God. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. I have no love. I have no camaraderie. I'm alone and I'm destitute and nobody cares about me anymore, God. This time when I go to sleep, can I please just not wake up? I'm done. This is an articulation of the lowest of lows in his life. I, even I only, am left. I have no friends. I have no family. I have no companions. It's just me, and I'm tired. And God says, I'm going to speak to you again. And it's this remarkable passage where Elijah is sitting in the cave on the side of this mountain. And the text tells us that there's this great earthquake and the ground shakes and the stones tremble and the trees shake. And you think surely that God's voice is in the earthquake, but he's not in the earthquake. And then God sends this fire by the mouth of the cave that consumes everything in its path, and you think, surely God is in the fire, and he's not in the fire. And he sends a mighty wind that shakes and vibrates and stirs and scares, and you think, surely God is in the wind, and he's not in the wind. And then scripture says there's a gentle whisper and God is in the whisper. And Elijah goes out to the mouth of the cave and God says, what are you doing, Elijah? And Elijah gives the exact same response in verses 14, in verse 14 that he did in verse 10. I've been very jealous for you. I've served you well. And I've put all my friends to the sword, and I, even I only, am left. And God hears him. And he says, I want you to go do something for me. I want you to go appoint this man and this man kings of their different areas. I've still got stuff for you to do. Go make them kings. And when you do, here's what's going to happen. Now go. And on his way to go do that, he comes across a man plowing in his field named Elisha. And he grabs Elisha and he says, I'm going to essentially make you my disciple. Come and follow me. I'm going to teach you to be a prophet like I'm a prophet. And Elisha goes and tells his parents that he's leaving and he leaves and he goes with Elijah. And he spends the rest of his life following Elijah. And when Elijah goes up into heaven on the chariot, his cloak wafts back down to Elisha, and Elisha receives a double portion of the Holy Spirit that Elijah had, and outperforms Elijah in miracles and in all the other things, has a greater ministry than Elijah did. And it can be argued that Elisha is probably the greater impact than defeating the prophets of Baal, that Elisha may have been Elijah's greatest work. But without question, in this 45 to 50 day period, we see one of the great servants of God at a low point in his life. We see him despair unto death. We see him go to sleep and not want to wake up. We see him express solitude and isolation, feeling completely alone and wanting to die. We see him despairing. What we see, I think, at least for this season, is a depression. And if you look at what he says, and if we think about what we've experienced when we've been low, then what we understand is that depression silently screams, you don't matter. Depression silently screams at you that you don't matter, that nothing you do matters. Look at what Elijah says the first time. I'm the only one left. I did everything you wanted me to do. Now they're going to kill me, and I'd rather just die I'm no better than my father's. I have nothing left to give God. My best days are behind me. I have no bigger miracles to work. I've done everything I can do. All that's left is waiting for death. Please just go ahead and take me. And it occurs to me as I reflect on Elijah voicing in that way that he felt like he no longer mattered. That one of the great strengths of grace is having a generationally diverse congregation. I love that about our church. And what I'm about to say is in no way a joke. This is not a time for stupid jokes. I'm not doing that. It occurs to me that a large portion of us, a large portion of you, you've reached the end of your career, the last portions of your career. You've ended your career and you're in retirement. You've raised your kids. Maybe you've even helped raise your grandkids. In your mind, you've shifted. I've seen the shift in men and women that I love. From wanting to build a name for yourself to thinking about what kind of name you're leaving behind. You've shifted from establishment to legacy. And you've accepted that you are in the twilight of your life. And I think it would be very easy to become convinced in that season that your best days are behind you, that you've done the great work that you're going to do. You've climbed the biggest mountain that you're going to climb. You've defeated more prophets then than you ever will in the future. I think it would be very difficult to have lived a life where in one setting you were important. Your voice mattered. People came to you for your opinion. They paid a fair amount of money for your time to a place where people don't come as much anymore and they don't ask as much anymore and your voice isn't as weighty as it used to be and you become convinced that my best days are behind me and if we're not careful, we can slip into, as Elijah did, just kind of waiting for the last day to get here because I have nothing left to give. And so I think in that way, even if we're not people who are depressed, we can hear that message of the world and that message of depression creeping into our hearts. Hey, you don't matter. Your best days are behind you. Or we can feel insignificant for other reasons. Our role in life right now reduces us. We have a thankless job and a somewhat thankless marriage with thankless kids, and we just feel small, and no one tells us that we're good enough, and no one tells us that they respect us, and no one tells us that they're grateful for us. We can move through seasons of life where we just feel like we're going through the motions, and we feel so insignificant and small. I know firsthand that when I preach sermons about God having a purpose for us, God having a use for us, when I quote one of my favorite verses, Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we might walk in them. And I encourage you guys, identify your good works and walk in them. I know that there's a large portion of you that hear that and go, yes, that's good. I have no idea what my good works are. I have no idea how God gifted me. God's gifted other people to do other things, but he has not gifted me in any significant way. So the best thing I can do is just keep my head down and be nice because I don't really matter that much in God's kingdom. That's what Elijah was saying. I, even I only, am left. I don't matter. There's nothing around me that's important. And I talked with some friends of mine who deal with depression more than I do. Candidly, this is not something that I'm given to struggle with. I have other struggles, and I'm pretty transparent with you about those. For this one, I had to outsource a lot of it. So this idea that depression silently screams at us that we don't matter, that's not my idea. That came from someone who walks it. And then I called someone else who probably deals with depression in a little bit more profound way, and I said, hey, does this check out with you? If I say that depression insists that we don't matter, does that resonate? And he said, yeah, but it's worse than that. He says, my depression tells me that it doesn't matter, that nothing matters, let alone me. And so if you've ever sat in that place, or you've loved someone who sits in that place, when we start to listen to the voices that tell us that we don't matter, I think God's response to Elijah when he was giving into those voices should breathe some fresh air into our lungs. And here's what God does to Elijah. We go back through the story. Here's what we see him doing. God strengthens, whispers to, sends, and encourages Elijah. And I think all of those things are important. He strengthens Elijah. He whispers to Elijah. He sends Elijah. And then he finally encourages Elijah. He strengthens him. He literally wakes him up and gives him food. You're going to need this for your journey. He literally wakes him up again and gives him some food. You're going to need this for your journey. Eat up. He strengthens him. He gives him enough to get through the day. Whatever you need to get through today, God gives that to you to sustain you. That's the daily bread. That's the manna. That's the daily sustenance of God showing up and sustaining you for today. I shared with you a few weeks back that I was reading the Beth Moore biography, and she encountered her mother-in-law had walked through a tremendous trial, and she said, how do you do it? How did you giving me strength for that day. I'm reminded of this famous passage in Isaiah Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not be faint. God will sustain us if we trust him to do it. He will strengthen us in the darkest of days when it's so dark and so heavy and so cloudy that we can't see a glimmer of light or a glimmer of hope. God, if we have within us one ounce that is willing to reach out to God and ask him for that day, he will sustain you that day. He will whisper to you. I love that we have a God that speaks to us in the whisper. In the most unexpected places, in the most unexpected ways, God shows up with his presence. A few weeks ago in men's Bible study, one of the guys shared his story. He's a little bit older now, late 50s, early 60s, than he was when this happened. But at some point in his life, I'm not sure when, but he lost his wife. Lost his wife to breast cancer. I can't imagine the pain of losing a spouse or a child. Losing a parent is hard. But I bet losing a spouse or a child is harder. I used to work at a school years ago and there was this woman named Emmeline McKinnon who founded the school. Wonderful lady, everybody loved her. A few years ago, she passed away from cancer, and her husband, in his grief, took his own life too, a few days later. And to anyone with a heart, when they hear that story, I think they say, I get that. They loved each other for 60 years. How do you keep opening up your eyes after that? So understand it. I empathize with it. And I don't condemn it. And my friend was walking through that grief. Did not have kids. No one was relying on him. He was in the depths of sadness. And so he made the decision that he was going to go to heaven to be with her because he didn't want to be here. He went and acquired whatever it was he needed to acquire to put together a cocktail so that when he drank it, he would be in heaven with his wife. He went home, put it in the blender, started to mix it up. As the blender was going, the phone rang. So he stops it. He answers the phone. The person on the other end says, hey, is this so-and-so? He says, yeah, who's this? And he says, well, I'm Dr. So-and-so. I was your wife's optometrist. And my buddy said, I haven't heard from you in years. How you doing? And he said, I'm doing good. I just wanted to call you and tell you how special your wife was and how sorry I am for your loss. And my buddy said, well, thanks. I appreciate that. He said, how are you doing with it? And he lied, and he said, I'm doing fine. The way you're supposed to lie in polite society. And the doctor said, hey, I don't know if you're a religious man, but I am. And I feel like I need to tell you that God has been really pressing on me to call you. He's been doing it for a couple of weeks, and I'm sorry, I'm the worst. I've been putting it off. Every time he presses on me to call you, I kind of have something else pressing, and I think, yep, I need to do that, and I set it aside, and I mean to do it later. He said, but about five minutes ago, I felt the press again. And I was in the middle of doing paperwork, and I tried to put it off, but God would not let me put it off. He would not relent, and I just really felt like I needed to call you. So how are you doing? And my buddy really told him how he was doing and what he was up to that day. And they cried together and prayed together. And my buddy dumped it down the drain. Lived to remarry, to love nieces and nephews, and to sit in that circle and tell us that story. God whispered to him that day. So not only will God whisper to you, but sometimes he'll use you to whisper as well. When he's prompting you to do it. Do it. And then, God doesn't just whisper to Elijah. He sends him. And I love the matter-of-factness of God sending him. Because it's like, Elijah, listen, I can see that you're clearly bummed out, but I've got some things I need to do. There's some guys who need to be named king. They don't have kings right now. They need to be anointed. So I need you to get back to work. Go appoint these kings. He sends them. He says, I'm not done with you yet. I know you feel like you're done because you finished this thing with the prophets of Baal, and now there's nothing left to do. There's stuff to do, Elijah, and I need you to get to it. And I was actually talking with my dad this week. I wouldn't call it arguing. We weren't arguing. We were just kind of going back and forth, as we are wont to do, about what the greatest work was in Elijah's life. Was it the prophets of Baal? Or was it the training and developing of Elisha and leaving him behind as a legacy? Which one was bigger? And in the middle of the discussion, I said, Dad, this is really a stupid conversation. Which usually he's the one that gets to do that. So I was happy to be the one that got to do it this time. This is a really stupid conversation. And I just pointed out to him, the size of our works don't matter nearly as much as the faithfulness of our works. Who cares if the miracle with Baal was the bigger deal than anointing a king or naming a successor or raising someone's son from the dead? Who cares what the bigger miracle was, the size of the work, the grandeur of the work, the import of the work? Who cares if that's bigger than what's left? For those of us who maybe our best years are behind us, maybe the biggest thing we've done is behind us. Maybe the most important thing you think you'll do from a human perspective is already in your past and not as big of things are waiting on you in your future. I think that's silly. God could care less about the size of our work. Like God's impressed with the size of any work. What matters is our faithfulness within the works that he gives us for as many years as he gives us. Here's how I know it's true. I know that you guys would support me in this. Right now, there's probably about 200 people here this Sunday morning. If next week you snapped your fingers and you made grace 2,000 people? Would my work next week in preaching be any more impactful, any more great, any more important to God? Would I somehow be more spiritual next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am this week preaching to 200? Would I somehow be more faithful or more loved next week preaching to 2,000 people than I am faithful or loved in preaching to you today? No! It's stupid. The size of our work is irrelevant. It's our faithfulness within what he gives us. What lies ahead of you is not insignificant if God has placed it there. What's significant is your faithfulness as you are obedient to that. And after he sends Elijah, he encourages him. He peels back the curtain a little bit. And he says, hey, I know you think you're the last one here. There's 7,000 more just like you. I've kept them for myself. They have not been the need of bail. You're not alone. You have companions. You have friends. And I see you. And I'm not expecting you to carry all this weight. Now go do what I've asked you to do. What we see in the story of Elijah. If depression says, you don't matter, and if Elijah's expressing, God, I don't matter, and I am alone, then what God says in the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the encouraging from a megaphone is, Elijah, you matter, you matter, you matter, you matter. I see you. I know you. I love you. What you're doing is important. And what he says to us and what he says to you and what I hope you hear is that you matter. Look, the love of God drowns out other voices and gently reminds you of how much you matter. The love of God and the strengthening and in the whispering and in the sending and the purposing and in the encouraging remind you in these subtle ways, I know life is hard. You matter. I know you feel insignificant. You matter. I know the world is trying to convince you that you don't matter, but I'm telling you that you do. Sorry, it's been an emotional week for me. One of the people I reached out to shared with me that he'll walk through really dark depression for months and sometimes a year at a time. And as I was walking through with him what I wanted to share, I admitted my own feelings of inadequacy to even address what it's like to actually be deeply depressed. Because I know that there's some depression that words don't touch. It just doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter what I pray. It doesn't matter how I encourage. There's just some depression that you walk through that's so dark and so difficult that words don't touch it and arrest you from it. And so I said, in your greatest times of trial, what helped you? And as I even admit the own inadequacy of my words to you, what can I say to help you? And he said, let me write you an email because I'm better with my thoughts like that. And he responded with some very helpful things, but one thing he said was so profound that I thought I wanted to share it with you this morning. He wrote me this. Solitude and isolation are freedom. They're the ability to define you as you wish because there's no consequence to any decision you can make. If you decide to surrender, there's no consequence. Your story ends and nobody else is there to see. Nobody else is there to care. Nobody else is there to respond. The profundity of that struck me as I read it in my office. That when you are deeply depressed and you are convinced that it doesn't matter and that you don't matter, that you are all alone and no one sees you. That you're isolated. In your solitude. But then that is freedom because you can do whatever you want and no one's going to care. And I thought, my gosh. That's a low place. But then he said, but it's because of, and this is a paraphrase, we have a conversation preceding this to help me understand that what he meant in our language is that because of the cross, because I know Jesus died for me, because I know God made promises to me. Because I know I matter enough to God for him to send his son. He said this, because it means, because of the cross, it means that there is no way not to be seen. There is no situation in which you are finally, truly, absolutely alone. You understand the cross stands eternally reminding you of how much you matter, that in the depths of not mattering, in the depths of despair, in the depths of I'm not important and I don't matter to anyone and no one sees me and no one cares about me and it might just be better if I weren't here, that even in the depths of that, that God sent his son to die for you, to claim you back to him. And before you say, no, he did that for other people. No, no, he did that for you. If you're the only person on this earth, he still would have sent his son to die for you, to reclaim you to the heaven that he created for you. And if we will cling to the cross, to the glimmer of light that shines through the millennia, we can take hope and solace in the fact that there's going to be a day where depression doesn't exist and where the darkness goes away and every day is bright and filled with joy. And I might not get to experience those here today, right now, but I will one day. And if I cling to that cross, God's promised that I matter, that there will be days where this will let up, where I will see joy, where I will live in the fullness of life, but even if it doesn't come, there's an eternity where I'll see that every day. We sang a few minutes ago that you're fighting a battle that I've already won. I'm fighting a battle that you've already won. This is the battle, and it was won on the cross. So let God strengthen you today. Let him whisper to you today. And hear me say that you matter to your God. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your son. Thank you for who he is. We thank you for loving us. Lord, I lift up those that feel sad or depressed or insignificant or unwanted or unwarranted. God, it is my fervent prayer that they would be strengthened today. That they would get enough from today to keep clinging to you. God, for those we love who live in a cloud of darkness from time to time, we pray that you would use us to help them brighten it. God, we pray for the days ahead that you promised through your son, that you won through his death on the cross. Where in your presence we finally at long last experience fullness of joy. God, I pray for my brothers and sisters who are sad and who are downtrodden and ask that you would pick them up, that they would know today that you love them, that you care for them, that more than anything, they matter deeply to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Now's not a good time. I'm busy. Happy Mother's Day for those to whom it applies. As we were singing that last song, I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. I think that's an excellent song for Mother's Day. I think about my wife, who's an incredible mother. I think about the mom that I got to grow up with. I think about the kids that we have and share together and see God's evidence, the evidence of God's goodness all over my life. And hopefully for Mother's Day, that's something that you get to reminisce and think about too. Hopefully you have a great mom. Hopefully you've gotten to experience being a mom if that's something that you want to experience. But I also know that for others, Mother's Day is hard. We had a lot of hard Mother's Days when we wanted the gift of children and we didn't have it yet. And so I always like to just acknowledge that and pray in gratitude for good moms, for good memories, for the blessing of motherhood, but also pray for strengthening for those for whom Mother's Day is difficult for myriad reasons. So if you'll join me in prayer, I'll pray, and then we'll dive into the sermon. Father, we're grateful for good moms, moms that love us,oms that love us enough to get on to us, to keep after us, to not give in. Moms who wake up in the night with us. Moms who are always there, who leave notes in our lunches and who pray with us every morning. We thank you for moms that we've seen read your word and seek you diligently. We thank you for moms who raised us to help see you. And God, we thank you for the gift of motherhood and parenthood. And those of us who have children, God, are so grateful that you've given us that gift. And so we pray that we would be the mom and the dad to them that we need to be. God, also lift up those for whom holidays like this are difficult. Maybe it's difficult because their mom's not here anymore, and that's hard. Maybe it's difficult because they want to be a mom and they're not. And that's hard. Maybe it's difficult, God, because we thought we were going to be a mom and then we weren't. So, Lord, I pray just for special strength, protection, grace, and peace onto those folks. And that, God, those of us who feel blessed by today would see you as the author of that blessing. In Jesus' name, amen. So this is part five of our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at different stories and instances in the Bible where we see these emotional flare-ups, these blow-ups and these blow-outs, and kind of just ask, what can we learn from that? Because this blowing up is a very part, it's a part of the human existence. It's something that we all experience. And so earlier in the series, we talked about, I talked about Peter cutting off the ear of one of the soldiers in the garden, and I kind of compared that to when we lash out at people. We just get angry, and we lash out, we're cutting off ears, and we should try to cut off less ears. And we talked about what can we do when we feel like lashing out. And so I thought it would be good to look at the other end of that and say, what do we do when we're the one whose ear just got cut off? What do we do when someone lashes out at us? So the question for today is, what should you do when someone blows up on you? When you are on the receiving end of unwarranted anger, of unjust frustration, of unfair lashing out, what should you do when someone blows up on you? And I thought that this would be appropriate for Mother's Day because what is being a mom if not getting blown up at eight times a day because you had the audacity to suggest that now might be a good time to brush your hair or not wear Crocs with a church dress or not get out of bed at 630 to make Mother's Day breakfast. Not that any of those things happen in our home, but with your children who are less good than ours, I'm sure that they blow up at you. And I can only imagine, you know, right now we've got a seven-year-old daughter. John is two. He doesn't really know how to blow up at anybody. He just clenches his fist really tight and you can just hear, he screams and you can just see this visceral anger coming from him, which is great. And, but Lily knows how to blow up. She's seven, but they're seven-year-old blowups, you know, like they're not, they don't really sting a little. I bet the 17-year-old blowups are rough. I bet those, I'm not looking forward to those. And then something tells me that the older your children get, the worse those instances become. And I also know that on the other end of the spectrum, I've talked with enough people, with aging parents, that sometimes as parents get older and older, their filter is just used up. It's just used up. They don't have a new one. There's no replacement. You can't get one from Amazon. It's just gunked up and they've tossed it aside. And they can say things that aren't so nice sometimes. And that's tough. It's tough when someone blows up on you. It's tough to be on the receiving end of unfair anger. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was going to pick up my dad at the airport. And I was at the airport and just kind of started to, I was near the terminal, so the traffic kind of starts to funnel in and slow down and whatever. And this cab, like a literal taxi cab, I don't even know, like, what are you guys even doing anymore? Like, who's using cabs? And not, why does it even exist in Raleigh? I don't understand this. It's like, it's like, it's like seeing the yellow pages on your front door or something. Like, didn't we, didn't we cover this? Anyways, cab comes blowing past me, swerves into my lane, like, and, and, and like slams on his brakes. Like he's mad at me. And I'm like, what in the world's going on with this guy? I have no idea. I did not see him anywhere in my rear view. I was not aware. I didn't even think that I had changed lanes recently. He just decided he was mad at me. He gets in front of me and I'm like, whatever. So I, I actually, I didn't even need to be in that lane and he was now going slow to mess with me. So I, I I just went around him like I got to go to the second terminal, buddy. And I look over, and he is aggressively hanging the bird at me. And I don't know how you do that non-aggressively, but this was aggressive. Shaking his fist, yelling things. I literally, like honestly, I'm on the stage, okay? I'm preaching to people. So before God, I have no clue, no clue what I did that upset this guy. And so I just kind of looked at him and went, and kept driving. I don't know. I wasn't mad, but he was really mad at me. So what do we do when someone gets really angry with us and we don't deserve it? We didn't do anything. We don't know what to do. How do we act in those moments? How does God want us to act? And what's really cool is not even how does God want us to act just so that we behave well, but how can we act in those moments that will actually draw people, the people who are angry and the people who can see that anger, that will actually draw them closer to our Father. What can we do in those situations when someone blows up on us? When I was thinking about that, there's one story that comes to mind in the Bible. To me, it's the best blow-up story in the whole Bible. It's one of the biggest ones. I can't think of many others that are like it, if any at all. But it's in 1 Samuel. We see the first part of it in chapter 18, and then I'm going to point us to chapter 19. So Saul is the king of Israel. He's the first king of Israel, but there's this kid named David who's been anointed as the next king of Israel. Normally, Saul's son Jonathan would take the throne from him, but God has used the prophet Samuel to anoint David as the next king of Israel. And then after getting anointed, David does this really annoying thing where he goes down in the valley and he kills a giant that everybody else in the whole country was afraid of, including Saul, and he does it without Saul's armor. And so Saul's a little ticked at him. And then he puts David in his army, and there's this song. This is the English translation of the song. Maybe it sounds better in the original Hebrew. I don't know. It's a pretty dumb song, if you ask me. But it was, Saul has killed his thousands, but David has slayed his tens of thousands. I don't know what the melody is on that. Maybe I should get Roburg to help me out. That seemed to work for you. But I don't, that was the song, right? So there's some jealousy there between Saul and David. And so Saul was a man that was given to what we would probably identify as anxiety or depression, bouts of despair and anger. And one of the only things that could calm him was David coming to the palace and playing the harp for Saul. That would calm him down. And so David's doing that one day, and Saul is just seized with anger and throws his spear at David to try to kill him two times. David dodges both of them and then gets out of there. Then after that, Jonathan, who was David's closest friend in the world, goes to Saul, his dad, and he's like, dude, this is a paraphrase. He says, dude, what are you doing? What's the problem here, man? This guy, he loves you. He serves you. He's a good servant. He's faithful. He's a good leader of men on the battlefield. He's there to play the harp when you need him to. I'm not mad at him. I'm happy that he's going to be my king. You don't need to be mad at him for me. Just like knock it off with David, with hating David. Can you do that for me? And Saul says, yes, I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Which just as an aside, if you ever in your life have to promise to stop trying to kill someone, you just need to take a look in the mirror. That's all. I'm not going to make a bunch of points about that, but that's a sentence that no one should say. I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Then we pick up the story in 1 Samuel 19. Turns out Saul's a liar. He just really liked trying to kill David. So here we go. Then a harmful spirit from the Lord came upon Saul, and he sat in his house with his spear in his hand, and David was playing the lyre. And Saul sought to pin David to the wall with the spear, but he eluded Saul so that he struck the spear into the wall, and David fled and escaped that night. Saul sent messengers to David's house to watch him, that he might kill him in the morning. But Michal, David's wife, told him, If you do not escape with spear two times, leaves, gets invited back to the palace, goes back to the palace. He's playing the lyre again to try to soothe Saul. And Saul, for a third time, throws a spear at David. David eludes it and gets out of there. Which, as an aside, I'd just like to point out, this is one of the fundamental differences between David and I. I have a one-spear-throw policy. If you throw your spear at me one time in anyone's house, I'm leaving that house, and I'm not going to trust you around spears again. David has a three-spear policy, much more gracious than I am. So he eludes it for the third time. He leaves. McCall is actually Saul's daughter that was given to David in marriage, and she helps him escape. Later on, we see this poignant scene where David and Jonathan meet in a field, and Jonathan tells David, you're going to have to go until my dad dies. He's never going to stop wanting to kill you, so you got to go. So David, for I think about this 20 year period goes and he just lives in the wilderness with a band of some of his soldiers. And they just elude Saul at various times. Saul chases David through the wilderness, trying to capture him and kill him. And there's actually two really poignant scenes in the wilderness where David has a chance to kill Saul and he doesn't. There's one where they're in the En Gedi, the caves on the edge of the En Gedi plain, which is in the southern part of Israel, close to the Dead Sea. And Saul's army must have been close because David and his men were hiding in a cave. And Saul, now at my house, when someone says they have to go to the bathroom, we say, do you have to go to the bathroom or the bathroom bathroom? Saul had to go to the bathroom bathroom. So he goes into a cave to take care of business. While he's in there, just so happens, that's where David and his guys are. And David's guys are giving David the eyes like, dude, you could totally kill him right now. And David realizes this. But he says, shame on me if I harm the head of the Lord's anointed. So he takes his knife and he cuts off an edge of the robe and Saul leaves. And once he's a little ways off, within shouting distance at least, David feels terrible that he even did what he did. And he goes out and he gets Saul attention, and he shows him the robe. And Saul feels so bad about the grace and forgiveness that David shows him that he decides, I think I'm going to be done killing David for a while. And he goes back to the palace. It wasn't long before he started hunting for David again. This time, David and a guy named Abishai snuck into the tent at night, and Saul's laying on the ground asleep with all of his men around him asleep as well. And Abishai looks at David, and he says, let me strike him with the spear. It will only take once. It will not take twice, which is a really, like, it's one of the cool lines. Like, I only need to do it once, man. I won't need two on this one. I'll get him. And David says, no, shame on me if I touch the Lord's anointed. And then in a battle between some of David's forces and some of Saul's forces, Saul ends up being killed. And the person who takes Saul's life, David actually takes their life for being willing to do that to the Lord's anointed. So what we see from David is that although Saul blew up on him, had completely unjust, unfair, unwarranted anger at David, David always, his whole life took the high road. His whole life honored Saul. Never once did he raise to meet Saul where he was. And so if we're going to ask, what should we do when someone blows up on us, when we are the object of unwarranted anger and frustration, I think we can look to this example of the life of David and see what he did, and we can mimic those things in our own life. And what's really helpful about this is I think that there are three really important New Testament passages, verses or passages, because some of them are two verses. I think there are three really important New Testament passages that honestly, every Christian, if you're here and you call yourself a believer, you should have these memorized. You should be able to say these off the top of your head. These should be things that show up in your life that you think of often enough so regularly that you can quote them. You might not know where they're from. You might not know how to find them. You might have to type them into Google to figure out the reference like I did this week, but you should know them. You should know what to type into Google. And so I want to look at three verses that display three behaviors that David displayed in this story about his interaction with Saul. So let's look at three things that were true of David and try to make those true of us. The first thing we see in this story is that David was slow to anger. He was slow to anger. And I know he was slow to anger because David could have, by all accounts, by all accounts, he was a better warrior than Saul. By every measure, he was superior to Saul. When Saul is in his house and potentially drunk and throwing spears at him, David could have very easily taken that spear out of the wall and gotten his vengeance on Saul right there. Now, you might say, well, he couldn't do that. There's guards. He could have been killed. Yeah, maybe, but what we know is that he didn't raise up in red-hot anger and do what some of us would do if somebody tried to hurt us. He kept his cool. He was slow to anger, which is really not the typical response in the human experience, right? That's why James writes this verse to remind us to do it. In James 1, 19 and 20, he says, does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. This is one that we should know. This is one that we should have memorized. This is one that we should remind ourselves of, particularly when someone is blowing up at us. Because human nature is not to stay calm and stay down here. Human nature is to rise and meet the anger with anger, isn't it? You guys who are married know this. You know this. You've had those fights, those days, where you look at each other and you're just mad at each other. You're just mad. And finally, one of you goes, what are you mad about? What are you even upset for? And the other one says, I don't know. You're mad at me, and I don't know why you're mad, so I'm mad at you. Well, I don't know why you're mad. So I'm mad at you. And then you kind of go back and forth. You're like, what was the first thing that made us mad? And nobody knows. And like, can we just agree to just kind of set the arms down and slowly back away from this one? Are we done here? We're like, yeah, we're done here. But that's typical in human interaction to meet anger with anger. I remember years ago, very early on in our marriage, Jen and I were at each other's throats about something. I don't remember what. But as we were talking about it, she gets really upset. She storms up the stairs, slams our bedroom door. Now, what did I do? Did I, because of my maturity and wisdom, think to myself, she's probably overreacting, but I'm going to let her stay up there and simmer because we don't want to say words in anger. And, you know, I'm sure that she'll kind of calm down. She'll realize maybe that was a little bit too much, and she'll come and apologize and tell me I'm right. That's probably what I need to do. No, I did not do that. I did not do that. Instead, I thought, I'm going to go upstairs. I'm going to tell her that she does not need to be slamming doors in our house. So I go upstairs, and I open that door, and I start getting on to her for the way that she's expressing her anger. And she, again, I don't want to talk to you right now, and leaves the room and goes into the guest room and slams that door. Now listen. Here's what I know. I don't know what we were fighting about. But if I make that sweet woman act like that, it's my fault. I was wrong. I don't know what we were fighting about. I know I was wrong. That's what I know. Now when she went into the second room and shut that door, did I leave her be? No. Because I wanted to poke it. So I walk up to the guest bedroom and I open that door. And I said, you know, I can open this door too. I can open all the doors. I don't know what happened after that. Things just kind of went red, I guess. It was just a blur. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's mad at us. Oh, I'm going to get mad at you. Some cab driver hangs you the bird, you're like, hey man, forget you. You know, like whatever. Your kid snaps at you, you've had a stressful day, you meet them there and you snap at them. Your spouse, your co-worker, your parent. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's angry with us, we raise to meet that anger. Well, James tells us, don't do that. Don't do that. Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. It's important to be quick to listen and slow to speak too, because in those moments when we're frustrated, we have things that we want to say. But if we'll calm down and listen, we'll probably learn new information that may change what we want to say, that may help us be slower to anger. So when someone's angry with us, wisdom says, I'm going to be quiet, I'm going to be patient, I'm going to listen, and I will not meet anger with anger. This is what David does. The second thing that David does is David was quick to forgive. He was slow to listen and quick to forgive. He moves to forgiveness very, very quickly. We see no evidence whatsoever in any of the texts that David was ever angry with Saul or that David could not forgive Saul ever through the rest of his life. We see David offer Saul quick forgiveness, which is right in line with what Jesus teaches Peter in Matthew chapter 18. When it says that Peter came up to him and said, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me that should I forgive him? As many as seven times? And Jesus says to as many times as you need to. Forgive again, forgive again, forgive again, forgive again. And it feels pretty generous for Peter to ask that. How many times, when my brother commits the same offense against me, how many times should I forgive him? Up to seven, which makes sense. Your friend comes over to your house, he gets too rowdy, he breaks your new TV. You forgive him that one time. How many more times should I forgive him? Seven? That's a lot of breaking TVs. And Jesus says, no, as many times as you need to forgive them, forgive them. The way that I think about it is, as many times as we hope God forgives us, forgive other people that many times. When someone offends us, when someone lashes out at us, when we are the object of someone's unfair anger and unfair frustration, we should as quickly as we can move to forgive that person. Because holding that grudge is only going to hurt us. It's not going to hurt them. Now, I will also say this. Last year at Lent, during the Lent season, I did a sermon on forgiveness. And I basically just preached to you from the perspective of my good friend, whose husband was having an affair on her, and she had to really learn what forgiveness looked like because they had five kids, and that was really, really tough. And one of the things that she said that was super helpful, if you're a person who's struggling with forgiveness or wants a more robust explanation of forgiveness and what it looks like, then I would encourage you to go back and listen to that sermon. But one of the things she said that I found very helpful and others have commented to me too that was very helpful is forgiving someone does not mean that you have to trust them again. And so I would say this to you. If the person who is blowing up at you is making a habit of that, if they do it regularly, if it's not just a one-off that you can ascribe to a set of circumstances that are no longer true, but you have someone in your life who's blowing up at you again and again and again, you should be slow to anger in those situations, and you should be quick to find a path to forgiveness in those situations. But let me tell you what David did not do. He did not go back into Saul's palace again. He did not make himself vulnerable to a spear the fourth time. He did not trust Saul again. Did he forgive him? Yes. Did he honor him? Yes. Did he give him grace? Absolutely. But did he put himself back in that home? No. No. If you have someone in your life who is habitually blowing up at you, it is perfectly good and wise to remove yourself from that situation until something changes and you feel like you can trust that that's not going to keep happening. As we talk about what do we do when someone blows up on us, it's... I'm mostly talking about people who aren't our spouses. If it's our spouse and they do it all the time, if it's our brother or sister or friend or mom or dad and they do it all the time, that's a separate sermon. But what I would say to that separate sermon is, it's okay to not put yourself back in a situation where someone's going to blow up at you all the time, where you feel like you're just around a ticking time bomb. We should seek to forgive, but we don't have to trust and keep putting ourself in a place where that is going to happen over and over and over again until we believe that something is going to be different. The last thing David does is David was a conduit of grace. He was a conduit of grace. He was connected to God's grace. He was pouring grace out onto others. Back in the fall, I did a series called The Five Traits of Grace, the five characteristics that make us who we are, The five things that we want every partner to exhibit. And one of those things is to be a conduit of grace. To be attached to the grace of God so that the grace that we receive flows out onto others. This is the verse that I think of when I think of this. This is probably, if you're going to memorize any verse at all, if you don't know any of these, start with this one. Start with this verse. Put it on your mirror where you get dressed. Put it on your dashboard if you get angry in the car. Put it next to where your emails are if those things make you angry. Whatever sets you off, whatever stokes your fire, just put this verse so that you can see it. And it's super easy to memorize and it's super impactful. For from his fullness, John says, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From the fullness of God's grace that pours out on us, we have all received grace upon grace. When we think about a couple of weeks ago on Palm Sunday, I did a sermon about the earned wrath of God on us for placing his son on the cross and that Jesus on the cross exhausts the wrath of God for his children. When we think of the wrath that we don't have to experience because God poured it out on Jesus instead of us, that's grace. And God knew, as I said, God knew that we were going to cheapen the blood of Christ by presuming upon the grace of God. He knew that we were going to do that. He knew what you were going to do after you prayed the prayer and after you accepted Jesus as your Savior. He knew that you were going to move through that awful season of your life that you'd like to forget. He knew that and he forgave that. He knows what lies ahead and he's forgiven that. When we think about the grace that we feel every week when we come to church and we sit here and we sing the songs and we have this voice in our head that reminds us of who we are and what we've done and where we've been and that if the people here knew what I was capable of, if the people here knew what I know, then I would have to find a different church to go to. And yet God chooses me and God loves me and God blesses me and he's given me grace upon grace. When we realize that, that that God is so good to us, that that God is so patient with us, that that God will watch us go through years where we don't have quiet times, where we're not praying to him, where we're not seeking him, where everything about our Christian life is compulsory and cursory. He will watch that zombie walk through life and still try to breathe spiritual life into us at all times, calling us back to him. He is excited every time we come home. He is excited every time we utter the words, dear God, and we begin to pray. He is thrilled in his heart every time he hears your voice praise your creator. When we receive from his fullness that much grace, it is very easy to pour grace out onto others. And this is what David did. He had grace for Saul. I think he understood Saul's plight. I think he had patience for him and his depressions and his moods, even in understanding his desire for his own son to be on the throne. And one of the best pictures of grace we see, maybe in the Bible, but definitely in the life of David, is once Saul has passed away, David has ascended to the throne. Anybody who's watched the History Channel or read any books about old kings and kingdoms knows that once a king takes over, one of the first acts of orders of business is to kill everyone associated with the bloodline that preceded him so that there's no threats to his throne. And there was no one left that they knew of, but then one day somebody found a relative of Saul's. It was a nephew or a cousin or something, I can't remember which. Named Mephibosheth. Mephibosheth, it says, had a disability. And that's important because that made it more difficult for Mephibosheth to earn money and provide for himself. So he was a person who needed help. And they brought him to David, expecting David to kill him, to put him to death, to be done with the line of Saul and move on. Instead, David, learning who he was, had mercy and grace on him, made a seat at his table for him, and invited Mephibosheth to live in the palace and dine with him and be with him and considered him a family member for the rest of his life. That was how David showed grace and honor to Saul. That's the kind of grace that we're to show to others. The grace that says, I'm not saying I did this in the moment, I'm not trying to give myself credit, but the grace that says, you know what? It would be super stressful to be a cab driver. I don't know how they do it. I went to Chick-fil-A and Home Depot the other day. I was about to lose my mind, and that's like five minutes away. I don't know how they do it to be a cab driver. And you know what? I bet I did something inconsiderate that I wasn't even thinking of. So I'm going to give them them that. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. They're probably in a hurry. They probably need to get where they're going. Or, if this helps, life would be really hard to be that dumb. So I'm glad that God didn't make me that dumb. Whatever you need. We offer others grace. And I'll tell you who's the world's best at offering other people grace. It's Jen, my wife. She will do this all the time. We will be in traffic. Someone will cut me off, cause me to have to slam on the brakes. Our children are crying. We're terrified. And I'll say, my gosh, can you believe that person? And she'll say, now, Nady, because she calls me Nady. If you want to call me Nady, too, you can. It'd just be weird. She says, now, Nady, you don't know. His wife could be in the passenger seat in labor right now. And we just need, tell me I'm lying. And we just, we don't know what's going on in their life. I could be walking down the road, I promise you. I could be walking down the road and some guy could just come up to me and dog cuss me in front of my family. And then I could get out of the situation and walk down there and be like, can you believe that guy? What a jerk. And she'd be like, now, lady, you don't know what's going on in his life. His wife may have just left him and his parents may have just passed away. You don't know. That kind of grace. And when we remind ourselves of God's goodness and grace to us every day, it is easy to pour that out onto others. And I say start with that one, memorize that one, because if we're full of grace and we're offering other people grace, can't we be more quick to forgive when they mess up? Can't we remember that hurt people hurt people and just assume that they're hurting and maybe actually help them get to the bottom of their hurt rather than piling on and making them feel shame for blowing up in a way that they regret? If we're full of grace, won't we be slow to be angry? Won't we stay here longer? Because we're trying to see the best in them and we're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt in the situation. I think if we just abound in grace that it takes care of the rest. And then the amazing thing that happens when we do this, when someone blows up at us unfairly or unjustly, if we do what this says, when someone blows up on you, be slow to anger, quick to forgive, and abound in grace. When we do that, what are the people around you going to notice? What are your children going to pick up on? It's the easiest thing in the world to match anger for anger. It's the easiest thing in the world to lash back out. It's the easiest thing in the world to let someone say something nasty to you, say something mean to you, to have a server who's curt with you, one of those servers who acts like they don't even want to be there that day. It's perfectly human to let them walk away and then you venture frustration to the people around you. But what if you meet them with grace? What if you're slow to anger when other people would meet? What if you're quick to forgive when other people would hold on? What if you're abounding in grace when other people would abound in suspicion and doubt? Then not only have you brought that person who blew up at you a little bit closer to Jesus, not only do you bring yourself closer to Jesus, but you bring the people around you who see that and who marvel at that closer to Jesus too. Simply by being someone who, like David, is slow to anger, quick to forgive, and always abounding in grace. Let's pray. Father, would we in this way be more like David? And so be men and women after your own heart. God, when we are the subject of unfair anger, unfair frustration, when people treat us in ways that we don't deserve to be treated, would you help us to be slow to anger? Would you help us to stop and to listen? Not meet frustration with frustration? Would you help us to be quick to forgive where we can, to give us an earnest desire to find a path to that forgiveness? And God, more than those things, would you help us be people who abound in grace, who walk in this acute awareness of the grace and the love and the mercy that we have from you. Let us be people who walk in an acute awareness that from your fullness we have received grace upon grace, and let us freely and excitedly and happily give that grace to those around us, even when those around us treat us unfairly. In Jesus' name, amen.

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

All right, well, good morning. As I said earlier, my name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. I will be speaking this week. Like I said, last week we did a silent sermon, and I've got largely good feedback from that, some really encouraging things. I've had some people who have been honest and said, hey, you know, it wasn't for me. And then I've got another section of people who said that was a pretty clever way to take a Sunday off. But let's not do that anymore. So I appreciate your honesty. I'm going to try my best to get through this sermon. I'm going to give you all the voice I got left for today. So Jen is in luck because I'm not going to be able to say a thing when I get done with this. But let's go. This is part five of our series called Powerful Prayers, where we're just looking at different prayers throughout Scripture and asking, what can we learn from these prayers? And the one that we're looking at this morning is one that is very near and dear to my heart. It's the one that when I went to Jen and I said, hey, I'm doing a series on powerful prayers, which prayer would you point me to? Because she's my number one sermon consultant, and she said the prayer of Hannah. She pointed me to this one because this one means a lot to us. The prayer of Hannah is found in 1 Samuel chapter 1. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. There's one in the seat back in front of you if you don't. But Hannah was married to a guy named Elkanah, and she wanted to have children and could not. She wanted desperately to have a child, to experience motherhood, and couldn't. She just couldn't conceive. And that's near and dear to our heart because part of mine and Jen's story is that for about six or seven years, we desperately wanted children. And the Lord, it just didn't work out. We couldn't get pregnant. We couldn't have one. And so we walked through that pain. And so to this day, when I encounter a couple that really desperately wants to experience parenthood and they can't, it's just not happening for them yet, my heart breaks for them. I immediately start praying for them. I immediately follow up for them, sometimes in borderline inappropriate and invasive ways. How you doing? How you doing? How you doing? It burdens me so much because I know the private pain of struggling to have children. I know what it is to go into lunch meetings, to go into one-on-ones, knowing they're going to ask me about it. They're going to ask me why we can't have kids yet, and I'm going to have to give them some canned answer, and it's the last thing in the world I want to talk about. Like, I know that pain. And so Hannah's pain resonates with me in her prayers in 1 Samuel. We don't hear all the words of her prayer in the first chapter, and then she sings a song of praise in the second chapter, but we're going to focus on what she was praying about and how it was processed, how it was interpreted by the priest, Eli, when she prayed it. So it's helpful if we think of what we're about to read. These are Hannah's earnest prayers for a child, but I think all of us have things in our life at different times that we want to. Sometimes it's for a child. And I know a couple of couples in the room and maybe some watching online who have prayed and prayed and prayed and they're sitting in the middle of blessing. We've got a couple of folks who I prayed for and they're pregnant and they're finally pregnant and God is good and that's wonderful. And now we're praying like crazy that they get to hold that healthy baby in the appropriate amount of weeks. Not too many, because mom's going to get tired of it, and not too few, because that's not good, but that they hold that healthy baby in the appropriate amount of weeks. We're praying hard for that. But I also know there's other things that we ardently pray for. Healing of loved ones. When we hear the C word, cancer, we hit our knees and we pray, right? We pray for, I know of another family in the church that their schedule is just untenable because the husband's job is just takes them away too much and he desperately needs another job. And so we're praying for that, that God will open up something there. I love that last song that we ended with, you make a way when there was no way. And you've done it before, we believe you'll do it again. And so we pray those prayers and we trust them to God. And I know that in this room, there's situations that are just driving you insane. I know another family that's dealing with aging parents and mom has no resources. The grandma has no resources. They have no more bandwidth. It seems like it's an impossible situation. What are we going to do? Well, we're going to have to pray about it. And so it's helpful for us when we look at the story of Hannah, if we think about the things in our own life that we genuinely want, that we deeply want, that we deeply need, that we're petitioning God for. God, will you please make a way? Will you please give? Will you please do? That's the mindset we need to be in as we encounter the prayers of Hannah. So in 1 Samuel 1, Hannah goes to the temple and she begins to pray fervently and ardently that God would bless her with a child. And while she's praying, the priest, Eli, notices her and accuses her of being drunk because her lips are moving, but there's no words coming out, and she looks like a crazy person. So he goes up to her, and he's like, hey, you got to get out of here. Like, go home. Go home, you worthless woman. You can't be here in the church. And it sounds harsh of Eli to do this, but I'm telling you from experience as a pastor, you got to keep your head on a swivel sometimes. One Wednesday night during rehearsal for our band, this was three, four years ago, pre-COVID, and I checked this with Jeffy, the guy who was singing. I call him Jeffy. His name's Jeff. I also call him SB. You can ask me what that means later. But Jeff was here this night, so he verified this this morning. Several years ago during rehearsal on a Wednesday night, a gentleman that had been kind of visiting the church, who's not coming anymore, you'll see why, came in and asked if this was an open rehearsal. And our worship pastor at the time was like, sure. So dude sat down. It was very clear that that guy got an early start on his evening, if you know what I mean. Yeah. And so he just starts barking out like suggestions to the band. You should do this song this way. They're like, what in the world? And so finally they had to say like, hey man, this is now a closed rehearsal. We're sorry. You got to go. And he went right outside to the bushes and began his purification process. And then he went on his merry way. So you got to, I don't blame Eli, right? You got to keep your head on a swivel. Sometimes it happens. So he goes to Hannah and he's like, hey, you're drunk. You need to get out of here. And this is Hannah's response in 1 Samuel 1, verse 15. So she goes up to the temple. She's praying ardently for a child. So ardently that the priest misinterprets her passion for drunkenness and confronts her. And I love that she says, she says, no, no, no, I'm just, I'm praying out of utter anxiety and vexation. I'm pouring it out unto the Lord. I don't know what else to do. It's this earnest and honest prayer. And Eli's response is wonderful. Eli's response is, may God bless your prayers because she's praying out of this honest spirit. And so the first thing we learn and see, I think, from Hannah's prayer and this experience in the temple is that God desires our honest prayers. He desires our honest prayers. He wants us to tell him what we're thinking and what we're feeling. He doesn't ask for us to hold back our anxiety and frustration and vexation. He welcomes our honest prayers. I know that this is true because I've seen honest prayers over the years that are cried out of just this honest place where we strip down all of the intricacies that we put up when we go to God in prayer and we just cry out earnestly to him. There's a story in my family. There's a story in my family. I think it's my great aunt or my great, great aunt. I don't know. It's one of those stories that's like, maybe it's like a 30% shot that it's true, but it's been passed down. And so I'm going to tell you, because for all I know, this happened. So there's some great aunt that I had in Southern Georgia or Southern Mississippi. That's where my family is from, which is why I'm so smart. And she was a church lady, man. She was a church lady through and through. She was there every time the doors were open. She told her neighbors about Jesus all the time. She loved God, and she was fiery and whatever. And she was a widow, and she didn't have very much money, and her roof was in shambles. It's leaking. It's clearly visible. She needs a new roof. She can't come close to affording one. And one day in frustration, she walks out into the front yard and she says loud enough for everybody to hear, God, all of my neighbors know that I'm your daughter. And if this is how you want them to see you taking care of your family, then so be it. But I wouldn't think you'd like my roof the way it is. And she walks back in the house. That was her prayer. Then I'm not kidding you. The next day, two dudes show up at the front door. Hey man, we're just here in the neighborhood. We're new roofers in the area. And we think that your house would really make a great kind of model home. So we'd love to redo your roof for free if that's okay with you. The very next day, it's as if God went, okay, Aunt So-and-so, you make a great point. Here you go. God desires our honest prayers. He desires our earnest prayers. And it's so funny when we pray. Sometimes, have you ever heard those people who when they pray, they start to use a vocabulary unknown to any of their friends outside of their prayers? These and thous and henceforth and Father God this and Father God that. And you're like, I never hear you say that outside of praying. We take on like this different language when we pray. We get more austere and serious when we pray. Now, we do need to approach the throne with a degree of respect, and I'm not advocating prayers like my great aunt prayed. I don't think that's really the design there. But we can go to God with honesty. We can go to God and we can tell him, I'm frustrated with you. I'm frustrated with you, God. I did when we were struggling to get pregnant. I would go to him and I would say, there's so many people who seem to be just getting pregnant on accident. Students that I taught that are dummies. And I know that that kid is going to struggle and end up in therapy, God, and you know it too. Why won't you bless us with kids? What's the deal? Like, I would go to him and be honest, and you can do that with God, because it's not like he doesn't know. It's not like he doesn't know that you're frustrated with him. It's not as if he doesn't know that you're doubting sometimes that these words are even reaching his ears. It's not like God doesn't know what we're doing, that we're living these duplicitous lives of sometimes I'm holy church guy and other times I'm just this shadowy version of myself that I don't like and don't identify with. It's not like God doesn't know that when we pray. It's not as if he doesn't know that when we sin. As a matter of fact, when we go to God and we try to put on this veneer and we try to act like we're full of faith when we're not, or that we're full of confidence when we're not, or that we're at total peace when we're really losing our minds, when we go to God dishonestly in word and in attitude and in emotion, I think we resemble the Cheetos kid from the commercial a few years back. It's one of my favorite commercials of all time. This dad's in a living room, right? There's a lot of white furniture and there's Cheeto dust all over everything. There's a bag of Cheetos there, Cheeto dust all over everything. And he's sitting there just kind of looking around going, good gravy, what in the world? And then his kids run through. And the last one that runs through is a redheaded kid, because of course it was a redheaded kid. And they're wearing, the redheaded kid is wearing all white, right? Cheeto dust just exploded all over this kid, all over his fingertips, wiped all over his shirt, yada, yada, yada. And his dad goes, hey, and catches him by the arm. And he goes, you know anything about this? And the kid goes, no, and then runs off, right? It's great. When we go to God and we try to be what we're not, we try to act more together than we are. We try to act less concerned or more faithful or more confident or less sinful than we are. We're the Cheetos kid. God's going, you know you can just tell me the truth, right? It's not like you're going to surprise me. I know every thought that you've ever had. I know you better than you. You can just tell me the truth. So I love the model of prayer from Hannah of going to the temple and praying out of her emotions. God, I want this. And what's so wonderful about her prayer is that Hannah was clearly a holy person. She was a spiritual person. And if you don't think of yourself as holy, the Bible defines you as holy once you become a Christian. If you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, then you're a believer. And God says, and the scripture says that when God looks at you, he sees you clothed in the righteousness of Christ, that you are holy. So as a Christian, when you offer prayers, those prayers are holy prayers offered by a holy person. Hannah was a holy person, praying spiritually motivated good prayers, aligning with the heart of God that she would experience the blessing of parenthood so she could raise that child according to God's standards. And she was asking for a thing. And in this story, God grants her a son. The son's name is Samuel. Samuel goes on to be the last judge and the first high priest in a long time of Israel. He was David's priest. Incredibly influential in the Old Testament. And what I also love about this prayer of Hannah is that once she learns that she's pregnant, she goes back to the temple and she worships. And it's such a good model for us. Because I wonder about us in our prayer life, when do you pray the most? Is it when you need the most or is it when you're the most grateful? What activates you into prayer more than anything else? Is it that you're overwhelmed with God's goodness and you just have to pour out praise to him? Or is it, I need, I need, I need, I'm scared, I'm scared, I'm scared, I want, I want, I want. And so the model of Hannah is a good time to ask this question, do we go to God in want and in celebration? It's good, it's good to go to God in need. We've got to do that. But once he answers that prayer, once he relieves that stress, once he relieves those tensions, do we go back to him in gratitude? I would encourage you to track those things because it can be a special thing when you do. As I was looking at this prayer this week, I have some notes in my Bible. Underneath the highlighted prayer of Hannah for a child, it was highlighted because Jen and I had been praying that prayer for a long time, for seven years. And we found out that we were pregnant the first time on October 15th, 2014. And I wrote out to the side, God is good, next to that date. But on December the 8th, we found out that we miscarried that child. At the time, that was the hardest thing we'd ever walked through. But here's the thing, and I'll talk more about this later. When we lost that first child, whose name was going to be Samuel, God was still good. God was still good. I'll talk more about that in a second. Then I've got another date, May 12th, 2015, a couple days after Mother's Day. And it just says again, we're pregnant. That was Lily. And then another one. January 15th, 2016. She's yours, God. Thank you for Lily and Grace. When we pray for things that we ardently desire, it is right and good and helpful, not only just the right thing to do, but helpful for our faith to mark those times so that we go back and we can sing songs like what we just sung in earnesty. I've seen you move, and I know you'll do it again. And I've told you guys this before. When we put John and Lily down for bed, we sing. The last song we always sing is God is so good. God is so good, he's so good to me. There's a lot of variations to that. I shouldn't tell you this, but I'm going to because I'm a child. Whenever we're having Asian that night, whether it's Japanese or Chinese or whatever, I always sing the verse of God loves miso. He loves miso because I think of miso soup. And I'm like, God likes Asian food too, to celebrate the Asian food we had that night. Because I'm a moron. I'm a moron. But the last stanza that I always finish with, no matter what, before I put each kid down to remind myself of God's goodness, is he answers prayer. He answers prayer. He answers prayer. When God answers prayers in our life, we need to come back and mark those so that they can be reminders and harbingers for our faith. Because the other side of this that's not so fun to preach about, but we've all encountered, is this reality. Sometimes God says no to earnest prayers born out of godly desire and prayed by holy people. Sometimes the thing we pray for, and it's not a bad thing. It's not a selfish thing. It's not a give me the promotion so I can get the boat thing, which is a fine prayer if you want to pray for the boat. I don't care if you have a boat or not. I'm just saying that's a little bit different prayer than I'd love to experience parenthood, okay? When you're praying for holy things, that our children would come to know Christ, that he would heal the cancer, that this disease would go away, that this situation would be alleviated, that this untenable part of my life would be healed, that whatever it is, sometimes we go to God and we pray those things earnestly, and then the answer's no. And it sucks. I remember when I was teaching school, this would be in 2010, there's a kid in my class named Alex who I was really close with. I loved him a lot. His dad was Ron and Ron had cancer. And Ron had had cancer since 2008, Alex's sophomore year. And Alex, even though he was a senior, had two little brothers in like first grade and third grade. And Ron was dying. And we prayed for Ron a lot. And I remember one day at the school, I think it was after practice, we had Ron come in, because Ron used to set up a chair and watch football practice. We had Ron come into my classroom, and men there from different denominations but involved in the school gathered around Ron. And one Pentecostal brother even brought some oil. I had never seen prayer oil before, but I thought, you know, it can't hurt. I mean, it can't be bad for the prayer. Let's do it. And we lay our hands on Ron, and holy people prayed earnest prayers with holy motivations. And Ron died. And God said no. And it was really hard to look at Alex and be his chaplain and try to see his faith through that time. It was really hard to understand why God would choose to say no when there's two young kids still at the house. We prayed hard for God to heal my father-in-law two years ago. And he could have. He could have. He didn't. That'll do a number on your faith. You've heard no too. You've got the bad news too. You've prayed earnest, fervent, ardent, wholly motivated prayers, and God said no. And it left you feeling confused and bewildered and probably betrayed by God. So we can't bring up, pray earnest prayers, and you'll move mountains without going, yeah, but what do we do when he doesn't? I think the best answer for this is found in the prayers of John the Baptist. Now, I'm being presumptuous in assuming that John prayed about this. Nowhere in scripture, I'm just telling you honestly, okay, hear me. Nowhere in Scripture are we told directly that John the Baptist prayed about this particular situation. But I think it's safe to assume that he did. Because John was a man of prayer, this was a dire situation. John had been arrested by King Herod. He was in the king's dungeon, and he knew he was going to die. But John knew of a prophecy in Isaiah 35 that says, And John knows that Jesus is the Messiah. He's the coming one. He's the one that they were talking about in Isaiah 35. And I'm a prisoner, so I should be set free. But here I sit. And so he sends some representatives to Jesus to ask him, are you the guy or did I mess this up? Let's look in Matthew. We'll pick up the story in chapter 11. Chapter 11, verse 2. The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk. Lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me. Other translations say, blessed is the one who does not fall away on my account. What's he telling John? He says, go tell John all the things in that prophecy are happening. Deaf people here. People are being raised from the dead. Blind people see. And prisoners are being set free. But you're not going to be one of them, John. And then, that all-important line, blessed are those who do not fall away because of me. Which is Jesus' little tip to John. Keep the faith. I'm the one. I'm just not going to do what you think I'm going to do here. I'm just going to let you down a little bit here. And I think that this story is so vitally important to the Christian faith. Because what Jesus is saying here to echo, to reverberate through all the centuries is, Christians, there will come a time when I disappoint you because I don't do the thing that you think I'm going to do. Do you hear me? If you're a believer, you will reach a point in your faith when you are disappointed in Jesus, when you are let down by God, when he doesn't do a thing. It's within his power to heal my dad, and he didn't do it. You're going to reach that point, and you're going to be ticked, and you're going to be confused, and faith is going to be hard. And what does Jesus say to us in that moment? Blessed are those who do not fall away because of me. I'm gonna disappoint you because I'm not gonna do what you expect. And if you can keep the faith, you are blessed. So what do we do when God's answer is no to our earnest prayers? We cling to him. We cling to Jesus. We do what Peter did. I love this story. I should have put it in your notes. Jesus was teaching the crowds one day, and in the cryptic way that Jesus teaches, he thinned the crowd. And he said, I'm telling you the truth. Unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. And the people who had been following him was like, all right, that's weird, man. We're been pretty cool with the miracles, but we're, we'll see you. They left him because that is weird. They know what he's talking about. We know he's talking about communion because we're smarter than they are. But they didn't know. That's not true. They didn't know about communion yet. So then he goes to the disciples and he says, are you guys going to leave me too? And Peter's response is, you're Jesus. Where are we going to go? Isn't that great? If I ever get a tattoo, that's what I'm going to get. You're Jesus. Where am I going to go? There's so much in that. I don't understand what you just said, man. That was weird that you want people to eat you. I don't get it. I'm totally confused. I have no idea what you're doing. I have no idea where you want us to go, but I know you're Jesus. I know you're the Messiah. I know that. I'm just here. I'm in. Wherever we're going. Wherever you want to go, I'm in. It's just weird, man, and I don't get it. When our prayers aren't answered the way we want them to be answered, it's entirely okay to pray, you're Jesus, and I'm in. But I don't get it, man. I don't know what you're doing. That's an okay prayer. That might be the most honest needed prayer that you've ever prayed. Jesus, I know you're Jesus. And I know you died for me. And I know you've promised me a future. And I know you could have done something that you didn't do. And I don't understand it, but where else am I going to go? Because you're Jesus. When he doesn't move the mountain, we cling to the promises. Because here's the reality of it. We pray prayers in this life. Jesus answers prayers in eternity. One way of looking at it is that when we prayed for John to be healed, for my father-in-law to be healed from his cancer, he wasn't because he died. But the other way to look at that is to say he was because he lives in heaven for eternity. And his life is markedly better than ours right now. And I can't help but think, Jen and I talk about this all the time, it creates such sadness for her family that their dad, their patriarch, isn't with them anymore. But I can't help but think that when we get into eternity and we realize what a blip on the radar screen our life is compared to all of time, that the fact that he left early won't matter one little bit once they're with them in heaven for all of eternity. I can't help but think, as callous as that sounds sounds that it just won't matter as much. I think that's why Paul refers to hardships as though you struggle for a little while, though you endure this light momentary affliction. Oh, you mean like decades of cancer, like that light and momentary affliction? Oh, you mean like being an orphan, that light and momentary affliction, you jerk? Yeah, that one. Because when we get to eternity, God answers all of our prayers. One day, God will grant all of our prayers. This is the hope that we cling to in Jesus. That's why I always say that what it means to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God and he came to earth. He sits on the throne at the right hand of the father. We believe that he did what he said he did. He said that he died and he rose again on the third day. And we believe that he's going to do what he said he's going to do, which is to come back one day and make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue and to answer our prayers in eternity. So when he doesn't move the mountain and when the answer is no, and when we've prayed earnestly and honestly and we've poured our guts out to the Father. And he still says not right now. And we don't get it. We're sitting there like Peter going, you're Jesus, I don't understand what you're doing and I'm pretty mad at you right now, but where else am I gonna go? The promise of Christianity and of our faith is that those prayers will be answered in eternity. And that one day there is issued a forever yes and amen. And we cling to that day. And we cling to that hope. That even though, God, I don't understand why you would let this family walk through that, why you would let Alex lose his father, why you would say no to this earnest prayer request from this wonderful couple who desperately wants children. Even though, God, I don't understand your timing or why you're making them wait or why you've said no, even though I don't understand, I cling to you and I know that you're good and I know that if I knew everything that you knew that I would understand this decision exactly. And so we cling to him and we cling to his goodness. And we remember that God is good all the time. I've talked with people recently who were waiting on results of tests. Pregnancy tests, tests for cancer, body scans, whatever it was. And it comes back with good news, all clear. Or we're pregnant and it's healthy or whatever it is. And what immediately follows is God is good. Yes, God is good. But if he doesn't cure it, and if you're still barren, and if you don't get it, God's still good. And that's the promise and reality that we cling to even when nothing around us makes sense. Is knowing that one day, whether in this life or the next, it will. Because God is faithful and God keeps his promises. Let's pray. Father, we don't deserve you. We don't deserve your goodness and your grace and yet you shower it upon us. We thank you so much for who you are, for what you do, for how you love us. Lord, let us be people who pray honestly and openly and trust you with our emotions and trust you with our words. Let us be people of gratitude who come back to you in celebration when you grant us the thing that our heart longed for. But God, in the middle of a no, in the middle of a mountain that's not moving, walls that are not falling down, paths that are not being made, would you give us the faith to cling to you, to trust you, to know that one day everything will be yes and amen? For those walking through that right now, God, who have heard the no or who sit in the desperation and in the stress of the what if. God, would you just strengthen their faith today? Let them cling and hold tightly just a little bit longer as you minister to their broken spirit. It's in your son's name we ask all these things. Amen.