Sermons tagged with Grace

Good morning. Thank you all for being here, for listening online. My name is Doug Bergeson. Thank you, thank you. It was my hope that I would get that. But to kick things off, I'm going to need a little help from you. The audience, congregation, flock, whatever you want to call yourselves. I need a little help. Who in today's culture, books, movies, TV, podcasts, or even real life would be considered a great detective, a master of deductive logic, one able to take the most cryptic clues, hints, and innuendo and figure out what's going on. I'm asking you all so as not to date myself and come across as a hopelessly out of touch boomer. So a little help, please. Just shout out some names of great detectives, masters of deductive logic from any realm of your experience. Sherlock Holmes. Okay, that's kind of a boomer response, but that's okay. Who else? I would have gotten that one. Who else? Columbo. That I had down too, and I wasn't going to share because it's so out of date. Anyone else? Axel Foley. Okay. Okay. In the first one or the one in the new release? Axel Foley. Okay. Who else? Ace Ventura. Okay. Okay. That's good. That's all I need. I really needed those names, and I appreciate your contributing to make this one point. When you see me being trotted up here to speak on a Sunday morning, you do not have to be a Sherlock Holmes, a Detective Columbo, an Axel Foley, or an Ace Ventura to know that we must be deep, deep, deep into the lazy, languid days of summer. When I plot up here on stage, you have the legitimate right to ask yourself dang why am I not on vacation but be that as it may I am here and I'm excited to share when Nate first reached out to me way back in March he wrote that he we'd be in the middle of our summer series which we started last year called 27 that covers the books of the New Testament and specifically the letters of the Apostle Paul and he said I could pick whichever one I wanted and build a sermon around its overall message. Now typically when asked to preach I deliberate, I agonize, hem and haw wringing my hands over whether I really want to do it or not. But not this time. I was excited and quickly responded to Nate, saying that I would leap at the chance to do the book of Colossians, as it is magisterial and soaring and easily one of my favorite books in all of Scripture. I was pumped. However, just moments later, Nate wrote back, and I quote, Doug, thanks for taking me up on the offer, though I have bad news that I hope will not dissuade you from your acceptance. Aaron preached on Colossians last year, and I failed to mention that to you in my request email. Kyle has also preached on 1 and 2 Thessalonians, so those are off the market as well. So remembering that old saying, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, I went back to Nate, explicitly asking him to confirm in writing what books were actually able and available for me to pick. And thankfully for me, and hopefully for you, Paul's letter to the Ephesians was one of them. And that's the book we're going to look at this morning. This letter was written by the Apostle Paul, once among the fiercest and most formidable opponents of the early Christian church. But God, in his wisdom and grace, had chosen Paul, this fervent enemy of the church and most unlikely of all candidates, to be his chosen messenger in spreading the life-changing news of Jesus Christ throughout the known world. And for two to three years, they don't know exactly how long, the city of Ephesus had been base camp for Paul's ministry, for his missionary work, establishing churches throughout the region. Now, by AD 60, some 25 years after his miraculous conversion experience on the road to Damascus, Paul is thought to have written this letter from a prison in Rome. Now, for those familiar with this letter, it is chock full of beautiful and iconic passages. Nate frequently has brought to our attention the last half of chapter 3, which is his favorite prayer in all of Scripture and one he prays over grace often. Ephesians also contains the verses that would shape and fuel the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago. Ephesians 2, 8, and 9 asserting that salvation is only found through God's gracious gift of Jesus Christ and is by faith in him alone. In other words, there's nothing we can do to earn or curry God's favor. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not fromesians, there are the frequently misunderstood, misappropriated, and sometimes even abused house codes, describing how the relationships between wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters, are to work in light of the Lordship of Christ. Finally, in a very famous passage near the end of the letter, Paul exhorts all believers to put on the full armor of God. And there are more, but this morning, our focus will be on the one overarching theme of this entire letter, our identity as believers, who we truly are now that we are in Christ. According to Paul, everything in both the individual and collective Christian experience, hangs in the balance, directly dependent upon the extent to which we can wrap our minds around this one transcendent and surpassing reality. At this stage of my life, if you were to ask me why I believe what I believe, my most honest and transparent answer would go something like this. I believe because everything I've seen, everything I've learned, and everything I've experienced in my life so far has validated the truth of Scripture. Not just some things, but literally everything has reinforced what the Bible has been saying all along. And despite being such an ancient book, I've for the most part stopped being surprised when I again discover another way in which the Bible is fresh and profoundly modern, relevant, life-changing, and most importantly, true. Here's one quick example from my long-ago past. In 1966, Professors Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn at the University of Michigan published a groundbreaking work in the field of psychology and organizational behavior. By the time I started graduate business school up in Chicago in 1980, Katz and Kahn's cutting-edge theory, only about a dozen years old, had swept through academia and was now all the rage at the elite business schools. What this theory offered was a sweeping transformational alternative to classical business management that up to that point had viewed organizations as machines. Now what this new systems theory proposed was that organizations should best be viewed not as machines but as living organisms. When I first heard this I was floored, blown away. What insight, what brilliance, so outside the box. I'd never in my life heard anything like that before. Oh, wait. Yes, I had. The Apostle Paul had made that very same point when he compared the church and how its members were to operate to a human body in his first letter to the Corinthians, written around A.D. 55. Turns out the Bible had beaten Dr. Katsakan and Kotz to the punch by just over 19 centuries. Much more recently, I was again struck by Scripture's remarkable freshness and relevance, revealing truth and wisdom long before the rest of us even begin to catch up. The occasion was this past fall when I listened to the book, The Coddling of the American Mind. And it has direct relevance and application to what Paul is trying to do in his letter to the Ephesians. Written in 2018 by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff, the book makes the case that our society and culture have gradually but steadily moved towards broad acceptance of three great untruths with terrible consequences, particularly for our young people. The three great untruths the authors cite are, one, always trust your feelings. Two, avoid pain and discomfort if you can. And three, life is a battle between good people on the one side and bad people on the other. Even if well intended, as they often are, the book asserts that these beliefs represent terrible and demonstrably false ideas whose adoption and embrace by large swaths of our society have contributed to an epidemic of anxiety and depression and overall decline in our mental health, to the intolerance and turmoil roiling our public discourse, and to the tearing apart of any semblance of social cohesion in this country, to name just a few of the disastrous consequences of these ideas, these patterns of thinking. The book went on to show how these flawed beliefs not only contradicted thousands of years of wisdom literature from a variety of traditions, but also fly in the face of the latest findings of science and modern psychology. That the Bible is prominent among wisdom literature debunking those three great untruths came as no surprise. What did come as a new revelation to me was when the authors introduced something I've never heard of, something called cognitive behavior therapy, or CBT, as an especially effective remedy and tool in combating these three great untruths. Why this is pertinent to Ephesians is that the Bible in its entirety, and the Apostle Paul in particular, espoused and practiced cognitive behavior therapy almost two millennia before it was even a thing. Some of you older folks, as well as any country music freaks out there, might remember the 1981 chart-topping duet by Barbara Mandrell and George Jones, I Was Country Before When Country Wasn't Cool. Does anybody remember that? Yeah, there we go. Well, tweaking that a little bit for my purposes this morning, it turns out that the Apostle Paul was doing cognitive behavior therapy before cognitive behavior therapy was cool. First pioneered in the 1960s, CBT is premised on the idea that how we think and what we think is what determines to a large degree both our emotions and our behavior. Rather than focusing on the origins of a problem as happens in traditional psychotherapy, cognitive behavior therapy works to change our current thinking. It is our incorrect, distorted, and emotional thinking about ourselves and our world, what cognitive behavior therapy refers to as cognitive distortions that must be addressed and changed. In clinical practice over the last several decades, this has been shown to be true as CBT has been proven to be remarkably effective. But zoning in on just the first of those three great untruths, always trust your feelings. It's an important, even vital question to ask, to what extent should our feelings and emotions influence and shape what we think, what we believe to be true? If one has been paying any attention at all, we now live in a society and a culture which have elevated and anointed emotions and feelings to such prominence that they control the moral high ground. And in many instances instances assume ultimate authority, even to the extent of determining what is true and what is not. One simply doesn't question or challenge another's feelings in polite society. After all, that's what you feel. That's your truth, right? Well, no. Wrong. Wrong. Not according to cognitive behavior therapy, and certainly not according to what God has revealed in his word. It turns out that in many instances, God cares far less about our feelings and emotions than we do. It can be off-putting at first, even shocking. After all, if God's supposed to be so loving, how does that compute? But lest anyone here this morning or listening online misses this critical point, it's not that God doesn't care about our feelings and emotions, but that he cares more for those things that have the greatest chance to help us. And from God's vantage point, just as in cognitive behavior therapy, the mind is the key. The mind is the key because how we think determines how we act. Our behavior follows our thoughts and beliefs. And we intuitively know this to be true. If I care to know what you really think, what you really believe, there's no need for me to ask you or for you to tell me. I'll simply watch closely what you do. How do you spend your time and treasure? What you prioritize? What are you willing to stand up for, come what may? When are you quick to compromise and make exceptions? What sacrifices and trade-offs have you made? How do you treat people? How different are you in public than in private? Your actions are the tell. Even the old adage, follow your heart, which I love, is not so much an appeal to one's emotion as it is to what one truly believes is right and true. In actual practice, the heart doesn't do most of the leading. It is typically more of a follower. It is the convictions of your mind that set the wheels of action in motion. It's what one thinks and believes that does the leading, and our hearts then follow. That is why, whether we like it or not, it's a far greater concern to God how we think and what we think and why we think the way we do than how we might be feeling at any point in time. The priority on the mind rather than the emotion is found throughout scripture. Time and time again, the Bible asserts that our minds are the key. But you may ask, don't feelings and emotions greatly influence how we think? Absolutely they do. And therein lies the problem. God is obviously not against emotions, revealing in scripture his own deep emotions and feelings. Furthermore, he's imbued us, his treasured and loved creations, with gobs of both. Emotions can be wonderful and transcendent, an indispensable and indelible part of being human. But the downside to our feelings and emotions is that they are often fleeting and fickle. They can also easily deceive, mislead, and distort. Here's a simple case and point from real life. If we have any poker players in the house this morning, do we? Any poker players? Okay. It's probably not, I was hoping to get a little bit more, better response. Have to move to Vegas. But if you do play, well, if we have any poker players in the house, you're probably familiar with the term tilt. If you do play and are not familiar with the term, then my guess is you probably lose a lot. Always leaving the table a bit mystified as to why you have such bad luck. Tilt is when emotion knocks a player off balance, disrupting and distorting his objectivity and ability to discern what's really happening. Tilt most commonly occurs when a player suffers, is unlucky due to a bad beat, a hand he should by rights have won but didn't, as it can spiral into frustration and subsequent decision-making infected by emotion. But tilt can also happen to a player on a winning streak, where strong positive emotions lead to equally poor and distorted decision-making. In both instances, emotional reasoning, patterns of thinking unduly influenced by how we are feeling at the moment, leads to bad outcomes. But unless you're trying to make a living playing poker, that example might not strike much fear in you. But I think it should. Feelings are always compelling, but they are wholly subjective and not always reliable. For example, I might be thinking I'm absolutely killing it up here this morning, really giving Nate a run for his money. But just because I feel that way doesn't make it so, does it? We live in an age of emotional reasoning. Way, way too much importance is placed on how we feel, elevating our feelings to such a degree that they can overwhelm the facts and distort reality. It's not been good for our mental health. It's not been good for our public discourse. It's not been good for our social cohesion. And it just so happens it's not good for our faith either. The powerful and often pernicious ability of our emotions to distort reality and overwhelm our thinking, to convince us something is true that is not, or to convince us something is not true that really is, presents a clear and present danger to the vitality of our faith. Imagine being in a story in which you think you know what's going on. All your senses are in touch with that story. Yet, in fact, there is a much bigger story and a different reality at work. Guess what? We're all in that bigger story. And the challenge is that our feelings and emotions aren't going to be of much help as they often point us the wrong way. As the writer and pastor Eugene Peterson most famously known for his popular paraphrase of the Bible called the message states, my feelings are important for many things but they tell me next to nothing about God or my relation to God. My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel. Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not by what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors. In other words, it's not so much the feelings we have about God, but the facts we know about God, what we are convinced of, that need to be right. Whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, there is a raging battle going on for our minds, and the stakes couldn't be higher. The key to victory, in a nutshell, is to think right about the things that matter. Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Romans, do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing, and perfect will. This task of renewing our minds is made even more difficult because influenced by both our own sin as well as the fallen world in which we live, we all begin our journeys of faith with a constricted and impoverished view of what's possible, of what God wants and has in store for us. And this is Paul's overriding message in Ephesians, to convince us of the things that are actually and eternally true. Paul knows that we all need a radically new orientation in our thinking. Because only when we change the way we think do we change the way we live. And in Ephesians, Paul starts right up front. In the opening verse, offering a view of a reality that immediately confronts and calls into question my own. Addressing his readers as saints or holy ones. Those set apart by God. Paul is directly contradicting my feelings about myself. For I don't very often feel saint-like or holy or set apart. That's certainly not how I would describe myself. Yet Paul is asserting that it's true. I have been set apart by God for his purposes. That is who I am in Christ Jesus. In essence, Paul is conducting a master class in cognitive behavior therapy. Just like in modern CBT, Paul goes about combating our incorrect, distorted, and emotional thinking about ourselves, our world, and our faith by laying out the facts and the truth. And as in cognitive behavior therapy, the goal is that the process becomes a virtuous cycle of sorts, slowly but surely changing the way we understand and interpret things, which causes a change in how we respond emotionally, which in turn causes our thinking to change a little further. And so begins Paul's full frontal assault on our small and constrained views of ourselves and our world that constitute reality as we know it. Like rapid, sharp staccato bursts of machine gun fire, Paul rattles off a whole slew of facts that we are in fact part of a massively bigger and grander story, one that began long ago and will continue for all eternity, that we were chosen by God before the creation of the world, an act rooted in the eternal purposes of God, to have a people, holy and blameless, set apart for himself, something only made possible through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and that now unites all believers as one, that although once dead, we are now alive, despite rightfully deserving the judgment of a just God, someone else has borne our guilt and suffered in our stead, And by and through that extravagant act of love, we have been declared not guilty. Once consumed, controlled, enslaved by our own sinful natures, the ways of this world, we've been set free and made new through faith in Jesus Christ. And that even now, all of God's spiritual blessings in Christ are available, active, and evident in believers' lives. These are the things Paul thinks we should know. This is who we truly are. We can't intuit them. We can't feel our way towards them. Our feelings and emotions offer little help in arriving at these transcendent and transformational truths. Only by repeatedly reflecting on these things, allowing them to seep into us, to question and challenge our existing patterns of thinking and emotional reasoning, will we ever be able to renew our minds. Paul is asking, he's cajoling, commanding, encouraging us to put on a completely new lens, a lens designed to color everything that we think about and all of our thinking. We are indeed part of a bigger and grander story. And as Paul writes in chapter 1, verse 10, this story will culminate when the times will have reached their fulfillment to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. So, though the world may often seem chaotic, mystifying, and out of control, a time is coming and is advancing already when all will make sense under the lordship of Christ. In the meantime, believers in Jesus Christ have been given the gift of God's Holy Spirit as the first installment and guarantee of our salvation, a magnificent promise and blessing. However, this has led to a tendency for Christians to sometimes describe their conversion process as inviting Christ into their hearts, as if salvation entailed a mini-Jesus or a little bit of Jesus being in us. While that, in a sense, is true, it can lead to a misconception that downplays the extent to which all believers are united together in Christ and whose identities are found together in Christ. Far more common in Paul's writings and conceptually more powerful and accurate is the idea that believers are part of a larger reality of God. We are now in Christ, not the other way around. In fact, Ephesians describes two separate and completely distinct realms, that of Christ and that of the world, which are polar opposites diametrically opposed to utterly incompatible spheres of influence. To be in Christ means we are moving from one sphere of influence to another, from the realm of the world to the realm of is in them due to the former way of life to put off the old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires to be made new in the attitude of your minds and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. Putting off the old self and putting on the new is the process which happens as we move from the world's sphere of influence to that of Christ, a migration to a new identity that will define us for all eternity. However, again, we're not going to move very far unless this increasingly becomes how we view and understand ourselves and our reality. Paul insists that we must engage our minds rather than our emotions. Again, it is only when we change the way we think that we change the way we live. That's when transformation happens. Now, personally, I've often observed in my own life that if I really believe what I said I believed, my life would look a lot different. The great majority of the time, I don't feel like I'm a new creation or that I put off my old self. Far from it. On the contrary, I still struggle with the things that I've struggled with all my life. This has been convicting and has made me feel like a giant hypocrite at times. However, if my mind, what I think and what I believe, is decisive in determining how I act, then all this disconnect really means is that I obviously have a long ways to go in changing my thinking and renewing my mind. I'm still very much a work in progress. Fortunately for me, and for all of us, one of the most consequential and vastly underappreciated blessings of having been given God's Holy Spirit is that the Spirit helps us to make this transition by helping us to better grasp these truths, by purging our minds of those influences which distort, deceive, and mislead. In other words, by helping us to renew our minds. God's spirit in us seeks to shape us by reminding and teaching us who we are now in Christ. Only when we more fully know and believe can we authentically move and change. But we need to do our part. We have a role to play. Again, just as in cognitive behavior therapy, we need to deliberately, intentionally expose our minds to the truths of God and ourselves. If we were to have any chance of changing our thinking. It's simply not going to happen otherwise. And this is why worship, prayer, study, community are so vital. Christians, including myself, often act like these activities are certainly good things to do, but essentially voluntary ones, more or less. That we have times and seasons in our lives when they can have less prominence, be less of a priority, perhaps because we're so busy. And other seasons when we can allocate more time to them and really get our spiritual mojo back. The Apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesians does not share that view. Being a believer, being saved, to use a nice evangelical expression, being a follower of Christ, having our identity found in Christ, are all descriptions of the process of moving from one sphere of influence, the world, to a completely new sphere of influence in corresponding reality, Christ. that requires a radically new orientation in our thinking because only when we change the way we think do we change the way we live. And we can't depend on our feelings, emotions, and intuition to convince us of these things, for they often tell us something very different, which is why we're going to close by listening to Aaron sing a song from about a dozen years ago called Remind Me Who I Am. I personally find it so, so compelling because it captures my desperate need to be constantly reminded of the truth of who I am and who God is. I'd like to read a few of the lyrics. When I lose my way and I forget my name, remind me who I am. In the mirror all I see is who I don't want to be. Remind me who I am. In the loneliest places when I can't remember what grace is, tell me once again who I am to you, who I am to you. Tell me, lest I forget, who I am to you, that I belong to you. When my heart is like a stone and I'm running far from home, remind me who I am. When I can't receive your love, afraid I'll never be enough, remind me who I am. Tell me, once again, who I am to you, who I am to you. Tell me, lest I forget who I am to you, that I belong to you. Worship is how we are reminded. Spending time in scripture is how we are reminded. Getting down on our knees in prayer is how we are reminded. Being in community is how we are reminded. These ancient and timeless disciplines remain profoundly modern for when we worship together on Sunday mornings, when we open our Bibles, when we bow our heads, when we sit quietly alone in God's presence, when we spend time with others who share the same Savior and the same hope, we are working on and renewing our minds, implicitly acknowledging that we are part of a much grander story.

All right, everybody. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us on this June Sunday. It's good to see you guys. It is incredibly hot outside. So thanks for braving that. Before we get into the sermon, just a small announcement. For me, this is my last sermon that I'm going to preach until August. A few years ago, the elders talked and decided that it would be best for the church for me to not preach in the month of July and best for me. And here's the reason why. And so we've been doing this for a few years now. The first and most important reason is this. There are other voices in the church that are very much worth hearing. They are thoughtful and insightful and articulate and wise and godly, and we are better off hearing from them. I don't know if you guys realize this or not. I'm sure you have if you've listened to a number of sermons. I don't really have something to say every week. So it's good for other people whose God has placed on their hearts things they do have to say to share with us. So first and foremost, we want to create an atmosphere of other voices. And that's why periodically in the year, I never go more than six or seven weeks in a row without someone spelling me and getting another voice up here. So that's always been a priority for us. It's always been a priority for me as a senior pastor. The other reason is taking that block of time allows me to focus on other areas of the church that I might not otherwise be able to give as much focus to in the regular rhythm of writing a weekly message. Last September, I stood up here on September the 10th, and I told you guys that I was going to be working hard, kind of in the margins and in the afternoons, behind the scenes, to develop some discipleship pathways for us that I believe is the next big step that we're going to take as a church, and maybe the most important thing I've worked on in the last year. So I've been quietly working on that behind the scenes and with other people in concert with others and putting things together. And I'm very excited in September, we're going to do a series on our five traits. Some of you may be aware that we have some, you might even be able to name one, but we're going to make those more a part of who we are and what we do as a church. And to accompany those, we're going to roll out what we're calling discipleship pathways that are kind of the next step for us to take towards spiritual growth as a church. So I'm finishing those up in July. I'm rolling those out to the small group leaders at the end of the month of July, and then you guys will be hearing about those in September. So that's how that work's been going on in the background since last fall. I'm finally ready to show it to you here as we enter into this fall. Now for this morning, as Mike said earlier, we have our last sermon in our series called Idols that's loosely based on Tim Keller's book called Counterfeit Gods. And in it, he presents this idea of source idols, things that really fuel the idolatry that we have in our life and other areas. Those source idols are power, approval, control, and comfort. And what he means by source idol is maybe our visible idol is greed or materialism, and we just want things. We want to get all we can, can all we get, and sit on our can. We just want more things. That's what we want. And so maybe that comes because we're really motivated by a desire for power. We believe money brings power. Maybe it's control. We believe money brings control. Maybe it's approval. Maybe it's comfort. But it's those source idols that really get sneaky and begin to turn our hearts away from God. And we talked about this idea of idolatry being so important because whatever occupies the space of our top priority in our life, and idolatry is anytime we put something in our life, we prioritize that over our devotion to God himself. Anything that occupies that top spot in our life is by default the recipient of our worship. And what we talked about is that nothing can bear the weight of our worship besides our God. So whenever we get that out of whack and we have something besides our God, besides Jesus Christ as our number one priority, then everything else in our life suffers. This morning, I've been excited to do this sermon because I believe it applies to everyone in the room. I've said along the way, different people have different source idols. We struggle differently with different ones. But comfort is one that even if it's not your number one, it's your number two. It's there. I think we all struggle with it. And the more I thought about this source idol of comfort, the more convinced I became that this is true. When it comes to comfort, we are the frog being boiled in cultural water. When it comes to comfort, we are frogs being boiled in the cultural waters of the United States in 2024. A desire for comfort is all around us. A desire to just be fine, to just be chill, to just feel comfortable, to have things set at the right temperature. Kyle just went back there and messed with a thermostat. You know why? Because we want to be comfortable. Because if we're not comfortable, we're not going to listen to Nate. That's why. So we've got to be comfortable. Here's a few ways I know that comfort is ubiquitously important to us. I have this theory in life that is yet to be disproven, that you can gauge a family's net worth by the number of unnecessary pillows they have in their home. Okay? And if you're thinking to yourself, joke's on you, I don't have any unnecessary pillows in my home, you're the problem. Okay? People have to move things out of the way so they can sit on your couch. And here's what I don't understand while we're here. While we're here, I'm just going to say this for the men, okay? Guys, I'm saying this on your behalf. Ladies, we don't understand why you go to the store and spend $200 on a chore to put on your bed every morning and every night. We don't understand why you go to HomeGoods and TJ Maxx and you dump 200 bucks on pillows to put further out from your sleeping pillows so that at the end of the day, you have to take them off when you're tired. And in the morning, you have to put them back on when you're in a hurry. It makes no sense. And you do it so it looks nice. For who? When's the last time you had a guest over to your house? And when you had them over, you were like, and here's our master bedroom. Nobody does that. Nobody does that. It's weird. Nobody sees your master bedroom. Listen, some of you I have been friends with the whole time I've been here. I am such good friends with you, I can walk right into your house unannounced, and I've done it before. You know what I've never seen? Your master bedroom. Because that's weird. No one sees it. Knock it off with the pillows. All right. There you go. Guys, you can talk about that at lunch. We have these symbols of comfort all over our culture. How many of you in your cars don't have heated seats? You don't just have heated seats. You have cooled seats. Don't raise your hand. Those things are wonderful. Yeah, two hands up back there. Whenever I'm riding with my friends that have cooled seats, I crank those suckers up all the way. I love those things, man. Those things are amazing. How many of you have a carefully negotiated thermostat temperature for your summertime nights and for your wintertime nights? These things have been, sometimes you had to bring in a moderating attorney just to get that settled. How many of you, how many of you, I'm being serious, how many of you have had the chance to fly first class before? and within 15 minutes of takeoff, you thought, I'm never sitting with the peasants again. This is amazing. Or you've been lucky enough to get the pods for international travel, where you extend out and you have a personal screen and there's a door to keep the pores out. That's how it goes. And you tell yourself, here's what you tell yourself. This is so funny. I've heard my friends say this. I need to be refreshed because I got to hit the ground running when I get there. I bet you do, buddy. I bet you do. That's why you chose the drinks that you did on the way over because you got to hit the ground running. I bet you do. That's why you chose the drinks that you did on the way over, because you got to hit the ground running. I bet. Sure. Maybe, maybe you just want to be comfortable. We like our space. We like our accompaniments. We like the things that make us feel good. And here's one of the ways I know that it's not a uniquely American problem, but it's a particularly American problem. I've watched House Hunters International. Have you watched House Hunters International? Without fail, the Americans go over to a foreign country, Costa Rica, Europe, New Zealand, wherever. They're looking at a $650,000 flat in the middle of Copenhagen. And you know what they say? This feels small. And it is. It's like a tiny little dishwasher, a one-burner stove. There's a toilet where you can control the shower nozzle from there. Like, it's all, it's real tight. And as Americans, we look at that and we're like, no way. I need my space. This desire for comfort is a particularly American struggle. In a culture, and this is true, where if you choose, if you have a desk job, and you choose at that desk job to stand, you have one of those high desks, people are like, look at the health nut over here. Look at Captain Fitness not sitting in a chair for eight hours a day. This is how much as a culture we prize comfort. And it's not just physical comfort that we prize, although that is a very good indicator. But mental, spiritual. We don't like to be challenged spiritually. We like to go to church. There's a certain amount of conviction that's okay. But over that, it's like, come on, man, you're being a jerk. And I'm not going to sit in this week after week. We want to be comfortable spiritually. I'm just going to edge right up to this and then I'm going to back off because I'm scared like you are. There are certain things I can't talk about and you know I can't talk about them because if I did, everybody in here would get fidgety and uncomfortable and it would feel like this. So I don't. And I talk about other things where we're comfortable, right? There are conversations that we need to have, but that conflict and that tension makes us uncomfortable, so we avoid them. In myriad ways, in myriad situations, we live in a culture that prizes comfort almost over and above all else. And what I want you to see this morning is we are like frogs being boiled in a cultural water. I came across this fact a couple of weeks ago in one of the books that I was reading, but it noted that if you, that there was an officer in the Spartan army circa 400 BC who got dishonorably discharged from the army because he was charged with taking a warm shower. He was charged with allowing himself the indulgence of a warm shower and he was deemed unfit to be a Spartan. How far we have come and the comforts and the things that we demand. So here's what I would say. And here's what I want us to realize this morning. If we don't idolize comfort, we've got to at least admit we have a tendency towards it. I doubt very much that anyone came in here this morning going, oh, comfort, that's me. I very seriously doubt that at the beginning of the series, when I did the first sermon five weeks ago and introduced this idea of idols and idolatry, that any of you went, oh gosh, if I just kind of survey the landscape of my life, I think comfort's probably my idol. I don't think anybody did that. And yet, I think it is prevalent and persnickety and pernicious and corrosive in all of us. And like I said, not just materially, but parents, how many things do you need to broach with your children that you don't? Because it would just be a hassle. I don't have the energy for that fight. I don't have the energy for that discussion. I know, and maybe it's confrontational. Maybe it's sympathetic. Maybe it's relational. Maybe you can see they're hurting and you just, you want to wait another day because it's going to be a hard conversation and you're tired. How many times do we choose our own comfort over what our kids need? Spouses. How often in our marriages do we tolerate a fragile peace? Because breaking that peace would cause so much discomfort that we don't want to deal with it. It's easier to just exist at this simmering tension. How much of what God asks us to do is blocked by the amount of comfort that we desire? I have a good relationship with my neighbor. I don't want to make it weird by inviting them somewhere or asking them about things. I have a good relationship with my coworker. I don't want to jeopardize that by asking an odd question or bringing up an odd topic. It's not just physically that we allow a desire for comfort to begin to derail us in our thought process. It's emotionally. We build up walls. How many of us, listen, how many of us know, know that God wants us to see a counselor? That we have some issues and some things in our life that we need to deal with that are rippling out and spilling onto the people that we love the most. And that what we need more than anything is to talk to someone that he has blessed and trained up to serve the kingdom in this way. And we need to go talk to them, and we don't. And you know why we don't? Because it will be uncomfortable to begin to deal with the things that could be brought up. So this desire for comfort goes way beyond throw pillows and first-class seats. And it permeates into every area of our life. And here's why this idol of comfort is so dangerous. Because idolizing comfort causes us to build our life around protecting it and we end up wasting it. Idolizing comfort causes us to build up our life around protecting that comfort, and we end up wasting our life in the process. I don't love admitting this, but I will, because I think some of us can relate to this in some way. After the first time I flew first class internationally, I got home, and I'm being dead serious. I started thinking to myself and racking my brain and talking to friends. What sorts of side hustles can I do to begin to generate more income so that when I travel, I can travel like that? What kinds of, how can I market myself in other areas? What kind of extra income can I make so that when I travel, I can get the upgrade? I can be in the excellence club. I can be the gold member. What can I do so that when my family has these experiences, I can turn them up a notch because I liked it so much? And listen, listen, that is so honest. It wasn't for other things. It wasn't, what can I do to monetize myself more, to work a little bit harder so that I can give more to God's kingdom, so that I can provide a more comfortable life for my family, so that my wife and my children can have a little bit nicer things and live life a little bit more easily. No, it was as simple as, God, I really like flying first class. I'd love to do that again. I don't want to have to fly back there with the peasants anymore, so let's see what I can turn up to travel nice. Listen, listen to me. How stupid is that? How stupid is that? But some of you do it for golf memberships. Or the cooling seats. Or the nice whatever. And isn't this so easy to do? Isn't it? Isn't our culture tailor-made to suck us into that trap? I was having lunch with a good friend this week. He's 35. And he's kind of come to a bit of a crossroads in his career where he could go this way or that way. And his entire career, he's been headed this way. He got the job. This is what the people in charge of me do. This is what I'm supposed to do. This is the next thing. This is what I'm going to do. And now he's picking his head up at this crossroads going, is that even what I want to do? And how often does that happen? For how many of us is that our story? How many of us have friends with that story? Who graduated high school or graduated college or got their masters and entered into the workforce? And when you entered into the workforce, all you were trying to do is prove yourself and make enough money to survive at some sort of level that you liked and that you wanted to attain. And then you got it. And then you needed to continue to pay for it. And then you married somebody. And then you looked and you said, okay, we're doing this thing together, either single income or dual income. We have goals. And then you spin it forward and you spin it forward and you spin it forward and you just put your head down and you do the next thing and you get the next promotion and your friend buys a white SUV and now I want that. And your friend flies first class and now I want that. And your friend buys this house and now I want that. And oh shoot, we're doing beach houses now? I guess I'll figure this one out too. I didn't know I needed white marble in my bathroom, but I really, really do. This tile is terrible, right? And we just need the next thing. And we never think about if we're spending our life and investing our years in the right thing. It's just the next thing. And by the time, listen, by the time we pick up our head and we wonder, is this even the direction I'm supposed to go? We have mortgages and we have and we have bills, and we have a standard of living, and we have certain expectations that we've built up. I took the kids to Turks and Caicos last year, so if I don't do it this year, I've somehow failed as a father. And on and on it goes. And we stay on the treadmill, organizing our life around comfort without ever realizing we had done it. This is what makes this the sneakiest, most pernicious idol of them all. Because none of you started your adult life and verbalized, you know what I want to do? I want to be comfortable. And I'm going to organize my whole life around it. But as you sit here, you're wondering if that's what you've done by accident. And if that's how we invest our whole life, we will have wasted it. And for me, there is nothing more sad, there is nothing I am more afraid of than getting to the end of my life and looking back on the decades and knowing in my heart of hearts that I wasted it. That I didn't use my years for things that mattered. And let me tell you what ultimately doesn't matter. Your comfort. It just doesn't. And I bring this up because I do think it's so easy to slip into this pursuit. I do think it's so easy to, without realizing it, almost by mistake, to have organized our entire life around building comfort and then marshalling our resources to protect that comfort without ever risking anything for God's kingdom. I can think of no better example of this in the Bible than in a parable that Jesus told of someone who in this instance marshaled their life around protecting comfort. And we see how the master responds to them. It's a well-known parable found in Matthew chapter 25. I'm just going to read verses 24 and 27. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there, but this is the parable of the tenants. I'm going to read from the NIV. It says bags of gold. That's one of the places where the scholars have let you down. It's talent. It's a talent. It's a denomination of money that may feel like to us a bag of gold. But in this parable that you guys know, but in case you don't, or in case you need a refresher, there's a master of the house. The master of the house represents Jesus. And the master of the house is leaving. He goes to these three servants and he says, hey, I'm going to go out of town for a while. Here's some money. Give me a report on what you did with the money when we come back. To the first servant, he gives five talents. To the second servant, he gives two talents. To the last servant, he gives one talent. And he goes out of town. And then he comes back in town. And when he gets back in town, he goes to the servant with the five talents. And he says, what'd you do with the money? And the servant says, see, I took the money, I invested it, I traded and sold, and now I'm giving you ten talents in return. I've doubled your investment. And the master says, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things. I will make you lord over many. And then he goes to the two-talent person. And he says, what did you do? And the two-talent person says, see, I have bought and sold and invested, and I have doubled your money. I'm giving you back four talents. And the master says to him, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things. I will make you Lord over many. And I would pause right here and just say this. I should do a whole sermon on it, but I'll just say this and maybe it'll sit on some of you like it sits on me. That phrase, well done, good and faithful servant, is worth living your life for. Pursuing that phrase, chasing hearing that from your God in your eternity, at the end of your life, marshalling all of your resources and all of your time and all of your talents and all of your interests and all of your effort and all of your discipline so that one day when we stand before the Lord, he will look at us and he will say, well done, good and faithful servant with the life and the time that you had. That phrase is worth your whole life. You will never be disappointed by the things that you pursue to hear that. And what's wonderful about that phrase is the five-talent person got the same response as the two-talent person. God doesn't care how big of an impact you make or how wonderful your work is or how many people know who you are or how many people come to your funeral or any of that stuff. He does not care about the size and the grandeur of your impact. What he cares is about the faithfulness and your small actions. What he cares about is that you are a good and faithful servant, and he will say, well done, whether you have five talents or two or one. I love that. But then he goes to the servant to whom he gave one talent to you. His master replied, you wicked, lazy servant. So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed. Well, then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers so that when I returned, I would have received it back with interest. He goes to the last servant. He says, what did you do? And the last servant says, well, I'm scared of you. I did not want to risk losing your money, so I buried it. Now, I cannot tell you in good faith and a good conscience that I have a depth of insight into a fictional character's soul in a very short parable in the Bible and can tell you that that man struggled with the God of comfort, but here's what I can tell you. In that moment, in that instance, that's what he chose. He chose to not risk anything and to be comfortable. And in that story, Jesus is represented by the master. And what was Jesus' response to that? You wicked and lazy servant. And he takes the talent from the one and he gives it to the one with the five because he knows it's going to be in better hands. This is what's at stake if we choose to marshal our resources around comfort and by default waste our life. Just bury the gifts and the talents and the abilities and the plan that God has given us because we're too afraid to risk anything. Then one day when we stand before him, we will not hear well done, good, and faithful servant. And here's the thing I want us to go home with today and understand. The more I thought about this God of comfort and how it juxtaposes with works of the kingdom, I was sure of this. Stories of kingdom-building faith always require a sacrifice of comfort. Stories of kingdom-building faith always require a sacrifice of comfort. You will never find anyone who's doing things for the kingdom who didn't, in order to do those things, have to give up some of their comforts in life. Later this week, next Sunday, I'll be flying to Ethiopia to visit Addis Jamari over in Addis Ababa. And I think of the women that founded that ministry. I think of Suzanne Ward and Cindy Douglas. And Cindy is over there months on end. She's over there months at a time with two teenage sons. You don't think that she's had to give up some comfort and that her family's had to give up some comfort for the sake of what God is doing over there in Ethiopia? And what God's doing there is amazing and needed and absolutely necessary. It's a wonderful work of the kingdom for which she had to sacrifice comfort. If you think of the godly people you know in your life, the people who love well and who serve well and who are always here during the week setting things up, they're always at their place wherever they serve, wherever they pour into, they're always pouring into it, they're always doing, they're always serving. Those people give up the comfort of doing that. When you think about good and godly parents, you have to give up your comfort for the sake of your children. Good and godly spouses give up their comfort for the sake of their spouses. Good and godly friends give up their comfort for the sake of their friends. You will never, ever find an act of the kingdom and an act of faith that is done without giving up some comfort on the other end. And we see this biblically in story after story. Two that spring to mind right away are of Saul changed to Paul. And I have to go quickly because we still got communion to do. And I think I'm going long, but just bear with me. When I think of Saul, he was on his way to Damascus to persecute the Christians there. Jesus appears to him, blinds him, sends him to a room, names him Paul, and says, I've got big plans for you, pal. And then goes to a guy named Ananias, and he says, Ananias, I need you to go see Saul, turn to Paul, and get the scales off of his eyes, because he needs to start serving me now. And Ananias says, no way, I'm not going to do that. He's a Christian killer. That does not sound very fun. And God says this in one of the most ominous statements in the Bible, Acts chapter 9, verses 15 and 16. But the Lord said to Ananias, go, this man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. But no, no, by all means, God is super concerned with your comfort. He is my chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. Do you understand that Paul is the most influential post-disciple Christian to ever exist? No one has influenced the church as widely and deeply and profoundly as Paul. And in order to do that, he sacrificed all comfort. And God said, I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. Shipwreck and beatings and floggings and imprisonment and disease and poverty. He endured it all for the sake of God's kingdom. In the Old Testament, I think of Ruth and Boaz and Naomi. Ruth was a Moabite woman. There was poverty in Israel because of the drought, and some families started moving to Moab, and she happened to marry one of these Jewish boys that had moved over. And then the dad and the two brothers died, and it left the mom, Naomi, with two daughters-in-law. And the other one said, hey, I'm going to stay here. And Naomi looked at Ruth and said, you need to stay here in Moab. You're young and pretty. You can marry, and you'll be fine. But Ruth knew that if she did this, that Naomi would be destitute. And so she said this in this famous line, no, where you go, I go. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. And she did the right thing, and she stayed with Naomi. She ended up marrying a man named Boaz. And if you fast forward several hundred years, you come to the book of Matthew. And in the first chapter of the book of Matthew, you have the genealogy of Jesus Christ. And when you read those genealogies, what you find is that you can trace a line from Jesus back to King David, the second and greatest king of Israel. And King David came from a man named Jesse. And Jesse came from a man named Obed. And Obed came from a woman named Ruth, married to Boaz. Because of her great act of faith and her sacrifice of comfort, God included her in his family tree. So first of all, we never will do anything for the kingdom that doesn't require a sacrifice of comfort. Second, we have no idea what can come out of that sacrifice and what God might do. The greatest example of this we see is Jesus himself, who gave up all the comforts of heaven to condescend and come here. I don't know what the pillow situation is in heaven, but I bet it's pretty good. I don't know. It can't enumerate all the comforts that Jesus gave up. But when he came here, it says in Matthew chapter 8, verse 20, that foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. For three years, Jesus sofa-surfed so that he could do ministry to us and build up disciples to leave us, to establish the church in which we now sit. Jesus is the greatest example of all time of what it means to give up comfort for the sake of a work for the kingdom. And what I want us to understand about this, because we do, all of us, somewhere have this God of comfort, that our proclivity for comfort stands in direct opposition to our desire to be used. I know most of you. I know a lot of you really well. And I know in your hearts more than anything you want to be used by God in this life for his kingdom. I know that you do. And what I want you to see this morning is that your desire for comfort stands in direct opposition to your desire to be used by God. God wants to use you in mighty ways. You are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. And I know you want to walk in those good works. But your desire for comfort almost more than anything else is what's keeping some of us from those. So here's where I would end with this simple question for you to consider as we move into a time of communion together. When is the last time you did anything at all that made you uncomfortable for the sake of the kingdom? When is the last time you made an intentional choice to allow yourself to be uncomfortable for the sake of the kingdom of God. This could be in a conversation that we know we need to have. This could be in a neighbor that we know we need to approach. This could be starting a small group that we know we need to start. Starting a ministry that we know we need to start. Volunteering with a place or with an area or in a team here where we know we need to do, we just haven't done it. This could mean broaching a subject with our spouse. This could mean taking the step to go into counseling and begin to let things tweak there so that we can do a little bit better for the people around us. This could mean what we give towards the kingdom of God. When's the last time our giving made us uncomfortable? When's the last time you intentionally chose to sacrifice your comfort for the sake of God's kingdom? And let me tell you this. I have never, ever talked to anyone who got towards the end of their life and said, gosh, you know what I regret? Just doing so much for Jesus. You know what, I think we gave too much. I think I did too much. I think I, here's what I've never heard. I should have made my life more about myself. Wish I would have. We have no idea what can happen when we begin to sacrifice this dearly held comfort for the sake of God's kingdom. And so I would simply ask you to consider as I pray and as we move into a time of communion, what is God pressing on your heart? Where is he asking you to sacrifice your comfort? I believe he's pressing something on each and every one of us. What conversation does he want you to have or action does he want you to take or invitation does he want you to extend or discipline does he want you to adopt or habit does he want you to give up? Where is God calling you to be uncomfortable? Let's pray. Dear God, thank you so much for sending your son who took on all of us and all of this and left behind all of that and all of you for our sake. God, we confess that we are slaves to comfort far more than we intended to be. That not being upset and not being rattled and not being stressed and not feeling uncomfortable in any way imaginable matters to us far more than we would have been willing to admit and perhaps more than we're still willing to admit. But Lord, in your gentle way, where you just navigate into our souls, will your spirit bring about the necessary conviction that you would have for us here? Help us to see with your eyes where we are choosing our comfort over you. And give us the courage, God, to choose you and to find out what happens on the other side of that choice. God, thank you for your patience with us. Thank you for your grace with us. Give us the strength to walk in the good works that you have planned for us and to set aside the comfort that keeps us from that so often. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. Grace, I would just like to point out that I'm the guy who fixed the sound. Let's pray and go home. I think we can leave on that one. Actually, and I fixed it by doing absolutely nothing. That's what happens a lot of times, right? Like you go try to fix somebody, somebody asks a question, and you just act like you do something. It's like, thanks, man. You know so much about everything. Hey, I'm so glad that you are here and you decided to join us this morning if you're new. My name is Aaron. Happy Father's Day to all you dads out there. Thank you for choosing to come to church instead of asking your wife if you could stay home and watch the U.S. Open. Jesus does love you more for that. I'm just kidding. He doesn't. I know some of you. Hey, we are in the third week of a series called Idols. And just to kind of set us up, kind of get us moving in the direction we're heading this morning. So you've got like the US Open, right? Very prestigious event, great golfers and all that. Then there's another event that's really close to it. It's the Grace Raleigh Golf Tournament. It's same prestige, same level of competition, same caliber of players and we had it back April, but nobody signed up. So what we did instead, we actually, there was like 16 people who signed up to be a part of it. So we quickly veered away from like tournament and we said, okay, so what we're going to do instead is just give whoever wants to play a reason to take Monday off and go play golf and hang out with one another, right? And so I just want to be very open and honest. I am, I'm not a good golfer, okay? And because of that, like, I don't typically sign up to be a part of stuff like that because I don't need you to see and remind me that I'm not a good golfer. Like, I'm learning. I love to play. I play often. I'm just not playing well. So I typically avoid stuff like that. But I look through the list. I look through the roster, and I was like, okay, I may not be the worst one there. I was. I was the worst one there. Absolutely. And I can tell you, there's proof that I was the worst one there. So what happens is as soon as you pull up, we were at Zebulon Country Club. If you've ever played there, you'll know what I'm talking about. You pull into the parking lot, and immediately atop of a conversation is the ninth hole, right? Because as you go to park, like some people will remind you and like warn you, hey, listen, you see that? There's a tee box right there. Like it's really close. The green is really close to the parking lot. It's really close to the clubhouse. And you don't want to park there because some idiot's going to hit the ball too far. It hit a car. You don't let it be your car, right? And so immediately what happens is you, okay, yeah, let me move. Like I'm going to go somewhere else. then we went. We played the eight holes, and I played terribly. Like there's all this added pressure, which is dumb. I'm not a good golfer. Everyone knows I'm not a good golfer. Why do I feel like I have to play like a good golfer? That's another reason. If you play golf and not well, why do you get so mad that you're not playing? What do you expect to happen? So we go through the entire eight holes or we go through eight holes. Then we get up to nine and then you start thinking about the parking lot again. Right? Well, I start thinking about the parking lot again. When I went up to the tee box, what was going through my mind was not, hey, there's a sand trap just in front of the green. Make sure, play the left side. I don't think, hey, you know what? I want to hit this in the back of the green and make it spin. I don't even know how to make the ball spin. I don't know if it does spin when I hit it. I have no clue. So that's not what going through my mind is. I line up to hit the ball. What I start thinking about is, don't be the idiot who hits a car. Like, don't be that guy. And I take my backswing, and I come through, and man, y'all, I blade it. Like, it's just, I hit it, and it just rockets towards the parking lot. Not just towards the parking lot, towards the Mercedes flipping bins, okay? Now, was anybody here? Did anybody go? Dude, either of you drive a Mercedes. Because if you do, this was going to have a very different ending. Like, it went past the Mercedes. There was this banged-up truck. I hit that thing. But no, so as you can figure out by now, like it went straight. I'm telling you, like everything got real. It was movie type slow motion. You know what I mean? Like I could see which way the blades of grass were going. There was a groundskeeper. He was in the sand. He just watched it. Uh-oh. It just looked. And then I'm telling y'all, like it was the loudest bang I've ever heard in my life. It sounded like this dude's ex-wife was really, really mad, found a sledgehammer in his car, and went to work. It was so loud, and everything in me just sank. I was like, oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. For one, the first thought was, my wife is never going to let me play golf again. I just played an $80,000 round of golf at a mediocre golf course. What kind of, I'm the idiot that everyone's thinking about. And then my second thought was, I have people with me. Like they all saw that I'm the idiot who hit the car on the other side of the green at Zebulon Country Club, right? And so I turn around, I'm like, well, maybe,, there's this idea of, okay, I'm one of their pastors. Which I am, by the way, if you didn't know that up to this point. But I'm one of their pastors. Maybe I'll turn around and there'll be some grace and some kindness. Here's what I. That's what the heck I turned around to. That was just that exact noise. No, I'm telling you. There's a guy. I'm not going to. We share the same first name, Carly Buchanan. It's his husband. You don't need to know the rest of it. But I turn around, and here's what I see. Like, he's laughing so flipping hard. Like, he can't even control his shoulders. I'm like, are you, you're a jerk face. And then I said, okay, well, there's still two others. And I look and there's another guy swinging a golf club. Just, oh, let me act like I don't see anything. But still there's a single shoulder. He's not as big. I'm like, are you kidding? There's one other guy. And I look over to him and his face is like this because I'm on his team. And he's like, we can't use that ball. I gotta, I gotta show up now and do something really good. Right. And I'm like,, my, this is the worst day ever. Okay, so immediately I start going into damage control. How do I make sure nobody else finds out? And about that time, the little golf club swinging guy, he yells out to people on another hole. He hit the Mercedes. I'm like, are you kidding me? Listen, I'm not joking about this. Two weeks later, two weeks later, we were at the AJ event. I think it was two weeks. Anyway, it was a couple weeks later. Somebody came up to me who wasn't even at the golf course and said, hey, I heard about the ninth hole. Dude didn't even go to our church. I'm like, are you kidding me? And the entire time I'm thinking, everybody knows I'm the idiot who hit the car. Not just a car. It was a Mercedes. And, like, everything that was the reason that I don't go get involved in stuff like this. Now, we did go. We went and we really looked over the car pretty well, make sure there was no dings or anything like that. And there was at some point the guys that were there with me, they tried to start consoling, except for the one jerk face whose shoulders are going like that. Like everybody was like, hey, don't, Aaron, it's all right, buddy. Like it happens. They certainly have to take a little bit of accountability. Like when you park there, like you knew there was going to be an idiot. You didn't know you were going to be the idiot, but like you knew there was a possibility. So they started to give some comfort, but I'm telling you, I'm telling you, like there was just this overwhelming overwhelming sense of not good enough, and everybody knows it now. Like, there was this overwhelming sense of everyone sees that I don't belong here. I don't belong at this tournament. I don't belong being here. Like, there's nothing about it. And fortunately, these guys came, they consoled, and then I do just want to say, like, I piped the next drive, right? Like, it looked really, really, so much so that the greenskeeper who watched it go like this, he was like, that wasn't the same guy who hit the bins, was it? I was like, shut up, dude. So, but there was this sense and this need, this overwhelming awareness where I was different. I didn't belong in that place. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever felt the not good enoughness? Have you ever felt like your weakness, your insecurity, all the things that you're worried about? Everybody kind of sees. And maybe it's just not a weakness, but maybe it's just a difference that someone else doesn't approve of. Maybe you feel it when mom-in-law or dad-in-law or mom or dad come to the house, and suddenly they start looking at everything, and you know there's going to be some criticisms. You know where they're going to say, hey, you should really do this different. You know they're going to say, you're not raising your kids right. I didn't let you do that. You've got to do this differently. Maybe it's in co-working world, right, or with your boss, or maybe it's whenever you go with a group of moms, and all the moms seem like they have houses that kids don't live in, right? Like it just, there's this overwhelming sense and awareness of different. Don't belong. Not good enough. And there's this pressure that in order for you to accept me and to like me, to approve of me, I have to become who it is that you want me to be. Not good enough. It's a powerful motivator. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. I have. And that's what we're talking about today. We started a couple weeks ago a new series, as Aaron was saying a little earlier, called Idols. And essentially what an idol is, an idol is anything that we elevate to a position of authority in our life. It could be anything at all. But I love what St. Augustine says about it. He says that the matter, the challenge, the problem, the difficulty with living the holy lives that we want to live is a matter of disordered love. It's loving things out of their appropriate order. That's not just a Christian thing. That's a human thing, right? Well, whatever's at the top of your list, whether it's a person, whether it's a thing, that's what's going to call the shots in your life. That's idolatry. Whatever is at the top of the list is going to determine the steps that you take because we shape our lives around pleasing that person or attaining that thing. And Nate talked with us last week. I don't know why I pointed over there. He's not over there. Nate talked with us last week about power and how when power becomes something that becomes the ultimate thing, it just rattles everything and how it destroys relationships. If you missed it, you can check it out online. Go and listen to that. Today, we're talking about approval. And I know the thought, I know the argument. You may have even had someone who leaned over to you and said, I really don't care what people think about me. Yes, you do. Because you wouldn't have said that if you didn't want us to think you were cool for saying it, right? Approval is not a bad thing. And approval, I wouldn't even say is a desire so much as it is a need. A need for approval comes from an awareness of self. A need for approval comes from this awareness of that I'm not perfect. And so what we need in these moments is if you are a Christian, you became a Christian because you were aware that you fell short and you needed Jesus. The sense of approval. It's not a desire, it's a need, but maybe you are a person who generally walks through life with an understanding that none of us are perfect. None of us have everything together. Like we all have things that we're working on. And so the opinion and ideas of others generally don't bother you. Here's what I would ask you to consider. and here's what I would argue. There is someone in your world whose voice influences the things that you do. There is someone in your world that what they think about the decisions that you make influences the decisions that you make. Approval's not a bad thing. It just makes a crummy God. Because here's what happens. The danger with approval, the idol of approval creates a fear of rejection that places our identity and worth in the people around us. The idol of approval, when approval gets to the top of the list, when it becomes the ultimate thing that we have to have, we have to have it from the people around us, we have to have it from the person, whatever it may be, it shapes who you become. And what we avoid is this fear of rejection. All of the idols are connected to your identity. All the idols that we'll talk about in this series, they determine who you become. Approval is the only idol that places your identity in the hands of the people you seek to be approved by. You know this. In order to be approved by someone, you have to either become or show them something they would approve. And what happens is when approval becomes ultimate, your sense of value and worth is determined by the acceptance of the people around you. And it creates this internal tug of war. You see an example of this in John. Jesus is pretty far into his ministry at this point. He's at kind of rock star status. Like everyone who knows who he is. Some people like him, some people don't. There's some people who do believe in him. There's some people who don't believe in our life. It creates this internal tug of war. This is who I am. This is what I believe. This is what I want to do. In order for people to accept, approve, like, love, respect, I have to do this. And when approval's at the top of the list, it's always going to win. Your value, your worth, your identity is going to be in the hands of the people around you. And let's think about that for a second. What version of right and wrong do you choose today? We live in a world full of opinions. Everyone has an idea about the way you should or should not raise your kids. Everyone has an idea about what is right and what is wrong. And it's also people don't see the action that you do in light of who you are. They determine who you are based off of the action that you do. We see it with political affiliations, political views, religious views. You don't believe this. You are this. You see it with, again, like the way you raise your kids, the way you discipline your kids. You see it with whether you shop at Target or Walmart. I get that one a little bit. Like, don't go to Walmart. Like, there's nothing good that happens at that place. But like, we see these things in our life and people determine who we are based off of who we do. And when approval becomes our idol, it creates this exhausting desire to please. It creates this exhausting pursuit of a fragile approval that can be taken away at a moment's notice. Because when you gain someone's approval, in order to be approved by one is to be disapproved by the other. It's a dangerous place to be. It's a dangerous thing. And so the thing that we really need to take away from when we idolize approval, we ask people to fill a need that only God can satisfy. And so this exhausting race, this pull back and forth, this constant trying to, okay, I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this to this over here. Like we, it's exhausting. And you're always going to be left feeling less than because it highlights the differences and typically what we would assume as weaknesses where we've dropped the ball. It brings those to the surface. Because people, and again, let me reiterate, I want to make sure that you're not hearing the wrong thing in this. Approval, it's not bad. It just can never serve you the way that we're asking it to. Because we start looking at broken people to fill this need that we were designed to have filled by God. And so approval from people just creates this fragile pursuit of never good enoughness, never quite arrived yet. The best person that I've seen, the best story throughout scripture that I've seen to kind of illustrate the difference of a life defined by the fear of rejection and a life defined and transformed by the approval of Jesus is with the Samaritan woman. Let me read for you just a second, then we'll talk about it a little bit. This is in John chapter 4. If you have your Bibles, you can turn there. We're going to put it on the big digital Bible in the sky, too, so you're more than welcome to read that one. But in John 4, starting in verse, I'm going to start in 4, but it from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, will you give me a drink? His disciples had gone into town to buy food. Verse 9 says, the Samaritan woman said to him, you're a Jew and I'm a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews did not associate with Samaritans. If you've been in or around church very much, you've probably heard this story. Even if you haven't been around, you may have heard reference to it. But in case you aren't familiar with some of the implications of the details that John gave, right? So the fact that it says she went to the well at noon says a lot about the life that this lady was living and the life that she was avoiding. So going to gather water was a common practice from the women in that day, but they would typically go one to two times a day, but it would always be in the morning or just before sunset because it's a cooler portion of the day, right? So, but not just was it practically better to go at those times, but it was also a time and an opportunity for community. Like there was a lot of ridiculous restrictions on women in that day and the way that they could function in public and especially around men and things of that sort. So whenever they would gather at the well, it was an opportunity for them to just be. Like they could hang out. They could hang out in their community. They could have conversations. They could talk about whatever it is they needed to talk about. They were just free to be there. And the fact that this lady, when at noon, shows us she was intentionally trying to avoid the people from her own town. Like she went at a time when she wasn't expecting anyone else to be there. And not only that, there's a lot of scholars and a lot of theologians point to that there was a lot of springs of water, a lot of wells closer to her village that she could have went to. So not only did she go at a time when she was expecting not to see someone, just in case, I'm going to go to a place further off. Like we don't know if, we don't know for certain if it was an idol of approval that she was dealing with. But what we do have a very good indicator of is she was avoiding rejection. She was avoiding the fingers. She was avoiding the conversations. Because what we find out a little later in the story is the life that she's living, some of the mistakes that she's made, some of the things that she's done would have been frowned upon by her community. And so what we can see in her life is that she is being shaped by an avoidance of rejection, which is a good indicator that there's a lack of approval in her world. I struggle with this. I struggle with the idol of approval much more than I'm proud of. Like, it rears its head up often. Like, I just need people to like me, partially because I'm so awesome, but also because the, like, no, there's just this, it's just something that pops up. Like, all of the idols do. I think they were all susceptible at different times. But this is the one that seems to pop up with me more often than not. And I was having a conversation with a couple of, actually three different people. So y'all are the fourth person I've ever told. Don't tell anybody else. An analogy that I used is with every interaction, every person, there's a brick wall. There's an imaginary brick wall. And the less bricks that are on that wall is an opportunity for me to come over. It's you accepting me, you bringing me in, you respecting me, you thinking whatever it is that I need you to think of me. It's I need you to love me, I need you to welcome me, I need you to do whatever. The less bricks that are there, the closer that I get to being fully brought in by someone. But the more bricks that are there is just the opposite, right? The more bricks that are there, it's more of a reason for you to not accept me. It's more of a reason for you not to like me. And so what I had told these people in this analogy was it feels like at times every conversation, every interaction, it doesn't matter if it's at like a rehearsal, it doesn't matter if we're hanging out and passing and going to grab lunch, if I'm passing you and barely talking to you in Walmart, in certain seasons of my life, it feels like every conversation I'm carrying a brick. I'm either putting a brick onto the wall and giving you a reason to not take me, to not like me, to not love me, to not accept me, or I'm taking a brick off of the wall. It's an exhausting pursuit. You're constantly carrying this weight of being whatever people need you to be, whatever people want you to be, oftentimes at the sacrifice of your own personal convictions, your own personal beliefs, your own ideas of who you want to be. We've all stood on the other side of a decision of regret. Like, why did I do that? For me, in my life, most of those decisions have been on the other side of, I've got to either remove a brick or I've got to put one up. That's an indicator for me. I didn't realize it until like I was writing this sermon this week, that whenever I feel that weight, whenever these moments start to happen in my life, when I feel like I'm either removing or putting a brick on, it's an indicator that approval is being elevated in my life. Not just simply because there's a need for it, but I'm looking to people for validation. I'm looking to people to affirm that I'm someone. I'm looking for people to help me realize that I am who I need to be and that I'm okay being who I am. I'm looking for people. That's an indicator. I don't know what it would be for you. Maybe that resonates with you. But some other indicators that approval has gotten really high on our list, is moving up the list in terms of desires, is when the one criticism speaks so much louder than 100 compliments. Like, you've got something, you've done something, you believe something, something happened, and there's so many people who are telling you, love that, you killed it, but there's one person, and that voice keeps you awake at night. When the idea of one person not liking you, being disappointed in you, thinking you messed up or that you let down, like it just rattles you to the core. Another indicator would be a lack of confidence, not just in you, but a lack of confidence in decisions that you have made or are making. And so what happens is we seek constant reassurance. I need validation. I need you to affirm that I'm doing the right thing. And honestly, in those seasons when approval is way up there, you can't make a decision without getting input from other people. These are indicators that we're seeking approval from a broken people. We're seeking approval from people who can never feel that need. This is what's happening in the world of the Samaritan woman. She's living a life avoiding the whispers, avoiding the reminders that she's not good enough, avoiding the reminders of the mistakes that she's made, and then she talks to Jesus. And this conversation changes everything in her world. Now, so something to understand, you saw that she was surprised that Jesus even approached her and talked to her. So remember, she's trying to avoid people. She's trying to avoid the people of her town. So she's going even further than what she needed to. And as she approaches Jesus, she's certainly thinking, okay, today's not the day that I'm gonna get a break from it. Because in this conversation, in this man, like with the man and woman, there was so many reasons why she would feel rejected by him. As she approached and as she got closer, as she saw that not just is he a man, but he's a Jew, as she got closer, she realized, oh man, there's religious tensions here that go back thousands of years. There's racial tensions there. There's cultural tensions that say men are not allowed to talk to women in public. Most husbands didn't even talk to their wives in public, much less a single man talking to a single woman in public. It just didn't happen. And as she got closer and closer and closer to the well, what had to start resonating with her a little bit more is, okay, today is going to be another day, just like the rest. But that's not what happened. Jesus talked to her. He broke cultural and religious norms, and he treated her like a person. Treated her not like she just had something, that he wanted something from her, but she had value in her world. And then there's a funny part of the conversation where they're talking about the water, and he's like, Jesus tells her, hey, so the water I've got, like, you won't ever be thirsty again. She's like, you ain't even got a bucket, man. Like, you asked me for water. How you got water? Like, what are you talking about? And then this happens in verse 14. Maybe not 14, 15. Actually, I'm going to go to 13. Jesus answered, everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. Whoever drinks the water that I give them will never thirst. This is quite true. So she goes and approaches and has this conversation, and then comes the question, right? Jesus brings up this very thing that has shaped her life. Jesus brings up what is likely the very thing that is causing her to feel rejected by the people in her town and need to be approved. It's the very thing that's made her feel not good enough. And Jesus, you had to bring that up? Like, you can't really, like, Jesus knows everything everything. He knows everything. Like he just told her. So you have to kind of ask this question. Like Jesus, why did you have to bring this up? I really don't think it was because he wanted to remind her. See, you're not quite perfect, are you? See, here's this thing in your life. You got to get this worked out. You got to fix it. She didn't need reminding of that. I think that Jesus brought up the question because he wanted to let her know, you don't have to do that here. You don't have to pretend with me. You don't have to feel the weight of your failures. You don't have to feel like you are the sum total of your mistakes. You don't have to feel like you have to be someone else in order to be accepted, approved, and loved by me. For the first time in probably a very long time. This lady who has been rejected time and time again comes to a conversation with someone who knows everything and welcomes her in. And suddenly there's a rest. I don't have to chase. I don't have to be. I can just be. I don't have to conform to what your idea of good and bad is. I can just rest in the approval of Jesus. And it changes her life forever. You can come on up here. It changes her life forever. What's incredible is you read throughout the rest of the story, there's a boldness and confidence after finding this approval that she runs back to the town. She runs, she leaves her water jug. She runs back to town, back to the place where she has faced rejection over and over again, back to the place where she's reminded you're not good enough, back to the place that people have told her and made her feel like you don't belong here. You're not one of us. You aren't good enough. We'll never approve of you until you fix everything. She's a boldness and a confidence that takes her back to that place and resting in the approval of Jesus, she becomes the person these people need in their life. She has influence on her community. She has influence in the people's lives around her. Resting. Listen to me. This is just an aside. I said I wasn't going to say it, but I want to. And so here we are. The people in your life that you feel like you have to measure up for, the people in your life who rely on you and depend on you, the people in your life who need something from you, what they need from you is to be the person that Jesus is asking you to be. Jesus is not going to lead you to be a poor wife, a poor husband. This lady, this, the first evangelist, I think she, she was, she was the first person to hear, hey, wait, you're the Messiah? And she went back to her, and she had influence in the lives of people who wanted nothing to do with her. When the voice of Jesus became the voice that she rested in, when the voice of Jesus became the voice that she found her approval, she found her identity, she found her life in, it changed her world. She realized that she didn't have to be all things to all people. There were certainly still people there, still people in her community that didn't respect, that didn't like. They may have still whispered. There were certainly people in her community who still didn't listen to what she had to say. But the beautiful part about it is after she found rest in the approval of Jesus, she didn't need them to anymore. They were no longer shaping who she became. Whose voice are you listening to? In certain seasons of your life, whose voice are you listening to? Do you know what Jesus thinks about you? Like, do you know what God thinks about you right now, knowing you fully? Ephesians 2.10 is one of my favorite verses. It's the Apostle Paul. He says that you are God's masterpiece chosen in Christ Jesus to do the good works that he prepared for you ahead of time. He says you are God's masterpiece. There's some versions that say worksmanship, craftsmanship, but the Greek word that Paul used there is poe. Let me look at it. I want to make sure I say it right. Well, I'm going to read it. Those are the right letters. I'm going to say it wrong. Poema. He says, you are God's poema. It's where we get our word poem from. Do you know what God thinks about you? You are his poetry. You are God's poem. His work of art that before time began, he loved. You do all of the things that you do, but do it from an awareness that you have of God who looks at you as his work of art. Let's pray. God, thank you so much. Thank you for the love, the life, the grace that you offer. God, there's going to be seasons, some of us more often than others, when the need and desire for approval begins to become our focus, when image management becomes the thing that we work on the most because we need people to let us in. God, what I ask you to do is just with the softness and gentleness of your Holy Spirit, remind us. Remind us who we are in you. Remind us of the life, the freedom, and the rest that we found in you as our Savior. And let us live our life, God, from a position of approval from God instead of seeking the approval of man. We trust you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this June Sunday. You guys have packed it out. I thought for a second that you guys were excited about church in June, which is wonderful. But what I've realized is inflation has hit all of us. We're too poor for vacations. So it's going to be a great summer for church. Before I get started, as one of the pastors, I get the opportunity to meet with folks who are new to the church sometimes. And this week I had the opportunity to grab brunch with a couple that's been visiting for a couple of weeks. And they shared with me that on their very first, they were going to look at a bunch of churches, but on their very first visit with Grace, that they struck up a conversation with another couple in the lobby that approached them. And that conversation went so well that they just invited them to lunch. So on their very first visit at Grace, they got invited to lunch and made friends. And I thought that was fantastic. So just sharing that with you, let's be that kind of church, Grace. Now there's a couple of people here for the first time and they're like, but don't, don't be that kind this week. All right. We don't, we would like to go to our own lunch. I'm sure it makes sense in the conversation, but when good things happen, I like to share them with you guys. Last week, we launched into this series called Idols and we looked at kind of how much more given to idolatry in our life we are than we might think we are or might have thought we were. And we talked about this idea that idols can't bear the weight of our worship. And I spent a lot of time saying we shouldn't idolize our children, our families, our spouses, and our communities, different things like that. And I just want to be clear. I meant to say this last week and I didn't say it and I should have. I just forgot. Those are good priorities. It's good to prioritize family and spouse and marriage and even career. That's fine to do that. But they make terrible gods because they can't carry the weight of our worship. And then at the end, I kind of told you what the rest of the series was going to be about. I had somebody tell me before the service started this morning, she was like, I caught up online. I was serving in children's last week and you got to the end about the four source idols, the four invisible idols. And once I listened to that, I did not want to hear the rest of the series. It's like, I was tracking with you on the other ones. Those are fine. I got those in check. And then I talked about the four source idols of power, control, approval, and comfort. And she was like, no thanks. Don't need to hear that. It's going to be too convicting. But it's this idea that there are surface idols. We idolize money. We idolize success. We idolize friends. We idolize whatever. But that idolizing is fueled by a source idol of one of those four things I just mentioned. So we're going to spend the next four weeks, including this week, looking at those different source idols, how they show up in our lives, and what we can do to invite the Holy Spirit into our life to make some space to root those idols out. Five or six years ago, I went with Jen, my wife, to Washington, D.C. with some friends of ours, Heath and Ashley. They flew into Raleigh, and then we drove up together. It was a really great trip. We stayed in an Airbnb. The first night we were there, we looked out the window, and there's this little bar-pub situation going on across the street. And so we said, let's just go over there. It'll be simple. It looks fine. So we walk over there. It was crowded. There was a little bit of a wait. And so I find one of the servers, and I say, hey, how long is the wait, and can we put our name in? And he says, oh, no, we don't do that. It's just first come, first serve. I said, like, free for all? Just, like, grab a table when someone gets up? And he goes, yep. All right. And I found out later it was trivia night. So it was a busy night. So we're kind of standing there waiting for something to pop open. And I excuse myself. I'm going to walk back to the restaurant. I'm going to go use the restroom. In the restroom. Not just in the back of the restaurant. So I'm going'm walking through and I look over and there's this high top table party of three and they're starting to get up there's four seats at the table I'm like perfect so I say are you guys about to get up and they go yeah and I said I'm running to the restroom would you mind waiting when I come back y'all get up we'll take your table and they go that's fine so that's what I did I come back and they see me and they start to get up. As they start to get up, I can see two dudes from either corner of the bar start to center in on this table. Right. So as that guy's, as the dad is getting up, I'm like, thanks very much. And I'll just kind of sit down like there's stuff still on it. They're putting on their jackets. They get their stuff. They move. These two dudes come to my table. And one of them, right off the bat, aggressively says, you can't sit there. That's not your table. That's our table. And I didn't like that. I didn't like that. And so I looked at him, and I said, that's funny, because it looks looks like my table because I'm sitting here. And he said, we've been here. I've watched you walk in. We've been here 30 minutes longer than you waiting for a table. This was the next table up. The right thing to do is to get up and give us this table. So get up. And I said, I don't think so, man. And I'm kind of motioning at my party to come sit down like for in a million years Jen's walking into that situation because I'm trying to tough guy this thing these two dudes are way bigger than me if this goes down it's not going to go well for me and then as I'm doing that they're still giving me lip then the server comes over and he starts clearing off the table. And the guy that was being aggressive says, hey, tell this, words I can't say in church. He said, tell this guy that this is our table. He needs to get up. And the guy said, I don't really get involved with that. Just kind of backs away. He was like, you boys got to figure this out. So he keeps at me. And I said, listen, man, I can acknowledge that you were here before me. I can acknowledge that you probably deserve this table more than I do. And I'll be happy to give it to you if you ask me nicely and say, please. And he said, excuse me and threatened me one more time. And I said, all you got to do is be a nice guy and say, please, and I'll give you this table. And finally, his buddy goes, dude, just say please. And he goes, he goes, all right, would you, would you mind giving us this table, please? And I said, sure, that'd be great. Here you go. Happy to give it to you. Walked off. Jen's shaking her head. Now, now listen, if you listen to that story and your internal monologue was, God, I don't really know if that's how a pastor should be acting. That's kind of, probably should have just had the grace in the moment to get over being slightly offended and let that person have the seat and maybe, you know, like be a grown up. If that's your internal monologue, that there was a better way to handle that, you're right. There was. And I agree with you. I do think, I can admit that story is funny. I am not proud of it. I wished I would have handled it differently. I do not think anyone is listening to that thinking, and through Nate would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of Christ in that particular instance. If you listen to that story and you loved it, and you were like, yeah, tell them, don't move, make them say please, make them pay you for the table. If you're thinking about what you would have done in that situation and you would have been equally upset, you need to pay attention this morning as we explore the idol of power in our lives. This idol of power, I told you last week I had to admit that it was mine. I didn't want to admit it. Because it sounds like you want to be in charge of everything all the time. And that's really not what it is. That's part of what it is. But what it's really about is we just don't want to be told what to do. Just don't tell me what to do. If you know anything about me, you know I do not want to be told what to do. Karen Lotta got me a mug. I drink out of it at least once a week that says, I was going to do that. And then you told me to. All right. If that's you, then like me, you struggle with the idolatry of power, of being in charge, of being the guy, of being respected. It doesn't mean you have to be the boss everywhere you go, but there's certain pockets in certain places where you're just not going to put up with it. And here's how you can really tell if power is the idol with which you struggle deeply. The manifesting sin of power is anger. The manifesting sin of power is being angry, is having these flashes of anger that cause you to do and say things that you wish you could take back. I acted that way in that restaurant in D.C. because I was made angry, because he had the guts to tell me what to do. And until he acknowledged who had the power, I was not going to back down. It was immature and gross, but that's what was happening there. The besetting sin of power is to be someone who is angry whenever that power and that license and that freedom is threatened. And anger, we know, is a terrible thing to have festering in our lives. If you are someone who struggles like I do with being more angry than we should be sometimes, then you know experientially and intuitively that what James says about anger in chapter one of his book, I believe verse 16, is true. When James says about anger in chapter one of his book, I believe verse 16 is true. When James says, my dear brothers and sisters, take note of this. Everyone, oh 19, everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. And then in the next verse, he tells you why. Because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Now listen, most of you in this room, because I know you, I know that you've been Christians for a while. And so a lot of the big sins, the big stuff that we shouldn't do, you've got that in check, and that's good. But for some of you in the room, maybe even most of us, if I were to ask you, what moments in the last month or two do you wish you could get back? What moments in the last year or two or decade do you wish you could have back and redo them and get again and do them right? If I were to ask you that question and you go to those moments that you wish you had back, I'd be willing to bet that for most of us, what flashed in those moments was anger that we didn't handle well. For most of us, what happened in that was we became angry and then we acted out in a way that we wish we could go take back and have a more level head about. I know that that's the case for me. And see, here's the thing about anger, and this is why we're told to avoid it at all costs. Because unchecked anger will unravel your life. Unchecked anger that you are not dealing with. Listen to me, if you are a person who is prone to anger, who just snaps, and you'll snap at your kids, you'll snap at your co- coworkers, you'll snap at your spouse, you'll snap at the guy driving down the road, and you'll stop singing a praise song to cuss at that person. If that's you, you deal with anger. And I know because I am one, and I have to keep a check on this. But let me tell you something. If you deal with anger in your life, unchecked anger that we don't allow the Holy Spirit to root out of our life will absolutely cause our lives to unravel. How many of us know a dude, it's almost always a dude, who has a power idol that manifests itself in anger? And because that anger is always brimming under the surface, his kids have distanced themselves from him. His wife has distanced herself from him. His coworkers or his employees do not trust him. And sometimes that unravels into alcoholism to mitigate the anger. Sometimes that unravels into divorce or separation. How many of us can tell a story of a life that unraveled because there was unchecked anger there? So if this is us, if this is our besetting sin, we need to listen and pay attention. I think there is no better example of an angry life unraveling in Scripture than that of King Saul. So if you have a Bible, I want to encourage you to open to 1 Samuel 18. We're going to be in 1 Samuel 18, 19, 22, and 28. We're going to hit some highlights here. So if you have a Bible, be flipping with me so as I give a little bit of context, you can see that context as well. If you're a note taker, there is a point in your notes before the verses start. I'm just going to move that point down below the verses. So we'll get to it. We'll jump back and fill that out. Don't freak out. But let's look at the life of Saul. Now Saul is one of the most tragic figures in the Bible, I think. Because Saul was the first king of Israel. He was anointed by God through the prophet Samuel. And he had the whole world at his feet. If you really think about it, it should be the star of Saul flying over Israel now. It's not. It's David. It could have been the throne of Saul that Jesus would ascend to. It's not. It's David's. Because Saul's life unraveled. And I would contend with you that it unraveled because of anger produced by his idolizing power. So we pick up the story in chapter 18. Chapter 17 is David slaying Goliath. Then the story kind of picks up and people have started to really like David. He's coming to national prominence. And Saul one day hears this song. Saul has slayed his thousands. David has slayed his tens of thousands. It's always a joke. I'm sure in Hebrew it flows better than that. But that was the song. And this really angered Saul. And here's his reaction and he hurled it saying to himself I'll pin David to the wall, but David eluded him twice Saul was afraid of David. What else could he take but my kingdom? This is my kingdom. This is my identity. I'm in charge here. That's disrespectful to me. This is mine, mine, mine. David is not going to come tell me what to do in my kingdom. I will not give up this rule. I have to protect my power. You see? And so he tries in a fit of rage to kill David. Doesn't work. David eludes him twice. And then he does what kings have done for millennia. He kind of exiles him for a period of time. Leaders of countries have been doing this for centuries. Someone upsets them. Someone in their court is causing too much trouble or noise. You're now the ambassador of Croatia. Go have fun. Get away from court. You're now going to lead these troops in this far-flung territory where we will forget about you. Go. And so his anger caused him to exile David to remove the problem. Well, the problem was David kept having success. And so we see the next highlight in chapter 19, verses 9 and 10. Saul has decided by now he's going to kill David. Jonathan, Saul's son, the heir apparent, is very good friends with David and talks Saul out of trying to kill David. David's a good man, don't kill him. And Saul says, I promise that I won't. But then this happens in verse 9 when David comes back. But an evil spirit from the Lord 20, you see that Saul becomes determined to kill David. Now it's a cold-blooded plot to kill him. It's not in the heat of the moment. It's not just, I'm so mad right now. It's no, no, no. I am going to end this threat to my reign and to my power. And so he begins to pursue David through the wilderness. In chapter 20, what we see is that Jonathan and David have worked out this scheme where Jonathan's going to give David an indication, you have to flee. My father is dead set on killing you. And so David flees and he goes. And in this fleeing, Saul spends the rest of his adult life pursuing David. We're talking about a 10, 15, 20 year period of time where Saul's rage and anger is fueling his life. He is on a singular quest to kill David. It's like one of those dumb movies with Liam Neeson where something bad happens to his family, and the rest of the movie is just rage-filled revenge. He said, this is bad and actually happened. So he's chasing David all through the countryside. And at one point, David goes into this temple, and the priest at the temple helps David and his men, feeds him with the bread that was supposed to be given to God, but it was okay in that instance. I won't get into why. And then he gives David Goliath's sword, and they move on. Well, Saul is hot on the trail of David, and he goes in there, and he finds out that this priest has been helping him. And you can imagine how he responds in chapter 22 verses 16 and 17. But the king said, you will surely die Ahimelech, you and your whole family. Ahimelech was the head priest in this particular temple. Then the king ordered the guards at his side, turn and kill the priests of the Lord because they too have sided with David. They knew he was fleeing, yet they did not tell me. If you keep reading, what you see is that the king's officials didn't want to have anything to do with that. They did not want to kill these defenseless priests. So Saul turns to someone who would, apparently, Doeg the Edomite. If you're pregnant, you're looking for a boy name, Doeg. Great. Doeg, I don't know, kills in cold blood 85 priests at the word and the bidding of Saul. His rage has now spilled over where he's killing 85 innocent men because they sided with his enemy. And we can see his life spiraling towards unraveling. And then in 28, we have one of the most curious conversations in scripture where Saul goes to see the witch of Endor, a medium, and somehow or another has a conversation with the soul of Samuel. Now, what I'd like to do is spend the next 12 minutes explaining to you exactly what happened and that I understand it. I'm kidding. I have no idea. I don't understand this chapter. I don't know how we talk to mediums and how he's talking to the soul of Samuel. But this is what happens. And's this powerful king. He goes to see a witch, and he's laying prostrate on the ground with nothing left in him, so much so that his men worry about him and have to carry him out. The next day, he dies on the battlefield along with his sons, just like Samuel said he would. It is a picture of a life completely unraveled because he allowed his anger to exist in him unchecked. And what I want you to see from the story of Saul that we can relate to is when power is our idol. Being the king of our kingdom becomes our identity. When power is our idol, when you will respect my authority, you will respect who I am, you will not tell me what to do. When power is our idol, we take on the identity as the king of our small kingdom or the queen of our small kingdom. And so when someone comes into your workplace and they threaten your expertise, they question you. They think you don't know what you're doing. No, no, this is my kingdom, and now we're mad because you're threatening me. When someone's hired and you think they're going to take your position, and so you become adversarial with them, that's you being the king of your kingdom. If you run a business, you have employees, and one of them gets out of line with you and you take personal offense at that. It could be you just being angry because you're the king of your own kingdom. And we see and saw what he was really mad about was David was threatening his identity. He was threatening who he thought he was. And when you have a power idol, when people question you in your kingdom, that really makes you mad. Let me tell you how I know this is true. This has been something for me and parenthood that's become so important. So parents, if you're in the thick of it right now, if you have children in your home, I'm speaking specifically to you. I would like to share with you something I've learned about my anger and frustration towards my children. There are times when your children say disrespectful things to you. Things that you don't deserve. They say things in anger. They flash hot. They lash out. They disrespect. In southern terms, they show their tail. And let me just tell you, when my kids get mouthy with me and start saying stuff that I would never say to my parents, I get real hot, real fast. I start to do the, hey, uh-uh. You will not talk to me that way in my house. What does that even mean? In my house. Oh, tough guy. It's the banks, dude. For like 27 more years. To come off it. But I flash hot. And I get mad. And I put them back in line. And I think back to my childhood. Because in our house, we don't spank. Maybe I'll regret that choice. But we don't do that. We just try to go about things in other ways. But growing up, they did not share that policy. And if I said some of the stuff that my kids say to me, to my dad, my tail would have been worn out. My dad was the, he was, he perfected the slap and grab in the four seat car. The no look, slap and grab right on my thigh, slap it, squeeze it as hard as you could. I'm writhing in pain. And you know what I did? I shut up, is what I did. It's masterful. But here's what I would ask you, parents. When your kid says something disrespectful to you, bosses, when your employees say something disrespectful to you, and you get hot, you get angry. What's fueling that anger? Is what's fueling that, because for me, when Lily says something to me that she shouldn't say, and I get hot, I'm not angry because, oh, baby girl, I just want you to grow up to be better than that and manage your emotions, and I've told you this so many times, and I really want to help you manage your big emotions. I know you have big feelings, but you've got to learn to manage those. And it's fueling my anger because I'm just so frustrated with watching you trip over yourself like this and you don't have to do that anymore and there's a better way. Is that what's fueling my anger? No. What's fueling my anger is you better get right because I'm the boss here. You're not. My voice is louder than yours. You want to find out? I'll make it. Parents, how hypocritical is it of us to yell at our children for not managing their emotions well? What the heck are you doing? You verbal bully. That's what I do. When anger flashes like that, it's really helpful to stop and go, where is this coming from? Am I angry because I want them to do better or am I angry because I've been disrespected in my kingdom? And if it's the second, grow up. Get over it. Give grace. Let them have the table. When you're an employer and an employee says something to you that you don't care for, are you upset because they had the audacity to question your authority at work? Probably so. And that's not good. That's us protecting our kingdom. When your spouse asks you a question and you flash hot at them, a lot of times it's because they're questioning us and we don't care for it in our kingdom. And so if that's you, if this is something that you struggle with, if anger is a part of who you are, what do we do? How do we allow the Holy Spirit to begin to remove this idol of power in our life? I think it's as we can't just say, hey, just stop being mad. That's not going to help. So what do we need to do? How do we think about things? I think we think about it like this. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. You don't have to be the king of any kingdom. Just let Jesus be the king of the kingdom. Just acknowledge it's not yours anyways. You don't have one, and you're never dead. And when you die, poof, it's gone. His kingdom exists for all eternity. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom and you gleefully serve Jesus. You humbly serve Jesus. Can you imagine? Imagine the different story that is written with Saul's life if he simply would have done that. Let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. And understood, Israel's not mine. It doesn't belong to me. It didn't belong to me when I was born. It will not belong to me when I die. And if Jesus wants to give his kingdom over to another person, fine. It's his. I'm here to serve. And what's remarkable about that is that was the attitude of his son. There's a part in the narrative where Saul says, don't you know he's going to take the kingdom from you? And Jonathan's essentially like, I think that's great. David's a great guy. He's going to make a good king. That's awesome. Can you imagine how much different the story is that is written with the life of Saul if he simply would have let Jesus be the king of Jesus' kingdom. Moms and dads, especially dads, you're not the kings of your house. Jesus is. Let him be the king of it. Your authority doesn't need to go unquestioned all the time. It's not your job to keep everybody in line. It's your job to point everybody to Christ. And when we respond, dads, in anger that's unwarranted, then the only way that's left to point our children to Christ after that is to go humbly apologize for not pointing them to Christ in the first place. Try to do better the next time. Bosses. Where you work, your department, your company, that's not your kingdom. That's Jesus's. You let him worry about that stuff. You're his servant there. If we would simply let Jesus be the king of his own kingdom and acknowledge that it's not ours, how much different will you handle the disrespect of your children? How much differently, how much more grace will you give your spouse? How much more grace will you give your coworkers, your employees, your boss, if you'll just acknowledge this isn't mine anyways? I think if we can bring ourselves back to this thought, just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. That we can allow the Holy Spirit to begin to slowly chip away and show us where we hold these idols of power in our life that are manifesting themselves in unchecked anger. So I would encourage my angry brothers and sisters, the ones of you who really liked that opening story, let anger be a warning light that flashes in your life. And when it happens, take a step back and ask yourself, am I angry because Jesus' kingdom has been threatened or am I angry because mine has? And then remind yourself, I just need to let Jesus sit on his own throne and I'm gleefully here to serve him. Let's pray. Father, give us open eyes, minds, and hearts. Let us see how these different idols and really sources of sin work their way into and manifest themselves in our lives. Help us see ourselves as you see us, as broken, sinful, but yet loved and clothed in your righteousness and value. Help us understand, God, that our power is pretty useless when we don't have a kingdom we're worried about protecting. And God, remind us as we go through our days and our weeks and our months that all we need to do instead of trying to protect our kingdom and our identity is to find our identity in you and to simply let you sit on your own throne. God, I pray that we would do that and I pray that for those of us who are prone to become angry, God, I pray that we would know that, we would acknowledge that, we would take steps to keep that in check so that you might bring about in us the righteous life that you do desire. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. That was, I think, maybe the loudest I've ever heard you guys worship, and I think that is wonderful. What a good morning. And listen, the week after preaching a sermon on politics, I did not expect there to be zero empty seats in the room. I thought maybe we'd thin the herd a little bit, but you guys are back to more, which is why this week I'm gonna tell you who I'm gonna vote for and why you should too. I do have, I do need to say something to my NC State fans, friends. Last week, you know, I started out, I said, mean thing. And Phil, our head usher, he's back there. He's not nice. He came up to me in the lobby and he said, so what was that funny little joke you made last week? I said, I don't remember, Phil. I don't know. It slips my brain. But congratulations, NC State, on your overtime victory over a 14 seed. We'll look forward to next weekend. This is our second part in unity. We are unified in our laughter at NC State. Isn't this wonderful? This is, I'm sorry, I'm done. I'm done, I'm sorry. I'm a Georgia Tech fan, okay? I got nothing. Absolutely nothing. Thank you, Easley. Do I have to preach still? What's happening? All right. So this is part two of the Unity Sermon, and we're pulling this out of John chapter 17 as we've been going this spring through the Upper Room Discourse found in John chapters 13 through 17. They're the final words or final thoughts of Christ to his disciples before he's arrested and tried and buried and rises again on the third day. And we get to come back next week and celebrate Easter. A quick word about the Good Friday service. It's just the second time that we've done it since I've been here. But Aaron and I have worked on how to format it. It looks a little bit different than a normal service. The whole idea of it is to let the weight of the crucifixion and the sacrifice rest on us so that we're spiritually prepared to celebrate on Sunday the greatest holiday of the year. So I hope that you can make it to that. So we looked at the prayer last week, and we acknowledge it's called the high priestly prayer because Jesus is praying over the disciples before he dies and ascends into heaven about 43 days from then. And they're the ones that are left with the keys of the kingdom. They're the first group of pastors and elders to oversee the church. And as he's praying for them, Jesus also prays for us. So I want to remind you of those verses this week found in John chapter 17. We're just going to look at verse 20 and 21 this week. Jesus prays this, my prayer is not for them alone, meaning I'm not praying God just for the disciples. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message. So that's you and I, that's the church, anybody who believes in the work of Christ. And I made the point last week that unity is Jesus' biggest priority for his church. Last week I said it was his only petition in that prayer for us. But this week, the way to think about it is unity, according to this prayer, is Jesus' biggest priority for his church. And when I say church, I mean Big C Church. I mean all the Christians who have ever lived, no matter our denomination, no matter our background, Big C Church, unity is a huge priority for Jesus. And I questioned last week why it's not a bigger priority for worldwide Christians. And I know it's not a huge priority because we have so many denominations, and we're going to get into that in a little bit. But we take, I take Jesus's petition for unity amongst the believers very, very seriously. And because of that, last week we said, let's look at the biggest threats to that unity. And so last week we acknowledged that in the United States in 2024, the climate is so divisive, it's begun to sneak into the church, that politics, our political leanings and persuasions, can sometimes allow us to separate or judge the faith of other believers, if they don't have the politics that we do, and how that is disunifying. That's not good for the church. The other thing I mentioned last week that would seek to divide us is our beliefs. What we believe about all the things. Because in theology, in Christendom, there's some things that you would consider primary issues. The deity of Christ, the sonship of Jesus, the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, the nature of sin, the doctrine of salvation. These things are primary issues. But there's other things that are secondary or even tertiary issues. What do we believe about baptism? What do we believe about communion and what we should do? What's our policy on church discipline? What does it mean to be ordained? What does it mean to be a church member somewhere? All these things are secondary and tertiary issues about which the body of Christ does not agree. And thinking about all of that and Jesus' call for unity, I was able to take a trip in February. In February, well, at the end of last year, I reached out to an old acquaintance of mine. This guy has a pretty unique story. His name is Brad, and Brad is a genius. Not like, that dude's a genius. Like, no, legit genius. And he went to the Air Force Academy and got a master's degree in aerospace engineering. He was literally a rocket scientist. He showed me the title of his thesis, his master's thesis. I understand two words in it. And he grew up with the Southern Baptist, loosely associated with Southern Baptist. And then in college, kind of found his way into the Episcopal Church. And then in the time in his service in Colorado, he joined the church, is what it's called when you become a Catholic. He joined the church. He converted to Catholicism. And in that, he decided to pursue being a priest. So he left the Air Force as a captain, and he went to school at the Vatican, and he went to school for like seven or eight more years and became a priest. And now he's a priest and a pastor in a parish in Birmingham, Alabama. And because of his spiritual journey, because of how thoughtful and well-read and intelligent he is, I wanted to talk to him. Because I just wanted to hear what he thought, and I understand his story and everything that went into it. So I reached out to him after having not spoken with him in at least a decade. And he was very gracious and he welcomed me. And one Friday in February, we sat at his house for nine hours and talked. And it was a good, fruitful conversation. He was an incredibly gracious host. And I was so grateful for his time because he's far more educated than me. But there was a part of the conversation that Brad and I had that really did make me pretty sad. He's, I don't know the title of it, but within his diocese district, he's the representative of the Catholic priests in this effort to unify with and learn from the other denominations. So he sits on a council with a Methodist person, Baptist person, Presbyterian person, Catholic person, and they kind of come together and try to find ways that they can work together as faith and be unified together. And I think that's wonderful. And because I knew that I had this sermon coming up and because I had been thinking about this idea of unity, I asked him specifically about that and what he had learned in his time doing that. And in that conversation, he told me that he was actually pretty excited recently because the Catholic Church was getting very close to achieving unification with the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church is the Catholic church in England that broke off from the Catholics years ago for, you know, reasons that we don't need to get into right now, students of history. And he said that they were very close to achieving unity, but that right before they actually unified, that the Anglicans shifted their views on a couple things, on views of women in ministry and a couple other secondary, tertiary issues. And so they couldn't unify. And I said, well, what does it mean to you to be unified with the Anglican Church? And he said, well, it means that a Catholic priest could give Anglican Mass and that an Anglican priest could give Catholic Mass and celebrate the Eucharist together, take communion together. And I said, well, can't you just not agree on a couple of those secondary issues and still agree in the personal work of Christ and celebrate communion together? And he said, no, it doesn't work like that. I said, why not? And he said, well, because in my understanding, to take communion with someone, implicit in that is that you agree about everything with them. You have shared beliefs in common, and that's part of what makes it so powerful. And I said, well, if you've got two entities that are seeking unity, but they have differing beliefs, then one of those two entities is going to have to leave their beliefs at the door to be able to get under the same umbrella. And he said, yeah, that's right. And I said, well, whose responsibility is that? And he eloquently and thoughtfully said, not ours. That's a more basic version of what he said. He used a lot more words. But he basically said, when people are ready to shift to the way that we think about things, then we'll be unified. And listen, I want to be very careful here. As I said, Brad was a wonderful and gracious host. We talked about a lot of very interesting things, and I learned a ton. And he is one voice in the Catholic Church. I'm very aware that I could talk to myriad other Catholic priests, and the conversation could have gone a bunch of different ways. So I don't think that he speaks for all of Catholicism, but this is what he said in our conversation. And it just made me very sad that that was the standard for unity. And so I said, well, could you take communion in my church? If you happen to be visiting on a weekend and you came on a Sunday where we were having communion, could you partake in communion with us? And he said, no, that would be scandalous. Yeah, that's what I said. Gosh. And I said, okay, why is that? And he said, well, do you guys believe, and there's a doctrine in the Catholic faith and in some other areas of Christianity called transubstantiation. It's the belief that when you partake in communion that the bread and the juice or the wine becomes the literal physical body of Christ in your body. It's something that they hold to. And that's fine. We don't hold to that. And so he said, do you believe in that? And I said, no. And he goes, well, then we couldn't because we don't have all the same shared beliefs. And that would be pretty scandalous of me to do that as a priest. I said, okay. I said, what if the elders and I sat down and we changed all of our beliefs and we got right in line with what Catholicism teaches about communion? Could you then participate with us in that communion? And he said, would that communion be administered to me by a priest who's under the authority of a bishop who's under the authority of the pope? And I said, no, it would just be me, and I'm under the authority of Brad. So that's all you're getting. And he said, no, I could not. I could not do that. And my account was just kind of sunk. And he said, you're quiet. I said, yeah, it just makes me really sad that someone who loves Jesus as much as you do would feel like you're not welcome to take communion at my church. It makes me sad to think that anybody who believes in the work of Christ, that he is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, it makes me sad that anybody who believes that would feel not welcome or out of place to take communion here with us. And so, reflecting on that conversation, on what that bar is for unity, that we have to believe all the same things, I remembered something that I said offhand in a sermon in January. And that when I said it, I thought, oh, that hasn't come out of my mouth before. Let me think about that some. And it's kind of been rattling around in my brain ever since. And I thought about it on the flight home from Birmingham. It's just this idea. We can never be obedient to the high priestly prayer if we insist on a homogeny of doctrinal thought. We can never be church, never ever be, not in these walls or in the big church. We will never be obedient to Jesus' high priestly prayer of being one as he and the Father are one if we insist on a unanimous belief about all the things on a homogeny of doctrinal thought across every church, on the whole world, on the whole planet that's ever existed, we have to agree on primary, secondary, tertiary ideas. We just, if that's the level, if that's the standard, then we just can't achieve unity. And to help us think about this, I wanted to bring up the whiteboard and do a little exercise with you guys. Plus, it's been a little while since I did the whiteboard, and it's time. It's time to do the whiteboard. Thank you, Harris. Last time we did this, thank you, sir, on a communion Sunday, while I was praying, they carried the whiteboard off the stage, ran it into the TV, and then knocked the wine glass off the table and chattered during the prayer. So we're looking for redemption this time around. It's going to go much, much better. But to help us think about what unity in the church could actually look like, and to think about what I think is the impossible task of bringing everybody under the umbrella in the same agreement about all the things. I want to do this exercise with you. This exercise, actually, believe it or not, the first time this thought occurred to me, what I'm about to share with you, changed my spiritual life because I began to look in more places for beauty, and it breathed wind into my sails, and so I hope that maybe it can do that for some of us this morning. But I want to think of all of Christendom in a pie chart. I know that's a terrible circle. And I know that those of you in the back can't see, but you're going to get the point. That's actually not that terrible a circle. I'm not ashamed of that at all. That's pretty good. And so this is all of Christendom. This is all the Christians currently alive. If we think about how they divide up into what denominations, let's say that this is roughly Catholic. That's a big chunk. We know that's a big chunk worldwide Catholic. There's a lot of them. Then let's make a sliver for Anglican. Then let's make a sliver for Orthodoxy. Then let's make a sliver for Orthodoxy. And then let's make a sliver for kind of Desert Fathers Asian Orthodoxy. So we're going to, that's what those are. Okay, and then that leaves us a lot of space for the Protestants. Okay, this big, big Protestant. And this is only,, it actually should be more like this. I did actually research this, but then I thought I'm not going to refer back to a paper and try to draw a perfect pie chart. I think you guys can get the gist of it. So then you've got the Protestant faith, but within the Protestant faith, so let's say you've got Baptists, okay? That's one. And within the Protestant faith in America, that's the biggest chunk. But then you've also got Presbyterians, okay? You've got Methodists, you've got Lutherans, and then you've got like Church of Christ, you've got Pentecostals, Holiness Movement, and then you start to really like subdivide, non-denominational, inter-denominational, all the smaller percentages, whatever we're missing. So this is what worldwide Christendom looks like. But we're not done there because each of these slivers has their own sliver. It's important that you see this faith and get it exactly right. She's like leaning past me, I'm sorry. So even within Catholicism, and I don't know them all, but there's like, you know, the Jesuits and then there's the Franciscans and then there's other orders of monks and things like that where the beliefs are just a little bit different in there. And then each of these slivers, like the Presbyterian sliver, PCUSA, there's been a divide in the Methodist sliver. There's been a divide, like they kind of break off and do the different things. And for my background, where I grew up, you have Southern Baptist is one sliver, but then you've got Independent Baptist, Primitive Baptist, American Baptist, and on and on with the Baptists. That's just inside the Baptists. So there's really a lot of slivers. Then here's what occurred to me. This, in the whole pie chart of Christendom, this red right here, that's my sliver. That's where I grew up. Each of us was born into or saved into a sliver. Each of us was born into or saved into a piece of this pie. And here's what happens when you're inside your piece of the pie. Okay? Now, if you can't relate to this, you did not grow up in church. This is my piece of the pie. And when I was growing up, when I was in school, when I was in seminary, we thought this sliver right here, gosh, I'm so lucky we have cornered the market on right. We're so good. We've nailed all the theology. Isn't that good for us? Listen, I would have never, when I was 20 years old, I would have never dreamed of taking over a church with a Presbyterian background unless it was to reform each and every one of you. Which my plan is slowly working. We thought people outside, like other Protestants, like in this area, they're probably okay. They're probably Christians. I can remember having conversations in church circles. Hey man, do you think Catholics are really Christians? And do you know what the answer was? A dead serious. You know, I think some of them probably do have a genuine faith. I think some of them probably can be Christians. What? You know what I found out that some groups of Catholics call Protestant Christians? Separated brothers and sisters. How generous of you. That's okay. Jews call you God's stepchildren. And so you begin to think that what's inside your sliver is the most right of all the slivers. And everything else outside of that can't be right. They're all wrong about different things. I was doing this one time with somebody and I showed them this and I jokingly said, well, you know, they're too liberal and they're too liberal. They shouldn't even be in the pie chart. And they go, I agree with you. And I was like, ooh, that's not the point of what we're talking about. I grew up thinking all the right answers for all the things, all the beliefs, but all the secondary and tertiary issues existed in my sliver that we had cornered the market on right. And somewhere in 2020, I realized that I had been doing this my whole life. And I realized how ungracious that was. And what I realized is, each one of these slivers, every single one of them, has beauty to offer us, has wisdom to offer us. I don't know which sliver you grew up in or were saved into. And when I say saved into, what I mean is, if you became a Christian later in life and then you started going to church, that particular church begins to inculcate you with their theology and all the history and everything that's gone into it. And you might not know it, but that's a theology that you've now kind of been saved into because that's going to be the background that you get. And about four years ago, I made the decision to start learning from other backgrounds and I found so much beauty there. Last year I had sabbatical in July and one of the things I did is I went to other churches. So I was thinking about change and and I made, I made the decision to go to one church that was way more conservative than I've ever been or would ever be. And I made a decision to go to another church that was way more liberal than I've ever been and than I think I'll ever be. And I went to the conservative church and I had a terrible attitude. I was judging everything. This is stupid. That's dumb. Oh, yeah, shocker, just men ushering. Yeah, I get it. And I'm just kind of going through the checklist in my head, right? And at the end of the service, the band got back up to play, and I saw something really cool. As the church was worshiping together, there was about 500 or 600 people in this room in the middle of July. And I looked around the room, and there was a ton of teenagers. I saw a bunch of three-generation families, grandparents sitting with grandbabies and kids. And I watched these people raise their hand in worship. And I listened to them, and their worship was boisterous and exuberant. And I thought, shame on you, man. Shame on you. This doesn't need to be for you. But it's for them. And it works for them. There's beautiful things here. And these people are getting closer to Jesus as a result of their involvement here. You need to support things like this. And I saw beauty there that day. Then a week or two later, I went to another church down the road, far more liberal than I am. And I expected to go in there and just kind of get some feel-good nonsense, you know, because of liberals. And what I found was a people who had a deep appreciation of God's Word. They honored it. The homily was so good and so thought-provoking that I had lunch with that pastor two or three more times after that because I had questions for him. And I learned some things from them. And we have and can find beauty in all these things. I know I've inadvertently and hopefully not disrespectfully picked on Catholicism a little bit, but I will tell you this. For 1,500 years, they were the watchers on the wall. There is no church without the Catholic Church. They were the ones who watched the things through all the years until the Great Reformation. They are the theological shoulders on which we stand. And even if you've never stepped foot in a Catholic church, we have a great deal sitting here in an interdenominational church in 2024 to be grateful for to our Catholic brothers and sisters. We learn liturgy from the churches of the apostles, from the Presbyterians, and from the Lutherans. We learn high church and sacred spaces from our Presbyterian brothers and sisters. We learn low church and church polity and church governance from our Baptist brothers and sisters. We learn about the spirit from our courageous Pentecostal brothers and sisters. There is beauty to be found in each one of these slivers. Except the church, historically, has done this. Rather than looking for beauty, we often look for battles. Rather than look for beauty, we often look for battles. And we want to tell other Christians why they're not Christians anymore. There's an article that came out this year that a president of a seminary wrote about one of the most famous, helpful pastors in the country. And he said, yep, this was inevitable. So-and-so has shipped off from Christianity. They have lost their faith. Why does he get to declare that? We want to pick these battles. We want to tear down other Christians for not being Christian enough. And I can't help but wonder what that must look like to a watching world when an entire denomination of people has a huge conference to decide whether or not women can be in ministry. And because they decided they can't be in authority in churches, several big churches get kicked out. And now their pastors are on CNN asking why they got kicked out. And the world is watching this. And is it any wonder why people who don't go to church look at church in our culture and go, I don't want anything to do with that. They can't even be nice to themselves. This is why Jesus says, he prays for our unity. Why? So that the world may believe. Because a disunified church looking for battles, looking to pick on things with one another, looking to get into theological arguments and make you believe everything the way I believe it and get under our umbrella or we can't be unified turns off a watching world. Which is why one of the reasons I love grace so much. I was joking around with Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, when I was thinking about this sermon, that grace is like the Statue of Liberty of churches. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. We'll take all flavors. We have somebody from almost every mainline denomination in this thing. We are very well represented. And one of the things that I learned in taking the job is we are not non-denominational, as if these things don't exist and don't matter. We are intra-denominational. We are people who are determined to remain in unity and in fellowship together despite a lack of unanimous agreement about all the things. And that is to our good that serves us. And this ethic of being a church that does not insist on a homogeny of doctrinal thought predates me. This is what the founding members laid out. This is the statement of faith that I found when I got here. It's actually on our website. I'm going to read you the first two paragraphs of the statement of faith if you'll indulge me a little bit. Now, I've reworded this because it was a little bit clunky and Presbyterian, so I had to make it flow a little bit. But this has been approved by two separate elder boards, and so I know that it is a reflection of who we are. But this is the opening two paragraphs of our statement of faith, and I want you to reflect on it in light of this idea of unity in the church. At Grace Raleigh, there is a great deal about the Christian faith that seems clear to us and foundational to all that we believe. However, there is also much of God's nature, purposes, and plans as revealed in the Bible and borne out in human history and in our lives that retains its mystery and lies beyond our full comprehension on which we don't all agree. This lack of universal agreement is acknowledged and embraced through the makeup of our church family itself. As a church, we have Presbyterian roots. While a senior pastor grew up in a Baptist context, our church body consists of almost every mainline denomination in the country. We believe this diversity strengthens us and makes us more effective as we seek to build God's kingdom on earth. Because of this, this is important, we try to be as generous as possible about where we draw lines and distinctions and allow for a variety of opinions and assertions on a variety of topics and teachings within the Christian faith. We hope to maintain a commitment to the holiness and authority of Scripture while erring on the side of grace as we apply it to our lives. That's our statement of faith. That's your church with those sensibilities. And I'm proud to be a part of a church like that, that holds things open-handedly. You know, with some degree of regularity, I'll get someone to ask me in passing conversation, in a meeting, in an email, hey, what's Grace's stance on blank? Someone asked me recently what our stance was on the rapture. I said, we don't have one of those. We never will. But I get asked that with some degree of regularity. And it's usually the same answer. I don't know what Grace's stance is on that. I don't think Grace has a stance on that. I've not seen anything written. I know what my stance is, maybe, but it's probably different than some of our elders. And I don't think I could speak for the elder board on this issue. And I would say, if it's not in our statement of faith, we do not have an opinion on that. We don't have a stance, a collective body of believers stance on that. And that's on purpose. Why? So that we can remain unified as a church. Because at Grace, we do not insist on a unanimous belief about all things. In fact, here's our goal. Here's what we seek to do. When I think about being a pastor, knowing I want to invest my life in this place for as long as the Lord will allow me to do it, this is what I dream of. And this is what the elders want to build as well. We seek to build a corner of the kingdom unified, not by a unanimous belief in all things, but by unanimous belief in the saving work of Jesus Christ. We understand. And we're not going to try to get everyone in this room and watching online and who will be here on Easter to agree about all the things. But when we take communion at grace, it doesn't mean that we agree on what communion means. It doesn't mean that we agree on how to define baptism. It doesn't mean that we agree on all the secondary and tertiary issues and all the lines that we're supposed to draw. It doesn't mean that. What it means is we have a unanimous belief in the person and work of Jesus Christ, that he is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you believe that, you are welcome to take communion here, and it is a show of unity to do so. And as we move forward as a church and we continue to grow as a church, we've got to maintain this as one of our guiding ethics. That's so important to us, it leads our statement of faith online. So here's what we're going to do. In a few minutes, I'm going to pray. And then Kyle's going to come up and he's going to guide us through communion. As we do that, it is a very intentional show of unity under the banner of Christ. And one of my favorite things to do is to sit right here in this front row on communion Sunday and look at all the people who walk by me and be grateful for you and marvel that you're. And wonder why you choose to listen to me sometimes. I love Communion Sunday because I get to see the body of believers. I get to see my church. And as you guys look at each other to your left and to your right, as you stand in line and you look at the other people who are taking communions and you come and you take it from the elders and you take communion yourself, know that besides you, you have brothers and sisters in Christ. And to have fellowship with you and to love you and to worship with you and to go to church with you, we don't need to believe all the things about all the things. We just need to believe in who Jesus was and what he did. And under the banner of Christ, we're going to bring as many people possible with us as we go see him. That's what we're going to do as a church. So let's let communion this morning be a thing that solidifies our unity and our commitment to one another as people under the banner of Christ who treasure the fact that we come from all these different places and all these different places have beauty to add here. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for this morning, for the way that you love us, for the way that you care for us. God, we are sorry for the way our churches divide and break and crack. God, I pray that there would not be a spirit at grace that seeks for disunity and division, but that we would champion holding things with an open hand, that we would be a people who would learn from all the shoulders that we stand on, not just a subset of the ones that we encountered first. Lord, we lift up the other churches in Raleigh this morning and around the world who are celebrating Palm Sunday, getting ready to celebrate Easter. We pray that our voices would go up as one next Sunday morning and that heaven would delight in the praise of your people here. Lord, make us stronger as a church. Unify us under the banner of Christ, our love for him and our desire to see other people come to know him. God, we love you and we need you. And we trust you. In Jesus' name, amen.