Sermons tagged with John

All right, well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. It's so good to see all of you. Thank you for being here. Like Michelle said, for part three of our series in John, as we've gone into the series, I've been trying to remind you and encourage you every week to grab one of the reading plans that's on the information table on your way out if you don't have one already. Those are also available online. I'm encouraging you to do that, to read along with us, because even if you come every week, if you don't miss a sermon or you catch up online, which by the way, if you're watching or listening online, thanks so much for doing that. But even if you don't miss a sermon through this whole series, it's going to take us to the week after Easter, you still, if you hear all of them, are only getting acquainted with Jesus through the book of John from my perspective. And that's not good for you. You need to read it on your own. Get your own perspective with Jesus. Get your own sense of what he's going through and how he's experiencing life and how you can learn from him before you come and I muck it up on Sundays. You are smart adults and you need to analyze that for yourself. So please be reading along with us as we go through the book of John. This morning we arrive at one of my favorite characters or figures in the Bible, a guy named John the Baptist, which just for the record so nobody has to feel silly, John the disciple, the disciple John wrote the book of John. John the Baptist is a different John. And in the book of John, we get more information about John the Baptist than any of the other three gospels, okay? So about John, I told you last week that Jesus says about John the Baptist that he's the greatest man ever born of a woman, which means he's the greatest man to ever live besides Jesus himself in Jesus's opinion. That's a big deal, which I think begs the immediate question, why would Jesus say that about John? What was it about John the Baptist that made him the greatest man to ever live? It's a question that I posed to you last week and invited you to go ahead and begin thinking about. I don't know if you spent any time thinking about it. I'm sure all the margins of your week were devoted to this singular question and you thought about nothing else. So thanks for being a good church partner and coming back ready. So I've got an answer that I want to propose to you this morning. And I will admit, this is my answer. It's my best guess on why Jesus thought John the Baptist was the greatest man to ever live. It's very likely a layered answer. It's entirely possible I could get to heaven one day and Jesus would go, Nate, why have you been teaching John the Baptist that way your whole life, man? Like you messed it up. But I hope not, and I think that we're on the right track with what we're going to look at today. To understand the greatness of John, I think we need to understand and recognize one of the most sneaky and pernicious lies that we have in our culture. It's such a sneaky lie that I would be willing to bet that 100% of the room at different points in our lives has fallen into it. I would be willing to bet that a significant portion of the room is still somewhat ensnared in it. We see this lie. I can see it in my life. I can see exactly how it happened. I got a degree in pastoral ministries, and then I got married and was going to go to seminary, and then God kind of redirected my life and said, I want you to teach for a little while. So we were living in Columbia, South Carolina for the first year of our marriage. And then it became clear that I probably shouldn't be a pastor. The going thought was maybe I wasn't kind enough to be a pastor, which I'm so grateful that's changed. And don't laugh so hard, man. And so I thought, I need to pursue teaching. I like to communicate. Maybe I don't have, maybe I need some work there, whatever. I need to pursue teaching. And so I got a job back home outside of Atlanta teaching. And I was teaching high school Bible. And I was actually, I was helping coach football. And I wasn't expecting this career, but I'm in the middle of it. And I'm trying to figure out what's next, right? When you're in your career, you go, what's next? What am I going to do next? That's always the question. When I talk to my friends, I ask them like, hey, what do you do? All right, well, what's next for you? How's that going? What's the next thing? Like, what are you going to settle into? We're always thinking about what do we want our life to look like five and 10 years from now. So we're always planning for that. And so as I'm teaching Bible and coaching football, I'm trying to figure out what's next for me. And I became really good friends with the head football coach, a guy named Coach Robert McCready. He was a recon Marine in Vietnam, and he was a bad joker, man. He was a great dude, and I loved being friends with him. He called everybody baby. And he was convinced that I was supposed to be the next head football coach there at the school. He was making me the coordinator and giving me different opportunities. And he said, baby, I'm going to give this team to you one day, okay? But I didn't know if that was true. I certainly wanted it to be true. It looked fun. But I also thought I don't want to be looking around and having to call everybody boss for my entire career. So I actually went to UGA to pursue a master's in education. I started that at UGA. A lot of people don't know that about me, but I actually did because I thought, well, if this is my career, then this is what I'm going to pursue. And then God changed gears. I was at a coffee with my pastor one day, and my pastor said, I'm going to offer you a job. I don't know what it is, but don't sign your teacher contract. And he came back to me with the job. I was at that church for seven years, and then I was here. So that's the story. But what I see in my story is something that I think that is common to all of us. You go to high school, and people ask you, where are you going to go to college? You go to college, and people ask you, what are you going to do? And they start asking you, who are you going to marry, and what's your family going to look like? And what they're always asking you is, what's your life going to look like in five years? What do you want to be true of you in five to ten years? And so you just put your head down and you get to work and you start doing the thing, right? I had no intention in my life ever of being a head football coach or of being a school teacher or an administration. That was never a thought growing up, but I found myself in this career, and I thought, well, I need to take the next steps, right? Because when you get into your career and you start paying those bills, however they start getting paid, you get used to a standard of life. And you start looking around at the people that you grew up with, and you go, oh, their houses are bigger than mine. I need to get on it. Or you go, I have the biggest house. I've done well. Right? Or you look at your coworkers and you're looking at the things that they're getting and the kinds of cars that they're driving and you look at the people around you that you go to church with and you look at the standard of life that they have and the vacations that they take and the clothes that their kids wear and then as they get older, the types of cars that their kids drive and it's just this big big competition, and we put our heads down, and we make the money, and we do the thing, and we pursue the career, and we're providing for the family, right, as we achieve the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And before you know it, we're 20, 30 years into our life, and we're never even sure if this is really what we wanted. I didn't even want to be a coach or an administrator, but I was going to take the steps to climb the ladder like I needed to because that's what you do, right? Or for others, for others, I was talking to my wife, Jen, about this this week and talking to her about this lie, this way that we just put our head down and we don't really think about anything else and we just begin building this life without ever really defining what we're looking for. I said, if you're going to believe this lie, what does it look like for you? Because she's never been really career driven. She's always wanted to be a wife and a mom and a homemaker. That's what she's always wanted to do. And so I asked her, what does it look like for you to fall into this? And she said, well, maybe it looks kind of like the Pinterest-y or the Instagram life to this desire to have this perfect home where every room in your home is postable, right? Where like, it's got, you have to have white and there has to be light flooding in and there has to be some color and gray somewhere. And then you take a picture of it and then you like, it's blessed. And then that's good, right? Like that's, that's, that's the life that we want. Like that's everywhere. And if we don't watch it, we get caught up in, I just want that house that will be good in the picture. I want the family that looks good in the picture. And so we pour our lives into building that. I've seen other people back off of career and invest in family. I've seen people deprioritize careers so that they can have opportunities to volunteer and cast a big net and have respect in the community and influence in the community. And listen, none of these things are inherently bad. It is not bad to be ambitious and build a career. It is not bad to love family and build a home that is a retreat. It is not bad to pull back from those things and exert your influence in other places. None of those things are inherently bad. But here's the lie, and here's what happens. As I think about this way that we go through life, where without even thinking, we just jump right in, and we start building this thing. Here's what I want us to realize this morning. We are all building our own kingdoms. All of us here in this room are kingdom builders. We're all kingdom builders. And all of us, to one degree or another, entirely or in part, are building our own kingdoms, right? We are kings and queens of our little quarter-acre lot, of our very own fiefdom. And this is the thing. It's that old phrase, right? Get all you can, can all you get, and sit on your can. That's what we do. That's what we're trying. We just build up as much as we can, and then we protect it from everybody else. And it's our kingdom. And now the family that I projected out 10 years from now, I have it, and it's perfect, and it's what I wanted. The career that I projected out, I have it, and it's what I wanted. And so we go through life, we work as hard as we can, we wake up in the morning thinking about it and we build our kingdom because all of us are kingdom builders. And this, when you think about it, is really the American dream. The American dream says everybody gets a kingdom. Everybody gets a kingdom. When this phrase was coined in the early 1900s or thereabouts, this idea of the American dream, there were places where you could grow up across the world and you never had a hope of building your own kingdom. You only ever had the option to build someone else's kingdom. But if you could get to America, the land of opportunity, now you can build your own kingdom. And so what we've done with our culture is we've produced generation after generation of kingdom builders. And we're all building our own kingdom, and we very rarely stop to think about whose kingdom we're building and why we're building it. And this, I think, is what helps us understand the greatness of John. Because John was a kingdom builder too. John the Baptist built a really respectable, successful kingdom. To understand John's kingdom, we should really understand a little bit more about the Jewish educational system. I'm going to try to not bore you with this. This stuff is fascinating to me. Hopefully it's interesting to you. If you were a little kid born at the time of Christ, then you would start elementary school at about five years old. And from five to 10, everybody went to elementary school. And you studied the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And during those five years, your goal was to memorize the first five books of the Bible by the age of 10. I'm not making that up. That's Jewish tradition tells us that that's what they did. And so if you made it to the end and you were a good student and you learned it and you showed some aptitude and you knew your Torah, then at the age of 10 or 11, really, you would graduate to a middle school called Beth Medrash. And you would go to that. And then what would happen is if you were a female, then you would learn, you would focus Deuteronomy and Psalms and you would be the worship leader in your home and in the synagogues. If you were a dude, then you would focus on the rest of the Old Testament being taught to you by a rabbi or a teacher in the synagogue. If at any point in this process you weren't keeping up with your studies, you weren't doing very well, you kind of flushed out or you couldn't memorize or it was just hard for you or whatever it was, then they would say, that's great, that's no problem, go home and learn a trade and be godly doing that. But if you can stick with it, stick with it. Then at the age of 13, you would take a break. And you would go home, and you would continue your studies privately while you learned the family trade, right? This is why we say that Jesus was a carpenter, because his dad was a carpenter, and you learned his family trade. Except for that carpenter thing is sneaky, because the Greek word there is tekton, which could mean carpenter, and it could also mean stonemason. And since Nazareth is surrounded by three stone quarries and no trees, it's very likely that Jesus was a mason and not a carpenter. So some of you need a new bumper sticker. But you would go home and you would learn the family trade, right? You would learn to do what your dad did, and then you would continue in your studies. And then around the age of 15, if you really thought you had potential, if you really thought you had what it took, then you would go and you would find a rabbi. A rabbi is just a Jewish word for teacher. You would go and you would find a rabbi, and you would go to him and you would say, can I follow you? Can I follow you? And what you're saying when you're asking the rabbi, can I follow you? What you're saying is, can I be who you are? The rabbi was somebody who had what we would call a successful ministry, whether that's a church or speaking ministry or whatever you want to parallel it to. Now, a rabbi had a successful ministry and was respected as what we would think of as a Christian leader or a religious leader in the community. And so you're going to him and you're going, can I become who you are? Do you think I have what it takes? Can I follow you? And the rabbis would have different answers for this. Sometimes they would say, well, tell you what, follow me for a couple of weeks and we'll see how it goes and then we'll talk about it. Others would quiz them. I've heard as an example, somebody would go, okay, Amos quotes the book of Deuteronomy seven times. What are the quotes, and what do they mean? And you'd have to know your stuff, right? And if you had what it took, if the rabbi saw something in you, then he would say, yeah, you can follow me. And that began the most intense internship program the world has ever known, probably. And from ages 15 to about 30, you followed this rabbi. You followed him every day. You listened to the way that he prayed. You listened to what he taught. You watched how he interacted with other people. You asked him questions. You learned the Bible from him. You continued to try to learn the Old Testament, what they called the Tanakh. And the goal was, by the time you were 30, to have the whole thing memorized. That's what you had to do to be a rabbi. And so they were learning from this person day in and day out, learning ministry and learning how to love on other people. It was an intense internship program. And then, towards the end of this program, if at any point in that program you just weren't keeping up with everybody else, because rabbis would have like eight to 12 disciples, give or take, if at any point you weren't keeping up with the other disciples, they would come to you and they would go, okay, listen, you're a godly young man and I love you, but you're not able to do this anymore. Go be a godly fisherman. Go be a godly carpenter. Go be a godly mason. And you would go and you would do that. But if you were able to hang with it and continue to show aptitude and propensity, then by the age of 30, what happened is the community around them began to call them rabbi, refer to them as rabbi. The more they taught, the more they were respected, and the community would begin to refer to them as rabbi. It kind of works like an old school pastor, like back in the 80s and 90s when you got hired at a church and you were a pastor. Everybody called you pastor, but at some point or another, they actually start to mean it, right? And you're their pastor. It worked the same way with the rabbi. Eventually, in that community, you became that rabbi. And then, once you became a rabbi, only ones that were in the upper echelon of all of the community of rabbis were the ones that were able to have disciples. So I want you to understand that to be a rabbi that could have a disciple, first of all, to be a rabbi at all is our equivalent of going to like an Ivy League school. To be a rabbi at all, this is the cream of the crop, all right? These are Harvard and MIT and Yale graduates. This is as smart as it gets. This is as sharp as it gets. And then to rise above the rest of those to become a rabbi where you could actually have disciples is the upper crust. And so when we meet John the Baptist, what does he have? Disciples. What does that tell us about John the Baptist? He was a sharp dude. We know other things about John the Baptist. He lived in the wilderness. He wore camel fur and he ate locusts covered in honey, so he's kind of a nut job. But he was like an eccentric professor, right? But he was super smart and he was really accomplished. And by every measure, John the Baptist was successful, wildly successful, and wildly respected. He even had a divine appointment. About him, there were prophecies that John the Baptist would be the voice crying out in the wilderness, paving the way for the Messiah. God gave him a divine role to be in Israel at the time of Christ, getting the rest of the nation of Israel ready for the arrival of the Messiah. He was the voice crying out in the wilderness, and by all accounts, wildly successful. When we meet him, he's baptizing in the Jordan River, and it says throngs of people are going out to meet him. He had a following. He had, he was the closest thing ancient Israel had to a megachurch pastor. He had this big following. He was the upper echelon of the religious community. Everybody was listening to him. Everybody was paying attention to what he said. He had the eyes of the nation of Israel on him. If he were around today to make a crude comparison, he would be one of these megachurch pastors talking to thousands of people at once with broadcasts at a bunch of different campuses. By all stretch, by any measure, John the Baptist was a wild success. And then this thing happened, and Jesus shows up. And when Jesus shows up, people begin leaving John's ministry and going to Jesus's ministry. And his disciples come to him one day, and they go, hey, people who are following you are now going and following Jesus. What do you want to do about that? They're telling him, hey, your kingdom's falling apart. This thing that you've been building, this thing that you've devoted your whole life to, he studied until he was 30 for the right to do this. He's devoted his entire life to do it. And then he launched it and it turns out he's good at it and it's successful. And he has tons of people following him. And make no mistake about it, John the Baptist was a man. He was a dude with an ego. And it would be incredibly tempting to look at those things and say, look at what I've done. You cannot tell me that he didn't derive a sense of his identity from what he had done and from what he had accomplished. You can't tell me that he didn't derive who he was from those things, right? In the same way that when we build our kingdoms, we derive our sense of identity from those. We derive our sense of value and worth from the things that we've built in our life. And so from the outside in, his worth and his sense of self had to be wrapped up in the things that he had accomplished, which were by all measures successful. And then his disciples come and they say, hey, someone's messing with your kingdom, man. Jesus is taking your followers and he's building his own kingdom. Yours is starting to fall apart. What do you want to do about that? And every person in history says what they want to do about that is take measures to protect their kingdom, right? But John's answer to that question, to me, shows us his greatness. In John chapter 3, on the screen we're going to start in verse 29, but I'm going to start reading from verse 27. We see John's response to his disciples who are saying, hey, your kingdom is falling apart. What do you want to do about it? And John says answer. His disciples say, hey, Jesus is taking your followers, man. He's diminishing your kingdom and he's growing his kingdom. What do you want to do about that? And he says, guys, do you not understand? Jesus is the groom. I'm the best man. On the wedding day, when the groom shows up, the best man doesn't stand there and get jealous that the groom's getting all the attention. He stands there and is the head cheerleader for the groom and everything that's happening for him. I am not the point here, guys. This is not what I wanted. This is the right thing. They need to go to him. He is the groom, and everybody is right to go follow him. In fact, what are you two still doing here? Go be with Jesus. My job has come. I've accomplished my task. He says, Jesus must increase and I must decrease. They said, he's taking your kingdom and he's making his kingdom bigger. And he says, yeah, his kingdom needs to get bigger and my kingdom needs to get smaller. And what he's telling his disciples there is, I think what makes him great. I have always been building Jesus's kingdom. I have always been building Jesus's kingdom. It was never my own. These were never my followers. These were never my people. It was never my education. It's never been my ministry. It has always, only, ever been Jesus's. And now that he's here, of course I'm going to give him what's his. I've been rallying these people for him. The whole point is for him to increase and me to decrease. The point is not for me to keep getting bigger. The point is not for me to continue to grow my kingdom. The whole point of this whole exercise has been to build his kingdom. Every verse he ever memorized, every person he ever spoke to, everybody he ever loved on, everyone he was ever patient with, every evening he spent in prayer, every morning he got early, those were all to build Jesus' kingdom, not his own kingdom. And I think John, in history, uniquely understood what it was to be a kingdom builder who was all about the business of building the kingdom of Jesus and not his own. And that's what made him great. And so that brings us to an obvious question for you. Whose kingdom are you building? Are you building God's kingdom? Are you building your own kingdom? Whose kingdom are you building? And I know that's a hard question. I know that's a tough question. It feels like an unfair question. Because the answer is, of course, of course we're all building our own kingdoms in some way. And if we've never thought about it before, and we've never opened our eyes to this lie that we just jump into life and begin to build things for a reason that we don't understand, if we've never drawn ourselves back from it and gone, wait, what exactly am I doing here? Then this is a really difficult question, but I would submit that either in part or in whole, all of us are building our own kingdom to some degree. I would ask you, whose kingdom are you building? Even as I ask this question of myself, just to be completely transparent with you and not be the pastor that's just making people feel bad. If you were to ask me, why are you working hard to build grace? Is the answer because I love you and I love the people that you bring here and I care for the souls that are represented in this room every Sunday morning and I love God and I want desperately for those souls to be knit with God so that everybody who walks in here can experience the peace that it is to walk with God and see families strengthened and kids grow up in those families and go out and be kingdom builders. Is that what motivates me? Yeah, absolutely that's what motivates me. But is there a chance that why I work so hard to build this kingdom is because I want to get to the age of 45 or 50 and go, look what I did? Yeah. Of course there is. Of course there is. And I'll be honest with you. I don't know how to suss out those motives. I don't know how to stand up here with a pure heart and be like, I'm doing all of this for God and none of this for Nate. I pray against it every day. The problem is I have an enormous ego, so I really pray hard. Your motives are mixed too. But I would ask you to press into that question. Listen, this is a successful room. Successful folks in this room. Smart people in this church. The things that you have accomplished, who have you accomplished them for? From this point on, as you continue to build, who are you building for? And so as we confront that question, we have to ask, what does it look like to build God's kingdom? What would it look like for me at 20 or at 30 or at 50 or 60 or 70 to make the decision, now, more than ever, I'm going to try to build God's kingdom. What does it look like to build God's kingdom? And just so we know, as we answer the question, whose kingdom are you building? Are you building God's or are you building your own? Jesus tells us in Matthew, don't store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourself treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy and thieves do not break in and steal. Don't invest your life in temporary things that are going away. Stephen, the worship before I ever got up here was talking about the temporary nature of this life and that what lasts for eternity are the souls of others, is the kingdom of God. And so do we want to invest our life in the things that matter for eternity or the things that only matter right now and even then not really? And let's be reminded that there's only one kingdom. There's only one kingdom that brings us a peace that passes understanding. There's only one kingdom that enables us to walk in joy. There's only one kingdom that says to death, where is your sting? There's only one kingdom that takes the tragedy out of funerals. There's only one kingdom that gives us a hope for eternity. There's only one kingdom worth dying for. Which one do you want to build? Yours or his? If we want to build his, what does that look like? Well, when John was building it, to me, it looked like holding things with an open hand. We're going to work hard. We're going to build things. We're going to build with our life. But the things we build, we hold with an open hand. And we say, these things were never mine. When Jesus comes to John and he starts taking followers from John, he says, I need these people now. They're going to be a part of my kingdom. Did John hold on to them and resent it? Or did he go, yeah, they were yours all along. They were never mine. He held them with an open hand. And so to build God's kingdom doesn't look like stopping our ambition. We'd be as ambitious and as smart and as hungry as we possibly can. But as we build those things, the things that we accrue, we hold with an open hand. And when Jesus says, I need that, we say, that was yours to begin with. It can look like the switch that happened in my dad's heart. And I'm going to brag about my dad now. He'll listen to this online and feel good and make him look really good. But I could also do plenty of sermons that would make him feel bad. So let's just be honest about that. But when he graduated college, he went and he got a job as a CPA. And he was a really driven guy. And his goal before he was 30 was to be a millionaire, which is a bigger deal in the late 70s than it is now. But he said, I want to be a millionaire. And that's what drove him, right? But somewhere in his 30s, God got a hold of his heart. And his thinking changed. And he said, I no longer want to be a millionaire by the time I'm 30. I want to give away a million dollars before I turn 40. I want to be a conduit of God's generosity. And then he made partner. And there's been some other iterations, but he owns his own firm now, and that firm is a conduit to God's generosity. They do for free the finances for several nonprofits. Dad's probably going to be mad at me for saying this, but they have a couple pastors on their payroll that he's simply supporting because he doesn't want them to not have options later in life. He sat on the boards for some missions boards and launched missions organizations and helps people all over the world with what they're doing. He is a conduit. His company is a conduit of God's generosity because something switched in him and he realized this isn't for me. This is for God. So here's my company. I'm going to work as hard as I can at it. Take what you need. He's open-handed with it. To be open-handed as a church. I think about this. I think I made him uncomfortable the first service. I'll do it two times in a row. Kyle, I've known Kyle, our student pastor, for a couple of years now, three, four years. I think he has the integrity and the gifts and the ability and the hunger and the unique makeup to do big things in God's kingdom. I think he's going to have great opportunities in his career. It wouldn't shock me at all to see Kyle become a senior pastor one day and go on to bigger and better from this. Not one little bit. And so while he's here, we're going to pour into him all we can. We're going to build him up and develop him. And I'm going to teach him everything I know, which is not much. It should take about the next six months. And we're going to do everything we can to get him ready for whatever the next opportunity is, understanding that it might not be in this place, and understanding that at some point or another, there's a very good chance that Jesus is going to go, I'm ready, I need him now over here. And we as a church are going to go, that's great, he was never ours. Even though he's going to leave a big void here, whenever this happens, we don't care because he's not ours and we want to see God's kingdom built wherever he goes. This is how we hold the people in our life as well. This is how we hold our time. I see people at the church. Y'all, we have one lady at the church who was a, she's been an elder for basically a vast majority of the existence of the church. She keeps up with the website. She's here early every Sunday morning. She works for a non-profit in her free time. If I email her at 11 o'clock at night, I will have an answer by six in the morning. She is on top of it. She does so much stuff for behind the scenes at this church that she has with her time and with her energy and with her talent said, here's an open hand, I want to build your kingdom. It can look like it at any place and at any time. So my question to you this morning is, whose kingdom are you building? Whose kingdom do you want to build? And what would it look like for you in your life to be wholly dedicated to building God's kingdom? And with that, what things are you holding with a closed hand that we're not allowing him to use? What things are you protecting that you haven't said, if you need it, God, it's yours? And then, what would happen here if we had a church full of kingdom builders? If everybody here quit being so concerned, and just like anybody else with their fiefdom and their kingdom and their quarter acre lot, if we quit being concerned with our kingdom and started getting concerned with God's kingdom, what kind of things would God do here with our collective efforts to build his kingdom in this place? We're about to sing a song about building a kingdom and there's a line in there that says, let the darkness fear. Let the enemy fear what will happen here if we determine within ourselves that we are going to be builders of God's kingdom and not our own. And look what can happen if a whole church will say yes to that. That's what I want grace to be. Let's pray. Father, you're so good to us. We acknowledge that you've gifted us in so many ways, God. Some of us are smart. Some of us are charming. Some of us are friendly. Some of us are hospitable. Some of us are funny. Some of us are servants, God. Each of us brings a different set of gifts to the table. And God, we acknowledge that they are your gifts and they are given to build your kingdom. And I pray that we would use those things that you've given us, not to build our own kingdom, God, but to build yours. Help us be more like your servant, John the Baptist. Help us to embrace what it means to decrease while you increase. God, give us the courage to be kingdom builders. Help us to identify, give us the discernment to see the things in our life that we hold too tightly and give us the courage to let go of those things. Let us, Father, live our lives for you, for eternity and for your kingdom. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate, and I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for coming out on this holiday weekend. You guys didn't get the memo that you're supposed to be at, like, cabins or something, so you came here instead. And this is great. If you want to know how to excite a pastor, this is it, man. There's also space at the first service, if you'd like. It's good to see all of you here. This is the second part of our series in John. Last week, we opened up, and instead of just diving right into the text, I spent a week giving you some context for what's happening in the book of John and for why we are choosing as a church to focus on the book of John for this many weeks. We're going to carry this through the week after Easter. So we're going to camp out in this for a while. And so my whole goal last week was to get you excited enough about the book of John to go and to read it on your own. So we have a reading plan that we've developed. It's on the information table that you can get on your way out. I hope that if you were here last week, you grabbed one of those, or maybe you looked online and found that. If you don't have one, they're there this week. We are really encouraging you to read along with us as we go through John. One of the huge reasons to do this, if you think about this, this is a dangerous thing. If you come every week and you listen to the sermons and this is the picture that you get of John, but you never read it on your own, then I have bad news for you. You are only getting my perspective of your Jesus through John, and that's not good for you, okay? You are mostly smarter than me. Some of you are not, but most of you are smarter than me, and you need to process this on your own, okay? So that's what we're all going to do is dive into John together. This week, we open up the text, and we start the first 18 verses of the book of John, which are a sweeping narrative of the grandeur of Christ and who he is, why he came, how he's going to do it, and what that means to us. So those are the things that we're going to discuss today. This passage, John 1, 1 through 18, has been called by theologians one of the greatest adventures of religious thought ever achieved. It's a grand passage, and I'm nervous, if I'm honest, about not doing it the appropriate justice because of all that it is and all that it means to us. If you wanted to just do one sermon from the book of John, to just read one portion of the book of John and say, what is the message in John? This is the portion that you should read. John chapter 1, 1 through 18. As you read through it and it tells us about who the person of Jesus is, what he came to do, how he came to do it, and what it means to us. If you only hear one message from the whole series, I would say that this is probably the most important one because this message and this passage encapsulates all that it is that John wants to address for us. To help us understand this passage and what's going on here and why John approaches it the way that he does, I want to tell you about a trip that I had earlier this year. Earlier this year in January, my wife Jen and I took our daughter Lily to Disney World, okay? And this is the racket that Disney World has going on. We took her because if you take somebody before they're three, then their ticket is free and you get to save money. This is a great deal, right? Except my parents went, they took us. And so there's four adults paying for everything to go down there and the trip and then everything inside the park. And the money that I had set aside to pay for things in the park, I get to the end of the day, the first day, and Jen goes, how much money do we have left in our budget? I said, none, no money. We have no money left in our budget. We're not doing anything tomorrow. Like that's it, you know? But listen, we saved 200 bucks, right? Because we went early, a bunch of dummies. Disney's genius, man. So we go down there and I actually, I rehearsed the sermons before I subject you to them. And this one was always running long and I figured out it was because I was so excited about the Disney trip that I was telling you guys, I was going to tell you guys like all these details that you didn't need to know. So ask me afterwards, I'll be thrilled to talk with you about Disney. But the thing that I do want you to know is before we went, we did the best we could to give Lily some context for the trip, right? She's almost three years old. She's liked Mickey and Minnie her, her, literally her entire life. When she was a baby, she would watch them and like somehow they would bring her peace. And I'd be like, this is voodoo, man. Walt Disney, like I'm already spending money and And I will be for the next 18 years. But she loves it. So she was excited to go. Mickey and Minnie are going to be there. I get to see them. Tigger and Pooh are going to be there. It's great. So we're talking to her about those things. We're also showing her videos. Like there's YouTube videos of the rides down there, the Dumbo ride and the teacups and the different things to give her some context for what's going to happen to try to help her understand why we're excited. We did a little countdown in the kitchen. Every day she would cut like a ring off and she would count. And this is many days till we go see Mickey. And so the whole deal, we did the best we could to kind of get her ready for what we're going to experience. And so we go down there and she does phenomenal. She's loving it. She's smiling on the first day. I actually took her on a legit roller coaster. It was probably one of the few mistakes I've made as a parent so far. And I put her on the roller coaster by telling her that it was a small train and that she was going to like it. And so then I sit her there and I have to brace her little head because it's just flapping around with the G-forces. And we get done and I'm thinking she's going to scream and cry, but we got done. And I said, Lily, did you like it? She says, uh-uh. I said, why not? And she says, it was too fast, Daddy. And I was like, well, I'm pretty happy this is a response, and not just screaming. So she did phenomenal. At about three o'clock in the afternoon, we realized, gosh, you know what? We're making such good time here that we could get everything accomplished at the Magic Kingdom in day one if we pushed it, and then we could go see someplace different the next day. And so we started talking about what do we want to do? Do we want to call it? Do we want to push? What's going on? And we decided, you know what? Let's just take it easy. Let's just let her experience this. Not push her too hard. Let's not push us too hard. We're old now. I don't want to go till eight o'clock at night anymore. And so let's just go back and rest our feet. Let's let Lily rest. And then we'll come back the next day, right? And then we'll take it easy. We'll finish up the other thing. She can repeat some things and we'll just relax and just enjoy Lily enjoying the park. And that's what we decided to do. And it was a good decision. And one of the happy accidents of that decision was we got to see the joy of anticipation with Lily because she gets back that night and she starts to talk and she's telling us about her favorite rides and she loved Small World and she loved Dumbo and she loved Aladdin and she was like, these things are my favorite and I love doing this and I love doing that. And then she woke up the next day and she's super excited about what we get to do. She can't wait to go to the park and she can't wait to ride Small World. And we're like, we got a fast pass for that, so you're in luck. So it was really cool. We got the unexpected gift of anticipation for Lily. And because of that, we get to have pictures like this. This is us on the Aladdin ride. We're not even riding it yet. She's just excited that she's about to ride it. And I'm excited that she's excited. It was this great, genuine moment, right? Because she knew what was going to happen and she was really looking forward to it. Without anticipation or context, day two Lily doesn't happen. So we've got day one Lily with no context for what's about to happen to her. Just kind of some base excitement, but not really unsure what's going to happen. And then we have day two Lily who is super pumped because she knows what's up, right? Okay. As we approach John, and that's good. As we approach John, we have day one Lily and we have day two Lily. We have a group of people who really are not sure what's going on. They have a general excitement about the idea of Jesus, but they don't know who he is. And then we've got day two, Lily, which is a group of people that are really keyed up and ready for who the Messiah is and what he came to do. And so day two, Lily, the people who knew what was going on is the Jewish community to whom John was writing. John wrote to the Jewish community and the Greek community. And to the Jewish community, when you tell them in the first century AD, hey, the Messiah is here, they instantly know what that means. They know because they have a knowledge of the Old Testament. They have been for thousands of years now, generation after generation, looking forward to the coming Messiah. Every generation waits to see, is the Messiah going to be coming now? Is he going to come in our lifetime? They know the prophecies that he's going to be Emmanuel, God with us, that he will be King of Kings, Lord of Lords, that he will sit on the throne of David, that he will come from the city of David. They know all the stuff. And so when you go to a Jewish person in first century AD and you say, hey, the Messiah is here, they're day two, Lily, man. They're fired up. They know exactly what's going on. But the Greeks, they're day one, Lily. You go to them and you say, hey, good news, guys, the Messiah is here. And they're like, that's great. What's that? They have no context. They've not been expecting a Messiah. They don't know who Jesus is or what makes him a big deal. And because John wants them to understand how big of a deal it is that the Messiah arrives, he starts his gospel off in a different way than the other three gospels. See, I went back and I looked at the other three gospels, and when I looked at how Jesus was introduced, what I picked up on was the fact that in the other gospels, Jesus is presented as the Messiah. But in John's gospel, he's presented as God. The other gospels present Jesus as the Messiah. They just start off and they just say, hey, here's the genealogies. This is Jesus. He's here. He's our Messiah, and let's go. But John's gospel doesn't start off like that. John presents Jesus first as God and doesn't talk about him as the Messiah until verse 14, which we're going to get to. So this morning, we're going to move through this passage, look at who Jesus is, why he came, how he intends to accomplish the mission that he came for, and what that means for us. And so to define who Jesus is, rather than starting out with Jesus as the Messiah, John starts out like this in some of the most profound verses and impactful verses in Scripture. This is just packed with stuff. He writes this. John 1 starts out this way. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him, not anything made that was made. In the beginning was the word. So right away, the word is capitalized. It's a capital W in the Bible. So he is giving, he is personifying that word. He is saying this is representative of an entity, of a person that I'm going to tell you about. So his introduction of Jesus is the word. In the beginning, before time began at creation, there was this entity that I'm now calling the word, and it was with God, and it was God. So right away, what he tells us is the person that I'm about to tell you about was not created by God and therefore subservient to him. No, he was God and is not subservient to God the Father, but is on equal footing with him. He introduces the Trinity or the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Spoiler alert, because we don't talk about the Holy Spirit enough and because Jesus does in the Gospel of John, after this series, we're going to spend some weeks on the Holy Spirit and who he is, which should be a really comfortable series for a lot of former Presbyterians. I'm super excited about it. But he introduces Jesus like this. He says, he is the word. He was at creation. And the Jewish mind goes back to the account in Genesis, to creation. And when you look at the creation account, how did God create the earth? What did he do? He spoke. The word, his word, the word of God is the mechanism through which he wrought all of creation. Do you understand that? Jesus is the activation and the power of the Creator God in bringing about the formation of creation. It says, let there be light, and there was light. Let there be animals, and there's animals. Let there be trees, and there was trees. And it is God's Word that activates all of creation and brings about all of creation. So John is placing Jesus back in the creation narrative for both the Jew and the Greek to say, in the beginning, there was this entity, and without this entity, nothing was made. And he is the mechanism through which everything was made. So he says right away, the person that I'm going to tell you about and the rest of this Bible is divine. And he is as divine as God the Father ever was. He was not created by and therefore subservient to. He is God. He was there from the beginning. And it's important to note that when John says this and he tells us who this Jesus is that he's going to tell us about, that he is telling us who Jesus is just as much as he is telling us who he isn't. He is telling us who Jesus is just as much as he is telling us who he isn't. We see later in the gospels, Jesus asks this question of his disciples. He says, who do you say that I am? He says, some people say that I'm a prophet. Others say that I'm a teacher. Through history, we've seen people label Jesus as a moral representative, a moral guide of some sort. And Peter says, you are Christ, the Son of God. And Jesus says, yes, and on this faith, I will build my church. Okay? On this rock, I will build my church. Those questions about who Jesus is have regurgitated and rung through all of history. Those have always existed about who is this person, Jesus of Nazareth, that existed. And we've seen different cultures and even different religions and different offshoots of even Christianity explain Jesus as he was a prophet, minimize him to a prophet or minimize him to he was a good teacher or he was a good moral representative. And so we've seen efforts throughout history to reduce Jesus to less than God by calling him a prophet or a teacher so we can accept his teachings, but we don't have to accept his divinity. And John right away says, no, that's not going to work. Which by the way, Jesus, this person that we are worshiping as God, did claim to actually be God. So you can't call a dude who is lying about being God a good moral guy or a nice teacher, right? He either is or he isn't. There's no in-between. And John takes this in-between away from us right away. He says, he is divine. He was not created by and subservient to. He cannot be reduced to prophet. He cannot be reduced to teacher. He cannot be reduced to moral guide. He is divine. That's the person I'm going to tell you about. And then he moves into this next series where he talks about John. John the Baptist is coming. Next week, I'm going to preach all about John the Baptist. I'm really excited to do that because John the Baptist is one of my favorite figures in the Bible because Jesus says of John the Baptist that he is one of the greatest people, not one of, he is the greatest man ever born of a woman, which means that Jesus thought John the Baptist was the greatest man to ever live. So this week, I'd love for you to be thinking about why in the world did Jesus say that about John the Baptist? Because that's the question we're going to come back next week and answer. So I'm not going to focus on those verses this week. We're going to get to those next week. After those verses, he's told us the who. I'm going to tell you about a person who is divine, let there be no doubt about it, and this is what he's come to do. This is his mission. This is why he's here. And we can sum up his mission in verses four and five. This is what he came to do. It says, in this person that I'm talking about, in him was life. And the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it. And he goes down for several verses all the way up through to verse 16, through verse 15. And he talks about the light and what it means and what it came to do. And what we find out is that Jesus shines light in the darkness, that the darkness will not overcome it, that he is the light of the world. And that if we place our faith in this light, if we believe in him and what he came to do and who he claims to be, then we will be children of God and we are a part of God's kingdom. And this is what Jesus came to do, to be a light in the world and to claim his children back into God's family. That's what he came to do. And this theme, this idea of light runs through the book of John. So I'm not going to belabor it this morning because we're going to come back to it as we go through the series, but there is a theme of light throughout the book of John. If you read it and you pay attention, what you'll see is a bunch of different instances where the disciples go to Jesus and they go, hey, this thing is happening. Why is this happening? Shouldn't we do this? And Jesus' response is, no, in the daylight or in the day or in the light, this is how we behave because it will not always be light, but right now it is because I am here. So it's this theme that runs through John. And last week I pointed out to you that when Judas Iscariot, the disciple that betrayed Christ, does the thing that he does, that there's this ominous sentence in the text that says, and it was night because the daylight has changed. So this theme of day and night and light and darkness moves through the gospel of John. And so he's introducing that theme here, that Jesus is the light of the world. But what I want us to understand this morning is that Jesus came to shed light in the dark places and that the darkness will not overcome it. And what does that mean for us? Well, I think that the light that Jesus sheds is twofold. First, he sheds light on who we are and our ingrained need for him. He sheds light on you and your sin in your life. Before we know Jesus, we have this loose understanding that if there is a God, that he's probably not very happy with me for some of the decisions that I've made in my life. And then when we see the light of Jesus next to us, and we read through the gospel, and we see who he is, and we compare ourselves to his standards, what we realize in the light of Jesus, in the face of his light, is that we fall woefully short of the standards that Jesus establishes for us, that we can never be as good as he is, and he sheds light on the sin in our life. I even had somebody this week in my men's Bible study make the comment that, man, I'm really learning that even the good things that I do as I suss them out and figure out the motives that push me to those places, those are gross and selfish motives that really negate the good things that I'm doing. And I'm like, good news for you, that's Jesus's life shining in your light, showing you your desperate need for him. And the good news for us is that it's twofold. It doesn't stop at just illuminating our need for him in light of our sin, but then also illuminates his grace to us in the face of our sin. That's the twofold light of Christ. To illuminate for us our need for him because of our sin, and then to show us his grace in light of our sin. And that if we trust in that grace, we can be a part of his kingdom and rescued to heaven for all of eternity. That's the promise there by Jesus being the light. So that's why he came. That's what he came to do, to be the light of the world, to illuminate for you your need for Christ, and then to illuminate the grace that he offers in light of your need. Then we get to verse 14. In verse 14, we see the personification of Jesus. This is when we're introduced to Jesus. This is when John has gotten everyone up to speed. Now everyone is day two lily. Now everyone is ready to meet this person who has existed for all of creation, who is divine, who is the activator of creation, who is the light of the world and is coming now to shed light on us and on his grace. Now everyone has the proper context to really understand and be grateful for what happens in verse 14. This is the how. How was Jesus going to accomplish what he said he was going to accomplish? Verse 14. And the word became flesh. That's a big stinking deal. And the word, capital W, word. The person that I've been talking to you about, the divine one who has a heavenly form, has condescended to become one of us. What he's talking about here is the condescension of Christ. He's talking about the condescension of Christ. The Word became flesh. And we often have a problem with that word, condescension. We don't like to be condescended to. We're told not to condescend to others. But make no doubt about it, Jesus gave up His heavenly form to take on our form. The Word became flesh. See, only God in the history of gods and any other story and any other narrative in the history of mankind to condescend and give up his heavenly form to us. I didn't do this in the first service, but I just, I want you to see this. Revelation chapter 18 and 19. Let me tell you who Jesus is. This is Jesus. This is heavenly Jesus. In the Gospels, we see this meek and mild person who has taken on the infirmities and the frailties of humanity. He is the Lamb of God. But in Revelation 19, we see the Lion of Judah. John writes this in Revelation 19, Oh man, that's Jesus. That's heavenly Jesus. That's the one that's going to come one day and make all the sad things untrue and all the wrong things right and exact justice on those that did not honor God in their life. That's Jesus. And what I want you to understand is when John says the word became flesh, that this is the form that he's giving up to take on our form, to come and live with us, to come and be one of us, to condescend and understand our frailties and be faced with the temptations that we are faced with. And this is essential. His condescension and his taking on of flesh is essential to our understanding of salvation because unless he does that, unless he comes down and he takes on human form, he cannot rescue and reconcile us back to God. Because to qualify for a perfect sacrifice that would cover over our sins, he has to live a faultless life. He has to come down and he has to face the same temptations that we do. He has to face the same infirmities that we do. That's why the Bible tells us that if you are faced with a temptation, that you need to know that you cannot be faced with something that Jesus has never been faced with. And because he faced that temptation down for you, you now do not have to succumb to that temptation. You understand? That anything that tempts you in your life, anything that would rally against you in your life, anything that would seek to overtake you and pull you away from God in your life, that that is not too great for Jesus to overcome because he has already overcome it, because the word became flesh and he condescended to us and he gave up that heavenly form for a time to come down here and face that temptation for you so that when you faced it later, you could lean on him and know that you could be victorious. He comes and in John 11, he weeps with us in our tragedy and in our pain. He ministers to us and he prays for us. And he trains the disciples to lead his church, his kingdom, and he hands the keys of the kingdom off to them as he ascends into heaven. And his ministry on earth is the reason that we sit here over 2,000 years later and have the opportunity to learn from one of the disciples that he trained. We need the incarnation of Christ so that he could be the sacrifice for us, so that he could not only, through his example, illuminate our need for him, but through his sacrifice, illuminate his grace to our need. Do you see? We have to have the personification of Jesus in human form. We have to have his incarnation. The word has to become flesh or the whole thing falls apart. So, he gave up his heavenly form. He gave up sitting at the right hand of the Father. He is crucified on the cross where he says, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, which means my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Because for the first time in eternity, he was separated from God the Father for you. And then he says, tetelestai, it is finished. The debt is paid in full. I have accomplished what I came to accomplish. And then he passes on. We have to have the personal incarnation of Jesus for our salvation to work, for our faith to exist. It's absolutely essential. So in the beginning was the Word. That's who he is. He is God. He is as much God as anything has ever been God. He came to shed a light on your need for him and his grace in face of that need. And then he condescended to human form to take on your frailties and your infirmities so that he might die for you and make a path. And then one day he's coming back as this heavenly Jesus to rectify everything. That's who he is. That's why he came. That's how he's going to do it. And then John doesn't finish there. If he finished there, that's enough. If he just stops there and he just says, there's a God in heaven that I'm calling the word and he's going to illuminate, he's going to shed light in the dark places and the darkness will not overcome it. And he took on human form to deliver you back to heaven. If that's all we learn about him, that's enough. But John doesn't stop there. He leads into this great verse in verse 16. It's becoming one of my favorite verses in all of scripture. He writes this, and this is what it means to you. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. That word fullness there, if you look it up in the Greek, I'm not going to quote you the Greek word because it's obnoxious when pastors do that. I'm not smarter than you. I just have Google. What it means there is from his fullness, we have received grace upon grace. That word fullness means the sum total of all that God is. The sum total of all that God is. From his fullness, from the sum of all that God is, from everything that we've learned in the sweeping narrative of God, that he is divine, that he is the mode and the medium of creation, that he has wrought the creation through himself. Without him, nothing exists. He is as much God as anything has ever been God. He is the light of the world. He condescended to take on frailty for us that he might save us. And from this fullness of an understanding of exactly who this Messiah is that I am about to tell you about from the next 21 chapters, from this fullness, from the sum of all of God is, we have all received grace upon grace. And then he goes back in 17 and 18, he says, until Jesus came, everybody had to follow the law. Everybody was subjected to the law of Moses. You had to follow these rules or you didn't get in. And now that Jesus is here, what we see is that we can't follow the rules. We'll never be able to do it right. And in light of our failings, we see his grace. So we have grace upon grace. There was grace provided and what the law did for us in the Old Testament and then covered over that grace is a larger grace of our salvation where now it's not a performance-based salvation. it's just a faith-based salvation. And we look at these truths of Jesus and we go, I believe you. I think you're telling me the truth. And he says, good, then I offer you grace and I claim you to be my child. And that word grace there is an important word. The easiest understanding of grace is to get something that you don't deserve. Grace is when we receive something that we haven't earned. Mercy is when we don't get something that we do deserve, but grace is when we get something that we do not deserve. And so what we're seeing here, when we think of this grace that we receive from Jesus, our mind probably goes first to our salvation. I don't deserve my salvation. I've done nothing to earn it. I've done nothing to deserve for Jesus to condescend, for the Word to become flesh and take on my frailty so that I might know Him. I don't deserve that. He didn't have to do that for me. He did that because He loved me. That's grace, and we acknowledge that as grace. But this doesn't say just grace. It says grace upon grace. And what I want you to see this morning is that from the fullness of God, from all that Jesus is, we don't just receive salvation, although that would be enough. But I want you to see that every good and perfect thing in your life that God has given you is grace, is something that you have that you do not deserve, that you have not earned. Everything in your life that brings you joy is God's grace in your life for however long it brought you joy. All those things are God's grace. Do you understand? As I think back through my life, I remember some moments that stick out. I can remember being up at the altar for my wedding day and watching the back doors open and the sun illuminate Jen in her white dress and knowing that that was the woman I was going to marry and walk through life with. And I began to cry right away because I still couldn't believe it. That moment is God's grace. Years later, I can remember learning that we were pregnant and going to the doctor and hearing the heartbeat of Lily. That moment is God's grace. I can remember having Lily and Lily laying on Jen's chest and me hugging her and looking at this woman who's now the mother of my child. That moment is God's grace. When we get those moments, they are God's grace in our life and you have them too. And what you need to understand is your own wisdom and your own goodness didn't bring those about, those treasures that we have, those moments of joy. When we have good enough friends that we can sit around and laugh and be vulnerable and real and be comfortable and be ourselves, that's God's grace to us. We have church that we enjoy. That's God's grace. We have small group that we enjoy. That's God's grace. And we have children. That's God's grace. All the goodness that we have in our life is a result of the fullness of God acting in you to bring about grace. Things that you have that are good that we did not earn or did not bring about because of ourselves. Those are God's grace. And so my hope is that this morning as you leave, you will walk in gratitude for God's grace. That you will understand that it's the fullness of God. It's all that He is. Everything that He was. Everything that He came to do and how He came to do it. That this full understanding of God rots for you the good things in your life that you did not earn and probably do not deserve, and that those things are God's grace to you, and from his fullness we have received grace upon grace. And even those of us who are walking through the hardest of times know that God still offers grace even through those things. And from His fullness, we have all, all of us, not some of us, not the chosen ones, not the believers, all of us received grace upon grace, gift upon gift, joy upon joy, goodness upon goodness. My hope is that you will walk in gratitude for God's grace in your life as you marvel at the fullness of Him that brings that about for you. Let's pray. Father, we love You and we are amazed by you. We marvel at you. That you would allow your son to give up his heavenly form to come down here to save us, to be one of us, to model for us, to carry our griefs and our infirmities and our temptations, God. That you would allow him to die for us so that we might know you. God, I pray that there would be this progressive revelation, these just waves of understanding that kind of hit us, God, as we go through our weeks of just all the goodness that you have allowed us in our life. that we would turn in gratitude for you for this grace upon grace that you offer us. God, we are so grateful for you. I pray for the people who are in this room right now that you would be in their stresses and in their concerns and in their heartbreak and in whatever is going on in their life and that all of those things would serve to draw us more nearly to you, Father. It's in your son's name I pray these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. I'm Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here. You guys, it's a holiday weekend. I mean, for the love of Peter, you're supposed to be out doing fun stuff. You chose to come to church. I am so thrilled about that. So it's good to see all of you, and thank you for coming on this Sunday morning. This is the third part of our series, Lessons from the Gym. As a disclaimer in that video, I've had a lot of people asking me, like, why do you think you're too good for turn lanes? Okay, here's what was happening in that video, is the shot was supposed to be, Nate, let me, this is, Steve was filming this, he says, Nate, let me get a shot of you exiting the gym, like pulling away, like that's the shot that we need to get. So I'm like, okay, good. So I pull out of the gym, and then I let him get a shot of that for as long as he could, driving down the road, and then just cut into the parking lot real quick to go pick him back up and not strand him. And what does he do but put that in the video and make me look like a degenerate? So thanks, Steve. But that's the story. I do actually abide by some, not all, but some traffic laws that make sense. All right. For the first couple of weeks that we've been in this series, we've been looking at what we're calling lessons from the gym and talking about getting spiritually healthy, right? Pursuing spiritual health in our lives. And as I've thought about it, what we've really been doing and what I've really been bringing to you is as you pursue spiritual health in your life, here are some things that I'd like for you to consider or to be aware of. And so the first week we said, here's five things that I want to tell you on your first day as you begin to pursue spiritual health. And then the next week, what I said was, listen, you can't do this alone. So those were things that were really descriptive to you of what does it take to be spiritual, like what do I need to know to be spiritually healthy? And so for the next two weeks, for this week and next week, I want to begin to answer the question, okay, what does it really mean to pursue spiritual health? What does it really require of me? What does it take to get there? And this whole time, I've been doing a parallel between pursuing physical health at the gym or working out or whatever it is we do to care for ourselves physically and paralleling that with our pursuit of spiritual health. And so as I got into the gym and began to pursue this physical health, there's a couple of things that became apparent to me. To go to the gym, to wake up one day and decide to go for a jog, to do push-ups, to buy a Beachbody DVD and try to do that, to do whatever it is you decide to do to get into the physical shape you want to get into, implicit in doing that, implicit in going to the gym, implicit in going for a jog, is this admission that I care about my physical health, right? If you don't care at all about your physical health and you don't go to the gym, you don't do the workout, you don't do the jog. You just eat the cinnamon rolls and sit on the couch. That's what you do. But to do any of those things, implicit in that action is an admission that physical health is important to me. And so when I went to the gym, everybody there is saying being physically healthy matters to me. The other thing is, as you go and you decide you want to be physically healthy, there are myriad goals within physical health, right? Everybody's got the before picture, and then we're all shooting for the after picture. We've got the before with the gut hanging out, we're wearing the t-shirt, we look like an overstuffed sausage. We've got that deal, and then we've got the after picture in our head, whatever it is that we're going for. And to some people, like, get in the gym and some people like they're in it, they're in it for the competitions. Like they are, they like go to competitions, they are lifting weights, they have figured out ways to isolate an exercise to get one strand of their triceps so that when they rub baby oil on it, it's really going to pop at the competition. Like that's their deal and that's their goal, which is also my goal. I'm very close. But that's what they want to do, right? They're in it for the competition. Others just, they just want to, like me, I just wanted to look good in a t-shirt. Like I just wanted to be able to put on a t-shirt, feel confidence without seeing my man gut. I'd love to be able to take Lily swimming and take my shirt off in front of other people and not be embarrassed about myself. Like that's pretty much it for me. Other people, they want to look good, but they want to be built, but not too built, you know. And others, when they start to get healthy, it's really not the way, it's really not about the way they look at all. It's about performance for them. They want to do a marathon or triathlon or whatever it is. And so for them, it's really about getting the body to be disciplined to do what it's supposed to do. And so people can have all kinds of different goals for their physical health, right? But whatever your goal is for your physical health, whatever you want the after picture to look like, there's actually a portion of the scientific community that has defined health for you. Whatever you want to look like, whatever you want your after picture to look like, whatever your reason was for going into the gym, if your goal is to be healthy, the scientific community has actually given you guidelines on what that health looks like, right? They're like, there's guidelines for BMI, for our body mass index, and for fat percentage. There's guidelines for what our cholesterol should be. There's guidelines for what our heart rate should be, our resting heart rate should be, for what our blood pressure should be. And really, whatever's going on outside of those indicators is fine and good, but if we're talking about health, there's actually some guidelines that dictate for us whether or not we are truly healthy. Because we can look fit and not be able to run a mile, and we can be cardiovascularly healthy but have some weakness in some other areas. So it's actually good to have a standard of physical health regardless of what our goals are for it. And in the same way, I think pursuing spiritual health parallels all of that really well. To me, to be in church in January, to be listening to this on a podcast or watching it online, implicit in the decision to do that, implicit in your decision to get up this morning to shower, which I hope you did, and then come here. And if you have kids, the hassle of getting them up and getting them ready for the early service. To do that, implicit in that is, hey, I care about my spiritual health. It could be a lot. It could be a little. But implicit in your attendance here is spiritual health matters to you. Implicit in listening to sermons online is the idea that spiritual health matters to you. And it could have mattered for a very long time. This could be an ongoing thing to you. This January is no different than last January or dozens before that. Or it could be a new initiative. But what I think is true of everyone in the room is that we are saying with our attendance that spiritual health matters to us. Now, there could be a difference in our spiritual goals. If we think about it as a before picture, this is what I looked like last year. This is what I looked like before I began to prioritize my spiritual health. And this is what I'd like to do now. There really is a wide range of goals that we could have. We could say, listen, I just want to be a good mom. I just want to exist in the house with my kids without losing my mind at them. That's what I want to be able to do. I'm just looking for a little bit of peace. Maybe it's my life has just felt so crazy that I just need some peace. I want to feel a connection with God. Maybe it's just things haven't been going my way for a while, and I just want to get some clarity about this. Maybe it's things have been going great and I want to begin to live a life out of this feeling of gratitude. Maybe it's more than that. Maybe we think I want to get plugged into a small group. I want to meet other people. I'd love for God to use me in ways in other people's life. I'd love to be involved in ministry in a volunteer capacity or even in a professional capacity. That's what I want to do. I'd love to be an elder of the church. I see these people that I admire, and I want to do that. Maybe we've got big, huge spiritual goals. Maybe we've got very modest spiritual goals, but we all have them, and I would say they're all good, at least as a starting place. But it got me to thinking, does the Bible, like the scientific community offers to those who are pursuing physical health some guidelines for what it actually looks like to be healthy, does the Bible offer similar guidelines to us for what it means to be spiritually healthy? And if it does, what are they? And I actually think that the Bible does this. Regardless of what your goals are, just to be a good spouse or a good co-worker or a good church partner or beyond that, regardless of what your goals are, does the Bible give to us standards that really define for us what spiritual health looks like, and I think that it does that. In the Bible, Old and New Testament, it talks a lot about this idea of bearing fruit, that if we're healthy, if we're good and we're vibrant, we will bear fruit. The book of Psalms was written by a guy named King David. He was the greatest king that Israel ever had. Jesus is going to sit on his throne one day. The flag flying over Israel now bears his star. He's an important dude. And he wrote the longest book in the Bible, Psalms, which is actually a collection of five different books. And in the Psalms are basically journal entries from David. Worship songs, times when he was sad, times when he was joyful, times when he, blessed are those who do not invest their time with people who don't love Jesus and love them, like what we talked about last week. But if we will delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, if we will pursue him in spiritual health, then we will be like a tree planted by streams of water. We will yield our fruit in season, and all that we do, we will prosper. We will yield fruit if we follow the Lord. So then the question becomes, okay, what does that fruit look like? And I think that answer is twofold, and we find it in the New Testament. If we're going to ask ourselves, what does it look like to bear fruit, to be spiritually healthy to a place where we are bearing fruit, what does that look like? Well, Paul answers this question in the book of Galatians. I talk about Paul a lot. He was a really influential Christian. He planted churches, and then he wrote letters back to the churches. And one of the churches he planted was in Galatia. And he wrote a letter back to them that became the book of Galatians in our New Testament. And in the fifth chapter, there's this really famous, and you will bear the fruit of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And so, to that question of what does it look like to bear fruit, what does it look like to be spiritually healthy, well, it means that we're going to bear fruit. Well, what kind of fruit are we going to bear? Well, Paul tells us in Galatians, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I think of that as character. So to answer the question first, if we are going to be spiritually healthy, what is an indicator of that? Well, our character is an indicator of that. As a matter of fact, I think this is such a good diagnostic tool that within churches there's always this question, am I really saved? How do I really know if I know Jesus? How do I really know if I'm going to heaven? And I say, well, Ephesians tells us that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment, as a deposit on our salvation, that God's going to make good on this promise. And we can tell if we have the Holy Spirit in our life by whether or not we bear the fruit that Paul lists out in Galatians chapter 5. So I would tell you, if you want to know whether or not you know Jesus, look at the wake of your life over the past three to five years and ask yourself the question, are those things growing in my life? Are those eight, nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those things growing in my life? Are those nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those increasing in my life, love and joy and peace and patience and all the rest? Are those increasing in my life? Am I growing in those areas? If you're not, it doesn't do you any good to lie to yourself about it. I think it does us a lot of good to get on our knees and pray about it. But if we're going to ask that question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? Well, we have to ask ourselves, am I bearing fruit? I think there's twofold ways that we bear that fruit. And the first is to be growing in our character as outlined in Galatians 5.22. The other way we see ourselves bearing fruit based on scripture is found in a lot of places, but I'm going to look at John 15, where Jesus says, and I've talked about this in recent weeks, I am the tree, essentially, I am the tree and you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. And in this instance, he's talking to the disciples. And when he's saying bearing much fruit, what he means is you will produce a lot of ministry. There will be people who are closer to me, closer to Jesus, as a result of you being in their life. And so biblically, to bear fruit means to grow in character and to grow our personal ministries. Does that make sense? And what that means is, can I look at my life, at the wake of my life, and point to individuals who would say, because that person is in my life, because I've been in PTA with them, because I work with them, because I played on the same tennis team as them, because I served in church with them, because I'm in a run group with them, because they are my friend. I am closer to Jesus because of them. If people would look at you and say that, then that is fruit. So when we ask the question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? The answer is, well, it means that we will bear fruit. And what does it look like to bear fruit? Well, it looks like we're growing in our character and we're growing in our ministry, okay? That's what that looks like. So as we define spiritual health this morning and say, what does it mean to pursue spiritual health? That's what we're going after. The after picture before is, I'm not doing that stuff. I need to grow in my character. I need to grow in my ministry. The after picture is I am bearing fruit, both in character and impact. So as I'm at the gym and I'm thinking about this idea of physical health, what it means to pursue physical health, one of the things I realized is I think I had committed at first to go three days a week. That's what I'm going to try to do. I'm going to go three days a week. I'm not going to do anything I don't want to do. I'm only going to do the stuff I want to do, and hopefully I get sweaty, and then I'll sit in the steam room, and then I'll go back to the house. That's what I'm going to do. But as I'm looking around at the people there, the people who look really healthy, and I'm thinking, I hope I can look like that. That's good for me. That's what I want to be, right? As I'm looking at those people, one of the things that occurred to me is, and it's really the thought for this week, is my goodness, what I see in them at the gym has a lot more to do with what they do at the gym. It has a lot more to do with what they do outside of the gym than what they do in it. You see? I'm looking at them going, man, their commitment to health is a lot more than 60 to 90 minutes three days a week. Their commitment to health is a lot more than coming into the gym and throwing up some weight and getting on a treadmill. And those of you who have pursued physical health before, you know that this is true. It takes a lot more. There's not just one thing that you can do. You can't just go to the gym three days a week and then do whatever you want to outside of the gym and get physically healthy. It doesn't take very long when you're valuing your physical health to realize that to get physically healthy, it really takes a holistic commitment to this health. If you're going to go to the gym and exercise or run or whatever it is you're going to do, at some point or another, you have to become at least moderately familiar with exercise science. You've got to know what the exercises are doing to your body when you do them. If you just repeat the same ones over and over and over again, you're not going to get physically healthy on a grand scale. You're just not. You're just going to have really big arms from doing curls. That's it. You've got to learn a little bit of exercise science, what it means to mix in some cardio. You have to learn to value that even though you don't want to. You have to learn what it means to eat right, not just healthily, but to eat right so that when you're at the gym, you're actually burning the stuff you want to burn off and not muscle, right? You have to learn that stuff. If you want to get physically healthy, then you have to be committed to eating right. You have to be committed to a diet. I would sometimes go to the gym in the afternoons, and that would impact the way that I ate lunch. I'd have a lunch meeting, and I'd want to eat something big and fun and filling, and realize I can't swim with that in my gut, so I've got to eat a wrap. Darn it. I have to eat fruit right now. But then I would actually feel decent later. So it begins to dictate all the things you do. You begin to think more holistically. You don't just eat to lose weight, but you eat to actually fuel yourself and get healthy. So you have to make a commitment to that. You make a commitment to sleep because you understand that the way that I sleep and the way that I rest really impacts the way that I'm able to perform when I'm trying to get healthy. And then sometimes to get healthy, and this is the hard part, means that you have to let go of something you really love, right? Any of you guys ever been to the doctor and they told you, all right, listen, here's the issue and you need to get better and if you want to get better, you got to chill out on the red meat red meat. That would be a tough one. I know that's coming. Both of my grandfathers on either side of the family had passed away from heart issues. So I'm really cruising for a bruising here if I keep it up with all the meat. I know that. At some point I'm going to have to give that up. I have found I'm a sucker for baked goods. I can be on quite the streak, and then some well-meaning jerk brings some stuff to, I'm just messing around about jerk. It's really sweet, sweet people bring stuff to the office, and I'm like, oh man, I really need to eat that right now. You know, like, and then staff members will mess with me, and they'll come and they'll put it on my desk, because they know that I'm a sucker for it, and I'm going to eat it. Like, I love that stuff, but sometimes getting physically healthy means giving up things that you really love, but it takes a holistic commitment, right? It doesn't just happen in the gym. And I think similarly, when we make a decision in our life and in our hearts that we want to pursue spiritual health, one of the things that we sometimes do is reduce that pursuit to a commitment to things like church and small group. And we don't intentionally reduce it to this, but we just start like anybody else does. Somebody says, I want to get physically healthy, and so they go, okay, I'm going to start going to the gym. I'm going to start running and pursuing prioritized physical health there. I'm going to make this important. And so they take a couple steps to make it important, but as you get into it, what you realize is, oh my gosh, this is not going to cut it. I really need to be entirely, like I need to be bought all the way in on this, or I'm never going to actually get healthy. And it works the same way spiritually. I think a lot of us make decisions to pursue spiritual health, and then as a follow-through on that decision, we go, I'm going to attend church more regularly. I'm going to try to listen to worship music in the car. I'm going to try to go to small group. I'm going to get involved in serving at the church. And as I think about those things, those are good things. But I wonder, is that enough? If we're serious about getting spiritually healthy, is that commitment, I'm going to go to church more, I'm going to sign up for a small group, I'm going to take the plunge, I'm going to do that. Is that commitment really enough to bring about holistic spiritual health in our life? And I think there's a passage that actually answers this question. It's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. It's in 2 Peter chapter 1. It'll be up on the screen in a minute when I start reading it. There's a Bible in front of you if you'd like to look at it yourself there. But it's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. Peter was like the leader of the disciples. And 30 to 40 years after the death of Jesus, as these disciples are popping up all over Asia Minor, Peter writes a letter. And the idea of this letter is for it to be circulated from church to church as he encourages them in their spiritual growth and their pursuit of spiritual health. And in the first chapter of the second letter that he wrote, that we call 2 Peter, he gives us what I think is a roadmap to spiritual health. He says, if you want to be spiritually healthy, then here's what you need to do. So I want us to look at this list together, verses 5, 6, and 7, and understand that this is really a roadmap to spiritual health. Here we go. For this very reason, Peter writes, make every effort. Another translation says, with all diligence. Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue. And virtue with knowledge. And knowledge with self-control. And self-control with steadfastness or perseverance, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. Now, as an aside on this passage, this is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside on this, one of the things I love about the Christian faith is that it is really so simple. Jesus, when he comes on the scene, he boils all the do's and the don'ts and the things that we get worked up about down to two very simple commandments, love God and love others. And so the greatest of these, Paul tells us, of all attributes is love, and that's what we're supposed to pursue. And so part of us goes, okay, this is great. I just have to focus on loving other people and I will fulfill the law. Me and God will be good. And that's true. But what Peter says is you cannot possibly love until you've mastered brotherly affection. You cannot possibly master brotherly affection until you have mastered godliness. And you can't master that until you've mastered what comes before that, perseverance and all the rest, so that there's actually building blocks to even be capable of loving. We don't start at love, we work to it. That's an aside, but I think it's an interesting part about this passage. And so I would ask you, if these, faith, virtue, or integrity, knowledge, learning more about God and the Bible, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection and love, if those are the characteristics that we should pursue, he says make every effort to add to this characteristic, this characteristic. If those are the characteristics that we are to dedicate our life to pursuing that result in spiritual health, I would ask you, can you pursue those on a Sunday morning? If you just come to church every week, can you pursue these things? If you go to church and you add to that a small group and you add to that serving and that's your Jesus time, that's your God time, that's your spiritual health time during the week, can you build these characteristics in your life? Or as you read through those and think through the mechanics of pursuing them, does it sound like those need to be on your heart and on your mind every day? Do you think it's possible to come to church once a week, to go to our small group on Tuesday night, to serve once a month or twice a month when we're supposed to serve, and then go through the rest of our weeks like God's not a priority, to go through the rest of our weeks like he's almost an afterthought, to just wake up in the morning whenever our job requires us to wake up, to encounter the stress at our job as it comes to us, to maybe every now and again pray for our food before the meal, and then talk about spiritual things when it comes up. And if we're being honest, most of us get into a habit and into a cycle where that is really our spiritual effort. If that is true of us, is it possible to develop these characteristics in increasing measure in our lives? Does it sound like we are being obedient to what Paul tells us to do in Thessalonians where he says rejoice always and pray without ceasing? See, what I think is if we're going to be spiritually healthy, it requires a holistic commitment with our whole life. We can't just go to the gym three days a week and expect to get healthy. Do you see? That's the first step. But if we're actually serious about our spiritual health, and remember, even being here and listening to me, implicit in that action is that to some degree or another, my spiritual health matters to me. And what I want to tell you this morning is, if it really does, and if you really want to bear fruit, and if you really want to be spiritually healthy, then what it requires of you is a holistic spiritual commitment from your whole life to pursue the health that God outlines for you. It requires waking up in the morning and intentionally pursuing the presence of God, spending time in his word and spending time in prayer. It requires putting people around you who love you and who love Jesus. It requires being able to get to a place where you understand God's word and you grow in knowledge so that you can teach it. You at least have some sort of moderate understanding of how the Bible ties together. It is hard work to get spiritually healthy, but I think a lot of us live in this place where we can pursue spiritual health with a minimal commitment. And what I think Peter is telling us is it does not work that way. We have got to be holistically committed to spiritual health. We can't half-heartedly pursue it. And when people do this at the gym, we see what happens, right? I've been at the gym and I've seen these, it's usually dudes who, they can throw up a ton of weight, man. Like they get over there bench pressing and I'm like, yo, don't mess with that guy. Like they can really throw it up there. They're squatting all kinds of stuff. They got thighs the size of my waist. Like they're some big old dudes. But you can also look at them and you can go, but they don't really seem healthy. They had a bigger gut than me. They're strong. They're good at the gym. They're not healthy, right? I think this happens in church too. They're good at church. They know their Bible. But, man, there's some stuff about them. I don't know if they're healthy. They're kind of jerks. I don't know if I see fruit. I mean, they're good at church. Like, man, they are a killer in Bible study. You ask them a question, they know the answer. But I don't know if that's what I want to look like. Right? And so I wonder this. If you're in a place right now in your life where the after picture doesn't look like what you want it to look like, your spiritual health doesn't look like what you'd like it to look like, you would not look at where you are spiritually and say, this is where I wanted to be. And to me, to be a Christian is to have at least multiple seasons in your life where you look at yourself and you think in your heart and you know it. And this is so true of me. This has been true of me more times in my life and for more of a portion of my life than I even want to admit. But when I think about where I am spiritually, what I tend to think is, man, I should be so much further along. I should be past this now. And if you've ever thought that too, and we would sit where we are right now and say, you know what, I'm not spiritually where I'd like to be. I wonder if it's because we've just been going to the gym three days a week. I wonder if it's because we've just tried to half-heart it. And we haven't ever really made a holistic effort to being spiritually healthy. I wonder if it's because we know that there's something that we really like. And we want to be healthy, but we don't want to give that up. Some of us are still hanging on to that red meat. Right? But here's the thing, and this is why I love Peter. And this is why I love this passage. There's a promise at the end of this passage. Do you know what happens if you'll commit yourself to being spiritually healthy? If you'll radically change your priorities and make the holistic commitment to spiritual health? Look at what happens in verse 8, and I love this verse. It says, Isn't that great? If these qualities are yours and are increasing, if you will lean into these qualities, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive. If you lean into these qualities, if you pursue them with your whole heart, if you will commit to holistic spiritual health and do what it takes to allow God to work in your heart, to bring you closer to him, then Peter promises you that you will bear fruit. Your character will change. You will produce the fruit of the Spirit. And even, I think, more importantly than that, more impactful than that, more rewarding than that, is if you pursue these, then he guarantees you that when you get to the twilight of your life and you begin to look back on all the things that God did in you and through you, that what you will see in your wake is people who would point to you and say, I am closer to Jesus because you existed in my life. Isn't that what we want? All the other crap aside that we pursue with our life and that we put effort into, what could matter more than getting to the end of our life and being able to say what Paul said, that I have been poured out like a drink offering? What could possibly matter more than being able to look at the wake of our life over the decades and know in our heart that there are people who would point to us and say, I am closer to the Father because that person existed in my life. What could be more important to pursue than that? And Peter says, if you will make a commitment to pursuing spiritual health by making every effort to make these characteristics true of you, then I will promise you that one day as you look back on your life, you will see a wake of ministry and impact and character there that will lead to a fulfilling life. I promise you it is not wasted effort. I promise you it will not return null and void. I promise you this is the best possible way to invest your life. So I would just challenge you this morning by asking you, is it possible that your spiritual health isn't where you want it to be? Because in whole or in part, we've reduced that pursuit to going to the gym three days a week. And is your spiritual health worth making a life-altering, holistic commitment to the pursuit of it? I've been saying since the beginning of the year, I hope this is the year that you move closer to Jesus than you ever have. And a big part of that is, what are you willing to do to pursue it? Let's pray, and then I'm going to call the ushers forward for the offering. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for the way that you love us. God, we are so grateful that you meet us in our effort, that you meet us in our cry to be closer to you, and that you do the hard work for us. Father, I pray that we would commit, that we wouldn't make a half-hearted effort towards you, but that we would offer our entire selves to you, that we would follow this roadmap that you lay out in 2 Peter. God, I pray that the people of this church would be people who bear fruit in ministry, who grow in their character. Let us not be a church who simply goes to the gym. Whatever stands between us and health, Father, I pray that you would give us the courage to get it out of the way. Let us be people who know you and are fruitful in that knowledge. It's in your Son's name I pray. Amen.