Sermons tagged with Messiah

Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to spend Sunday mornings with you, even if it is in this way. I hope that you're getting a chance to watch on Sunday morning or sometime throughout the week. Last week, we started in a new series called Still the Church, where we're walking through the book of Acts together. We thought it would be appropriate because it's a time of uncertainty for our church and for the church. In this time of isolation and doing this communal thing by ourselves, it's a difficult time to be the church. It's a difficult time to know how to express the church. And for grace, it's a difficult time to know how to express grace. And so I thought it would be good to go back to our roots, to go back to the foundational beliefs and philosophies and practices of the early church and see what we can learn from the birth of the church in Acts to apply to our church now. Because the same church that is born in the book of Acts is the church that we are now, which is why we are still the church. And that's why we've called this series Still the Church. This week, I want us to look in Acts chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. There's a lot of significant things that happen in Acts chapter 2. Actually, we're going to spend two weeks in this chapter looking this week at the foundational repentance and confession of the church, and next week, some of the foundational practices and characteristics of the church. But to understand what's happening here in Acts chapter 2, I think we have to flash back to Luke chapter 23. You'll remember last week that we talked about Acts is really, Acts and Luke are two parts of the same work. They're both addressed to a guy named Theophilus to explain first in Luke's gospel, Jesus and his life. And then the book of Acts is written to tell the story of the early church and is known either as the Acts of the Apostles or the Acts of the Holy Spirit, depending on your translation, but both are appropriate. So to understand what's happening in Acts 2, we need to look at what Luke, the author, wrote in his gospel in Luke chapter 23. In Luke chapter 23, we arrive at this scene where Jesus is in the care of a man named Pontius Pilate. At the time of Christ, Israel was a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. And Pilate was the Roman governor that was put in authority over Israel. And the leaders in Israel wanted to kill Jesus. The problem was, under Roman rule, they didn't have the authority to execute the death penalty. So they had to convince the Romans to do it for them. They had to take their prisoner to the Roman governor, to Pilate in this case, and convince Pilate that this man, Jesus, was worthy of the death penalty. So Pilate's talking to Jesus and he finds no fault in him. He finds no fault in his story. Pilate's wife is even wise and told him, you need to have nothing to do with this man. So Pilate goes to the crowds. There's a crowd gathered outside his fortress, outside his headquarters where he is. And the crowd is a Jewish crowd and they're clamoring for the death of Christ. And there's such a big crowd in Jerusalem at the time because it was the high holidays. It was Passover weekend. So they were there from all the corners of Israel to celebrate Passover. And they had worked themselves into a frenzy pursuing the death of this man named Jesus of Nazareth. And Pilate goes to them. And because he finds no fault in Jesus, he goes to them and he says, hey, I find no fault in this man. It's your tradition to let a prisoner go for Passover. It was the habit that they were in. They let a prisoner go every Passover. And so Pilate says, why don't you invoke that tradition and let this man named Jesus go? He does not deserve to die. And the crowds refuse. And they say, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a known criminal and rebel. And he was in the stockades and was going to be crucified as well. And they said, no, we want to give the free pass to Barabbas. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And Pilate says, I really don't think that's right. I really don't think that's fair. I wash my hands of this and we pick it up in Luke 23 as they go back and forth. Luke 23, 23 says this, So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted. He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder. That's Barabbas. For whom they asked, but he delivered Jesus over to their will. In another gospel account, Pilate says, It's this profound passage. So from there, Jesus is crucified. He's put in the tomb. The disciples sit there on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, just kind of wondering what to do and where to go from there. And then on Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene sees the empty tomb and tells the disciples. And shortly after that, Jesus, a resurrected Jesus, appears to the disciples and gives them newfound faith. And he walks with them for 40 days until the day of Pentecost. If you were with us this last fall, we went through these Jewish holidays and you know that Pentecost follows 40 days after Passover. And so Jesus was following the calendar that his heavenly father, that God the father instilled into the Jewish people. It's really remarkable the parallels here. And then 40 days afterwards, he goes up into heaven. Jesus ascends into heaven. He gives the disciples the marching orders. Yours is the kingdom to build. Go into all the world, preach the gospel, make disciples, baptize them in my name, he says. And the disciples are tasked with building the church. And Jesus also tells them, wait until you receive the helper. Wait until you receive the gift of the spirit, because that Spirit is what's going to empower you to build the church. He's actually referring to what he told them back in John. In the book of John, Jesus tells the disciples, it's better for you that I would leave, because when I go, the helper is going to come and he's going to empower you. And so now they're told in Acts, wait for the helper, just sit and wait. So the disciples go back to this upper room and they just kind of sit and stare at each other and wait. I wonder what those days were like. I wonder how they looked at each other and what they were expecting and what they thought the Holy Spirit would be like. And meanwhile, the crowds are still there. They're back for Pentecost. They're back for the holy holiday and they're there. And they know that they crucified this Jesus and now they know that he was resurrected and walking among them for 40 days and that his disciples, his followers are holed up in this room trying to figure out what to do. So the crowds began to clamor around this home to see what the disciples were going to say. And as they're in this room, Acts chapter 2 tells us that the Holy Spirit descended on them like flaming tongues of fire. I can't imagine what that moment must have been like. But the Holy Spirit descends on them like these flaming tongues of fire, and at the reception of the Holy Spirit, they walk out on the balcony and they preach to the crowds. And it's remarkable because they preached in their native tongue, but everyone there heard in their own language. It's the first time in Scripture we see the gift of tongues. That's where we get the idea of the gift of tongues for those of you that are interested in that. And you know, as an aside, Acts really formally introduces us to the Holy Spirit. And Acts brings up a lot of questions about the Holy Spirit. How does the Holy Spirit work? What is the Holy Spirit's job? How do we interact with the Spirit? What does it mean to receive the Spirit? What does it mean to be full of the Spirit? But you know, we also did a whole series on the Holy Spirit last spring. So if you weren't here for that, or you forget that and need a refresher, you can find that series. It's called Forgotten God. It's on our website. You can go back, and we did four weeks on the Holy Spirit, talking about how we interact with him and how he interacts with us and what it means to be full of the Spirit and be empowered by the Spirit. If you want to do even more learning on that, because we're going to focus on something else in this chapter, but if this is something that you want to pursue personally, I would encourage you to read The Forgotten God by Francis Chan. It's the book that we went through last spring. If you haven't heard of it or had a chance to read it, it's a really good introductory book to the Spirit, to His role and to what He does. If you want a little bit more than that, if you have specific questions about what does it mean to be full of the Spirit? What does it mean to be baptized in the Spirit? What does it mean to be empowered by the Spirit? There's a great short read that I have found to be the most helpful book on the Holy Spirit in my experience. It's called Baptism and Fullness by a guy named John Stott. I have one copy of it. The first person to ask me to borrow it is more than welcome to do that. Otherwise, you can find it just about anywhere. If that interests you, that's a super helpful book on the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples. They walk out on the porch and they preach the gospel. They tell the story of Jesus and who he was. And the crowds they're preaching to, it's important to note, is the same crowd that was clamoring for the death of Christ before Pilate. The crowds they're talking to in Acts chapter 2 is the same crowd, the same community with the same sensibilities that was at the gates of Pilate's fortress clamoring for the death of Christ. This crowd crucified Jesus. And now Peter and the disciples are preaching to them. And what they're preaching to them is, hey, that man that you killed, that resurrected, that we all saw go into heaven the other day, that was the Messiah. That was the promised Messiah that our God had sent. And you killed him. And to do this, to help them see this, it's important that we note that he quotes Old Testament prophets, Peter does. He quotes Joel. There's a huge passage, a huge portion of Acts chapter two that's a quote from the prophet Joel that he's quoting back to them so that they would see, hey, this guy that you killed, he actually fulfilled this prophecy that you know and cling to. This guy that you killed, he fulfilled the prophecy of David that you know and you cling to. And when he finishes, when he finishes, he finishes like this. And the response of the people is incredible. Look at what he says. As they wrap up their sermon, Peter says, It's the same crowd. I love their response. Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do? And listen to Peter's response. This response is incredibly profound. It's a hinge point in history. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So Peter and the apostles preached to this crowd that crucified Christ. And what they preached to them is, this guy that you killed was the Messiah that was sent from God. It's the Messiah that you've been waiting for generation after generation after generation. It's the one that your grandparents told you about and the one that you've told your children and your grandchildren about. And now he's arrived and you've killed him. And it says that they were cut to the heart. And they said, brothers, what do we do? You're right. We messed up. What do we do? What they're asking in that moment is how do we make this right? How do we make ourselves right before God? We've sinned before God. We've committed an egregious evil. What can we do to settle it up with God? What do we do? How do we get right with God? In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God. In our vernacular, in our context, what they're asking is, what do we do to be saved? How do we become Christians? How do we get right with God? It's the same question we ask when we go, what's the barrier of entry to be okay with God? In terms of the church or the kingdom that God is starting here, what they're saying is, what's required of us to be a part of the church? What does God require to join up, to be in his kingdom? What's the barrier of entry? It's all the same question, and they're asking the same thing that we ask. What do we need to do to be right with God? We messed up. And Peter's response is that they should repent and be baptized. And I think it's worth asking, if Peter wants them to repent, what was the repentance Peter was calling for? What was the repentance that Peter was calling for? To repent of what? I think it's a really important question to look at that when they say, what's the barrier to entry? How do we get right with God? And Peter says, repent. I want to know, repent of what? I think we're tempted to just assume that it means repentance of sins. Repent of your sins and be baptized and you will know Jesus and he will forgive you and you receive the Holy Spirit. But we have to consider who this crowd was. This was a Jewish religious crowd. This was a crowd and we know that they were a religious crowd because they were convicted by the words of the Old Testament. These were not a group of people that were just walking through life as if God didn't exist, not caring at all about his laws. They were, most of them, devout Jews. They were, by all accounts, this crowd was, by all accounts, outwardly righteous. This society, this Jewish society that was contemporary of Christ, there wasn't a lot of atheists and agnostics walking around. There wasn't a bunch of aspiritual people walking around. Everybody had faith. Everybody expressed a faith. Everybody claimed God as their father. Far and away, this crowd of people was an outwardly righteous crowd. Meaning, they had already repented of their sins. They weren't going through life like God's laws didn't matter. In fact, one of the reasons they wanted to kill Jesus is because they felt that he had violated one of God's laws and deserved that death. If you were to tell them that they needed to repent of their sins, they would respond in much the same way that you and I would likely respond if you're a believer this morning. If someone told us that we needed to repent of our sins, I think what we would say is, I mean, yeah, I feel like I have. I know I'm sinful. I know I mess up. I'm trying to do better and repentance is kind of progressive. I'm working on it and through the power of Christ, hopefully I'll continue to move away from those sins, but it's not like I'm walking through life not thinking I'm sinful. I think repentance of sins is too broad to apply to this crowd because many of them, if not all of them, felt like they had already done that. What's more is the impossibility of the command, if it applies to all sins, it's the impossibility to fulfill that command in light of what repentance means. Often, and a lot of you know this, but just so we're on the same page, often we equivocate repentance with confession when they're two different things. To confess something is to agree with someone else that what you did is wrong. In spiritual terms, it's to agree with God about your sin. But to repent, to repent has this implication of walking in the other direction, of being headed in one direction, doing one action, and then not only stopping and confessing that that's the wrong way to go, but then turning and moving in the opposite direction. It's like if you lose your temper with your spouse. And after losing your temper, you're sorry and you feel bad and you go, hey, listen, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. That was my bad. You didn't deserve for me to fly off the handle like that. That's confession. You've agreed with your spouse that you were wrong. But repentance would be not just to apologize for what you did, but then to walk in grace and generosity with your spouse moving forward. To repent of sexual sin isn't just to say, that was wrong, I'm not going to do that anymore. It's to actually turn and walk in purity. You understand? To repent of being a thief or being greedy is not to simply stop being greedy or stop taking what doesn't belong to you, but to walk in generosity to others. It's to stop going one way and move in the opposite direction. And that makes this command, if it means to repent of our sins, particularly impossible because no one can perfectly repent of their sins void of the empowerment of Christ in their life. No one is capable of repenting of our sins to the satisfaction of God because that would mean walking in perfection and we can't do that outside the power of Christ. I would argue that we can't do that this side of eternity. So I don't think that what Peter is saying in Acts chapter 2 is that we should repent of our sins as a blanket general statement. We should, and that's fine, but I think there's a more specific repentance happening here. I think he's speaking right to this crowd that was present at the release of Barabbas and the insistence of the death of Christ. He's speaking to the crowd that says the death of Jesus is on our heads and on our children's heads. He's speaking directly to the crowd that once they realized they had crucified the Christ, the son of the living God, they said that they were cut to the heart. What do we do? And Peter says, repent. And I believe that he is telling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. Peter is calling them in Acts chapter two, the crowds in Jerusalem, repent and be baptized. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. Peter was calling them to repent of who they thought Jesus was. You used to think he was this. You used to think he was just a prophet. You used to think he was a crazy person. You used to think he was a false teacher. You used to think he was making false claims, but now you know who he is. So confess that you were wrong about that and move in a faith of Christ. And I think it's remarkable the parallels in Peter's life because Peter is asking them to make the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. What we'll see, what I want to show you is that this repentance that he was calling for in Acts 2 is the same confession and repentance that Peter himself was called to by Jesus. If you flip your Bible over to Matthew chapter 16, you see this incredible scene where Jesus has the disciples gathered in front of him. And he's asking the disciples, they're in northern Israel and as close to the border as you can get. They're out in the country and he's talking to just his disciples and he's saying to them, who do people say that I am? And they said, some say that you are John the Baptist reincarnated. Some say that you're Elisha. Some say that you're a good teacher. And he says, yes, but who do you say that I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ. Look, verse 15, he said to them, but who do you say I am? Simon Peter replied, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered him, blessed are you, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Jesus says, yeah, but I understand what other people might think. Who do you say that I am? And Peter, the one who is to preach the sermon that begins the church years later, says to him, you're the Christ, the son of the living God. You are exactly who you have claimed to be. And Jesus says, yes. And the spirit has revealed this to you. You didn't figure that out yourself. And on this rock, on the rock of that confession, on the rock of that faith, on the rock of the belief that Jesus is who he says he is, that he is the name that he claims to be, Jesus says, on this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Years later, Peter is preaching to a Jewish people that killed Jesus and he tells them who Jesus was and they say, what do we do? We messed up. What do we have to do? And Peter preaches to them the same repentance and confession that he made. And he says, you need to believe that Jesus was who he says he was. You need to confess that you killed the wrong guy and you need to walk in faith and fealty to him. The confession that he's asking the crowds to make is the same confession that he made years ago. And it's the confession on which Jesus says, and that is the one on which I will build my church. This passage is incredibly important because it sets Jesus up as the cornerstone of our faith, as the cornerstone of our church. And this is the confession and repentance from which all other things flow. The foundational belief of the church is that Jesus is exactly who he says he is. Don't you see that to be able to confess that Jesus is exactly who he says he is, that you have to be moved to a saving faith? That if Jesus claims that he is the Lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world, that to believe that claim, to believe that Jesus is who he says he is when he says he's the Lamb of God, you have to first admit that you're a sinner in need of a Savior. When Jesus says he is the high priest that advocates for us, you have to first admit that you're in need of a high priest to advocate to God because you forfeited that with your sin. When he says that he is the sacrifice that covers over our sin once and for all, do you understand that we have to believe that our sins need covering? When God says that he views us through and sees the righteousness of Christ covering our sins, we have to confess that we have sins that need covering. This confession and repentance and belief in who Jesus is and believing that he is who he says he is is the foundational and fundamental confession and repentance of the whole church. We cannot confess and believe that Jesus is who he says he is without walking in faith to all of his teachings. We cannot. Our behavior changes when we believe who Jesus is because we trust him when he says that he's the good shepherd. And so we walk in light of that trust, in light of that claim. We trust that when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father except through me, we acknowledge that he is exactly who he says he is. The barrier of entry into God's church is to believe what Jesus says about himself. It's to believe that he is who he says he is. The reason that Jewish crowd wasn't a part of the church before this moment is because they had wrong beliefs about who Jesus was. And the very second they believe that Jesus was who he says he was, they become the church. And we find out in Acts 2 that about 3,000 were added to their number that day. And this is the birth of the church. That foundational claim is the birth and genesis of the church. And it is still the same foundational claim that welcomes you into the church. If there is somebody who doesn't know Jesus, who does not yet know Christ as God as their father and Jesus as their savior, it's because they don't yet believe that Jesus is who he says he is. Think back to before you were a Christian. If you have that memory of yourself and of your belief system, wasn't the fundamental issue in your heart that you didn't believe that Jesus was who he said he was? Weren't you making the same error that the Jewish crowd was making and disregarding him as something that he claimed not to be? And that the very thing that brought you into faith and salvation was the gradual understanding and confession and repentance of walking in a faith and in trust that Jesus was who he claimed to be, that he was the Lord of lords and the King of kings, that he's Emmanuel, God with us, that he's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and that he's the Lion of Judah who comes to conquer hell with his church. Before you were a believer, you didn't believe those things. And once you became convinced that those things were true, you were all in on faith. Isn't that the barrier of entry for a Muslim? A Muslim person thinks that Jesus is simply a prophet. And for them to become a person of a Christian faith, they would have to do away, they would have to repent of the idea that Jesus was simply a prophet and walk in the truth that he is the Messiah who died for them as well. Isn't this the barrier of entry for an agnostic person who before becoming a Christian would argue that Jesus, if he existed, didn't matter very much? Wouldn't it be, isn't the need to repent of that idea of Jesus and walk in a belief that Jesus was who he says he was? If an atheist is going to come to faith, the very first thing they have to do is repent of their idea that Jesus doesn't exist and that God is not real and walk in a belief that Jesus is who he says he is. And for us church people, if sometimes our walk with God feels a little janky, it feels like we're out of step and we're not in sync. We can't get the traction that we'd like. Isn't it possible that we need to repent of some of the ideas that we have about who Jesus is and trust that he is who he says he is? I think some of us, without saying it, we have this view of Jesus like he's some sort of cosmic hall monitor that's just waiting to get onto us and make our life not fun. Yet Jesus promises and tells us and claims that he is the good shepherd and that he came to give us life to the full. Some of us need to repent of who we think Jesus is, that he's just there to squash our joy and kill our fun and walk in the fullness of pleasure that Jesus offers at the right hand of God. We may with our mouths claim that Jesus is Lord, that he is the king of our hearts, that he reigns in us. But in many of our day-to-day lives, mine most of all, he's not the Lord we are. We don't walk in a belief that he is who he says he is. We don't walk like he's the Lord of our hearts. We don't walk like he's the king of the universe. We walk sometimes as if he's something we can put on a shelf and take down when it's convenient or when there is a need. And what we need to do is confess that we view Jesus as this trinket to put on a shelf and repent and stop doing that and walk in a belief that he is the Lord of the universe, that he is creator God and I am creation and I should live my life in a joyful servanthood to him. This confession that Peter calls for in Acts chapter two, this repentance that he calls for is for the crowds to repent of who they thought Jesus was and to believe that Jesus was exactly who he said he was. And in that repentance, the church is born. And in that same repentance, our faith is born. And that invitation that Peter made 2,000 years ago to repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and the reception of the Holy Spirit is the same invitation he extends to us today. My hope and prayer is that this will drive us deeper into learning about our Savior. That we would be constantly asking the question, Jesus, who do you say you are? What does your word say that you are? Where are the areas of my life where I'm not living in harmony with this, where I don't believe what you say, where I'm not trusting the claims that you make? and I think we should pray that God would help us repent of those things, confess those things, acknowledge where we're thinking wrongly about Jesus and walk in a knowledge, an assurity, and a faith in him that he is who he says he is. This invitation to repentance that Peter gives in Acts chapter two is the same invitation that you and I have right now, every day. We're still the church. That's still the foundational repentance. Let me pray for us. Father, we thank you for your son, Jesus. We thank you that he is the cornerstone of our faith, that everything begins and ends with him, that he is the alpha and the omega. Father, teach us to embrace all the many sides of our Savior, the one that is zealous for us, the one that watches out for us, the one that is the high priest for us, the one that is the good shepherd for us, the one that is the way for us, the one that is the bread and the living water for us. Let us be sustained on our Savior. Father, if any of us lacks faith, pray that you would provide it. If any of us is seeing Jesus inaccurately, help us see him more clearly. If we, like the crowds in Acts, need to repent of who we think Jesus is and walk in a truth of who he claims to be, give us the courage and the vision and the faith to do that. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

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

All right, well, like I said, good morning. It's good to be here, and I'm excited that you're here on this October Sunday. We've got a team down in Mexico now. We're gonna have a chance to catch up with them a little bit. Connor's gonna tell us a little bit more about what they're doing after the service, but I'm excited about that team. I'm gonna fly down there and join them on Tuesday of this week. But right now, we're gonna focus on the sixth part of our series called Feast. We did it. We made it. We've gone through the other five festivals in the Old Testament. We've arrived at the final one. This one is called the Feast of Weeks, or it's also known as Pentecost. It's the end of the first fruits celebration. Now, the trick here is you're thinking to yourself, why in the world do I care about the Feast of Weeks? This is the first time I've ever shown up for a sermon at a church, and they said, good news, everyone, we're talking about the Feast of Weeks from the Old Testament. So here's the thing. I think that if we learn what's happening here in the Feast of Weeks, if we learn what they're celebrating, then it can impact our life right away. It can impact the way that we understand that God loves us. It can impact the way we go about our days, and it can impact the way that we understand the Bible. If you've spent any time at Grace, you've heard me say that one of the most, not one of the most, the most important habit that anyone can ever develop is to spend time every day in God's Word and to spend time in prayer. The most important habit we can ever develop, eating well, exercising, being mindful, sleeping well, reading, whatever it is, any other habit, I would put this up against that one and say, this is the best one that any person could ever adopt is to spend time in God's Word and time in prayer every day. So if we're going to do that, it's incumbent upon us to understand the Bible. And what we're talking about today, I think, breathes fresh and essential life into our understanding of scriptures. And if we get it, will unlock for us a lot of the meaning of the New Testament. I would argue that the New Testament is not possible to be understood without the principles that we're talking about today. That's why I think the Feast of Weeks is so very important. Now, the Feast of Weeks, we see in Deuteronomy that it originally commemorated, it was a time to remember being in bondage or being in captivity. Over time, they looked at the timing of it and it became a celebration of something else because the Feast of Weeks is locked into the other spring festivals. The other spring festivals, for those who don't know, just so we catch up, is first Passover, and then that's on the Sabbath Friday, and then it starts on Friday night, and then that Sunday is the Feast of First Fruits. There's a timing thing there. It's two, three days after, and then you count 50 days from that period, from that time, and you arrive at the last holiday in the spring calendar, the Feast of Weeks, known as Pentecost. It's 50 days and counting. Penta means 50, and so in the Old Testament, it was known as Pentecost. Now, some of you know your Bible well enough that you're jumping to Pentecost in the New Testament. You know what that is, and Acts, we're not there yet. We'll get there. You're smart. But we're not there yet, okay? This is where we are. And what they realized after some years is that there wasn't a significant event that happened to be timed up perfectly with the Feast of Weeks and Pentecost. And that was the receiving of the law. And so traditionally, the Feast of Weeks has celebrated the reception of the law. You've got notes there in front of you. We handed those out. Obviously, we're not going to put those up this week. We didn't need one more thing to try to not mess up. But I'm going to say enough things that you can fill in your notes if you need to. So Feast of Weeks celebrates the reception of the law. And that timeline that you have at the top of your notes is really important. Now, why was it such a big deal to receive the law? Why did the Jewish people celebrate this every year? Well, one rabbi said that the law is so essential that it's what makes Jews Jewish, that following the law is what makes Jews Jewish. In it, it's their essence. It's who they are. Tradition says that the law was given in all 70 known languages, but the Jewish people were the only people that decided to take on the mantle of the law and begin to try to follow it. So first, the law gave them their identity. That's why it's a big deal. Another reason it's a big deal, I don't know if you guys have ever thought about this. I spend time with the Bible and try to think about stuff like this because I kind of get paid to do it. But have you ever thought what it would be like to be a believer in God before the law, before the scripture, before the Bible? To just be in Egypt and to know that there is a God. I'm pretty sure there's a God. He seems to be pretty tight with Moses. When Moses says stuff that usually comes from God, he encountered a bush one time. And so now he's telling us what to do. And I feel like that's authoritative. But have you ever thought what it would be like to be a believer before the law, before the Bible, before websites had statements of faith, right? Like if you're new to Grace or if you've checked out a church recently, one of the first things other church people do before they go to a church is they go to the website and then they click on statement of faith and they go, do these people agree with most of the things that I think, right? So that when they go to church, they kind of know what they're stepping into. Can you imagine just visiting someplace blindly? Can you imagine going to a church and the pastor's preaching and he doesn't have the Bible? There's no authority. There's nothing to check him on. I'm just telling you what I think is a good idea, what I heard from this guru in the mountains this one time, and now I'm telling you that this is the gospel truth. Can you imagine how murky and how confusing and how difficult that might be to try to follow and please a God that you know exists, but you're not sure how? I think it would feel like I felt at my old job, Greystone Church, one time. When I was at Greystone, I was the small groups pastor, and I was in charge of student ministry. I was in no way talented at graphic design or content creation. Yet, that's what I got assigned to do this one time. My boss, the lead pastor, Jonathan, he came to me and said, Nate, I want you to design a booklet that has all the information that somebody would need to know about Greystone Church. I want you to just put it together, do pictures, summaries, do a picture of Sunday morning worship, tell them what that's about, give them the mission of the church, student ministry, children's ministry. I want you to put this together and make it look nice. We're going to put it on the information table, and then when somebody new visits the church, we'll just be able to hand it to them, and they can know everything need to know about Greystone. And I'm like, all right, great. You got the right man for the job. I'm gonna knock this out of the park. So for the next two weeks, I actually worked and I tried hard at this. And I had my friend come in and they took pictures and I assembled the document. I figured out how to make it the right size, how to make it like a square, I think, is the shape that I went with. And there was pictures, and there was captions, and there was someone dynamically leading worship, and then a paragraph underneath about what worship means to us, and a verse to go along with it, and then the preaching, and then the small groups, and why we do that, and here's our vision for small groups. And it was excellent. And then I had to go print it out. And I realized, I don't know, I don't know if you guys have ever encountered this. I don't know how to make the printer do the thing I need it to do. Like, I don't know. I need it to print out in a square book that's folded. That's what I need. And what it's giving me is eight and a half by 11 that's not folded and not square. I don't know what to do. So we did like 200 of these things all day on the Saturday before because I didn't want to mess it up. It was due Sunday morning. I didn't want to let anybody down. And so I fear failure. That is my main driver. So like if you'll do this, it'd be great. I'll never do it. But if you don't do this, you will fail. I will stay up 48 hours to get it done. So I'm hand stapling each one of these things. I'm measuring them out and hand cutting to eight and a half by 11 and the borders around the whole thing and then folding them myself, like nice and neat. I get it done. I array them on the information table. Look at what Nate did. And then we get there Sunday morning, very proud of what I've just done. And Jonathan gets there. And I go, hey, dude, I finished these. Did you see them? And he takes a look at it. He's like, oh, yeah, that's good. Good job, man. Thanks. And he sets that down. About five minutes later, I look over, and the volunteers that day have been instructed to just sweep those into the trash can. Just throw them all away. These are garbage. And listen, you think that's mean. That was the right choice. Those things were terrible. They were, I knew as I was cutting them, I can't believe this. This looks like an eighth grade art project with someone with no talent. Like this is awful. And I knew it was awful. And really, I was grateful because in the decision to throw those away, he saved me the shame that was going to come from everyone discovering that, oh, isn't that sweet that Nate did these? Like, I didn't need that in my life. So it sounds mean, but he actually did me a favor, right? And then he put Kyle on it. Like three weeks later, there's this, not that Kyle. Kyle's not good at that stuff. Another guy named Kyle who is good at that stuff. Kyle's the student pastor here. He used to work with me at Greystone. But we had a worship pastor there named Kyle, and he was good at that stuff. He put it all together, and it was this nice glossy color pamphlet that unfolded and had minimal words and maximum pictures and looked way better. And Jonathan was like, great job, Kyle. And I think they still have that sitting over there, okay? Here's the thing. I didn't have the direction or the competence to do what I needed to do. I was groping in the dark to try to do a good job at this assignment, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do. I didn't know what he had in mind and I was ill-equipped to get it done. I did not have the talent to make it happen. I think that's how it would feel to try to follow God without the law. I think that's how it would feel to try to follow God without the Bible. Just this loose idea that we're supposed to obey him, we're supposed to love. I think we should probably love our neighbors. I think we should probably not steal things. This all seems good. But then in the nuances of the day-to-day, how do I please this God? I am ill-equipped and the mission is undefined. I don't know. And so the law brings clarity to a place that was unclear. The law says, okay, you want to be right with me? You want to know what it takes to please me? Here are the rules. There's 10 of them. The law communicates. Now, this is not what God communicated, but this is what they heard. And over time, this is what the law came to communicate. And this is actually in your notes if you want to write it down. The law came to communicate, if you obey me, I will love you. You want some clarity? You want to know what you need to do to please the God that talks to Moses? You want to know what you need to do day in and day out? Then here's the law. Here's what you need to do. If you do this, I will love you. And then the Jewish tradition, the rabbis, what they would do is the law is here. The line is here. Do not cross this line. So what they would do to make extra sure that they never crossed the line and faltered in the law is that they would draw their own line back here. And then somebody else would go, oh, that's not far enough. And then they would keep backing up and keep backing up and keep backing up so that they would stay away from this. And so God continued to add more laws like the fine print undergirding the other laws, like honor your father and mother. Here's the 38 laws that will help you do that. Honor the Sabbath. Here's the 150 laws about the Sabbath. And so over the course of history and in the book of Leviticus, we have over 630 laws that they accrued, and they lived according to the law. And so they celebrated this each year when they celebrated the Feast of Weeks at the conclusion of Pentecost, 50 days after the Feast of Firstfruits, because it gave them clarity. It gave them their heritage. It made Jews Jewish. It showed that God loved them and was communicating with them, and it gave them a clear path to be right with their Creator. The problem with the law is really twofold. It engenders exhaustion and it engenders frustration. Legalism. It engenders exhaustion and it engenders legalism. It engenders legalism because now our spirituality is defined by how well we follow the rules. Some of us have been in environments like this. I can remember growing up in the 90s in evangelical world in high school. For me, I don't know how it was in your high schools, but for me in the context that I grew up in Atlanta, if you're in high school and you don't do things you shouldn't do with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, and you don't cuss, and you don't drink, and you don't smoke weed, you don't do those four things, and you do go to church, you're an excellent human. You're the best possible version of Christianity. That was it. And if you did one of those things, then you're kind of okay, but you probably can't be a leader in your youth group. You probably wouldn't be an elder or a deacon one day in your church. That was the rules. I grew up in that legalism. If you don't cuss, you don't do inappropriate things with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, and you don't do drugs and you don't drink, then you are a phenomenal Christian. Never mind that you have all these bad habits going on in private. Never mind that you're pompous and you're filled up because you think you're better than everybody who does those things. Never mind all that. That's what the law does. It engenders legalism. And gray area. And then we start asking questions like, is it a sin if I do this? I know that this is wrong, but can I get away with this? Right? More dangerously, it engenders frustration and I think exhaustion. Because the law says, if you want to be right with me, here are the rules. Here's what you have to do. And so you set yourself about doing that, and you fail, usually within a couple of hours. You feel bad about your failure. You go to God in sorrow. You perform a sacrifice. You're forgiven. You're good with God again because the law has made that provision, and now you start over. And you try really hard this time. I'm really gonna honor God. I'm really gonna have the right attitude. I'm really not gonna do that thing. I'm not gonna mess up anymore. And then you mess up. You feel bad. You perform a sacrifice. You start over. Try hard, fail, start over. Try hard, fail, start over. It's the whole cycle of the Old Testament. And we've seen this in our life. We've seen this in our life. And what happens eventually when you try hard and you fail, eventually instead of starting over, you just quit. Instead of starting over, you just go, I'll never be able to do it. I can never be who God wants me to be. I can never be right with him. I can never follow the law well enough. I can never follow all the rules right enough. I can never be the person that I see in my church. I can't be those people. So I'm out. I'm done. And we walk away. I think this is what happens with a lot of kids who grow up in church and then they fall away in college. We know this story. it's very prevalent. It happened with a lot of us. A big part of that is we grew up in some version of faith where we were legalistic and we were told that God accepts us based on our behavior. And then we get off and we have a little bit of freedom and honestly, we're tired of trying. So we just stop. We know this frustration. And if we don't, if we still think one day I can be good enough, one day I can still, it's possible for me to behave in such a way that I will honor God with my behavior day in and day out. I would introduce you to what I call the torment of motives. There's this actually philosophical question. It's been, I mean, the debate's been going on for centuries. Is it possible to do anything that is truly good? Some of you guys may have thought about this before. And basically it states that there's no truly unselfish act. That when you do something good, and you're nice to somebody, you hold the door for someone, and you go, that's a good act, that's positive. And you go, yeah, that's great, why'd you do that? Well, I just want to be courteous. Why do you want to be courteous? Keep asking those questions, you know what you'll get to? I want other people to like me. That's selfish. You didn't hold that door for them, you did it for you. That's tough. There's actually a Friends episode about this. Joey and Phoebe debate this, like through the course of the show. If you don't know Friends, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna give you the context for Friends, but if you do, great. There's two people on a TV show and they're debating back and forth. And finally, Phoebe feels like she thinks of the one thing, the one altruistic act that she can do that's truly good. And so she goes to the park, and she lets a bee sting her. She said, look, I did it. This caused me pain. I got nothing out of this. It was good. And Joey says, well, the bee died, man. That's murder. Even if we think we're good, even if we have a good behavior week, if you get down to the heart of the matter and what motivated that behavior, that's still nasty. It's still muddy. It's still selfish. It's still self-centered. And so when the law says, if you obey me, I will love you, what we find out is that that leads to frustration and it leads to legalism and we end up exhausted. And it's in the middle of that exhaustion. That's not just for us, but the Hebrew people too. They lived that generation after generation. It's in the middle of that exhaustion that the second Pentecost shows up. Second Pentecost we find in Acts chapters one and two. What's going on here is that Jesus has come and he's lived his life. He's died on the cross. And then he ascends into heaven. The disciples gather in an upper room. And then they receive second Pentecost in the book of Acts. It's the you're supposed to do it when you get the gift. So they're just sitting there. The Holy Spirit appears in the form of flaming tongues. They go out on the balcony of this upper room and begin to preach. And gathered all around them are the citizenry of Jerusalem as other people from the surrounding areas in all kinds of languages and all different tongues. And they begin to speak. And these people hear the gospel in their language because they're still in Jerusalem. Because what just happened is 50 days ago, we murdered a guy named Jesus of Nazareth. We put him on the cross and we crucified him. But when he died, the sky turned black and the veil tore in two and some pretty seismic things happened. And then three days later, he wasn't in his tomb anymore. And we got to know what in the world is going on with this Jesus guy and what in the world is happening with these disciples. What did we just do? And so at Pentecost, Peter goes out and he tells them what they did. He said, that man that you crucified, that was the Messiah. And he shows how all the scriptures pointed to Jesus and prepared them for Jesus. And even the festivals prepared them for Jesus. And he helps them see what we've been seeing for the past six weeks. Everything points to Jesus. God's been prepping us for the Messiah. And he was the one and you killed him. And they go, what do we do? You're right. We believe you. What do we do? Peter says at the end of chapter two, repent and be baptized. Repent. Repent of who you thought Jesus was. You thought he was just a man. You thought he was just a teacher. You thought he was just a prophet, and because of that, you killed him. But he is the son of the living God. So repent of who you thought he was. Admit that he is Lord. Put your faith in him and be baptized. And it says that day that 3,000 were added to their number. Do you know what that is? That's the birth of the church. That's where we came from. It worked. We're on another continent 2,000 years later. It's pretty good. I've been on the southern tip of Africa in Cape Town in Masapumaleli, standing outside of a church, looking up at the clouds, listening to them praise God in a language that I don't understand and going, God, your plan worked. Pentecost worked. While I was there, there was a team there from Australia, from the other end of the globe. It worked. That's the birth of the church. And then we get the seminal passage in chapter 2, verses 42 through 47, that defines the early church. They gathered in their homes. Two days later, first fruits, Sunday. Then you count 50 days, and it's Pentecost, the receiving of the law. The Holy Spirit speaks, and he gives them the law. After Jesus dies and goes to heaven, on the day of first fruits, they count 50 days later, and what happens? Second Pentecost. You see? Passover. Jesus was celebrating Passover with the disciples. He's arrested and crucified. That's Friday. Two days later on Sunday, he raises from the dead. That's Easter. That's the feast of first fruits. He goes to God. He offers himself as the first fruits of the rest of the harvest that's about to come, that he's just one with his death and his resurrection. He counts 50 days. 50 days later, the disciples are holed up. They're supposed to be celebrating the feast of weeks, but they don't know what to do. They're waiting for a gift. The Holy Spirit speaks to them in the form, comes to them in the form of tongues, and they present the gospel instead of the law. Thousands of years ago, the law was delivered. The Holy Spirit spoke on the day of Pentecost and he delivered to them the law. And the law engenders frustration and exhaustion and legalism. And in the middle of that frustration and exhaustion, God delivers Jesus and it follows the same timeline. And on the feast of weeks at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit speaks again, except this time he speaks with the gospel. And if the law says, if you obey me, I will love you, then the gospel says, I love you, obey me. Totally different. The gospel says, I love you. I don't care what you do. I don't care what you're going to do. I don't care if you don't have your quiet time for the next 50 days. I don't care if you have it for the next 50 days. I love you. There's nothing that you can do to make me love you more. I don't care if you tithe 50% of your income in 2020. I will not love you more at the end of that year than if you tithe nothing. I don't care if you join eight small groups or if you join no small groups. I love you the same. You can go have the best week possible this week and be walking with the Lord and check all the boxes and do all the things you're supposed to do. And guess what? When you get to the end of this week, God will not love you any more than he does right this second because it's impossible because he loves you as much as he possibly can right now. And if you do nothing this week, if your life spirals out of control and all the things in the shadow are thrust into the light and you're a wreck, God will love you just as much at the end of this week as he did at the beginning. The gospel says, I love you. Obey me. I love you. You don't have to earn it. You don't have to perform. I'll clean you up. I'll get you right. Obey me. Do you know what else this does? This purifies our motives. Because now I'm obeying out of the sense of God loves me so much, I'm blown away by his love. I can't believe that he loves me in this way. I just want to go do what he asked me to do. I want other people to know this love. Can I tell you where I see this show up in my life? It's very few places, if I'm honest. But I see this show up in my sermons. When I'm not in a good spot, which is more regularly than you know, I'm not joking. It just is. There's all kinds of mixed motives laced into when I preach. I want you to think I'm good at it. I want you to tell your friends. I want my friends from back home to listen and miss me. I want it to be good. I want all the same ego crud wrapped up in what I do that some of you do. Some of you are pure of heart and you can't relate to this in any way. Jen, my wife Jen's like, I don't know what you're talking about. I've never done that in my life. But when I'm not totally healthy, my prep is laced with the desire to do good. But when I am healthy, when I'm overwhelmed by how much the Lord loves me in spite of myself, I care less about doing good. When it's really pure, there is this thing in the Bible that you guys have got to know. And I'm going to get up and I'm going to tell you. And I don't care if you think it's good or not. I don't care if I think it's good. I just want you to know this. Those are the good ones. I want to live my life like that. I want you to live your life like that. When someone says, why'd you do that thing? Why'd you give those people that money? Why'd you wait? Why didn't you yell at that person? Why don't you fight more with your children? What's going on? I want your sincere answer to be, God loves me, so I love them. How pure would our lives be? We wouldn't have to try to obey anymore. We would never ask the question, is this sin? Never. We would just walk in this reality that God loves us. Then we don't have to do anything. Do you know the whole point of the law was to get us to a place where we realized our need for that? That's what Paul says in Romans 8. Romans 8 starts out and he says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Okay, so that means that there's no blame. Everybody who's in Christ Jesus, everybody who has faith is right with God. They don't need to perform anymore or try anymore. They're good. He said, for God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, was unable to do. Which means that the law, the point of the law was trying to show us how to be pure and earn our way into heaven. But because we are human, we can't do that. The law, weakened by the flesh, was unable to do. So God sent his son in the likeness of sin and in flesh, who condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. Jesus met the standards for the law so that you didn't have to. He broke the cycle of frustration and exhaustion so that you didn't have to. And he freed you up to walk in this freedom of simply being overwhelmed by the fact that God loves you and then loving other people. That's why he says this new command I give you. All 630 laws, this new command I give you. Just go love people as I loved you. Love others as I have loved you, is what Jesus says. That's the whole point of Second Pentecost. And here's the problem with this. We have a constant, nagging drift to the First Pentecost. We are a people of the Second Pentecost. We are a people who are not judged by how we act. We're judged by where we place our faith. We are a people who are not encumbered with required obedience. We get to obey out of love. We are a people of the second Pentecost. The problem is we're more comfortable with the first Pentecost. We're more comfortable drifting back towards law. And this is the tension in the entire Old Testament. I said this tension would help you understand your Bible better. This is the tension, excuse me, in the entire New Testament is the desire for the Hebrew people to go back to being first Pentecost people, to go back to following the law rather than living under grace. All of Acts is about the tension of, wait, wait, wait, wait, we know we have Jesus, but how many of the rules do we have to follow? Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Corinthians, the book of Hebrews, laced throughout all those books is a desire of the audience to go back and be first Pentecost people when the writers of the Bible are trying to go, no, no, no, forget about that. You're second Pentecost people. Walk in love. Walk in forgiveness. Walk in acceptance. Do that. We're people of the second Pentecost, not the first. God doesn't say to us, obey me and I love you. He says, hey, I love you. I love you so much that I sent my son for you. Now walk in obedience. We're people of the second Pentecost. And God didn't lay these over one another by mistake. Let's try to walk this week and not forget that. Let's try to do some pure things this week. And when we do the good that we do, and someone were to say, hey, why'd you do that? Let's let the sincere answer be, because God loves me. Let's pray. Father, we love you too. We are not worthy of it. We do not deserve it. We cannot earn it. God, I pray that we would be overwhelmed by it. Thank you for making us people of the second Pentecost. Thank you for seeing us in our frustration and telling us that your yoke is easy and that your burden is light. May we please live in light of the fact that we are loved by you, no matter what. And because of that, go and love other people for you. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

All right, well, good morning. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. But thanks for being here on this September Sunday. I'm excited to be back in the fall in two services and to be in our new series called Feast. What's going on here is that God, using Moses, carrying the Israelites out of Egypt. They were a nation of slaves. The Israelites are God's chosen people. They're living in the desert. And we see this in the first five books of the Bible. And the books of Leviticus and Numbers really kind of give us the details of God's effort to help Moses kind of construct a civilization or a society. If you think about it historically, it's about 500,000 people coming out of slavery. It's all they've ever known. Now they're an independent nation or group of people, and they're trying to figure things out. So God gives them laws and the Ten Commandments. He gives them religion. They assign a priestly class, the Levites, to set up the tabernacle and put expectations and provision around how these people are supposed to interact with their God. They install a government. Moses names elders and everybody looks out for their tribes and it works kind of like that. And one of the things that God does for this new society is he gives them six festivals or six holidays, and he says, every year I want you to celebrate these six events. And last week we talked about this idea that really what a holiday does is it stops us in the midst of our year, in the midst of our crazy life, as everything just kind of gets going and blowing and we focus on all these other things. What a holiday does is it stops us and it narrows our focus in on things that are important to us. And so to me, it's really interesting to look at the six holidays that God installed in the Old Testament for his chosen people and ask ourselves, what is it in these holidays that God wants us to remember? What is it that he wants us to celebrate? What was it that he wanted his chosen people to stop and slow down and focus on for a little while? And so as we approach the holiday this week, last week was Feast of Trumpets. It kicks off the Jewish New Year, and I had a good time. We kicked the service off with a shofar. I thought it was a really fun service. I really went home last week going, man, this fall is going to be really, really great, really, really fun. As we approach this week and the festival that God had, I wanted to go back a couple of weeks to a podcast that I was listening to. There's a guy that does podcasts. I think it's called Armchair Expert, a guy named Dax Shepard. He's an atheist. He's not a believer. It is not a church-friendly podcast. I'm not like, go listen to this and you'll be spiritually enriched. But what he does is he talks to other people and he has these actual meaningful, vulnerable, deep conversations. And I've found in my life that conversations like that, where you can just really get down to things that matter and learn about people and be honest and vulnerable with people, those kinds of conversations really kind of give me life. I like those. And so I like listening to his podcast. And he had a guy on named Danny McBride, I think. He's an actor, comedian, whatever. And they're talking, and they were talking about growing up being forced to go to church. Danny grew up in the South, I think maybe even in North Carolina. And he was forced to go to church, but he never wanted to. And so as soon as he was old enough, he quit going. And he really doesn't claim to have much of a faith now. Dax grew up, sometimes his grandparents would make him go, but he is a devout atheist now. He's very open about his atheism. But they got to talking about going to church when they were young. And then one of them made the comment when they were old enough to not have to go anymore. I think it was Dax. He was like, you know, I kind of missed it. I liked having to do something, being made to do something that I didn't want to do. And Danny said, yeah, you know what? I found that I kind of missed it too. I wonder why that is. And Dax said this thing that I thought was incredibly interesting coming from an atheist. He said, I think that there is a human need to repent, a need to make ourselves right with our Creator. There's an author named C.S. Lewis who was around in the early 1900s, World War II. He was an English professor at Oxford and was an atheist as well. But he made this intellectual journey from atheism to theism to eventually Christianity. And he wrote a book that chronicles that journey called Mere Christianity. It's a Christian classic. If you've never read it, it's absolutely worth the time. The language is a little bit tough. It's hard to understand. Sometimes you're going to have to reread passages. If you're like me, you're going to have to really reread them a lot. But eventually when you understand it, man, it is one of the best books I think ever written. And in his argument for God and explaining how he arrived at a belief in the Christian God, the first thing he does is talk about, lay out some proofs for God for himself. Not trying to convince you, and I'm not going to go through those proofs this morning, but he starts making the case for why he came to the conclusion that there has to be a God. And then after he concludes that there has to be a God, he makes a reasoned argument that he has to be a perfect God. And then he says this, and it stuck with me. I've always thought it was so interesting. He said, and since there's a God, and since he is perfect, we have no choice but to conclude that he is offended by us, that he's angry with us, because we're not perfect. And we know intrinsically that there's a God who created us and that we have displeased him in the way that we've acted because we haven't lived up to his standards. And I just think that these two different thought processes by people who were or are atheists coming to the conclusion that, you know what, and they wouldn't say it like this, but I say it like this, written on the human heart is a longing to be made right with our creator God. I think it exists in each one of us. I think if you're here this morning and you're not even a believer, somebody drug you here or you're kicking the tires, I think that you might even agree with me that there is something that wants us to be right with God, right with the universe. If you're a believer, you know this feeling very well. And it's for this need, it's to address this feeling, this thing that was written on us, this need to repent that God placed on the calendar the holiest of holidays that we now know as Yom Kippur. And that's what we're going to look at this morning. Now, Yom Kippur is what it's called in the Hebrew culture. And those words together, Yom means day and Kippur means atonement. So it's become known as the day of atonement. But Kippur can also be translated as covering, the day of covering. And so it's the day on the calendar that God provides for his people so that you can be sure, so that the Hebrew people, the Israelite people can be sure that they are right before their God. It addresses this intrinsic need within us to repent and know that we are right before our creator God. And so it's on this day that all of the sins of the priesthood, of the high priest, and of the Hebrew people are atoned for in a ceremony that we're gonna go through that occurs at the temple in Jerusalem. It's the day of atonement or the day of covering. It's the provision that God makes so that his people can be right before him. And to me, it's a remarkable day. Most of you have probably heard of it before. Most of you who pay attention to cultural things probably know that it's a Jewish holiday and it's the holiest, it's the highest of the holidays. It's celebrated so reverently that every 50 years, the day of atonement becomes a year of Jubilee. And on the 50th year, on that year of Jubilee, all debts are canceled and all land is given back to the family. It's a really important holiday in the Hebrew calendar. And on this day, everybody went to the temple. So to help us as I kind of walk us through what happened at Yom Kippur, we have to kind of have a working knowledge of the temple. So I actually found this picture that I wanted to show you. This is the temple. If you go to Jerusalem right now, in the city is a museum that I've been able to go to. And in the middle of that museum is a replica that's probably about as big as this room of ancient Israel at the time of Solomon and immediately following. And in the middle of the city is the temple complex. And this is the temple complex. And so what you see here, I just kind of want to walk us through there for a couple of things. That big building in the middle, the tallest part of it, that is the holy place and the holy of holies. We're going to talk about it in a second, but that building was basically divided in two by a curtain. The front portion of it was the holy place. The only people allowed in the holy place were Jewish priests. And then the other side of that is the holy of holies. The only person allowed there is the high priest. And then outside of that through the door, you see the inner courtyard. The only people allowed there are Jewish males. And then outside of that building and more of the space is the outer courtyard. Only Jewish people are allowed in the outer courtyard. And then this roofed area to the left of the screen, that's where the Sanhedrin met. That was like their senate. That's where the government met. All the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Zealots, their representatives would meet there and decide on things. So that's kind of, when I talk about the temple for the rest of the morning, this is what I'm talking about. And it's important for us to know that on Yom Kippur, on the Day of Atonement, the focus of all of God's people was on the temple. On the Day of Atonement, on this day, on the holiest of holidays, the focus of all of Israel, of all of God's people scattered wherever they were, was on the temple. And so what they would do is they would come from all over the country. And having been there, it's not super far. You can get there in a couple of days if you're walking from the top of the country to Jerusalem in the center or from southern Israel to Jerusalem. So everybody has the chance to come and gather in the holy city at the temple, the holy place where the presence of God is. The presence of God was said to be in the holy of holies. And so on this holiday, the highest of days, all of Israel would gather and clamor into Jerusalem. And then on the Day of Atonement, as many people as could fit into that temple complex would fit into that temple complex and wait for the priest to perform the ceremonies and the rites and the duties that went along with Yom Kippur. And the priest was also a focal point of this day. And as I learned this stuff, I'm going to walk you through kind of what that day looked like. I was fascinated by all of these things. I hope that it doesn't bore you, but for me, I'm kind of a history nerd, so as I was reading this stuff, I really, really ate it up. But the priest would come out. First of all, he would start to fast the day before. Everybody would fast the day of. Every good Hebrew would fast the day of Yom Kippur, but the priest would fast a day early, and then he would stay up all night. Members of the Sanhedrin were assigned to watch him and make sure he didn't fall asleep, because he was likely an older guy, and our population of people who are the age of what the high priest would have been know that it's kind of hard to stay awake during one of my sermons. So I can't imagine staying awake all night. So the Sanhedrin would kind of watch him and poke him and make sure he didn't fall asleep. And then after that, they would hand it off to the priestly elders and they would make sure that he would stay awake. And then very early in the morning, the ceremony would start and he would go into the temple, I would assume surrounded by thousands of people, and he was wearing his traditional priestly robes, which were laced with gold as is detailed in the book of Leviticus. And he would go behind a curtain to like a bath and he would ceremonially bathe himself, which I'm guessing wasn't awkward for them. They would have been like, yeah, I mean, he's just taking a bath. For us, that's weird. But for them, he would take a bath behind the curtain and it was fine. And then when he was done, he would put on white priestly garments specifically for Yom Kippur, for the Day of Atonement. And he would begin to perform the ceremonies and the rituals of the day. And the first one was he would go to the altar in that outer courtyard in front of the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, and he would take a bull. And he would place his hands on the head of the bull, and he would repeat this prayer of repentance because this bull was dying for the priest and for his family. This was his personal atonement and the atonement for the rest of the priesthood for all of the sins that had been committed in that year. And so he would atone for his sins, and his sins were symbolically transferred from him to the head of the bull, and that bull would die in his place and in the place of his family. It's a sacrificial system. And then the blood of the bull would drip into a bowl, and he would hold that, and that would be prepared for something in a second. Then, in this really kind of interesting ceremony, there would be two goats that were brought to the high priest. And he would take one goat, they would draw lots, which was their way of playing paper, rock, scissors. And he would decide which goat got designated as for the Lord and which goat got designated as the scapegoat. And the one that was designated for the Lord, they put a white cord around its neck. And the one that was designated as the scapegoat, they put a red cord around its neck. And then after doing that, the priest would then say a prayer. And in this prayer, the name of Jehovah was elicited. And I think it happened like eight times throughout the day. And every time the priest would say the name of Jehovah God, the entire assembly would fall on their face and worship God. And then stand back up and he would continue. to God, and then you would walk through this curtain. And this curtain I always heard about growing up separates the Holy of Holies from the holy place. And I always heard in Christian school and in Bible college that if you put a team of oxen on either side of that curtain and they pulled against one another, that they would not be able to tear that curtain. It was an impenetrable layer. And in the Holy of Holies was the Ark of the Covenant. It was a box that you weren't allowed to touch. Inside this box was the stone tablets that God gave Moses the law on and the staff of Moses. On top of this box were two golden angels. And it's thought that their wings were pointed out and their heads were bowed and that their wings were touching each other at the tips. And where they touched would create what was called the mercy seat. And it said that the very presence of God rested on that mercy seat. And there was only one person alive allowed to go in there, and that was the high priest. Because it was the very presence, the holy presence of God. And if you went in there and were impure, anything about you was imperfect and not worthy of God's presence, then you would fall dead in an instant. They were so worried about this. This was so sobering and such a concern that in the white priestly garments of the high priest, they wove bells into the hymns so that when he would move, you could hear him moving. And before he went into the Holy of Holies, they would tie a rope around his ankle so that if the bells stopped, they'd just start pulling. That's how serious it was. Can you imagine being guy number two? And they had to pull him out and be like, well, you've got to put on that robe now. That would be really scary. But that was the seriousness and the sobriety that surrounded going into the Holy of Holies. And it's only the priests that even saw the high priest enter. The Jewish males are outside. Maybe if they have a certain vantage point, they can peek in and see. But the other, the people, the throngs up on the walls and on the roofs, they can't even see him going into the Holy of Holies. And that's where the presence of God rested. And when he got in there, he would take the blood of the bull and he would sprinkle it on the mercy seat and he would sprinkle it on the curtain and he would say a prayer and that was for his family and then he would step out. And when he stepped out, he went and he took the goat that was designated as for the, and he sacrificed that goat. And this was the beginning of the atonement of the sins of the people of Israel. He would take the blood of the goat, he would pray a prayer, he would read a scripture, people would fall on their face and worship God, and then he would go back into the Holy of Holies, and he would sprinkle the blood of the goat on the mercy seat and on the curtain, and this was the atonement for the people. Then he would step back out and he would take the scapegoat. And there was a designated priest in a particular causeway of the temple. And he would send the scapegoat to that priest. And that priest would then walk that goat out of the city limits into the wilderness, traditionally 10 to 12 miles. I don't know how long this took, but I do know that if I were an ancient Hebrew person, that waiting for the goat to get to the place would be my least favorite part of Yom Kippur. I'm not a man of a lot of patience, and that's 12 miles away with an old priest. I would get pretty bummed out about that. All along the way, there was 10 stations, 10 booths where they would eat and drink and then move on. And once the scapegoat got far enough away, the priest would then sacrifice that goat. And then he would camp there overnight and not come back into the city until the morning. And it said that that scapegoat is the goat that died for the sins of the people of Israel. And it would cover over the sins of Israel. That's where we get the kippur, the covering. It would serve as the covering of the sins of Israel so that when God looked at the people of Israel, he didn't see their sin. He saw the covering. And this particular death was for sins of omission because all of these people, listen, if you're at Yom Kippur, if you've got prime seats and you're watching this, you probably have been going to temple every week and you've been doing your sacrifices every week and you've been making sure that you and God are good throughout the year. But this particular sacrifice were for the sins of omission of the people of Israel throughout the year. And we can relate to this. Those things that you didn't know were wrong until later, that thing that you've been doing for years, and then you find out like, oh my goodness, I shouldn't do that. That's not really pleasing to the Lord. I guess I should stop. Sorry, 2012. Like we know those things, or maybe those little like attitudes that show up, the little flecks of racism that we find in ourselves. And we go, oh my gosh, I can't believe that I used to think that way. These things where we've displeased the Lord and we don't even realize that we have. That's what the Day of Atonement was for, was to say, hey, everything is covered. Everything is taken care of. Once the goat had been sacrificed, there was a series of flags that would be waved by centuries all the way back to Jerusalem. And then once the word got back to the high priest, he would burn the remaining parts of the bulls and the goat that were sacrificed earlier. He would read three scriptures and say eight benedictions. He would invoke the name of the Lord and the crowd, the thousands of people would worship along with him each time. And when he was finally done, after a whole day's worth of ceremony late in the afternoon, he would ceremonially bathe one more time and put his personal clothes back on. And tradition says that he would go home and have a feast with his family to celebrate surviving that day because it was a stressful time for his family. And I do think it's interesting that after the high priest performs all of these duties on a somber holiday, the first thing he does is he goes home and he has a feast. So even on a holiday that's dedicated to fasting, there's still a feast to cap it off at the end. And so as I learned about these things this week and this process and this ceremony, I just began to think, man, what would it have been like to have been in the ancient Hebrew world? And watch this. What would it have been like to grow up with this tradition? What would it have been like to bend one of the throngs of people in the temple watching or listening or waiting and seeing the reaction of everybody else? At a time with no internet, at a time without published books, at a time where the only way you learn is through rote memorization, whatever the previous generation tells you, that's what you retain, and then you teach it to the ones who follow you. And for thousands of years, that's how it worked. What would it have been like to take in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as an ancient Hebrew person? What would it have been like to just be surrounded, to be from the countryside of Galilee and to come in and be surrounded by all these people? To have grown up and have your grandpa or your grandma explain to you every year, Grandpa, we know the bull, like we get it, we know what it means. What would it have been like when you came of age and it was your responsibility to explain it to the younger generation and keep them along? To have grown up seeing this every year, to watch the same high priest perform the same rites every year. What would it have been like to have fallen on your face? Really picture it and worship at the name of the Lord every time. How totally separate and other must the high priest would have been? Don't think about it from the perspective of the Sanhedrin looking down from their VIP seats or from the other priests who would watch the high priest and think that might be me one day and kind of peek out of the holy place and watch his back as he performed in front of the crowds. But what would it have been like to be in the crowds, to be separated and other, to even be a Hebrew woman and not even be allowed in the part where you can see the priest and all you can do is listen. How distant would the priest have felt to you? I know over the years I've gone to different Christian conferences and in Christian world there's these celebrity pastors that write books and do podcasts and have thousands of downloads and tens of thousands of people that go to their church and they feel like little celebrities and you them down there on the stage, and you're like, oh, that's so-and-so, that's so neat. I'm really glad that I'm here, and that's as close as I'll ever get to them. And I imagine that at the best, that that's how the high priest felt, is so different and so other and so separated from you. What would it have felt like to know that he was going into the Holy of Holies on your behalf? To know that in the Holy of Holies was the presence of God, and we're so fearful of the presence of God that the holiest man among us, the most righteous among us, the high priest, is fearful that he might die. He's barely qualified to walk through that curtain. I know that I could never walk through that curtain. What kind of mystery surrounded the holy of holies? What kind of separation must they have felt from the high priest who was arguing to God on their behalf, who was interceding for them, who served as their intermediary? What kind of separation must they have felt from God? What kind of fear must have surrounded what they interpreted as the presence of God? Can you get yourself into the mystery and the wonder and the pageantry of Yom Kippur and what it must have been like to take that in as an ancient Hebrew person and pass that down from generation to generation? And I ask that because I wonder what it would have felt like to be one of these people at the time of Jesus. And to be a devout Jew, to celebrate Yom Kippur every year, it's the highest, the holiest of holidays. And the temple, the focus of all God's people is on the temple, and that's where the presence of God rests, and that's where his people work, his representatives, the priests work and intercede for us and serve as intermediaries for us. What must it have been like to be sitting there and to be a devout Jew and to watch this man who claims to be the Son of God die on the cross, and the moment he dies, you can look across the valley there from the eastern side and see into the Holy of Holies and watch that veil tear from top to bottom. Which is what the Gospels tell us happened when Jesus died. That veil was torn in two. How earth-shattering must that have been for a Hebrew people who grew up believing, rightly so, that the presence of God was on the other side of that veil. Something that was different and other and we're fearful of it and we're separated from it. How earth shattering would it have been for that veil to tear as the Son of God dies on a cross. What I want us to see is that Jesus' death on the cross was the final atonement and the perfection of Yom Kippur. Jesus' death on the cross, our God sending His Son to die for us, who lived a perfect life, who died a perfect death on the cross as our eternal sacrifice, is the final atonement. They needed this atonement every year. They needed the high priest to go through it all every year. They needed all the pomp and circumstance and pageantry and majesty and mystery every year to make sure that they were right with God. And then Jesus dies on the cross outside the city as a final atonement and the perfection of Yom Kippur. And what I want us to see here is, I said that for all of history up to the point of the death of Christ that the focus of Israel had been towards the temple. Did you know that even all the synagogues built in Israel are built so that they are facing Jerusalem, facing the temple? And that all the synagogues throughout the world and whatever other nation that exists, they are built facing Israel, facing Jerusalem, facing the temple. All of the Hebrew world, their focus is on what happens at the temple. But at the death of Jesus, at the final atonement and the perfection of Yom Kippur, there is a seismic shift in focus. There is a seismic shift in the focus of God's people because the focus of God's people no longer needs to be on the temple and what happens there. There's actually several shifts in focus and I want to walk us through them very quickly. Maybe the most significant one is there is a shift in focus from the temple to the cross. All of Israel, all of God's people, all of those who would declare faith and believe in God the Father are to shift their focus from what happens at the temple to what happens on the cross. And the cross becomes our focus. That's why we don't place any priority on the temple. That's why we don't have to go there because of what happened on the cross. That's why our church doesn't face Israel. It faces the parking lot. Because the focus is on the cross. So we shift our focus, God's people, from the temple to the cross. We shift our focus from an annual sacrifice to an eternal sacrifice. The book of Hebrews tells us that in this ceremony, in Yom Kippur, that all of the sacrifices are shadows that are cast by Jesus on history. That the bull represents Jesus and the goats represent Jesus. And particularly the scapegoat that was led outside the city into the wilderness to die for the sins of the people. Jesus, thousands of years later, was led outside the city on a hillside in the wilderness to be crucified for all the sins of the people. He is the scapegoat. He is the goat that is for the Lord. He is the bull. Jesus is the perfect sacrifice. And so our focus shifts from annual temporary sacrifices to eternal ones, we're told in the book of Hebrews. Hebrews also tells us that Jesus is now our high priest. And so we switch our focus from a human priest to a holy one. We had a human priest who was fallible, who had ego to deal with, who had all the sins that we have to deal with, to a holy priest who is divine, who intercedes for us. And what I think is amazing about this priest is he's not other. He's not distant and far. He holds us and he weeps with us. And the Bible says he stands at the door and knocks and waits to come into our life. He dies for us. He serves us. He washes our feet. He walks amongst our poor. The high priest that we have doesn't sit and wait for us to come to him at a temple. Surrounded by all the other priests in the pomp and circumstance, he comes to us and he beckons that we come to him. And he offers us an intimate relationship. Not only that, but he advocates to the Father on our behalf. No longer is there this wall of separation between us and God, where the only way to approach the presence of God is to go to the priests, his intermediaries, other people who are our peers. You guys get to bypass me entirely and go right to God, which is good for you because I've got my own issues to deal with. We go right to Jesus and he advocates to the Father on behalf of us. So our focus shifts from a human priest to a holy one. Maybe most interesting to me is our focus shifts from covering to cleansing. Do you realize that in the Old Testament, all the language used to talk about us no longer being guilty of our sin is covering language, that the blood of the sacrifice covers over our sin. It makes us outwardly appear righteous as God looks at us. Even as we go back to the very first sin, the sin in the Garden of Eden by Adam and Eve. What is God's response to that sin? What does he do? He takes animal skins and he fashions them and he covers over their shame. He doesn't cleanse them. He covers it. But in the New Testament, there's a shift in language. He cleanses. He removes it from us. Because when it's just covered, it's still there. We're still sinful. If you get up on a Saturday and you go out and you work all day and you sweat in the yard and you're gross and you come in and you take off your yard clothes and you don't shower and you put on your nice going out clothes, you'll look nice, but you stink. When our sin is covered over, we are acceptable to God, but we are still sinful. And the miracle of Jesus on the cross is that he cleanses us. This is what Hebrews says. This is why the author writes this. Chapters 9 and 10 of Hebrews are really a statement on Yom Kippur. And what they're saying, what the author is saying is that whole deal was a big shadow cast by Jesus on history. It was a road sign pointing to our need for Christ. And what Hebrews 9 and 10 tells us is that Jesus is the sacrifice. He is the high priest. He is, like I said earlier, the final atonement and the perfection of Yom The Bible tells us that he removes our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. We are clean and invited to walk with the Lord. And finally, and I love this one, our focus shifts from separate to intimate. Again, take yourself back to the place where you were the Hebrew person and you're watching all of this take place and you see the very holy priest, very pompous and pious, and I'm sure he was a righteous man, but he must have felt just very separate and other. You could never even approach him. And then he would walk into a holy place and then a holy of holies and you're three layers removed from the presence of God. And it's only once a year that you go into God's presence. And it's a fearful thing and an awe-inspiring thing. And then in an instant, the veil tears. And when that veil is torn, the separation that was felt between the people and God goes away. And the very presence of God rushes out of the Holy of Holies and into the lives of those of us who would believe. And Jesus becomes our high priest who begs for intimacy with us, who wants to know you. This presence of God that feels different and other and fearful and unapproachable, now we're told he knows the very numbers of hairs on our head. We're told that he weeps with us. We're told that he touches us when we are sick. And I don't think we have an adequate appreciation for what it must have felt like to feel so removed from God and his people to immediately transition into this intimacy that we're invited in so that this God that we would die if we went into his presence undeservedly because Jesus' blood now cleanses us. Romans tells us that we call that same God Abba, Father, Daddy, or Papa. The kind of intimacy that we are invited into. And so as I looked at Yom Kippur and just kind of reflected on what it means, it became very clear to me that what Yom Kippur really is, what we're really celebrating, what God is really doing here, Yom Kippur is God's ruthless and relentless effort to remove all the barriers that exist between He and us. You see? In the Old Testament world, there was priests that existed between us and God. There was sins that existed between us and God. There was sins of omission that we didn't even know about that existed between us and God. And Yom Kippur is when he gets everybody together and he says, look, look, everyone, I am putting things in place so that there is nothing between me and my people. I'm putting things in place so that you know that I want to be with you, so there is nothing that can separate us. There are no barriers between us now. And then when he sends Jesus, who is the perfection of Yom Kippur, he removes all of the barriers and his presence rushes into the lives of those who would believe. And Yom Kippur is God's relentless and ruthless effort to remove all barriers between you and him. He wants nothing to exist between you. And knowing that we are impotent to remove those barriers ourselves, he installed a celebration once a year to tell us, hey, there's nothing between me and you. There are no barriers. There's nothing keeping you from my presence. You are welcome here. And then by sending his son the perfection of Yom Kippur, he says eternally once and for all, you are invited into my presence, so much so that I am preparing a place for you in my very presence for all eternity. And as I thought about the spirit of Yom Kippur and this God who ruthlessly removes every barrier between he and I, what I realized is I am impotent to remove the barriers that are placed between me and God, but I am very capable of putting them there. And as I reflected on myself, it occurs to me that any barriers that exist between me and God are ones that I put there. They're man-made. I built them myself. Sometimes with doubt, because I walked through that. Often with faithlessness and inconsistency. The feelings of guilt that he's ridden me of that I still cling to. Because I can't understand how he could still love me. Oftentimes it's my sin that puts a layer, puts another veil between me and God. And then I got to thinking about you as your pastor and would submit to you. If you feel like there are barriers between you and God, things preventing you from being as close with him as you would like and he would like? I think it's very likely we put those there ourselves. I think based on the heart of God, I see in Yom Kippur that any barriers that exist between us and God are ones that we built. Because he removes all the ones he can. So maybe we have doubt. But we haven't asked God to remove that. So here's what I want to do. In a few minutes, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, the band is going to be playing through a song. And I want to invite you while they play to just stay in your seat and be quiet and pray and reflect. And invite you to pray a prayer for yourself that I've been praying this week. And ask God, are there any barriers between you and I? Ask for the faith and the courage to see those. And then if he's gracious enough to point them out to you, maybe you know them right now, maybe they're blaring in the back of your mind, then pray that God would give you the courage to take the steps of faith to remove them. And so, as we pray together, I want you to have this opportunity to ask God, God, are there any barriers between me and you? Have I hung any veils in my life that need to be torn down? And give him permission to do that. Give him permission to bring down those barriers. Maybe you came today and you don't know Jesus. Maybe you wouldn't call yourself a believer. And so the barrier between you and God is faith. If you're here today and you want to become a believer, you want to accept this atonement, you want to be made right with your creator, that human desire to repent and be made right resonates with you. Then maybe today is the day that you become a child of God. To be a Christian, all you do is admit that I've sinned. I've acted in ways that have displeased my creator. And my sin has placed a barrier between God and I. And because of that, I need the death of Jesus on the cross to atone for me. It's not just cover over my sins, but cleanse them. You pray and you tell that to God. And then you say, from this point forward, I'm no longer the Lord of my life. I'm no longer the decision maker in my life. God is. And I'll do my best to do what he says. Many of us in here have been Christians for a long time, but over the years, we've allowed barriers to develop between us and God, and we don't have the intimacy with him that we want. Take a few minutes and have the courage to allow God to point those out, and have the faith to ask Him to remove those, whether they be doubt, bitterness, or sin, or habits. And on the day that the church looks at Yom Kippur, God's visible effort to remove barriers between he and I and restore the intimacy that we both long for. Take a minute and approach God for that intimacy as well. I'm gonna pray and then you guys sit and pray. And when Steve thinks it's the right time, we'll all stand and we'll finish singing together. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We are floored and humbled that you have so intentionally removed all the barriers between us and you. God, we thank you for the day of atonement for Yom Kippur and all that it represents, for all the symbolism there. I ask that we would be touched by it, that we would be moved by it. God, I ask that for those of us who came in this morning with a veil that we hung ourselves, with a barrier that we built ourselves between you and us, God, give us the faith to see it and the courage to ask you to remove it. It's in your son's name we pray.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. Somebody's near those lights in the back. Can we hit them? Thanks, David. Both of them. There we go. I want to be able to see everybody, even Jim Adams in the back. Welcome to Grace. It's good to have you here. I'm so excited to be kicking off the fall. I really, as a pastor and just as a person who's no longer in school, hate the summertime. It is too hot. Nothing in my life calls for the temperature to be over 70 degrees. I really like football, and I really like two services, and I really like when small groups start. So I'm so excited to be launching into this new series. As a clerical note, as we begin here today, those of you that got the bulletin when you came in and you are my note takers and you like to fill in the blanks, I have bad news for you. I'm not going to use those today, okay? I'm going to use them kind of. There's going to be enough in the sermon that you can fill in the blanks if you really want to, but I went back to Alan running the computer and I said, we're just going to put the verse on the screen when I get to it. Other than that, don't worry about the notes because they're just going to mess me up this morning. Okay. So anyways, I just wanted you to know that. Don't get frustrated when you're like, I don't know what to write down. You're not gonna. It's going to be a big fun mystery. I want to take you to our staff meetings. We have staff meetings now every Tuesday, every Tuesday, full-time staff. So that's me and then Steve. Yeah, the one with the curly hair that comes up here sometimes. Steve, our worship pastor. Kyle, our excited student pastor. I'm a little worried that the stage is now too wide for him. It's got too much space up here. And then Aaron, our wonderful children's pastor. And then sometimes some of our part-time staff will join us for lunch and stick around for a meeting. So that's what we do every Tuesday. And so we go out to lunch and then we come back and we sit down in a room over there and we talk about whatever it is we need to talk about. And I don't know how your staff meetings go. I'm sure that you are all on staff or have been on staff in different places. You have meetings that everyone loves. And I don't know how well you guys stay focused, but I know for us, all of our meetings go at least 33% longer than they need to because all four of us are very prone to chasing rabbits. It can very easily go something like this. If you could please silence your cell phones, that would be super. I'm just messing around. I just always wanted to say that. We'll sit down in a meeting and we'll be like, okay, we got to plan the Hootenanny. Hootenanny's coming up. We got to plan it. Let's talk about it. What do we want to do here? And then I'll say like, what kind of food should we serve? And maybe Aaron will say, well, how about just hot dogs? Those are easy. Let's try hot dogs. And then Steve will go, oh, man, I was downtown, and I had the best hot dogs at Crazy 8's. They were so good. You guys have got to try this restaurant. And then Aaron will be like, yeah, Harris and I love that restaurant. That's the best. And then I'll hear about Harris, and I'll get excited and be like, hey, how's Harris doing? Is he doing okay? Has he been able to get out and golf lately? I know that dude likes golfing. And then Kyle will be like, yo, me and Harris just went frisbee golfing like yesterday. It was great. And I'll go, get out of here. Where did you go? And he'll say, we went to such and such park. And then Steve will go, Grayson loves that park. And then Aaron will say, I do too. And then I'll go, let's all get together and hang out at the park. What do we need to bring? Hot dogs? And then eventually somebody goes, hey, hey, hey, hootenanny. We've got to focus. And we go, oh, yeah, okay. And then we go. I mean, am I lying? That's totally how it goes. And we've got to stop. We get to wandering off. We get caught up in everything else, and then we have to refocus on what's important. And I bring that up because I think that that happens in life, right? I think that in life we all choose our priorities and our things that are important to us. If I were to ask any of you, what are the three most important things in your life, for most of the people in the room, even if you're lying because I'm the pastor, you would say, well, my faith and my family and then like job or friendships or whatever else comes next. We'd all say those things to one degree or another. But then as we get into life, sometimes that gets skewed a little bit because life just gets crazy. I was talking to somebody last week who said that they learned while all three of their daughters were in middle school, high school time, they got a new car, and they learned very quickly that the mom was putting 1,000 miles a week on her car just getting all the kids to all the different places that they needed to be. That's busy, man. That's hectic. We volunteer for stuff. We overextend. We fill our calendar so that we feel like we're doing something and we don't have any time in the margins. We got to go to meetings that we don't care about. A lot of us live our life out of a sense of ought. Someone asks us to do something and when we feel like since they asked me, I should say yes. And then we wake up in the morning resenting that thing that we have to do, but we go and we do it anyways because this is what good people do. And we just go on to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. And I think that sometimes our years get away from us. And this is why holidays are great. Because holidays force us to slow down and focus on this thing that we've designated as important. Right? This is how Mother's Day works. We go through the year, and I don't know who gave it to us, Hallmark maybe, I can't back that up with paperwork, but we're grateful to them. We go through the year, and if we have a good mom, we take her for granted sometimes. We forget to tell her that she's awesome. We forget to thank her for all the things that she does. We forget to call her when we should. And we just kind of go through the year doing that. And then May comes and everybody goes, hey, hey, Mother's Day. All right. Say you're grateful. Oh, yes, thank you. And then we do the flowers and the hugs and we go eat at the restaurant with the bad service, right? That's what we do. It's the same for our anniversary. If you're married, you go through the year. And often, I mean, it never happens in my marriage with Jim, but I've heard that other people take one another for granted and they just go through the year kind of forgetting and then your anniversary comes up and you go, oh, that's right. And for that day, you focus on what's important. And I think that this is what holidays do for us. I think holidays orient us on what really matters. Holidays remind us to focus on what's actually important. This is why I think God instilled some holidays in the calendar in the Old Testament. This is an aside. I couldn't move through the sermon without saying this because it's something I've been thinking about with the rhythm of life. We're going to spend the next six weeks looking at the six festivals or holidays or feasts that God installed into the calendar of his people that we see in Leviticus chapter 16. We're going to look at those six holidays and figure out what they mean for us and what we're celebrating now as we remember them. And I've loved diving into them. I've learned more, more quickly than I have in a long time because this represented a big gap in my biblical knowledge. And so one of our great partners gave me a stack of books that I've just been reading through for every holiday. It's been so enriching. But one of the things I've been thinking about is if holidays serve to reorient us on what's important, to take our focus off all the stuff and focus us in on what really matters. And this is the rhythm that God has installed so that every now and again, at a certain rhythm over the course of the year, before we get too far off the mark, God goes, hey, and he focuses us. Then isn't this what happens on Sundays? As he installed the rhythm of church, we go through our weeks, and before we can get too far away, God brings us back into church and focuses us on him and says, hey, don't forget about me, I'm important. And isn't that what's great about the rhythm of waking up every day and spending time in God's word and time in prayer? I've said a bunch of times that you can develop no more important habit in your life than to spend time in God's Word and time in prayer every day. And if nothing else happens, if this sermon this morning is a dud and you leave here, you're like, I didn't get anything out of that. I wouldn't blame you. If you get up and you read the Bible in that particular week, you kind of go, gosh, I just didn't get anything out of this. I just didn't see anything today. Isn't it good that if nothing else happened, there's this rhythm in your life of bringing your focus back to God every day through prayer and through scripture reading and every week through church and then every so often through the holidays that he instills. I think there's something to a rhythm of life that reorients us on what's important. But we're going to spend the next six weeks looking at the festivals that God installed in the Hebrew calendar. We're going to do this with a little bit of an awareness of why God did this and when he started these in history. So just so we're all on the same page, the Hebrew nation really looks at the people of Israel, God's chosen people, they really look back at Abraham as their founding father, as their forefather. For Christianity, he's kind of the forefather or the founding father of the faith. For the unindoctrinated, he would be like our George Washington, okay? Like he was the guy. And so way back in Genesis 12, God made Abram, at the time he wasn't yet Abraham, some promises. Three promises of land of people and of blessing. I'm going to give you the land that we know as modern day Israel. Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. That's going to be the Hebrew people, the Jewish people. There's going to be a bunch of them. And then one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth, is the promise. So in Genesis 12, God makes these promises to Abraham, and through those promises, he becomes the forefather, the founding father of the Jewish faith and of our faith, if you're a believer. Then from him, he had some sons, and a couple generations later, there's Joseph. Joseph is a guy who ends up down in Egypt. All of Abraham's family moved down to live with Joseph. The Bible fast forwards 400 years between the end of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus, the first and second books of the Bible. And then we have Moses sitting there in Egypt. They are a people who are enslaved by Egypt and God tasks Moses in Exodus 3 and 4, the burning bush, with leading his people out of slavery. So Moses leads the people out of slavery. They're in the desert. They're wandering around, and it's this fascinating time. It's fascinating biblically, but just historically, if you like to think about things like this. Here's this nation of people, maybe about 500,000 strong, between three and 500,000 strong, that are living as nomads in the desert. And they have to now figure out life. They have to figure out laws. They have to figure out a religion. They have to figure out a civil structure. And so Moses installs a government and God gives them laws. This is the Ten Commandments that he carries down from the mountain. They start meeting. They set up a tabernacle, and they have a whole group of people called the Levites, or the priests, who are in charge of setting up the tabernacle and performing all the ceremonies necessary at the tabernacle to relate to the God that's meeting them. They start to form this little society, this little civilization. And as part of the civilization, God says, I want you to have six holidays that you observe every year. And so for the next six weeks, we're going to look at those six holidays. Because what these holidays do is they teach us and they show us that our God is a God of remembrance and he's a God of celebration. Our God is a God of remembrance and he is a God of celebration. He wants us at each of these holidays to remember something that he's done, to look back at something that he's done. He wants us to celebrate something that he's done. And I kind of like pointing that part of God's character out to people. I think sometimes we get the idea that church needs to be somber and sober and serious and that I should be wearing a suit and that we should put on our best for God and that it needs to be just high church of the utmost all the time, when really God designed fun. He initiated fun. He gave you the ability to smile. He likes laughter. He likes hearing your laughter. He likes watching us laugh together and enjoy one another, which is why in a couple of weeks when we have the Hootenanny, there's going to be a bunch of silly stuff and a bunch of funny stuff around that. We're going to have competitions in the service, and if you win one, you're going to get a fanny pack, and it's going to be the Hootenanny fanny. And you get to wear it to the Hootenanny so that everybody sees how awesome you are for the rest of the day. You're going to be the king or the queen of the hootenanny. It's going to be great. And we'll laugh and we'll giggle and we'll share stories and we'll talk about fantasy football. I'm going to win the league this year at the church. Worst to first, it's going to be an incredible story. And listen, God celebrates that. God ordains that. When we have the moments in here where we cry and we're brought low, those are holy moments. But when we have the moments where we celebrate and we're brought high, those are holy moments too because God initiated those. He is a God of remembrance and of celebration and we'll see these in the festivals. So this week we want to look at the first festival that God orders in Leviticus chapter 16. It's called the Feast of Trumpets, and it's initiated by the sounding of a trumpet, which is why we had Brandon come up and play the shofar at the beginning of the service. If you didn't get to see that because maybe you rolled in a little bit late, then you have to stay for the beginning of the next service. It's just a must. So he sounded the trumpet, and it initiated the service, and that's what they would do for the beginning of the next service. It's just, it's a must. So he sounded the trumpet and it initiated the service. And that's what they would do for the Feast of Trumpets is they would sound it and it would initiate and bring in the Jewish New Year is what it was a celebration of. Oddly enough, I don't know how it works out. Okay, I don't ask questions like this. Their New Year began in the seventh month of the year. It was a month called Tishri. It mirrored a large portion of September and the beginning of October. So according to the calendar, we're observing it and looking at it at exactly the right time. And I think that that's really cool because to me, this first full service, I mean, we had Labor Day, we did Grace Serves, and it was amazing. But this first full service in September, to me, initiates the new year at Grace, the new ministry year. And that may sound funny to you, but for me, the rhythms of the year kind of work like this. In September, everything's back, right? Small groups are back, people are back from vacation, and the church is full again, and people are consistent again, and schedules are a little bit more regular. And so September is a big month at Grace. And so we push hard in September. We get ready for it, and we push, push, push, and we go, go, go. And really, we push really hard until Christmas. And Christmas is a big celebration. And then we kind of take a deep breath, and we get ready because January is a huge month too. We gear up for January, then we push really hard to Easter and then through Mother's Day and then after Mother's Day, schedules kind of start to get irregular again. People go on vacation and we know that. That's perfectly fine. And then over the summer, we kind of take a deep breath and then we gear up for September again. So that's kind of the rhythm of church. And so to me, this Feast of Trumpets mirrors our new year as well. Their new year mirrors our new year. And so I thought it was a good place to start as we dive into these feasts. And they sound the trumpet because it was symbolic of a lot of things in Hebrew culture. The trumpet, the shofar, the ram's horn. And we have a small one, but you guys have probably seen those big, long, loud ones that would just fill the area with sound. You've probably seen those. Trumpets meant something to a Jewish person. There's the ram's horn, but then there was also a silver trumpet that was sometimes sounded. And the silver trumpet was emblematic or symbolic of the redemption that God buys for us, the way that he makes a way for us to be right with him. You would sound a shofar as a battle cry. You would sound it so that people would prepare for an announcement. It was sounded around the walls of Jericho. To me, one of the coolest things, because there's a parallel in our New Testament, is it would be sounded to call the workers in from the harvest. So it's time for synagogue or it's time for temple. One of the priests would go out and he would sound the shofar and all the people working out in the field would hear the sound far off and know to come in because it was time to gather for assembly. And I think that's really cool because in Thessalonians and in Corinthians, we're told that one day Jesus is going to come back and he's going to claim his children to himself. And if you're here and you're alive, then you are a worker in the field. You are active. You should be about actively bringing other people along with you to heaven. We all have work to do. That's one of the reasons why at Grace we have partners. We don't have members because we kind of believe that members tend to consume and that partners tend to contribute. And we believe that we are an entity that is about getting something done. So we're looking for people to partner with us. We are laborers in the field and workers for the harvest. And one day Jesus is going to return and he's going to call us home. And do you know what we're going to hear when he does that? The sound of a trumpet. I would bet everything I have that it's a shofar. What a beautiful parallel there is from the Old Testament to the New Testament promises. But I think the most profound symbolism that we see in the Feast of Trumpets is that the horn that was blown is symbolic of the ram that was caught in the thicket in Genesis 22. I told you that Abraham was the forefather of the Hebrew people and that God promised him that through you, you're going to have a ton of descendants. This was an issue because Abraham and his wife Sarah had not yet had any children. And so very late in life, I think Abraham was 99, if I remember my Bible correctly, they had a son named Isaac. And a few years into Isaac's life, God says, I'd like you to offer Isaac to me. And so Abraham, in obedience, gets up and takes the physical manifestation of the promises of God to this land, to this region of Moriah, up onto a hill, and he prepares to sacrifice him. And right at the moment where Abraham was going to strike down Isaac, he hears a voice that says, Abraham, Abraham, do not touch the boy. And there's a ram caught in the thicket. And the voice tells him, go and get the ram and let that die in Isaac's place. And so he goes and he gets it and he kills the ram and the ram dies so that Isaac doesn't have to. And it's the picture of the sacrificial system in the Old Testament that says and acknowledges that when we sin, and sin is any time we put our authority in our life over God's authority in our life. God says, I think that you should do this thing, and we go, no, I don't think so. I think I need to do this thing. That's sin. Whatever it is, it's when we elevate our judgment over God's in our life. And when we do that, we're separated from God. And that separation requires a death. And so God in his sovereignty in the Old Testament installed the sacrificial system so that essentially that ram dies so that Isaac doesn't have to. It's a picture of what's called a substitutionary atonement. And the really cool part of this is, this is what the Hebrew people would remember. So on the Feast of Trumpets, the trumpet is blown. It stands for all these things, but it most pointedly stands for the ram caught in the thicket in Genesis chapter 22. And so God told them, I want you to remember the promise that I made to Abraham, your forefather, and then remember how I kept it in the form of a ram. And now here you are today at the time in the land of Israel with the promises of God kept. And so what the Feast of Trumpets is really is a time for us to celebrate and remember the promises that God has kept to us and anticipate the promises that God has made to us. And so for a Christian, as we look at this festival, what we understand is that it points directly to Jesus. Do you know what the picture in Genesis 22, when Abraham takes Isaac up on the mount, do you know what that's a picture of? It's a picture of the crucifixion of Christ. Do you understand that all of Israel looked forward? They would celebrate the Feast of Trumpets every year. They would celebrate, next week we're going to look at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. They would look at that and how there was an atoning work done for them. And they would anticipate one day God's going to send a Messiah, his son, a messianic figure, and he will be the atonement for us all. He will be the ram for us all. And so it was a remembrance of the promise that God made to Abraham and a looking forward to the fulfillment of that promise. And as believers now in 2019, we look back and we see how God kept his promise to Abraham and his people by providing Jesus. That the sacrifice of Jesus to that point is the apex and the perfection of history. That all of history before Jesus looked forward to him coming. That the feast of trumpets was a yearly reminder that we anticipate the coming of Jesus. And then after that, we anticipate this perfect utopia that God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth where his children live in peace, and that Jesus brings that about. And as New Testament believers, we see that the ram is really a picture of Jesus. And so the shofar that is sounded at the Feast of Trumpets to us is not a reminder of the ram. It's a thing that points to Jesus. And it's our job to remember on a day like this the promises that God made to us and kept so that we can gleefully anticipate the ones that he will keep. To me, the Feast of Trumpets is a big ceremony that's existed for thousands of years to point us to what I believe is the most hopeful passage in all of Scripture. If you were to talk to an ancient Hebrew person on the day of the Feast of Trumpets, they would tell you that one of the promises they were anticipating, the main promise they were anticipating was being in eternity with God one day. It was a utopia that God is going to create with a new heaven and a new earth. And if you were to talk to a Christian and say, what are you hoping in? We would tell you, ultimately, we are hoping in an eternity spent with God. And in Revelation chapter 21, one through four, we see this eternity kind of synopsized in four verses. John writes this. The dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away. If you are a believer, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, then that is the hope that you cling to. When life doesn't make sense, when things get hard, when days are dark, that is the hope that we cling to. And we cling to that hope because Romans tells us that our hope will not be put to shame. We cling to that hope because we remember the other promises that God has kept. And if he's kept those promises, then I know he'll keep that promise. If he's been faithful to his church through Jesus and his death, then I know that he'll be faithful to his church through Jesus and his return. I know that I'll hear a trumpet again one day and I know that he's gonna call me into this promise in Revelation where all the wrong things will be made right and all the sad things will be made untrue. And all the things that you don't understand in this life will make sense. And so on the Feast of Trumpets, we reflect on the promises that God has kept. And we eagerly anticipate the ones that he will fulfill. We do that as a body of believers, as the church Big C Church. We do that as Grace, Little C Church. It would be right and good to reflect on where the church has been and how God has been faithful to us through the years and anticipate what we believe his promises are about our church as we move forward. And I think most importantly this morning, it's a time for us as individuals to reflect on the promises that God has kept in our life and be hopeful about the things that he will bring about in our life. Some of us are walking through hard times. For some of us, our anxiety level when we walked in here is up to here. We're struggling with depression. We're struggling with anxiety. We're struggling with sleepless nights. We're struggling with indecision or pain or hardship or grief. And if we're not struggling now, we know enough about life to know that those days come, that there's dark days too. And the Feast of Trumpets slows us down in the midst of our anxiety and focuses us and says, hey, do you remember all the things that God has done for you so far? He will see you through the next thing. And so I think it's right and good today for all of us, no matter where we are, no matter how we felt when we walked in the room, to remember the ways that God has come through for us in the past and know that he will come through for us in the future. I've shared with you guys before that the most difficult season of my life was our miscarriage. We struggled for a long time to get pregnant. We finally did, and then we learned that we had lost the baby. Those are the darkest months of my life. That shook my faith the most. That made me the most angry with God. Those days were the most difficult ones to pray. Those were hard. And I remember those moments. But now I have a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Lily. And she's the fulfillment of things. She's the promise of God. She's my physical manifestation of his goodness that he will come through for me. And every now and again, I get to put her to bed. Most nights not because Jen is her favorite and she makes that very clear. She will tell me, Mommy is my favorite. I do not like you today. Okay. Same as our friends. But when I do get to put her to bed, we do the whole routine. And then finally we lay down and I'm laying there next to her and I sing her some songs. And the last song that I always sing is God is so good. God is so good. He's so good. He's so good to me. And she doesn't know it. She thinks I'm just singing. But she's the goodness. And the last stanza, there's a bunch of different ways you can sing that song, but the last stanza that I always sing when I put her to bed at night is God answers prayer. He answers prayer. He's so good to us. He answers prayer in your life too. You have the manifestations of God's goodness in your life too. And the Feast of Trumpets, even in the hardest of times, focuses us on the promises that God has kept for us in the past and gives us hope even when we don't see how, even when we can't piece together why, that God will fulfill those promises in the future, that he will see us through again. So today, that's what we celebrate. I'd like you to pray with me, and then we're going to move into a time of communion together. Father, we love you. You are so good to us. You do answer prayer. God, you've seen us through so many seasons of our lives. You've come through in so many ways. Father, I pray specifically for those who came in with heavy hearts this morning for whatever reason. That you would focus them in on the things that you've done for them in the past so that they might have a little hope that the future is bright too. God, thank you for all the manifestations of the goodness in our life. I pray that we would take a minute today and realize those before we get out of here, before we run out and let life pick up again and forget what we should be focused on. I pray that we would each take just a minute and be grateful for your goodness in our life and the way that you've come through for us in the past. God, be with our brothers and sisters, our family members who are hurting. Pray that you would heal them. Pray that you would give them your peace. And we thank you that you are a God of celebration and that you are a God of remembrance, Lord. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.