Sermons tagged with Reflection

Thank you very much. Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. There you go. Now they can see me on video. Isn't that so much better? If you are joining us online, thank you for doing that. And I would just say gently for those who are joining us online, if you're doing that consistently, there is nothing quite like worshiping together as a family. So if you can get here and worship with us, do that because it's a sweet, sweet time, and it's my favorite part of the week, every week when I get to worship with you guys. We are in the third part of our series called Traits of Grace, and these are kind of five distinctive characteristics that make grace, grace. I am a firm believer, and will wholeheartedly share it with whomever is curious that grace is not, we're not nailing it as a church. Okay. We haven't like figured out how to do church the right way and all the other churches are doing it wrong. Okay. They're, they're worse than us. You guys are the good Christians who've really figured out how to love Jesus well. And the other churches are apostate and we should pray for them. Like we don't believe that. We believe that there are plenty of churches in the city of Raleigh that are doing wonderful jobs, pushing people towards Jesus and making disciples. I would even say that there's got to be plenty of them who are doing better than us. But you guys are here this morning. So we're going to make the best of it together while you think about a better church to go to next week. But there's plenty of great churches doing plenty of great things, and so I think it's important for churches to figure out what is it that makes us us? What has God wired us to do? A few weeks ago, we talked about being kingdom builders, and I kind of left you guys with the question of what is your good work? Ephesians 2.10, for we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And so we asked, what is your good work? And I think similarly, it's wise for churches to ask, what is our good work? Every church is supposed to make disciples, but how would God have us go about it? How has he uniquely wired and gathered and impassioned us to do it? And as we were having the discussion about what makes grace, grace last fall, we came up as a staff and then as elders with these five traits. So we've talked about the fact that partners at grace are kingdom builders. Then we talked last week about how partners at Grace are conduits of Grace. We stay connected to Jesus and we pour out all the love and all the goodness and all the grace that we receive from Jesus onto others. We are conduits of Grace. And so this week we arrive at the third trait that we feel like we are at Grace. And I realized this morning as I was reviewing and preparing that I didn't put this in your notes anywhere. So I don't know if this is going to be unofficial or something. I hope I haven't done something wrong and now this one doesn't count. But we are people of devotion. That's the third trait of grace. We are people of devotion. And when I say devotion, obviously that can mean multiple things, but it really means what it meant back in 1985. We are people who have devotions. You have heard me say many times, if you've been at grace for any period of time, that the single greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life, a lot of you can finish this sentence, is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. That is the most important thing, the most important habit that any single one of us can develop at any point in our life. And I believe that to be true, and we hit on that to be true, and we remind you of that all the time, because I also try to remind you that I am not enough. You can't come listen to me talk for 30 minutes a week and know the breadth and the depth of the God that's waiting for you in this text. You can't listen to whatever I choose to pick out and talk about just this little tiny snippet within here and somehow hope to understand the whole book. That's just not how that works. So it takes more than 30 minutes a week. It takes more than just one small group a week, which we'd love to say is an hour a week talking about spiritual things, but really it's about 45 minutes a week talking about whatever the heck and then about 15 minutes of good spiritual conversation. If you're in a small group, you know what I'm talking about. So that's not enough. We've got to spend time in God's Word, and we've got to spend time in God's presence through prayer. So when we thought about what are we at Grace, what do we want partners to be at Grace? We want to be people of devotion. We want to be people who develop that habit. And as we think about it this morning, I don't know about you, but I feel that when God is speaking to us, he often speaks in stereo. When someone will ask me, hey, how do I hear God's voice? How do I know what he's saying to me? How do I discern God's will for my life? I often will say, one of the first things I'll tell him is, God speaks, when he speaks to me, he speaks in stereo. He tells me from this source and this source and this source and this source, and it just kind of continues to come up in my life. And one of the themes that has been coming up for me in my life before the summer, but in particular the summer, you guys gave me the great privilege and rest of not having to preach in the month of July to just kind of settle and work on some other things in the church and allow God to refresh me a little bit. And it was wonderful. And one of the things that I brought out of there and that seems to continue to come up in my sermons that I'm preaching like when I preached on the law a couple weeks ago and I've seen it come through in themes these last couple weeks and then really we're hitting on it again in my Tuesday morning men's Bible study. I have a men's Bible study that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6 30. We meet that early to keep out the riffraff. The only thing the only thing prohibiting you from being there is laziness. So come on and join us. We're not any nicer there either. This is as nice as it gets. But I see this theme in my life and I've seen it in what we're learning at Grace and I thought it worth highlighting this morning, which is simply the beautiful simplicity of abiding. We talked about this last week. We're conduits of grace. And we looked at John 15, where Jesus is speaking to the disciples, particularly four and five. And he says, I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we talked about this idea of all I have to do is stay connected to Christ, and he's going to produce the fruit in my life that I need to produce. I don't have to think about that. I just focus on abiding in Christ. And I think that there is this beautiful simplicity to that. Because we can make Christianity really complicated, can't we? It can be really challenging and difficult. It can be intimidating to look at this Bible, to open it up, to come to service on a Sunday and the pastor says, turn to Malachi. You're like, I've never even heard of that name in my life. I don't know where that is, right? Just to learn just the names of the 66 books, to learn how to find them all, that there's 37 or 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament, to learn all, what are all the sins? What are all the things I'm supposed to do? What are all the things I'm not supposed to do? Who are all the people? And how old was Paul? Did he live to be 900? Or is that some other guy? Like it can be a lot. And one of the things that I have a heart for is adults, people who have already gone through life and made a bunch of decisions. And in your 30s, 40s, 50s or later, you decide this is when I want to get serious about my faith and you start trying to learn Bible. And you don't have the background that I've been learning about this since I was old enough to talk. But it can feel like a steep bell curve when you're trying to learn faith and taking it seriously. So I love the beautiful simplicity of really what God asks us to do, which is to simply abide in him. Just simply, you just, just, just focus on Jesus. Just pursue Jesus. Just love others like Jesus loves you. Just do all that. The rest of this stuff, if you focus on abiding in Christ, the rest of this stuff, the rest of Christianity, the rest of life will take care of itself. Just focus on abiding in Christ. And this is, this is an attitude that we see throughout scripture. We're going to look at two other places today where it's pared down and it's made just this simple. One of my favorite pictures of this in the Bible is in the book of Hebrews. In the book of Hebrews, there's Hebrews chapter 12, verse 1, obviously follows. I don't know if you know this. You have to go to seminary to know this, but chapter 12 of Hebrews follows chapter 11 of Hebrews. And in chapter 11 of Hebrews, we have this really famous passage that's called the Hall of Faith, where the author of Hebrews lists out all of these heroes of the faith and the acts that they performed by faith. And then when we get into 12, and I'll read it in just a minute, but when we get into 12, we see it begin, So it's this idea that we're on the playing field of earth as those in heaven who have come before us are now watching us in real time, which I think is a really cool thought. And here's what the author of Hebrews says. He says, Because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. And it's language, I think, that we can identify with. It's language that inspires. We're kind of like, okay, I'm on the playing field. I'm supposed to run this race. I'm supposed to live my life. I'm supposed to do the things that God wants me to do. How do I do that? Well, I throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. I need to run in such a way that I can do what God wants me to do, that I can be who God wants me to be, and I need to get rid of all the things that don't help me run my race. And this, again, is an idea that is replete throughout Scripture. It shows up again and again and again. Paul tells us that we are to fight the good fight. He says that he fights the good fight. He tells us that in this race, we are to run as the one who's trying to get the prize, that we are supposed to cling to our faith. We are told to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. Jesus tells us that other people should see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. So all throughout Scripture is this simple admonition that we need to live a life worthy of the calling that we've received. We need to run the race. We need to be who God created us to be. We need to determine what are our good works and how do we walk in them. And you can rephrase all of that and we say we need to be good Christians. We need to grow in our faith. We need to move towards Jesus. And we can identify with this. This is, to me, inspiring. It's easy to understand. Yep, I'm running a race and I do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that's so easily entangled. So I got to stop doing those things so I can do the things that God wants me to do. And sometimes, I think more often than not, that's where we stop. I'm going to try really hard at running this race. I'm going to try really hard to be a good Christian. I'm going to try really hard to be a good dad and a good husband and a good friend, a good employee or employer. I'm going to try really hard to be a good citizen. And I'm going to do that by throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we act like the next verse doesn't exist. How are we supposed to do that? By looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Even in Hebrews, where it uses this language about running our race, doing better, being good Christians, being who God's created us to be, it tells us, it gives us the answer right there. How do I do that? How do I run my race well? By focusing my eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. How do we produce much fruit? By abiding in Christ, by focusing on Jesus. And so I call it the beautiful simplicity of abiding because there's this thing that happens. When I decide that I want to be a better father or a better husband or a better pastor or a better human, there's a lot of growth that needs to happen in all of those areas, except for husband. I'm nailing that one. When I decide I want to be better at those things, I think our tendency is to go, okay, what do I need to do to be a better husband? And we identify things and we run and I'm going to do more of this and less of this. What do I need to do to be a better wife? I'm going to do more of this and less than this. What do I need to do to be a better mom? I'm going to do more of this and less of this. And we try to white knuckle our way to better, right? That's the American way. I want to be better at these things. I'm going to focus on those things. I'm going to come up with a plan, and I'm going to do it. And Christianity says, no, no, don't do that. Don't do that. Just focus on Jesus. Just focus on God. Just focus on abiding in Christ, and I'll take care of the rest of it. So here's how this works practically. I do have a lot of room to grow in being a husband. You know the most effective way for me to be a better husband to Jen? It's to pursue Jesus. It's to wake up tomorrow and say, Jesus, I want to honor you today as I seek to be Jen's husband. How do I honor you in that? How would you have me be a good husband today, Jesus? You want to be a better employee? You want to move up the ranks? You want your career to progress? You can spend a lot of time thinking about the best thing to do and the best person to please and the best way, the best jobs to go for or the best tasks to complete or the right people to make friends with or whatever it is you do to progress in your field. Or you can go to work every day, focus on Christ, and you can say, Jesus, how can I honor you today in my work? How can I honor you today in these meetings? How can I honor you today in these tasks? And then you honor Jesus. And you know what happens? Everything else works out. I was talking in my Bible study group about this idea. Just honor Jesus in what we do. Just pursue Jesus in what we do and let him handle the results. And they said, well, what does that mean practically? I said, for my sermons. My job is to be diligent on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday so that when I stand before you on Sunday, before God on Sunday, I know I've given my best effort. I've honored God in my preparation. I've honored Jesus in my prayer life as I approached sharing this with you guys. And I know that I've done the best that I could in the week that I was given with the time that I was allotted. And I'm honoring Jesus as I give this to you. If I can say that, what happens as a result of the sermon is completely out of my hands. I have nothing to do with that. I don't worry about that. I worry about where my heart is as I prepare, and I'll be the first to confess. Listen, I say that, and that sounds lovely, like how Nate, he's worked diligently on sermons, and he's prayed through them, and he's ready to present them. Yeah, most of the time, sometimes, y'all, I'm winging it, and I sit down, and the very first, y'all are singing, and y'all think things are good, and I sit down, and I'm like, God, I'm so sorry. I dishonored these people. That wasn't worth showering for. I can't believe that I did that to them. So sometimes I don't do it. But on the weeks that I do, then I preach the sermon, and I wash my hands of it. Now it's between you and the Spirit. And somebody in my Bible study said, well, wouldn't that be a great way to approach life? And I was like, yeah, yeah, it would. We should do that with everything. We should do that with how we lead people, with how we love people, with how we be good parents. It's the beautiful simplicity of abiding in Christ. We focus on him, and then he takes care of everything else. And I think that this is a radical message in a culture that wants to try so hard at everything, that wants to have a to-do list for everything, for all the things in life. I'm going to find a way to tackle it, and I'm going to white-knuckle my way to better. And really, the beautiful simplicity of abiding means that we try hard at pursuing Jesus. That's it. That's where we try hard. Christians, you want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where to put your efforts? You want to know what you need to wake up thinking about? What you need to be consumed with? How you get better at life? How you do all the things that matter? You want to know how to do that? You want to know where you should put your effort? Put it in pursuing Jesus. And waking up every day and spending time in God's word and time in God's presence through prayer. Put it into pursuing Christ and everything else will take care of itself. And there's a lot of ways to pursue Jesus, okay? We do it through worship. We do it, I believe, through godly community and spiritual conversations. We have transparency and vulnerability. We ask good questions. We share pieces of ourselves. We pursue Jesus through his service, through doing his work. Jesus says whatever we do unto the least of these, we do unto him. So we pursue Jesus by helping those who can't help themselves. But I think the primary way that we pursue Jesus is through devotions. One of the primary ways we pursue Jesus is by waking up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer. I think it's the fundamental way. I think one of the most frustrating things to me about trying to get in shape and fit into your old mediums. I've got one on underneath this that I have to wear a baggy shirt over it because if I don't, I'll just bring shame on my family. I can't wear this polo in front of other people in public. I used to be able to, there was a time, but when you go to get in shape, you can, you can exercise 30 minutes a day, right? And exercising to me is the easy part. That's, that's, that's the fun thing to do. That's fine. That's good. I can put in a podcast or a book or something like that. That's kind of the easy discipline to gain on. You know what the hard part is? Eating like a rabbit, man. That stinks. Eating salads. That's not fun. I don't like eating right. I just don't. I like eating wrong. Very wrong. But unless you do both, you'll never be in good shape. You won't be in good health. And you can exercise all you want, but until your diet changes, your body really doesn't. And you really don't get that healthy. You can exercise all you want and go to church and do all the things and go to Bible study and have the conversations and serve sometimes and give of yourself and tithe. You can do all the exercise you want, but until your diet changes, your spiritual health won't really either. I believe that our pursuit of Jesus begins here. And that when we do that, when we begin it here, then God handles everything else. This is actually affirmed in the book of Psalms. The very first Psalm, the one that Parker read earlier in the service, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. And then look what happens. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. David says, blessed is the man who doesn't waste his time with frivolous things, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. His delight is in God's word. And on that law, he meditates day and night. How can you meditate on it if you don't know it, if you haven't learned it, if you haven't poured yourself into it? He prays over it. He pursues Jesus in it. And because of that, he's like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season. And all that he does, he prospers. The man that David is describing in Psalm 1 did not set about to prosper. That's not the point. He set about to know Jesus. He set about to know his God, to know his law, to know his word. And the happy side effect of that was that God blesses him along his way. I want to be careful when I say that. God's blessings look different than what you think blessings might be. So I'm not preaching that if we get up every day and read God's word that we're going to have all the things that we want. That's not how that goes. But what I am saying is if we get up every day and we spend time in God's word and time in prayer, then we will become who God wants us to be. That's the blessing. And I believe that becoming the people that God has created us to be is the place of greatest peace and contentment and happiness that we can find in life. If you've ever had a season where you were moving, you were doing exactly what God wanted you to do, you know there's no greater peace or joy than that. I had lunch with somebody this week, catching up with them after a long time, and he shifted careers and got a new job. And I said, how's it going, man? And he said, God has affirmed over and over and over again that I am doing exactly what he would have me do, and I have never been happier. It's remarkable how that works. When we walk the path that God has laid out for us, lo and behold, that's where joy is found. I think Psalm 16 tells us something about there being a fullness of joy in the presence of God. And I feel like that's a joy and a peace worth having. So I would also mention to you that nothing worth having is gained by default. Nothing in this life that we have that we really value is gained by default. If you have a good marriage, like a good one, you worked hard at that, Joker. You didn't just fall into that. Unless you're like, if you've been married for like two years, you're like, my marriage is pretty good. We haven't had to work that hard. Okay, forget you. All right. You don't count. Talk to the rest of us in 10 years, rookies. If you have a good marriage, you worked hard at that. You've intentionally spent time together when the kids made it difficult. You've intentionally chosen each other when life tried to prevent it. You've had hard conversations. You've said hard things. You've heard hard things. But you're stronger for it and you have a good marriage and you worked at it. If you have kids who love you, if you have adult kids who love you and want to spend time with you, you worked hard at that. That was not easy. That did not happen by default. If you have a career that you like, that you're proud of, you worked hard at that. That didn't happen by default. If you have good, rich, deep friendships, you've prioritized and valued them over the years. You've made them important. You didn't just default into those. Why would we think that we would default into a good, healthy, vibrant relationship with Jesus? We have to work at it. We have to make time for it. So do that. Prioritize it. Make it happen. Find a time when you can spend time in God's Word and spend time in prayer. If you don't know what to read, ask somebody. Start in Proverbs. If you don't know the Bible at all and you want to read it and you don't know what to read, start in Proverbs. You don't have to know anything about anything for Proverbs to make sense. Totally out of context, just start reading it. It's great. Read a gospel, read the book of Mark. It goes very fast and it points you with Jesus very well. Or just pick up and read something you've been curious about, but start doing it. Make it a habit. Be consistent in it. Trust me when I say that there's no greater habit that anyone can develop than that, and do it. Whatever you're currently doing first in the morning isn't as good as this. And if what you're doing first in the morning is sleeping an extra 30 minutes, it's definitely not as good as this. Just hit pause on that other stuff and engage with God first and then go about your day. I do it when I get into the office. I get into the office. I tend to be the first one in the office because I'm the hardest worker on staff. And I have a kid that starts school early and I have to drop her off every day. So I get here early. But the office is quiet and that's when I have my time. That's when I'm able to pray and read God's word and get ready to prayerfully approach my day. Pick a time when you can do it too. Make it happen. Prioritize it. Value it. Last week, I said that we needed to abide in Christ and we're going to talk about how to do that. And I said that when you came back this week, I was going to light some of your faces on fire and really convict you. So here's the convicting thing. What I'm about to say, I'm not saying to you if you're new. If this is the first time you've ever heard a sermon that's imploring you to have a devotional life, then I'm not saying this next thing to you. If it's the second time, maybe the first time you weren't paying attention, or I just did a bad job with it, whatever it was, I'm not talking to you either. But if you've heard this sermon before, I've preached it plenty. Maybe not from this angle, maybe not in this way, but I've preached have devotions. I've preached that a bunch. I've joked around. I'm going to do it one day. I'm just going to walk up here on stage and I'm going to go, hey, good morning, Grace. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate, one of the pastors here. You should read the Bible more. Let's pray. Because that's all you need because you know that I'm right. You know that we need to do this. So if that's you and you still don't have habit, as your pastor, as someone who cares about you, let me just ask you, how many more times will you need this sermon? How many more times? How many more times are you going to sit in this room or a room like this and hear this sermon and go, yeah, Monday, I need to. How many more? Can this one be it? Can this one do it for us? Because there's some people in this room who already do this. They've got a rich, vibrant devotional life, and they've been sitting in here, and they've just been cheering me on. Yes, do it. Please. It's the best. And I want all of you to cheer this sermon on every time you hear it from now on. Next time you hear this sermon, listen, I don't want it to convict you one little bit. I want you to sit in those seats feeling great because you know it's true. And now you're the cheering section because I'm never going to stop preaching this sermon. I'm going to preach it once or twice a year for the rest of my days as long as God gives me a stage to preach on to push people back into God's word and to push people back into prayer. But at Grace, as our partners, when I preach this sermon again, I want you to be the biggest cheerleaders. And I never want it to convict you again. Because I want you to hang in there and develop this habit. And I'll tell you this, okay? Just give you a little pastoral advice. Some of you, gosh, I hope, as a result of this, are going to wake up tomorrow, you're going to read your Bible. And it'll be something that you haven't done in a while. And that's great. You'll set your alarm. You'll make your coffee. You get your vibe all right, exactly where you want to be. This is good. This nice fall weather. This is great. I'm going to have the best quiet time. And you're going to open up your Bible to wherever you've decided to open up your Bible. And maybe, maybe God parts the heavens and the angels sing to you and Shekinah glory shines down directly on your head. Maybe. What's probably going to happen is you're going to get a little something out of it that's encouraging, that speaks to something in your life, or maybe nothing at all. You'll pray. If you're not used to praying, you'll pray for about two and a half minutes. You'll be like, I'm all out. Kind of run out of stuff to pray about. That's okay. And maybe it doesn't feel like the heavens parted and Shekinah glory shone down on your noggin. But I tell you what, if you get up tomorrow and you spend time in God's word and you spend time in prayer, I can promise you this, you'll have a different day than you would have had otherwise. You have a different mindset going into that day than you would have had otherwise. And if you do that several days in a row, I don't know when the heavens are gonna open and words are gonna leap off the page, but I can tell you this, if you do it several days in a row, you're gonna have a different week. And if you can manage by God's goodness and grace to hang in there and string together a couple of weeks like that, three, four weeks, you're going to have a different month. And if you start stringing together months, you're going to have a different life. And that's what we want for you at Grace. That's why we want you to be people of devotion. So let's pray that God gives us the strength of conviction to do that so that we know the only thing we need to try hard at is pursuing Jesus, and he'll take care of the rest. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for your word, for the way that you've chosen to reveal yourself to us. I pray that you would give us a heart for it, that you would give us a passion for it, that we would love your word, that we would love this text. God, make it exciting to us as we dive into it. Let us start to piece things together and understand where people go and where they fit and how you're revealed in your word. Let it excite us about you. God, create in us such a hunger for your word that we wake up looking forward to it. Create in us such a hunger for your presence that we desire to pray every day. May we be refreshed in your presence. May we be refreshed by your word. And God, may we become increasingly people of devotion. In Jesus' name, amen.

Oh, hey there, pals. Don't you just love this music? It's nostalgic, isn't it? Takes you back to a simpler time, when you were a kid and things were light and fun. I love times like that. I'll tell you what else makes me feel nostalgic. It's those old Bible stories. The ones that we learned in Sunday school or maybe just picked them up somewhere along the way. I love the heroes, David and Goliath, Noah and the ark, Jonah and the whale. The list really does go on and on. And I wonder, pals, how long's it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kid stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along, and that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, Mailman Kyle. Today, pals, Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. That has to be the coolest Mr. Rogers. I mean, a little bit creepy, but mostly, mostly, mostly cool, right? Hey guys, if you are new visiting or we just hadn't had the chance to meet yet, my name is Aaron and I am so excited to be sharing with you today. If you weren't here last week, it was a really cool week, especially for me being the newbie at Grace. It was a ministry partner Sunday and we got to hear from some of our ministry partners and just kind of hear exactly what was going on. And then afterwards, we gave you tacos. And I kind of wish the tacos were this week, because if I do a bad job, but we give you tacos after, you're going to leave and say, that was pretty good, right? So no, no, Nate, man, thank you so much just for the opportunity to come up and share what's been on my heart. Really excited about it. So, to kind of get our minds going in the right direction, I just kind of want to gauge the audience, see if anybody is like me. Is it anybody else who is extremely frustrated and gets angry when something doesn't go according to plan, but because of someone else, right? Like somebody else doesn't do their job, right? Have you ever had a bad haircut? I realize some of you guys are looking at me right now and you're like, 15 years ago, and your wife's looking at you and giggling. I didn't mean to bring that up. I'm sorry. But you understand what I'm saying, right? That happened to me not long ago. And now I'm realizing that I thought of this illustration this morning, getting ready for church, and now there's a bunch of people looking at my hair to see if I'm telling the truth. And stop it. But no, it's the most frustrating thing that can happen, right? Because it's not just that moment that you walk away angry. It's every morning afterward, you're looking, you're trying to fix your hair, and he's like, are you kidding me, right? You go get a hat, go to work, and it's done and over with. But it's frustrating because I went in with a plan, right? I went in and said, hey, this is what I want to do. I talked to him about showing pictures. I didn't walk out looking like Brad, but I looked like one of the little creatures from the Where the Wild Things Are. It was terrible. And every day, I'm like, bro, you had one job. I did everything that I could possibly do. Is anybody else like that? But let me ask you a question. Have you ever had that experience with God? You do everything that you could possibly do, and at some point you kind of sit back and you say, I mean, God, are you going to do anything about this? Like, God, is there, like, I can't, how long am I going to have to keep going through this same thing day after day? God, are you going to step in at any point in time and change things? That's one of the things that I think is so inspirational about, have you ever seen people that just have this unshakable faith? Have you ever encountered that before? It's like it doesn't matter what they deal with. It doesn't matter what they go through, what happens to them in their life. There's this solid confidence in tomorrow. Well, not necessarily tomorrow, but more in the God who kind of controls tomorrow. It's like nothing can be thrown at people like, no, it'll be okay. And they're not void of emotion, right? It's not like they're walking around saying, oh, no, everything's whatever. No, they grieve, they hurt, they have pain, they do all of this other stuff, but there's still this confidence. If you ever have a chance to speak to somebody who is kind of like that, they just have this solid, unshakable faith, I want to encourage you to just ask a lot of questions. And what I believe you will end up hearing is some variation of this, this confidence that God is not simply an observer of our life. He is actively involved in our life. God is not simply up there watching and hoping you get things figured out, hoping things work out according to plan. He's actively involved in the shaping of who we are and the world around us. It doesn't mean everything is going to be perfect all the time, but it means we're never going to be alone in this. And if you ever encounter someone who just kind of walks with that bold confidence that regardless what happens to them, I know that God is not just watching. And that's one of the things that I loved this last week about studying through and reading through Joshua and the battle of Jericho. You're probably familiar with the story. We are going to be in Joshua chapter 6. Joshua is the sixth book of the Old Testament. You can turn there, thumb to it in YouVersion, or we'll put it in this fancy digital Bible in the sky, right? But to catch you up, make sure we're all on the same page, Joshua, where we pick up in the story is he is a newly installed leader for the Israelites. It has been for hundreds of years, not hundreds of years, but for years and years, Moses was the leader. It starts back in when they were in slavery to the Egyptians, right? Moses stepped in, God used Moses, freed them from slavery to the Egyptians, walked them on this extremely long journey, got to see God do some incredible things while they're in journey to this land that God has promised them. And because the Israelites are super creative, they called it the promised land, right? And so now they get to this place where the promised land is in sight. They can see the land of Canaan and it's like, okay, that's it. That's where we're headed. Like everything they had been hoping for, they see it with their eyes. Moses dies. Joshua is raised to be the new leader. And God says to Joshua, hey, listen, there it is. We're going to walk into that land, that land that I promised you, the thing you've been hoping for. You're going to go there. And you're going to go and you're going to conquer all of your enemies there. It will be your land. The very first thing in their sights is Jericho. And so in Joshua 6, 1, it says this about the city of Jericho. It says, Jericho was strongly fortified because of the Israelites, no one entering or leaving. And the Lord said to story, right? Because it's not just any normal boundary. You can see that they really weren't worried about fighting. That's not what Jericho was depending on. They were depending on being able to keep the Israelites out, and that's what was going to keep them safe. I've done a little bit of reading. Without getting too bogged down into the details, the walls are actually made up of two sets of walls. They have an outer wall that starts with a stone retention wall, keeping the resources in. It goes above ground about 12 to 15 feet. Then on top of that, you have a brick mud wall. And it just goes up. It goes up an embankment for a little bit, and you come to the second brick mud wall, and it's built up. A lot of archaeologists, and I've read some commentaries, and what they would end up saying is if you're standing at the base of this wall and you look up, it would be similar to looking up at a four-story building. And that's what God says. That's the first target. But did you catch what he said in verse 2? He says, look, I have handed you. That's past tense. That's already happened. And so God sends them to this place that says, the wall, you can do nothing about. Like, it is absolutely impassable. You cannot touch this. I'll take care of that, and you're going to take care of everything else. And in verse 3, he says, here is the plan. I'm going to try to read this, but it's small. My large print Bible is still in transport, and I'm from Kentucky, so there's that too. But it says this in verse 3. It says, That's not that funny. I mean, come days. Have seven priests carry seven rams horn trumpets in front of the ark. On the seventh day, march around the city seven times while the priests blow the trumpets. When there is a prolonged blast of the horn and you hear it sound, have all the people give a mighty shout. Then the city wall will collapse and the people will advance each man straight ahead. So to kind of flesh that out just a little bit, it's essentially this. This was the plan. He said, I want you to have your fighting men in the front. Right behind them, I want you to have seven priests with seven trumpets. And then I want you to have a couple of priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant. And behind those, pulling in the rear guard, have the rest of your fighting men. And then he said, walk. Like literally, God's plan was take a hike. Like that was what God told them to do. Now listen, I am not much in way, I don't know much about like military strategic battles, right? The extent of my knowledge with warfare strategy begins and ends with Call of Duty. And I'm really not good at that either. But I do know this, that's a bad plan, right? Like, if I'm Joshua, I've got some questions. It's like, okay, God, that was a great broad stroke about what's going to happen, but there's some details I really kind of need to know about. Like, just feel me. Like, so we've got these guys. We've got our swords. Anything at all you want us doing with that? You want us making a lot of noise while we're circling just to strike some fear? No, no, just walk. As a matter of fact, just be real quiet while you're walking, too. Okay, God? I saw Bob has a shovel. Like, we can dig around, build something, like, to make the walls a little... No. Just walk. You poke it with a stick. I mean, what? Just literally just walk? Yeah, just walk. And so we have a tendency when we're reading stories like this, especially if you're anything like me, we kind of dehumanize, right? Like we will pull all of the emotion out of the text that we're reading. So just to kind of put you in that, let's say Nate comes up next week and he says, hey guys, listen, I have a vision from God. The city of Raleigh is going to be ours. We are going to remove all things evil from this city, right? There will be no more cats in this place. Like everything, everything evil is going to be, we'll get rid of it. Like there's, there's nothing else. The first thing we have to do, we have to conquer the most evil place in all of Raleigh. So we meet at Walmart and he says, so what we're going to do is I want you to just kind of walk around. He was like, okay, okay. We walk around, we get excited. We're ready to go. Yeah. We walked around. What now? He said, well, go home, and then come back tomorrow. Okay, okay, we can do that. What, you want us to bring? No, no, you're really good. Just walk. As a matter of fact, guys, we're going to do this for seven days, and on the last day, we're going to walk around it seven times. Listen, I trust Nate. I'm not doing that, right? Like, I'm sending my text. Hey, man, shoot me a message after y'all scream, and I'll show up, right? Because it just doesn't make any sense. Like, maybe the first couple of days, the Israelites were excited. Again, they just saw the land that they had been hoping for. They just saw the place that they had been traveling. They just saw the place that their grandparents and their grandparents, that everyone has been telling them that we're about to walk into it. So maybe there was some excitement. Maybe there was some enthusiasm on day one, two, and three. But what about day four, when they walk around it again and nothing changes? Day five, they walk around again, They look up, and there's not a brick that's fallen. Six and seven, much the same. I mean, again, let's be real. They're not superheroes. They're people like you and people like me. I mean, have you experienced that before? Were you're doing exactly what God has asked you to do, and the end result just doesn't seem to be happening. Maybe it's in your marriage, right? Like your marriage hasn't been exactly what you would hope it would be. And so you try to be obedient to who God has asked you to be as a spouse. You love sacrificially. You put them first. You're consistently serving, but they're just not reciprocating. And at some point, do you step back and say, is it worth it, God? Are you going to do something here? Because the unchangeable thing, Jericho, I can't change their heart. God, you said you would do something. You gave me your promise. Like, I know you want this. Maybe it's with work, right? Like you try to be a hard worker. You are the first one there, the last one to leave. You're trustworthy. You're always looking out for your coworkers, but time after time, year after year, you get passed over for the promotion. Somebody else gets in like, God, what are you doing? Maybe it's with finances in general, right? Like you start saving, you stop eating out, you try to create some margin, you put a little bit of money into saving, except the thing you can't control, inflation just seems to keep going up. And it's like, God, man, I'm doing everything I can. Are you going to step in at some point? Like, what do you do when the right thing no longer seems like the right thing to do? What do you do when you're doing exactly what God has asked you to, but nothing is changing? That's where these guys were. Like, again, if you're anything at all like me, well, the wall starts to influence my behavior a little bit. That unchangeable thing starts to have a little bit of control in who I become. Think about how crazy that is. That the thing you dislike the most ends up influencing who you become. And I get it. I'm not up here talking at you. I'm probably doing more counseling to myself than I am anything. Because it's hard when you're doing exactly what God has asked you to do. You're stepping in the exact path that he's asked you to step, but nothing is changing. You take another trip and the brick doesn't fall. You take another trip. There's no rain to make the ground soft. There's no winds. There's nothing. It's like, God, all right, what's going on, God? But that doesn't seem to be what happens to the Israelites. I'm not saying that's not what they felt. Because I believe with all confidence they had to have those wonderings. But what we see Joshua say in verse 16 tells us that they consistently had a hope. That God was not simply an observer, that he was involved, that God's promise wasn't forgotten. And here's what he said in verse 16. After the seventh time, this is on the seventh day. Remember the seventh day they were supposed to walk around at seven times. This is after the seventh time. The priest blew the ram's horn, and Joshua said to the troops, shout, for the Lord has given you the city. Did you catch the tense that he used? He said, the Lord has given you the city. Joshua, the wall's still standing, bro. How is the city mine? But he had this confidence. And what he did was echoed God's promise. From the very beginning, God said, hey, listen, the city's yours. Don't worry. I'll take care of the walls. And there's something about Joshua. There's something in Joshua's world that allowed him to consistently do the same thing, consistently be the person God is asking him to be, consistently follow in the steps, consistently let his faith influence his steps versus the opposition. And he said, hey, we did it. We're there. We won. It's good. And it was simply the promise. There was something that he did that kept him gripped to the promise versus the not tumbling wall. It's that confidence that we were talking about. Joshua had a hope God would fulfill his promise by remembering the promises he fulfilled. That's what he did. So maybe that needs to happen kind of in your world, right? Hey, God, I'm having a hard time here. But Joshua encouraged his men. That's why I said, shout. Victory is won. And as I'm reading this, I'm like, okay, Joshua, that's not the problem. The problem isn't believing God can, or the problem isn't believing that God is able, but what is it when you're in that moment that makes it so hard to cling to the promise of God? And as I'm reading through, I come to this portion of the instruction that is right in the middle of everyone, the Ark of the Covenant. Now see, to everyone, to the citizens of Jericho and everyone watching, the Ark of the Covenant really represented who the Israelites were, who they were fighting for, exactly whose people they were. But to the Israelites, it was a little something different. To the Israelites, when they looked at the Ark, it actually contained three different things in it. The first thing was Aaron's staff, which was crucial in a big part of being freed from the Egyptian slavery. The second thing was the stone tablets, which Moses chiseled the Ten Commandments on. And the third thing was manna. Manna was something that as they were walking through the wilderness, they didn't have any food, they were starving, and it's where God provided food for them. All three of those things were sitting in the ark. And everywhere that the ark went, not only did it represent the presence of God, but it represented the promise of God. And I think it's by no accident, no accident at all, that when God said, hey, listen, I want you to have some guys up front. I want you to have some guys in the back. And right in the middle of everything, in the middle of everything you're doing, I need you to put the ark. I need you to be able to see the ark. When the wall's not falling quite as quickly as it needs to, I want you to be able to see the ark and remember how I've provided for you in the past. As the walls and you're walking around and something's not necessarily happening, I need you to be able to see the ark and remember, oh man, I remember whenever we were in captivity, God stepped in and freed us for no reason other than the fact that he loved us. I need you to be able to see the ark, and I want you to remember that when we didn't have a direction, he gave us a direction. I need you to see the ark, and I want you to remember as soon as you start thinking, I'm not going to come through for you, I want you to remember how the bread came from nowhere, and you had plenty of food. I need you to see those things. And it was right in the middle of everything that they were doing, in the middle of their frustration, in the middle of the waiting, in the middle of the, God, are you going to do something? Suddenly they caught a glimpse of something that was a reminder of God's presence and God's promise. And they held onto this hope because they remembered God's promise. Joshua said, shout. And is the thing in your world that cannot be taken away from you? What is your experience with God, your encounter with God, that when things aren't happening the way that you would like them to happen, when you're moving toward what you hope for the most and you aren't quite seeing it yet, what is the thing that catches your eye, that you can go back to, that you can remember? And hope. Hope comes in. Like there's hope in a tall obstacle. So, just to be very transparent, very honest, a couple of years ago, serving at a church in southeast Georgia as one of their pastors, and it was a dark, dark time. I grew up in a church where it was really very behavior and rules oriented. I'm not saying anything except for what I ended up taking away from that is that I had to be good enough in everything that I did. I'm grateful, in part, because it made me so awesome today. But no, there's another part of it that I kind of shifted that same type of approach to God. I felt like I had to be good enough for God. And from time to time, that would creep up in my world. And serving at this church, leading people, and I'm not saying that to elevate myself. I'm saying that to say, hey, listen, I, none of your pastors are any different. I was at a place that I felt like God didn't want me anymore, that I felt like God didn't care for me, that God kind of took his hand off of me, that God wasn't going to use me anymore, and he was just kind of done. Go. I gave you too many chances. I'm done. I'm over with. And I'm telling you, I was at a dark, dark place. And I remember, I'm an artist. I'm going to get emotional. Just deal with it. It'll be fun. I remember I went into the church one day, and I was so desperately, I needed to see a brick fall. And I'm saying, on my knees, I'm praying, God, listen, I need to know you haven't given up on me. I need to know that you're still here. I need to know that you still hear me. I need to know that you still care. I was so desperate for some type of a sign. After I would pray, I would look up at the lights and kind of hope for them to flicker. I needed something. I stayed there for 10, 15 minutes, glancing, looking at my phone. Maybe he would say, I love you or something. Just anything. Silence. Day seven. No brick. No lean. And I remember I stood up. I walked right down the middle of the aisle, headed out. And in my mind, I said, I guess I still got to be that good Christian kid, huh? I was angry. I went home. And I was about to sit down and just work on my call-to-duty skills, right? And before I did that, it hit me. I was like, I guess I got to, again, do my devotional thing. And I sat down. I don't need to read it. I sat down. Opened my devotional. And it was actually, it was Louis Giglio, an incredible speaker. He was probably good. I don't remember what he said, though. But I read the text with it. It was Isaiah 43. And it said, this is the Lord your God, and I love you. I chose you. I'll be with you. And I'm telling you, I got broke. Just like, there's my arc. I don't care what happens tomorrow. I can always look at that. I can always remember. He heard. He remembered me. He didn't give up on me. And I'm telling you, I suck really bad at remembering that. So much so I had to get it tattooed on my arm, right? And every day at two o'clock there's a notification that pops up on my phone that says, hey, remember how God is for you. Believe that he'll do it again. Every day, 2 o'clock. What's your arc? What is that encounter? What is that moment? What is that experience with God? Is it a car accident that should have killed you? Is it your spouse still loving you? Is it a home, being able to close on a home in 2022? Good Lord. What is your arc? How different, how different would those moments of walking around the wall be if you started and stopped your day with a journal? Like at the end of every day, sit down and write down, man, this was my God moment. This is what I saw God do in my world today. And then next week, recount back to the week prior. Read that, oh man, that was incredible. And you're sandwiching your day with your God moments, with your ark. How different would your world look if every night at dinner you sat down and you just asked your kids, asked your spouse, hey, what happened in your world today? What did you see God do? What was that cool thing? Not for any type of you have to to be good enough, but I'm telling you, you've experienced it. I've experienced it. The Israelites experienced it. This hurt and this heartache and this wall that kept me from having the hope that Jesus said he came to offer. What's your arc? In just a minute, I'm going to pray for us, And there's a new song. Maybe you're familiar with it, but I believe it's a newer song for here. And it comes right out of this text. And so what I want you to do, I don't want you to necessarily sing along at first. You're more than welcome to. You can read the words if you don't know it, whatever. But what I want you to do is take just a moment and find your ark. Like think back to those God moments, those God encounters that cannot be taken away from you because I promise you this, we need those in our journey because one of the things we were never promised is easy. Find your ark. And then we get to this bridge. The bridge of this song says, I've seen you move. You move the mountains. And I believe you'll do it again. You made a way when there was no way. And I believe you'll do it again. What I'm going to ask you to do at that moment, you've got your ark. I want you to stand up and do exactly what the Israelites did. Shout it. We declare praise to a God who is worthy of our praise. And I believe with all of my heart, right, he is involved in the world that you're living in. I can't tell you tomorrow is going to be easy, but I can tell you if it's not, you've got an ark that can still bring hope into your journey. Let's pray. God, thank you. Thank you for being a God who is good, a God who is kind, a God who is faithful, a God who has blessed us with encounters with you that we can take along with us for the rest of our life. And it's in those moments, I believe that's what helped your disciples ask and pray for boldness, to pray for moments of new experiences with you. Because it just strengthened their faith and it built them to a place of unshakable faith in you. So God, I know sometimes it's hard to remember, and again, you have this promise that your Holy Spirit will speak to us and guide us and lead us. What I ask you to do, Lord, is we sit in just a couple of moments and we reflect on our encounters with you. We invite your spirit to just come and flood our minds, God. Just pour these encounters with you, maybe even moments that we didn't give you credit for. Just flood our hearts, flood our minds with an ark that we can carry with us for the rest of our life. In Jesus' name.

All right, well, good morning, and thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors at Grace, and if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that. This is officially a summer Sunday, so you guys really mean it. I'm grateful for your being here as we move into the summer, and I'm excited about our upcoming summer series that starts week after next called Kids Stories for Grownups, where we look at some of the Bible stories that many of us learned when we were younger that we've all heard of, and we kind of revisit those and wonder what we can still learn from them as fully formed, intelligent adults. So that should be exciting. And I love it because the stories from the Bible and the Old Testament are some of my favorite things to examine. So we're excited to get into that series here in a couple of weeks. And I'm excited for the end of this service when we'll take communion together. We're going to take it the old-fashioned way for the first time in over two years. And I know there's many of you here who have never partaken in communion at Grace in the way in which we will do it and have always done it for years. So I'm excited for us to do that as a family, and I'll explain more about that later. But right now, we're going to get into the first part of a two-part sermon based in 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 8. So if you have a Bible, you can open there, and we'll be looking at that text this morning. This morning, we're going to look at verses 5 through 7, and the next week we're going to look just at verse 8. And I know that I say this a lot, and you guys will chuckle at me, but this is one of my favorite passages in all the Bible. I love this passage, and I told you if you get the grace vine and read that this week, so that's two big ifs. Okay, so if you get it and if you actually read it, then you would have seen that I said in the grace vine, if you don't get it, fill out a connection card or something and make sure that you get on our weekly email list so you know what's going on. Unless you don't want that in your inbox, then don't fill it out and we won't send you anything. But I said in there that this passage sums up so much of what we need for the Christian life, for Christian behavior, for Christian expectations, and for Christian purpose. This passage kind of just succinctly encapsulates for us where we need to be focused and what happens when we focus on these things. And for me, I just love it. I've always loved this passage. And it's a big reason that we're doing a series in Peter, and this is what I said in the Grace Find, is so that I can preach these two things. I was actually in a conversation with our new worship pastor, Aaron, about this passage and said, man, I don't know how to condense it to one sermon. And I kind of told him the two things I was thinking. He was like, you got to do two. And I'm like, great, two-parter. I'm in charge of the sermons anyway. So it just became a two-part sermon. So here we go. We're going to dive in, but I want to dive in with some reflections on what the Bible has to say about love, because that's what we're going to be building to today is the way that we're instructed to love according to Peter in 2 Peter. So as we think about the biblical idea of love, it's kind of Christian 101, one of the very first things you learn when you are a believer. After God loved you and Jesus died on the cross for you, and after those things, the thing you learn about what you're supposed to do is love other people, right? We all know. That's the very first thing we're told. Love God, love others. This is what we learn immediately, right? I'm reminded of the conversation that Jesus has early in his ministry where a younger person comes up to him and they say, what do you say is the greatest commandment? And they have a little conversation about it. And it's settled upon that Jesus agrees that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. These are the two greatest commandments. And Jesus says that in those commandments is captured the whole law and the prophets. Meaning, if we'll do those two things, then we'll do everything we're supposed to do in this book. Those two things, just love God, love others, will capture everything in this book. And so I've always loved that teaching because it distills something very complicated, very detailed, down to its most basic elements. It takes everything in this book that we're supposed to do from cover to cover, all the behaviors that we're supposed to have, all the prayers that we're supposed to pray, all the things we're supposed to start doing, all the things we're supposed to stop doing, all the things we're supposed to think, all the ways that our character needs to change. It takes all of that and it boils it down to two simple commandments. Just love God and love others. And in doing that, you'll take care of everything here. And that's something that is probably not new information for a vast majority of you. You know that, you've been taught that, you're aware of it. If I asked many of you what the greatest commandments were, you would tell me those things. But Jesus, later in his ministry, distills those commandments down even more to just one thing. In John chapter 13, verse 35, at the end of his ministry, he's teaching the disciples. He's been with them for three years and he tells them this, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. So he says, he gets them, he sits them down and another week they're going to have the last supper. They're going to do communion. They're going to start communion that we're going to observe at the end of the service. And after he spent three years with them, modeling for them what ministry is, teaching them, discipling them, he sits them down. He says, this is the new commandment that I give to you. And that's a huge word, new commandment. That's not just a passive phrase that he's saying to get to the point. What he's saying is the greatest commandments are to love God and love others. The 10 commandments we learned in Exodus. I'm gonna give you a new commandment that hasn't been given for thousands of years. There's been no new commandments for 4,000 years. I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm gonna give you a new commandment. This one's fresh, listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm going to give you a new commandment. This one's fresh. Listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, go love other people like that. That's it. That's the commandment. But what about all the other things? If you do this, if you go love other people like I've loved you, you'll do all the other things. And in our, some of our theological minds, we'll go, well, Jesus, wait a second. We need to love you too though, right? We can't just go love other people because then that's not Christian, that's just kindness. And Jesus goes, yeah, but go try to love other people the way I've loved the disciples without first loving me. And so Jesus knows that baked into offering Christ-like love to those around us is the necessity that we would fall deeply in love with him, that we would love him earnestly and passionately and sincerely in a steadfast way. It is impossible to live out the new prepping this week, just as an aside, how powerful would it be to live your life in such a way that after you spent time with people, after your kids grew up in your home and you sent them out into the world, what if as a mama or a daddy, you were able to look at those kids and you would say, sweetheart, the way that I've loved you for these last, hopefully just 18 years and then get out, right? But the way that I've loved you for these last 18 years, you go and love other people like I've loved you. What if you could, the people who worked for you, when they moved on to bigger and better and you gave them some parting advice, what if you could look at them and say, the way that I've loved you when you've been with me, go love other people like that. What if you could say that if you moved away? What if you could say that to your small group? What if you could say that to the people that you've been associated with? What if you could say that if you're changing roles, if you're leaving one company and go to the next one, what if you could look at your co-workers and say, all I would ask is that you love people the way that I have loved you. What if you lived a life powerful enough to be able to say that? I could not say that to people. But what if we lived our life in such a way that we could look at the people around us and say, the way that I've loved you and cared for you and prayed for you, now go and do that to other people. And that be the very will of God. It's such a powerful example that Jesus sets there to be able to say that to the disciples. But he tells them very clearly, love is the most important thing. You go love. You go offer the kind of love that I've offered you. You go offer that to everyone around you, to your neighbors, to your brothers, to everyone around you. And that's the commandment. That's what God needs of you. Because if you'll just simply do that one thing, then you will have done all of these things. Jesus knows this. And so he's setting up love as the apex value. And as if that's not clear enough, Paul in his writings in Corinthians, and we're going to get to the love passage in Corinthians 13, but at the end of this passage where he's written about spiritual gifts and he's saying, but spiritual gifts really don't compare to Christian values and of the Christian values of the virtues, really there's only three that remain. He says this in 1 Corinthians 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Paul makes it very clear. Love is the apex virtue. I always think that there's got to be some family with triplet girls named faith, hope, and love. And you know which one is the favorite, right? Faith and Hope, they're fine. But Love, she's great. These three remain, Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love. So Paul makes it very clear, in addition to all the teachings of Jesus, where it's very clear throughout the Gospels that Love really is the apex value. And so so we tell new Christians, when you become a Christian, Christianity 101, what do I need to do? What's expected of me? Go love God, go love others. And then if you really want to get technical about it, Jesus gives us one commandment, go and love other people as Jesus has loved you. That's what we are to do. That's what we're instructed to do. That's what we see in scripture over and over and over again is like, okay, you're a believer now. You're a Christian. You believe that God is your father and Jesus is your savior. And just to be very clear, the simplest way I know to understand what it means to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, that he is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. You believe in those things, you're a Christian. Once you believe those things, go love as Jesus loved you. He died for us. Go sacrificially love others. Offer a Christ-like love to your neighbor. But I don't know about you. I know about me. That's hard. I'm not very good. I'm not very good at loving people that I love. I'm really not good at loving people I don't care for. And so that's a challenging command. And it makes me wonder if we've ever considered this. Have you ever considered that maybe love is the end of a journey rather than the beginning? Maybe we build towards love. Maybe Jesus, when he told us to just go love other people, maybe he knew the layers of intricacy and nuance that lay underneath that, that that is a situation where it is far more easily said than done. What if actually offering Christ-like love to others is the end of a journey and it's not the place where we begin? And I can't help but think that that's true, that when we first become Christians, when we become believers, or as we go through our Christian life and God is forming our character and sanctifying us, as he does that, I can't help but think it's true that maybe love is the goal and not the starting place. And 1 Corinthians 13, where we learn the most about love and what it is, actually makes this point for me. I'll remind you of what is written in 1 Corinthians 13 verses four through eight. Now, this is usually read at weddings and that's fine and appropriate and good, but this is not romantic love. This is the love that is required of all believers. And this is the love we are to offer. This is what Paul says about it. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. So I would ask you this. Have you ever loved anybody like that? Have you ever actually loved anyone with a love that is not envious, that doesn't boast, that is not easily angered, that isn't rude, that takes no record of wrongs. So if you're married, that one's out. As I was asking myself, have I ever offered anyone this love? The most pure love I can think of is the love that a parent has for a child. Just the way that we've had two kids, and both times, as soon as they're born and they place them on Jen's chest and you're looking at this new life, my heart was instantly so full of love. It's nothing that you can describe. You can't really explain it. You just have to experience it. And when it happens, it just fills you up with so much joy and so much love. And it's just there. And the kid can't do anything but be annoying for like four years. So it's just there. You just love them, right? But even in that pure love, when my one-year-old son, John, is teething and fussy for three days straight, I really fail at not easily angered. I fall off the wagon there. I don't offer him that love. When my six-year-old Lily asks me how to pronounce a word in Spanish, and I tell her, and she says, no, you're wrong. Based on nothing, nothing. She doesn't even know how to say English words all the time. And listen, I don't want to brag. I took Spanish two twice in high school. And I've been to Mexico like a lot. All right. So I know Spanish pronunciations. And then she asked me how to say it. And I tell her, she's like, no, that's not it. And I just, I was easily angered in that moment. Maybe that wasn't easily angered. That was justified anger. I take it back. She deserved it. Have you ever loved anybody like we're told in Corinthians to love? Those things, those things are hard. Being patient and kind and not envious and not keeping any record of wrong and not boastful. That kind of love is hard. And loving others as Christ loves us, who condescended from heaven and took on human form and put up with us for three years, for 33 years, and faultlessly loved everyone around him, selflessly giving of himself. Have you ever loved anyone like that? And I'm belaboring the point to get us to this thought, that telling a new Christian to love like Jesus is like telling a crawling baby to run a marathon. Telling a newly formed Christian, someone who's just come into the faith, whether they're eight or 18 or 48, looking at them and going, okay, you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did and is going to do what he says he's going to do? Yes, I do. I absolutely do. Okay, then go in love exactly as he did. See you later. That's like looking at my son, John, and telling him to run a marathon. John crawls, and he crawls like really good. He's the best crawler that I've ever seen. He's a better crawler than all of your children. He crawls, and he can start to, like, stand a little bit, but he's fat, so he's got to develop some muscle before he can really get going. It would be like looking at him and being like, oh, you're crawling now, buddy? Well, how about a marathon? There's a lot of things that need to take place in his development before he can even think about that. Standing would be good without grabbing the couch or my pant leg. There's a start. Taking steps. Once you take steps, stay on your feet. Learn to actually run. And then there's this funny thing with kids where they have to learn to moderate their speed, right? If you've seen a little kid learn to run, they have one speed, sprint, full out sprint. There's no jogging. It's just the hardest possible steps, and they sprint to wherever they're going. There's no moderate in the middle. So you've got to learn how to jog and moderate your speed. You've got to let your body develop. You've got to build up lung capacity. You should probably try to eat healthy because it's hard to run a marathon on cheeseburgers. You have to start going distances. You have to work towards it. You have to build towards it. And to me, looking at a church full of people and saying, hey, we need to love others as Christ loved us, is in a lot of ways looking at developing children and saying you need to run a marathon. And I'm not looking to denigrate any new believers at all. I'm just trying to think of an illustration that could help us understand the path that needs to be traveled so that we can love as Jesus loves others. And we should understand it as a process, not a starting point, as a goal, not necessarily where we begin. And this is why I love the passage in 2 Peter so much. Because in 2 Peter, what we have is a roadmap to be able to love. Loving like Jesus loves feels impossible. Offering the type of love described in 1 Corinthians 13 feels like too big of a challenge. How could we ever do that? Well, this is where Peter comes in and he shows us and he tells us, hey, if you want to love, here's how you get there. So let's look at what I believe are building blocks of Peter telling God's children, here's how we begin the path towards love. Here's the journey that we take. 2 Peter 1, verses 5-7. For this very reason, make every effort. Let me stop right there. If I hadn't been lazy in my notes, I would have made this a point. And if you are a note taker, I would love for you to write this down. For this very reason, make every effort. Listen to me. Christian character is not developed by default. Christian character is not developed by default. We do not coast into godliness. We do not become a Christian, start going to church, and then slip it into neutral and just coast for the rest of our lives. And I think so many of us get stymied in our Christian walk. So many of us feel like we're in a rut. I know that I'm guilty of this because I somehow assume that developing Christian character and the process of sanctification, which is becoming more like God in character, that that process just happens by default. If I just claim faith for long enough, if I pray a couple of prayers, if I start to bless my meal, if I go to small group, if I go to church, that Christian faith will just develop by default in my life. And I'm just going to grow closer to Christ and experience the spiritual maturity and depth just by simply going through the motions and attending the things I'm supposed to attend. And I just want to tell you, there's a reason that he writes, make every effort. Sometimes we got to try. Christian character is not developed by default. We intentionally and ardently work at it our whole lives. He says this, for this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. We went through this passage in my men's Bible study, and there was a little bit of discussion of, are these things that we're supposed to pursue to make every effort to add to ourselves, our faith, virtue, virtue, knowledge, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection, love, are those things that we're supposed to pursue all together at the same time, just kind of haphazardly in our life, kind of like the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We just kind of pursue all of these things at once. And I just happen to think that that's not the intention of this passage. I think that these are actual building blocks. And I think that because of the word supplement, because Peter says, for this very reason, I want you to supplement your faith with virtue, then supplement your virtue with knowledge, then supplement your knowledge with self-control, then supplement, I think because of that word supplement that he's saying that these things intentionally build on one another. I also think that because he starts with faith. Without faith, none of the rest of this matters. Without faith, how in the world can we be virtuous? If virtuous is dictated to us by the desires of God and who he wants us to be and how he wants us to behave, then how can we possibly do that without faith? What are we being steadfast in? What are we persevering in if it's not faith? How can we possibly offer but move towards godliness without faith? Faith is the essential building block for all of this. It is also the starting point of all salvation. So if we think of new believers, what do they have? They have faith that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. They have faith. And Peter says, good. Instead of going and loving your neighbor as Jesus loved you, how about we do this? How about to that faith, we add virtue? Work on supplementing your faith with virtue. Virtue, simplest way I can understand it, is to be aware of the things that we're supposed to start doing and aware of the things that we're supposed to stop doing. When you are a believer, when you convert to Christianity, there's no doubt that you carry in some behaviors into your new faith that do not belong in your new faith, that ought not be there. And so there's, to be a Christian is to kind of have a constantly running list of things in your head, right? Of things that you're supposed to start doing and things that you should stop doing. And so to be virtuous is to take that seriously and just start to move towards God and character. And then he says, add to your virtue, knowledge, learn about your faith. And I would just slide this in there. I feel like many of us, I've spent my whole life in the church. And I would honestly tell you that I think, and this includes me many times in my life, I think most Christians just stall out right there. I think most Christians come to a faith, yep, I believe Jesus. And then kind of look around and be like, okay, there's some ways I'm supposed to behave. I need to stop doing that stuff. I need to start doing this stuff. And then that's it. And then we just put it on cruise control into eternity. I would be willing to bet that if you're here or you're listening, and sometimes faith feels hard, and it doesn't seem to click with you like it clicks with other people, and I'm just kind of in a rut, or maybe I'm just kind of going through the motions, or maybe I'm not really sure what I believe, I would be willing to bet that part of that is that you just stalled out right here. We started with faith. We added to faith the ways that I'm supposed to behave. And now let's just see what happens until I get to heaven. And there's so much more after that, that we are to make every effort to develop. He says, add to your virtue knowledge. This one's important. I don't think I can stress this too much. Christians, we need to learn about our faith. We need to know our faith. We need to understand our faith. We need to know some basic theology. We need to know some basic things about the Bible and the construction of Scripture and how we know we can trust it. We need to know about the triune God, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We need to know what words like faith and sanctification mean. We need to understand these things. And there's a lot of us who we don't really make much of an effort to do that. We don't really make much of an effort to learn. We just kind of soak in whatever I say, which that's sorry for you guys, and whatever's said in small groups and all those things. And we don't challenge ourselves with personal study. We need to learn and we need to grow. I talked about this, I preached about this a couple of weeks ago, that we need to be prepared with a why. When someone says, hey, why do you have faith? We need to be prepared with an answer. We are to add to our virtue knowledge. We ought to be learners of and about our faith. And if that's a place where you feel like you are lacking or you don't know where to go, please reach out to me and I'll do my best to point you towards some resources that won't all be books, some videos and some podcasts and stuff like that, depending on what kind of learner you are. But we need to grow in our knowledge of our faith. And then to that knowledge, we're to add self-control. The discipline of just continuing to do it, of denying ourself for the sake of something later, for the sake of something better. And then to self-control, we had said fastness or perseverance. This is another reason why I think it's actually building blocks because perseverance isn't required in the infancy of faith, right? If you ever have the privilege and the joy of being with someone in the moment when they convert and they pray to receive Christ and you say amen and then you look at them and you put your hand on their shoulder and you go, hey, listen, just hang in there, buddy. You're bad at that, all right? You're bad at giving advice. If fresh out of the gates, the first place you go to is just cling to hope. Until you've been disappointed by God, until you've been in a spiritual rut, until you've walked through a personal valley of the shadow of death, that advice and that encouragement rings hollow. But when I preached about suffering at the beginning of the book, and we talked about the fact that suffering is a fact of life. The encouragement that I gave you was to persevere. Cling to hope. Don't lose faith. When we addressed Uvalde last week and we said, what's the role of the church? Our role is to persevere and to cling to the hope and so beat back the darkness in the world with the hope that we cling to. We are to persevere. So these things build. And then to perseverance, godliness, becoming more like God in character. And then to godliness. And this is important. When I think about godliness, it's more than just virtue and it's more than just self-control. Because virtue and self-control, those address behaviors. Those address how we behave. But godliness is about who we are. It's about our being. Godliness is when we do the inner heart and soul work to figure out what is it inside of us that's broken that's motivating me to need virtue and to need self-control? What is it inside me that's not right? How is my heart unhealthy? Where are the pockets of darkness in my life that I have not addressed? Maybe we go through the motions of Christianity for years and years and years, and we're good at being virtuous, and we're good at being self-controlled, but there's this voice that kind of tells us when we start to pursue godliness, like, hey, you know the only reason that you've ever really gone through all the religious machinations is to get all the people around you to like you and respect you, right? And that you're really not super sincere in your faith. I'm not saying that that's occurred to me, but I've heard that it occurs to weaker Christians, perhaps. It's when we allow the Holy Spirit to really do the work in our hearts and we cry out to God. When we pursue godliness is when we realize how wretched we are. The person who wrote Amazing Grace, it said, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I promise they had pursued godliness because when you do that, you start to realize that you might have mastered the behaviors, but what's in here is gross. And so you ask God to come in and do the work. And as he works on your heart in that way, he says, now add to your godliness brotherly affection, which is familial affection, brotherly and sisterly affection. And it means the family of God for other Christian brothers and sisters now work on loving the church. And the Christian love that we're supposed to offer the church is powerful enough and strong enough. The unification that we have in Christ and the love that we can offer in Christ supersedes all the other divisions that would seek to drive a wedge within God's church. The love that we have for Christ and the love that we have for one another should overcome any political divide that we would experience between our Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Independent brothers and sisters. None of that should matter when we come together as a church. The love of Christ, the brotherly affection that we are instructed to offer overcomes ethnicity. It overcomes socioeconomic divides. It overcomes divides of just doing life different than one another. The people who just live lives that you would never ever choose and you don't get them and you don't understand them and you think they're dumb. Well, guess what? They think you're dumb too, but the love of Christ unites us. It should cover over those things. And how could we possibly offer the love of Christ to a fallen and lost and broken world when we can't even offer it to the people who share our faith? And I think it's worth pointing out that in our country and in our culture that is as divided as I can ever remember. As far as I can tell, in most churches, that division in the world is mirrored in the church 100%. All the divisions that exist out there, we bring in here. They bring in there. They bring in there. And unless we can learn as believers to offer brotherly affection to the Christians who think differently than us, to be humble enough to do that, how could we possibly offer brotherly affection to a lost and broken world with whom we have very little in common. So we pursue brotherly affection, loving God's church, loving God's people, allowing the love of Christ to bridge any gaps that exist between us. And then, once we do those things, we supplement them with the love of Christ. Now go and love others as Jesus loved you. But love, you see, is the end of the journey. It is not where we start. Jesus starts us there. Go love as I loved you, but he knows all the things that we have to learn along the way before we can be remotely capable of offering others the kind of love that he loved us. And so I don't know where you are. If we use 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 7 as some sort of crude diagnostic tool, I don't know where you are. I don't know where you look at that and go, gosh, that's really where I need to focus in on. That's really what I need to work on. But we're instructed that we are to make every effort, that these things are not just going to happen by osmosis. They're not just going to happen by sitting in the sermon and be like, yep, that was good. I learned from that. And then we go and never, ever work on these things. They'll never, ever happen. So I would strongly encourage you to go home. Take some time today or maybe tomorrow morning and sit down with this passage and say, Father, where am I? Father, what do I need? Do I need more faith? Father, do I need more virtue? Do I need more knowledge? Do I not know enough? God, maybe I need to start learning intentionally. Do I need to just simply cling to and persevere and learn how to flex that muscle because it's really important to me right now? Do I need to forgive some other believers and offer them brotherly or sisterly affection? Do I need to bridge the gap within my own church and let my love of Christ cover over any other divisions that exist? Or God, am I ready to begin to go out and start to offer the love that you offered me? Please do. Sit down with the passage and ask God, where am I? What do I need to do? Where should I place my effort? And it's my hope and my prayer and what I've been praying this whole week that we would do this. Let us commit together to make every effort, every effort to build towards love. Understanding that love is the apex, it's the end of the journey, and it's a path that we are all on to grow to there. Let us go this week and make every effort to build towards being people who offer Christ-like love to everyone around them. Who, after spending time with people, you are able to look at them and say, now go and love others as I have loved you. Let's pursue being those kinds of people and that kind of church with eyes wide open as we understand the journey that that is. In a minute, we're going to take communion and reflect on that love. But first, I'm going to pray for us. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for being love. Your word tells us that while we were still sinners, before we knew you, before we had any capacity of affection for you, that you died for us anyways. Let us be grateful for and fueled by that love. God, give us the discipline and desire to make every effort to build towards a capacity to love others as you have loved us. I pray all these things in your son's name. Amen. Next week when we come back, we're gonna look at what happens, at what the promise is when we pursue love in that way. Because it's not just a simple commandment to love. There's a payoff. And it's remarkable. I'm going to share that with you next week.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us, and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. Thank you for joining us for Easter. Everybody looks great in their Easter best. I really do like all the bright colors, and I am of the opinion that Easter is the greatest day in the Christian calendar. It's the greatest holiday. Christmas acknowledges the arrival of our Savior, but it's Easter that acknowledges and signifies the victory of that Savior, of Him doing what He came to do, And it is right and good to be together in church and celebrate this victory. And that's what we're going to talk about this morning. As I was thinking about Easter, I was also thinking about the power of images and how when we see a picture or we see an image or we see a logo, it often carries with it a great amount of emotion for us or at least information from us. There's things that we can see, images that we can see that will immediately conjure up from us stories or nostalgia or emotion or things that we'd like to share or things that make us laugh or whatever. And I think that there is this really remarkable intrinsic power in images. To help you understand my point, I have some for us this morning. Here's a very famous one that all of us have seen before. When we think about images, when you see Mickey Mouse ears, what does it make you think of? It may send you back to your childhood when your dad was wearing short shorts and he took you to Frontier Landing or whatever it is. That's what mine was, mosquitoes and the whole deal and hotlines and everything. And it goes back to my childhood in the 80s. And now more recently, it goes back to taking my daughter Lily. We went earlier this year. We went three years ago. I have great memories there. So when I see those ears, it conjures up with me pages and pages worth of memories that I could share with you. And I'm sure that you do too. Maybe it's just annoyance at Disney World and you don't like that place at all and you wish it would quit showing up in your life. That could be it, but you've got something there with just that image. And there's another, here's another one. Let's look at this one. That's not even a picture, but we all know what that is, right? That's coffee. And when you see that, I don't know where that takes you. It takes me, when I think of coffee, I think of being quiet and being relaxed, often studying, having a book, or just staring out the window in silence. The older I get, the more things I see that make me want to sit somewhere and be still and stare out the window in silence. Maybe it's because I have two young children, but that's what I think of when I see coffee is maybe it takes you to after dinner, to a little dinner and dessert or whatever. But maybe you are a person who has coffee paraphernalia all over your kitchen or your office and coffee is a part of who you are and you feel very seen right now, whatever this image means to you. Speaking of feeling seen, some of you will feel seen with this next one. Yeah, we know what that is. That's the Vince Lombardi trophy. That's the Super Bowl trophy. Now, for some of us, it conjures up memories of great, great success. For others, like me, I'm a Falcons fan, it's great pain that is in that image. For others of you Browns fans, that image means nothing to you. You might not even know what that is. I don't know if you do or not. I probably had to explain it to you. And then lastly, there's this, which is known the world over for excellence, victory, and championships. We can all wholeheartedly agree that Georgia Tech's the greatest at everything. That's such an easy joke because Georgia Tech's the worst. They're the worst at everything. They're the NC State of Georgia. Anyways, whatever the image is, whatever the image is conjures up for us emotions and stories and experiences. And I was learning about the power of visual learning and what images do. And they have this remarkable ability to package and compartmentalize for us knowledge and stories and so much other information that's represented in just that image. And it's funny because God created us that way. He created us to be people who don't learn as well by seeing or by reading or by hearing, but by experiencing and by seeing something and by having an image or an icon that immediately takes our mind to a thing or to a place and immediately begins to unpack all the details that go into that image. And I was thinking about the power of imagery this week because I believe that God designed and created for us an image to last until Jesus comes back to remind us maybe of the most important part of the Bible, which is Easter. It dawned on me that baptism is the image of Easter. The act of baptizing someone is the image of Easter. And so when we had some folks in previous months reach out and say, hey, we think we might be interested in being baptized, I asked them if they would do it on Easter. I mentioned before that the early church would only baptize people on Easter because of the imagery, because of what it meant, because of the symbolism laced into baptism. And so I thought, what better way, what better way to acknowledge Easter than to celebrate Easter than to have baptisms on Easter and talk about the symbolism of those baptisms within, or the symbolism of those baptisms within the act of them themselves. And so as we gather for Easter and we are reminded what it's about, let's also acknowledge that God created for us an image of Easter that we ought to be reminded of as we go throughout our Christian lives and our Christian walk. Baptism is so important, as a matter of fact, that Jesus himself started it. Jesus only started two traditions. The church has a lot of traditions. We're observing Lent right now as a church. I hope that that's been a spiritually nourishing season for you, and I hope that the Lord has spoken to you and moved in your heart and drawn you closer to him. I hope that observing Lent this year has been spiritually beneficial for you. And many churches have many different traditions. Some of you, you're here with friends or you're here with family and your church has different traditions that our church isn't observing this morning. And either I'm sorry for that or you're welcome. I'm not sure how you feel about the traditions that you're not currently experiencing. But the church has a ton of traditions. But only two of them were started by Jesus. The first is communion. Communion celebrates the Last Supper and the breaking of bread and Jesus dying on the cross, which is encapsulated by the image behind me. But the other tradition that he started was baptism. When he left, when he went back up to heaven, his final instructions to the disciples were to go into all the world and make disciples and to baptize them in the name of the Father and great deal to God. And I would argue that it matters a great deal to God because the very act of it, the very image of it is itself a symbol of Easter, which is the greatest victory that is ever won. And this isn't just my idea. I didn't just conjure this up reading scriptures and piecing things together. This comes from Paul himself. The Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the Romans. And in that letter, it says this in chapter 6, beginning in verse 3. So Paul says, in our regular rhythm of faith to remind us of the miraculous victory of Easter. And he walks us through it. And in a few minutes, we're going to have the opportunity to baptize in this service two of our kids, and then in the next service, two of our adults. And I'm very excited about that. And when we do it, when we baptize them, we're going to put them under the water. And when they go under the water, that is a picture of the death of Christ. They are buried with him in death, Paul writes. And so that takes us back, it should take us back to that Friday when Jesus hung on the cross, when hope was lost, when the disciples scattered, when Mary was brokenhearted, when no one knew what to do. And it takes us to the Saturday in that poignant moment before they come back out of the water. It takes us to that sacred Saturday where hope was lost and confusion reigned and disappointment ruled the day. And they didn't know what to do. And they didn't know what to do about their Savior. And they didn't know if he was going to come back. They didn't know what was coming on Sunday. So Saturday they just sat in their sadness and in their depression. And in that moment when they disappear and you can't see them, right before they come back up, that's Friday and Saturday in the baptism imagery in the Easter story. But the story doesn't end there. It doesn't end on that sacred Saturday. It ends on Sunday when Mary goes to the tomb to look for Jesus. And it's that passage that Jordan read to us a little bit earlier in the service. And in that passage, it has to me what is the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. When Mary goes and she's looking for Jesus and the tomb is empty and there's an angel there who looks at her and he says, what are you doing? Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is risen. He's not here, Mary. You're not gonna find him. And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, that's the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has risen. Because without that sentence, without that sentence, nothing else matters. Do you understand? Nothing else in all of Christendom, nothing else in life matters without that sentence. When we have Christmas, we have the arrival of the Savior. That's good. We should celebrate that. That's hopeful. And that's a fulfilled promise that people clung to for thousands of years. But on Easter at the empty tomb, when Jesus conquered sin and death, that is the greatest victory ever won. That is the greatest sentence in the Bible. And if that sentence isn't true, then everything else fades and nothing else matters. All of Christendom and all religion and all faith is just babbling morality without that sentence, without the reality of the resurrected Jesus and the empty tomb where he conquers sin and death finally. And so when we see the baptized person spring up out of those waters, that's the moment that they're capturing. They're capturing the empty tomb. And it says that they are raised to walk in newness of life. And it reminds us of the victory that Jesus won that day. It reminds us of why this is the greatest holiday. It reminds us of the import of that sentence because in that empty tomb, in resurrecting, in raising to walk again in newness of life, Jesus accomplished for us victory over death and victory over sin. Jesus made it true that old prophecy, oh death, where is your sting? I'm reminded of this old gospel song that's ripped out of the scriptures that says, oh sin, where are your shackles? Oh death, where is your sting? Hell has been defeated. The grave could not hold our king. And when we baptize someone and we pull them out of the water, that's where the moment goes. It's to someone springing forward in newness of life. It's to victory over death. Do you realize, do you realize that this, one of the reasons that this is the greatest day on the Christian calendar is that this is the day that conquered death. This is the day that gives us hope. This is the day that we celebrate, that we cling to, that we hope for, so that when we watch someone we love slowly drift into eternity and eventually we say goodbye to them, because of Easter, we say goodbye for now, but not goodbye forever. Because of Easter, we can hold their hand and we can pray with them and we can know with certainty that they really are going to a better place and that they are waiting for us there. Because of Easter, death has no sting. What hurts about death is missing someone for a little while. What hurts about death is not having them in your life, is not being able to pick up the phone and call them like you used to. But what hurts about death is not the finality of it because Jesus took that away when he raised up out of that tomb. And we celebrate that victory when we raise someone up out of the water. That Easter is the greatest victory of all time. And it gives us incredible amounts of hope. And it takes away the fear of the one thing of which we are all the most fearful, which is what happens when we die. And because of Easter, because Jesus died on the cross, because he was buried, because he rose again and was raised to walk in that newness of life. We know that one day we will go to the marriage supper of the Lamb. We know that one day we will be in heaven with Jesus for all of eternity. We know that one day we will see those that we loved again. We know that one day we will be united with our Savior and we can set down the burdens of hope and faith because Jesus will be right there in front of us because of Easter. And not only in that moment where Jesus sprung out of the tomb, where we come up out of the water, not only is there victory over death, but there's victory over sin as well. Sin has no shackles on us anymore. So not only is there hope for the future, for what will happen one day, but there is hope for right now because scripture teaches us that when we are a new creation, that we come up out of the waters to walk in newness of life, that what that newness of life means is we are no longer shackled to the sins that we carried before we knew Jesus. I preached a couple of weeks ago about repentance, and what I said is that after Jesus, after the Holy Spirit, after we know him, after we become Christians, then repentance is possible. Before that, scripture tells us that we are slaves to sin, that we have no choice but to sin. But with the miracle of Easter, it doesn't just give us hope for the future. It gives us hope for the right now, that the sins and the things in our life that we don't want there anymore can actually be defeated. And we find that hope in Jesus. Easter reminds us of that hope. And it reminds us that we're not chained to the sins that we once carried anymore. So not only does Easter point us towards a future hope, but Easter points us to a present hope, victory over death and sin, future and present. And so, in a few minutes, as we do the baptisms, let's see in these baptisms the picture of Easter. When they go under, let's take ourselves to the Friday and to the Saturday and to the waiting and to the confusion. And let's know that that's just God putting to death your old self. And when we see a raising to walk and newness of life, that that is the victory of hope for all of eternity. That is the victory that Jesus has already won and he's going to come and claim again someday. But as you move through life, as you go through Easter, as you attend other services, as you go to other churches, and some of you back to your own churches, my hope for you is that whenever you see a baptism, that it will carry you right back to Easter, right back to this day, right back to the victory that Jesus won for you and for me, and that it will fill you with a hope, not only for the future, but for the present as well. And let's see baptism for what it is, a picture, an image of Easter itself, of the greatest victory ever won and the greatest day on the Christian calendar. Let's pray and then we're going to baptize some people. Father, thank you so much for the miracle of Easter. Thank you for what it is, for what it represents. God, I pray that as we think of Easter and we think of the images that surround it, that it wouldn't just be bunnies and eggs and pastels and baskets and flowers and all the rest, but that the first thing we would see is your victory. The first thing we would see is how you love us. How you sent your son to die for us and how he resurrected on the third day. God, may we be moved with each baptism that we see with the power and the efficacy of Easter and all that today represents. I pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. We'll be reading from Matthew chapter 6 this morning. This, then, is how you should pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you get to be the senior pastor here. Congratulations to Tar Heel fans. Please be humble about it, lest you become unbearable to your Christian brothers and sisters. That was a heck of a game last night. Yes, yes. That's good. That was some very tepid applause there. I know you feel bigger than that, but you're being humble as we speak. We have been going through our Lent series. This is, I believe, part six of the series, and I hope that you have been keeping up with the devotionals, as I say, every week and reading and being encouraged by those and by the other folks in the church as you've gone through those. This week, we arrive at the topic of forgiveness, and we've been kind of walking through that all week. Hopefully, as you've read the devotionals, you've thought about forgiveness in your own life. I think when we arrive at the topic of forgiveness, we can't help but wonder, do we owe some forgiveness? Whenever I encounter that topic of forgiveness, whenever I see the word, whenever I'm challenged by scripture, whenever I'm talked about how God has forgiven me so I should forgive others, I immediately think, who in my life am I holding a grudge against? Who am I withholding forgiveness from? And I would bet that most of us, when we hear that idea, begin to think about who in our life have we had to forgive? Where have we had a difficult path to forgiveness? Is there anybody in my life that I need to work towards forgiving now? And so with that in mind, I wanted to kind of talk about the challenge of forgiveness and the instructions that we find in the Bible concerning forgiveness. And the best place, I think, to start is with the very words of Jesus. We're going to allow Jesus to frame up our discussion on forgiveness this morning. The Bible in the Old Testament, New Testament, all throughout it has a ton to say about forgiveness. But again, I think if we can go to Jesus and read his very words and what he has to say about it, that that's the best framework for the discussion that you and I need to have about forgiveness as we rest on that topic this morning. So I would first look at two different passages, two different things that Jesus says about forgiveness that are really in harmony with a lot of other teachings throughout scripture about forgiveness. The first is the one that Jacob just so eloquently read a few minutes ago. I don't know if you've noticed it before. Most of us know the Lord's Prayer, and you identified that as the Lord's Prayer as soon as he started to read, right? But in Matthew, when Jesus finishes the Lord's prayer, which is where Jacob was reading from, he does a little bit of commentary. He has some comments to make about it. And we read those this morning, but I'm not sure if we heard it or if you've paid attention to those before. So I would call our attention back to the way that Jesus comments on the prayer that he just prayed. Because part of that prayer is, Father, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. At least that's how I memorized it growing up in the King's English. But sometimes forgive us and then help us forgive other people. So Jesus says this after that in verse 14, for if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your father will not forgive your sins. So this is a pretty stark and interesting teaching. And I'll be honest with you, I don't know how this works theologically necessarily and intertwines with the doctrine of salvation. I just know that when, that Jesus himself says that if we will not forgive other people, then our Father in heaven will not forgive us, which is pretty stark. That leaves us very little option, right? So forgiveness immediately we see is required. It is not optional. And then later in the passage, or later in that same book, Jesus is having a conversation with his disciple Peter. And Peter asks about this forgiveness. Surely by now Peter knows that forgiveness is not optional, that if we do not forgive other people in our life, then God does not forgive us. And that seems like a place that we don't want to be in. But Peter asks, certainly there has to be a limit to the forgiveness that we are instructed to offer to others. But to that, Jesus says this in Matthew 18, verses 21 and 22. Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times? Jesus answered, I tell you, not seven times, but 77 times. Some translations say, but 70 times seven. And see, we need to give Peter a little bit of credit. He says, Jesus, how many times should I forgive someone for sinning against me, for wronging me, for harming me? Up to seven times? Which feels very generous, if we're being honest about it. Someone slaps you in the face seven times in a row. You're just going to keep forgiving them? A business partner steals from you. Maybe you can forgive them once. You're going to, up to seven times, you're going to do that? Your neighbor backs into your mailbox. One is a whoopsie, but three, come on, man, knock it off. Like seven times is pretty generous. And Jesus says, no, no, not seven times, but up to 70 times seven, up to 77 times, which is a figurative way of saying as often as they require it. No, you forgive others as often as they require your forgiveness. And when we look at these two teachings from Jesus on forgiveness, these two statements, we have no choice but to conclude this, that unlimited forgiveness for the Christian is not optional. If you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, I would say that the good part of that is that you don't have to forgive anybody if you don't want to. You can just hold grudges, which may be nice. But for the believer, unlimited forgiveness is not optional. And I think that that's important to say out loud and to acknowledge. Because so often, we Christians have a habit of kind of viewing instructions that we're given as things that maybe we're supposed to do. Maybe we can try to do. Maybe one day I'll get there. Maybe one day I'll work up to forgiveness. Or we will think of it as optional. Someone hurt me. I don't want to forgive them. I don't need to. That's in the past and we've never done the work to do that. Or someone did something to us and we have every right to withhold our forgiveness from them. And so we do because it hurts so deeply. And what the Christian ethic is on this is to say, hey, we're instructed to offer unlimited forgiveness, and it is not optional. Now, to some of us, to many of us, that sounds like a challenge. That sounds difficult. If you think about some of the people who have hurt you in your life, some of the things that would require your forgiveness, to simply pithily say, well, God tells you to offer unlimited forgiveness, it's not optional. That's tough. And so I thought it best to have this conversation kind of in light of different groups of people in life that we will feel called to or pressed on to forgive. So I've got three categories of folks, three categories of situations that require forgiveness from us. And I want to talk about how we should kind of address those things because some are different than the others when we get into forgiveness. So the first and maybe the easiest category of people to forgive are those who have apologized and sought restitution. Your neighbor backs into your mailbox. They knock on your door. They say, hey, I'm so sorry. I just knocked over your mailbox. That's my bad. How can I pay for it? Okay. If you withhold forgiveness from your neighbor in that scenario, you've got issues, right? Like you've got problems. Someone stole 50 bucks from you 10 years ago. You still haven't forgiven them. Simple, everyday offenses. Your spouse said something that had a bad day. Just yesterday, I was kind of just being snippy in the morning, and Jen just looked at me. She goes, are you grumpy? Like, did you wake up grumpy? And I'm like, yeah. Sorry. I'll fix it. And, you know, thankfully, I got a little bit more chipper, but I had to apologize. Sorry. Sorry I woke up. I don't know why. I had slept eight hours. It was a great night. I had a great night last night, a good day. I don't know what my deal is, but I'll fix it, right? So there's sometimes just these run-of-the-mill things. Someone wrongs us. They apologize and seek restitution. And the right thing to do is to forgive them and move on. And if in these scenarios, you can't simply forgive them and move on, that's a you problem. You should do that. If you are holding grudges and can't just forgive people when they apologize to you, listen, I sent that email and you shouldn't have been copied on it. And I know I said those negative things about you in front of our coworkers, and I'm very sorry. and I will not do that again. Okay, that one stings a little bit, but still, you're a grown-up. Get over it. Forgive. So in these situations where someone has wronged us, but they've apologized, admitted their fault, they're seeking restitution, we should forgive. And we all know that. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought like, yeah, that's pretty easy. You're all adjusted adults. If you can't do that by now, you need a different sermon. Okay, this isn't for that. Let's just suck it up and forgive. The second one is a little bit more challenging. The second one is when we are tasked to forgive those who do not know they need to or simply refuse to apologize. That's a little bit more difficult. When someone has wronged you and they refuse to apologize for the wrong or acknowledge that it was wrong, and yet you find yourself in a position where you need to forgive them. Spouses get into a fight. They argue. They each say hurtful things. They go to their separate corners of the room, and they sit there like children with their arms folded. I mean, are you going to forgive him? I'm not going to forgive him until he says he's sorry. Okay, well, you sure are teaching him a lesson. Congratulations on being a grown-up. I always say in those situations that children are concerned with whose fault it is, and grown-ups are worried about making things right. So as adjusted adults, as people who love Jesus, we seek to make things right. Now, it's more challenging when someone has hurt you and they won't admit it. They refuse to admit that that was their fault. They refuse to admit that what they did was wrong, but we need to find it in ourselves to forgive them. It's a more difficult task, and yet we should simply extend forgiveness. Another one that I thought of this week is, you know, in this category too, is when people don't know that you even need to forgive them. When people don't know that they've hurt you. And so when you forgive them, you just forgive in silence and they'll never know that you forgave them. And I don't know if this is appropriate for me to share or not, but one of the difficult things in my position is when people choose to no longer be at grace, when people choose to move on from grace. The longer they've come to grace, the more difficult it is when they choose to leave. And I understand that we're not all going to go to the same church for our whole life. Like, I get that, and not everybody leaves poorly, and not everybody hurts when they leave, and some people leave really, really gracefully. But sometimes people leave, and as they're leaving, they say things that hurt. They say things that are insensitive to me, and they'll hurt my feelings. And I understand that I operate in a world where most of the people around me don't think I have those. But I do. I do have feelings. I don't have as much as you all. That would be rough. But I have some. And sometimes they get hurt. But they don't know that they hurt me. They don't know that that's difficult for me. They don't know that I haven't forgiven them. They don't know that I need to. And I'm not going to call them up and say, hey, you hurt me. I just want you to know you hurt me, but I forgive you, so we're good. So I just have to forgive in silence. We don't get any credit for that. But God calls us to forgive nonetheless. And in both of these situations, those where people have wronged us, they've apologized and sought restitution, and then those where people have wronged us and they don't know they have or they refuse to admit that they have, I think it's very helpful for us to refer back to Jesus' instructions and say, to the Lord's prayer, and say, Father, forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Forgive us our debts. Forgive us our sins as we forgive the people who have sinned against us. It's this reciprocity. It's this awareness of the more I focus on Christ, the more I allow the reality of his forgiveness to wash over me. The more I see myself as the happy recipient, undeserving recipient of his grace and of his goodness and of his mercy and of his kindness and of his forgiveness, the easier it is for me to be a conduit of that forgiveness to others. When I reflect on what God has forgiven me of, the fact that he has forgiven me before I even know that I needed to admit fault. Before I was willing to admit that I had wronged him, God in his goodness still offers me and extends to me forgiveness as soon as I'm ready to accept it. And so particularly for these first two categories, when someone's wronged you and apologized, or when someone's wronged you and they haven't apologized yet, but it's your run-of-the-mill average amount of frustration or hurt, it helps us to reflect on Jesus and who he is and how he's loved us and how he's forgiven us and say, yeah, how could I possibly hold a grudge in light of all that love? And so in most situations where you need to offer forgiveness to someone else because they've wronged you, in a vast majority of them, 95% of situations that require our obedience, My official pastoral counsel to you would be, just suck it up and forgive them, man. Figure it out. That would be my counsel to you. Now, I might arrive there in a gentler way. I might say it like, well, you know, and we'll pray about it and wait for you to call me back and realize that's what you need to do. But at the end of the day, the advice would be just suck it up and forgive them and move on. God forgave you. You forgive other people. He empowers you to forgive. We have no right to hold grudges. We've all messed up. Let's move on. But there is a third category where I would never, never give that clumsy of advice. And it's really where I want to spend the bulk of our time today because I feel like it's probably the most helpful for us. And that's those of us who have this group of people to forgive. Those from whom you have every right to withhold your forgiveness. If there is somebody in your life who has hurt you so profoundly and so deeply that you have every right to never forgive them. No one could come to you with an argument and say, you know they deserve your forgiveness, right? Because they don't. No one could come to you and be like, you know, you just need to kind of eventually, it's been 20 years, eventually you got to figure out how to suck it up and forgive. No, no, no, you don't. No, you don't. I have a very good friend who used to be married to another really good friend of mine. Their names are Kevin and Lacey. They live in another state, so I can use their names. If you know Kevin and Lacey, just shut up about this. About seven or eight years ago, Lacey had invited me and another friend of mine, Tyler, to their house to surprise Kevin for his 40th birthday. And we went up for a couple of days to celebrate the birthday. And it was a little weird. There was a little bit of tension. But Kevin and Lacey also had an adult daughter who was engaged. And then five children aged like 10 to 12 and younger. So the oldest was like 10 or 12 and then they had four younger ones and one of those was adopted. So their life was crazy. So to go to their house and for it to feel a little bit crazy or a little bit stressful wasn't totally out of the ordinary. So I didn't really have any red flags going off. It just felt a little tense, right? So we spent a couple of days there, Tyler and I do, and then we hit the road to drive back to, at the time I lived in Atlanta, so we're driving back to Atlanta. And we get about 45 minutes away, and Lacey calls me. I answer the phone, and she said, hey, her voice was shaking. She said, hey, can you come back? I said, sure, what's up? She said, I think he did it again. Three, four years prior to that, Kevin had admitted to an affair with a friend of theirs. And, you know, we kind of all walked through that together, and they had sought restitution and made things right and worked on their marriage, and she had extended forgiveness and yada, yada, yada. But when she said, I think he did it again, I knew immediately what she meant. So we turn back around, go back to Lacey's house. She kind of explained why she thought what she thought. We get into Kevin's computer and read text messages, and she's right. It was a woman in their church small group of all things. And they had made plans in a couple of weeks to tell their families because she had three young kids too. They had made plans to tell their families and somehow existed in this fantasy world where everything was eventually going to work out okay. They just had to get over this difficult challenge at first. But Lacey had figured things out too soon. So Kevin had gone over to her house, picked her up, and they ran off together. And we didn't know where they were, and he wasn't answering his phone. But see, Kevin and Lacey only had one car and Kevin had it. And they only had one bank account and Lacey, they had one bank account and Kevin had moved everything to his business account. So she had no car, no resources and she had five kids. And I spent the next two days convincing my friend Kevin to let Lacey have a car and a couple thousand dollars. And I sat in that house as Lacey gathered up the kids with some close friends of hers and explained to them that sometimes people make poor choices and your daddy's been making poor choices. That is pain. That is hurt. That is being wronged. And I would never, never look at Lacey in those moments and say, you know that offering unlimited forgiveness is not optional, right? You're a believer. And yet that's still true. And I don't know everyone's story, but I'm confident that we have some Lacey's in this room. Some women who have been hurt in that way. Some men who have had to walk through that pain. I know in a congregation our size, we have people who grew up in abusive homes. We have people whose parents victimized them. I know that we have folks in our midst who have walked through being a victim, who have been abused by a parent or by a grandparent or by a spouse or by a partner, and your hurt is deep, and that wrong is big, and that chasm is wide. And what I wanted to know when I was looking at the topic of forgiveness is, what do we tell those folks? How do we help you, those of you with the deepest hurt and the deepest lies and the most challenging path to forgiveness, what can we offer you? So frankly, if your issue is someone hurt my feelings or someone hurt me and they apologize and they've sought restitution but I'm choosing to hold this grudge, figure it out. Figure it out. Forgive them. But for those who sit in profound hurt, what do we do? How do we even start towards forgiveness? The thing that kind of played in my head as I thought about deep hurt is kind of this question, is how could the father look at his victimized children and instruct them to forgive? How could our good heavenly father take Lacey, pull her in, hug her and hold her and tell her, you know, eventually you're going to need to let go of this. Eventually I'm going to move you to a place where I'm going to ask you to forgive Kevin. How can God do that? If we've been hurt in that way, how can we hope to do that? And listen, listen, listen. If you're like me and the path to forgiveness in your life, you're lucky, you're blessed. It's never been that difficult. When I think of, gosh, what are my challenges in forgiveness? They're not a lot. I've not had to walk the road that Lacey's had to walk. So if that's you, I would still encourage you to lean in to what we're talking about this morning. I would still encourage you to listen to what I'm about to share with you that Lacey told me this week, because you might find yourself one day in that room when your friend's life is falling apart, and you might want to counsel them well, or God forbid, you might walk through this too. And let me also say this. Last week, talked about repentance, walking away from the things in our life that don't need to be in our life and walking towards Jesus. If you are doing things that have the potential to require someone to forgive you the way that Lacey is working to forgive Kevin, please stop doing those things before they require the forgiveness that you do not want to force on anyone. But I picked up the phone this week realizing my ignorance, realizing I have not much to offer for deep hurt. And I called Lacey. And I basically asked her that question. How can the Father look at you and love you and yet still push you towards forgiveness? How have you processed forgiveness over the course of the last seven to eight years? What would you say to this topic? And it really, it kind of made me sad. I'll just be honest with you guys. We talked for about 45 minutes, and at the end of it, I realized how badly I wish that I would write sermons several weeks out because it would have been so much more beneficial to have Lacey here and to let us just have a conversation and let you guys listen to it and listen to her perspective. And I told her that. I said, I wish that we could just play this phone call for the people of grace, for the folks in the church. I wish that they could hear these come out of your mouth and not just me bloviating for 30 minutes trying to repeat what you said that was so, so great. I wish you could hear that conversation. But since you can't, I wanted to share with you some of the more helpful things that she shared with me about how she's moved through this profound season of hurt and tried to walk in obedience to offering unlimited forgiveness in the way that she is called to do. And so a couple of things that she said about forgiveness were particularly insightful. And I wanted to share those with you as well, particularly those of you who are walking through profound hurt. And you could say, I have every right to withhold forgiveness from this person. Okay, a couple things for you to know. First, that she pointed out to me, forgiveness does not require trust or affection. To forgive someone, you don't have to reinstitute them into the position that they were in. You don't have to drum up some artificial affection for this person. Lacey has forgiven the other woman, the woman that was in her small group that claimed to be her friend that Kevin left her for. She has forgiven her. She feels no affection for her and she feels no calling to do it. So if one of the things holding you back is, I don't know how I could ever like that person, I don't think you need to. Forgiveness looks like loving somebody. Biblical love, we're instructed, is that we should love others as we love ourselves. How do we love ourselves? We want what's best for ourselves. So how do we love others? To offer biblical love to someone else is to simply desire what is best for them. It is possible to desire what is best for them without actually liking them. Last night, I desired that Duke would win because it's a more interesting story. It was best for Coach K. I do not like the man. I don't have any affection for him. It was just an interesting story, right? We can want what's best for someone without having feelings of affection towards them. And if that helps you get over that hump, so that's good. We also don't have to reinstall them into trust, right? If you have a business partner who steals from you, you can forgive that business partner. You do not have to go back into business with them. If you do, the next one's on you, man. That's your bad. We do not have to reinstall trust. If someone cheats on you, you can forgive them. You do not have to go back and stay with them. So if that's helpful for you, just understand that forgiveness, as I understand it, does not require a reinstatement of trust or affection. It's simply wanting what's best for them and moving on. This one was helpful too. Forgiveness doesn't get to be an arrival. For deep, profound hurt like that, someone lied to you for years, someone hurt you in an incredible way, it doesn't get to be an arrival. Lacey told me she kept expecting to kind of cross this finish line, that she would have one day where God had worked in her heart, with through enough prayer and enough counseling and enough time and enough space that she would be able to say, okay, he's forgiven. I'm moved on. That's done. Except the ripple effects of his actions show up again and again and again in her life. The weekly task of just coordinating the kids with him, where to pick them up and where to drop them off and what are you going to pay for and what are going to pay for, and all the crap that you have to deal with when there's a divorce now, and you have to shuttle kids around, and it's just fresh aggravation every week. Right now, she's got a couple kids going into college, and she has to fill out all of that paperwork on her own, and it's difficult when there's two different parents and two different families, and she's experiencing fresh frustration at the reality of her divorce because of choices that he made and she didn't. That's fresh frustration that she has to then forgive him for again and again. One of the most profound things she ever said to me as we were kind of talking through it, and I was asking what are the hard parts, she said one of the hardest parts is watching your kids grow up alone. Because they do that thing that they do and they make you smile or they make you laugh. And you get to look over at your husband or your wife and you both acknowledge what they just did and you get to experience that intimate joy together that no one else gets to see. And now she has to do that alone. That requires fresh forgiveness. And so it made me think that maybe this is what Jesus was talking about. When he said, no, no, no, not seven times. As many times as they require it. Because maybe Jesus understands that profound hurt has ripple effects. And they show up again and again and again and again. And if you're not prepared to offer ongoing forgiveness, then you're not yet prepared for forgiveness. Because those ripples show up over and over again in your life. And so if you're facing profound hurt like that, just understand, you don't get to cross the finish line. It's more of a mindset of forgiveness. And really the thing that she said that I wanted to finish with is she said, you know, Nate, this would all be impossible without Jesus anyways. She said, I don't know how people walk through hurt like this without Jesus and then try to forgive without Jesus. He's the only reason I can even ever forgive. And she said, in this really funny way, everything that's happened has pushed me more to him, has pushed me closer ever forgive without him. And it reminded me of this verse in 1 Corinthians. And I thought, oh, how appropriate and how much sense does that make in the context of forgiveness when he says to Paul, Jesus says this to Paul, my grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in your weakness. Or rather, that's God the Father saying that to Paul. We are insufficient to offer the forgiveness that we need to for some of the offenses that have been committed against us. It is only through Jesus that we are able to offer that forgiveness. His strength is made perfect in our weakness. It is only through him that we are able to forgive. So if you're one of those people who's carrying that profound hurt, just know that I don't believe you will ever find true forgiveness outside of Christ empowering you to offer it, compelling you to offer it. And when we do that, and when we allow Jesus to empower and compel us towards forgiveness, I think this really great thing happens. By empowering us to forgive, Jesus untethers us from our hurtful past. By empowering us to forgive, Jesus untethers us from our hurtful past. Lacey described it like this. She would just be going through her day, having a perfectly fine day, and then she would see something. She would see a store that Kevin liked to shop at, or a place that they used to go to, or just something that would trigger her and remind her. And then instantly, because she was holding all that hurt, and because she had not yet moved to a place of forgiveness, it was like there was this tether attached to the back of her head that would just jerk her attention into years in the past and jerk her right back into that hurt of those days following the decisions that he made. And she said it was terrible to go through days not knowing when or how my attention was going to be jerked back into the past and I was going to experience that pain fresh. And so really and truly, and we know this about grudges, and we know this about hurt, and we know this about pain, when you are walking through life carrying hurt, when you are walking through life carrying anger, when you are walking through life holding a grudge, that's not hurting them. It's not hurting them for you to be angry at them, not nearly as badly as it's hurting you. And so when Jesus empowers us to forgive, he cuts that tether and he gives us the freedom to walk forward into our future, not being constantly jerked back into our painful past. And I think that there is some freedom there. He unburdens us from the hurt and the pain that we carry every day. And he says, here, let me take that from you so that you can walk in freedom. And so I would say to you this, very carefully, very gently, if there is deep and profound pain in your life, if forgiveness for you is hard, and that person or those people have no right to ask it of you, okay. But when you're ready, Jesus offers you freedom from that hurt. When you're ready, Jesus offers to untether you from that past. When you're ready, you can move into a more free and loving future where you can't get snapped back into your pain at a moment's notice. But it requires you to forgive. It requires you to offer that. But when you do, you find a freedom in Jesus that you can't find anywhere else. I don't know how deep your hurt is, but I do know that life is better when you're not holding it. I don't know how hard forgiveness is for you, but I do know that the reason the Father would hold you and call you to him and say, you know that I'm going to ask you to forgive that person is not so that you can be morally right and morally exemplar and so that he can push you into this uncomfortable situation just so that you feel like a good human. He's telling you to do that because he loves you and he knows that freedom and love are going to be found on the other side of untethering yourself from that. He holds his victimized children and encourages them towards forgiveness precisely because he loves them and wants them to experience the freedom of life on the other side of that pain and he knows he's the only one that can make it go away. Which incidentally is why if your pain is in the first two categories, and I flippantly say, just get over it and forgive, because the same promise is extended to you, that Jesus will empower you to do it and that you will walk in love on the other side of it. So I would encourage you this morning, wherever you are on the spectrum, however you've been hurt, if it's possible to forgive, do it. Allow Jesus to empower that. If you're not there yet, if you say, I hear you, Nate. I know, I understand. Hopefully you don't disagree with what I've said. I haven't said anything clumsy. But you're simply not there yet. It's okay. Maybe just pray this prayer. And say, Father, I know you call me to forgive. I'm not ready. Will you please work in my heart so that I want to forgive? Just pray that prayer. I know I'm supposed to forgive. I don't want to. But I'm asking you and giving you permission to work in my heart to change that so that I do. And just take that step towards forgiveness. But I hope and I pray that as I pray in a second, that if there are people in your life who have hurt you, who you do need to extend forgiveness to, maybe just take a second while I'm praying right now and go ahead and offer that. And let's move out these doors free from some of the pain that we carried in with us this morning. And if you can't do that, let's take a step. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for modeling forgiveness to us. God, we know that we have offended, that we have hurt, that we have trampled with our actions, and yet you offer us unlimited forgiveness. So God, first, I pray that we would be grateful for that and overwhelmed by that. Second, Father, I pray that in turn we would offer forgiveness to others. And Lord, I pray in particular for those who have walked through deep hurt, through a hard betrayal, through abuse, through manipulation, through whatever kinds of awful things we people can do to one another. God, I pray that you would give them the courage to take a step towards forgiveness, to simply maybe even just pray that you would help their heart move, that you would soften their heart. Father, if we do offer forgiveness and obedience to your instructions, I pray that you would meet us there, that we would find you there, and that we would experience a peace there that maybe we haven't had in a long time. In the meantime, God, thank you for loving us so well. In Jesus' name, amen.