Sermons tagged with Repentance

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, Aaron, and the band. Thank you very much. It was good stuff this morning. This is the second part of our series called Powerful Prayers. I think I called it Great Prayers last week. I don't really know what we named the series. I just tell them what I'm going to preach about, and then they make a graphic. So that's how that goes. But this one's called Powerful Prayers, and I am excited to share with you this morning what I believe is probably the most powerful prayer of repentance in the Bible. There's a couple different instances where we see some people in profound repentance and restoration situations, but this is probably the greatest one and the most famous one. This is David's prayer of repentance after his sin with Bathsheba. And I'm not sure what the worst thing is that you've ever done, and I don't want to know what that is. I'm very grateful that we don't have a Catholic model of pastorhood here at this church, and you have to confess things to me. I don't want to know those things. Those are your business. Those are not my business. You and God, you take care of that. I don't need to know. I don't know what the worst thing is you've ever done, but I'm willing to bet it's not as bad as what David did, and I'm willing to bet, unless it is just mind-blowing in its evil and efficacy, that they're not going to write about it so that every generation, henceforth for,000 years learns of it, okay, when they come of age. So this is a pretty unique sin and a pretty profound response to it. And so I think that there is a lot to learn from David's prayer of repentance. And that's kind of what we're doing in this series, is we're just looking at great prayers in the Bible, powerful prayers prayed by saintly people, and we're asking what can we learn from these prayers. So we're not talking about how can I get a better prayer life. We're talking about when I pray, what can I learn from these prayers? And even on this topic of repentance, we're going to be talking about repentance this morning. I preached on repentance in the spring in our Lent series. I'm sure you guys all remember, I mean, almost all of it. It was really good. But I preached on it in the spring, on what it was and on how we do it and on the symbolism of it. And when we walk away from a sin, we walk towards Jesus. And so if this raises some questions for you and you feel like it might be a little incomplete, I want to repent, I don't know how to repent, or I'm not really sure I understand what it is, then I would tell you to go back and listen to that one in the spring, because that's when I kind of talked about the details of repentance. But this week, I want to ask, what can we learn from David's repentance? And if that's what we're asking, then we need to know what he did. Now, a lot of you know what he did. You know this story. You know how David became a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer. Some of us don't know it at all, and some of us know bits and pieces. So just to make sure we're on the same page and that we understand what we're reading when we look at his prayer of repentance in Psalm 51, which is where we're going to be, by the way. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. I wanted to let you know what he did. We find this story in 2 Samuel 11, so you can go there and you can fact check me to make sure I'm not making this stuff up. But it says in the springtime when the kings were off to war, David was in his palace. And there's a lot of insights that we can make into this story, but I don't want to belabor the story this morning. I just want us to understand what's happened. So David's army is off to war, being generaled by Joab, who shows up in this story. And David decides one day that he's going to go out onto his roof. And while he's on his roof, he looks across the way, I would presume, and he sees a woman named Bathsheba bathing. Because in that culture, you bathed on the roof, out of sight from everyone else, but unless you're the king and you have a palace that's higher than everyone else's building, now you can see what you want to see. And so let's be clear about this. David did not go up onto the roof to have a cup of coffee, fire up a cigar, and just take in the sunset, okay? That's not what he was doing. David knew what he was doing. David went up there to see what he could see, and he saw what he wanted to see. Bathsheba was bathing on the roof, and so he tells his guys, whoever his guys are, however the attendants to kings work, he says, I'd like you to bring her to me. So they go get Bathsheba. They bring Bathsheba to his chambers. And he did with her what kings do with pretty girls that they bring to their chambers. And what's interesting, I don't know if it's interesting, but what's important to understand in this moment is that consent was not a thing. I can't say with certainty that what happened between David and Bathsheba was against her consent, but what I can say is that it wouldn't have mattered at all. David was the one making this choice. Bathsheba had no choice. I'm 100% certain she felt powerless in that situation, which only compounds the sin and the predatory nature of what David is doing. And if you're going to tell me that this is the first time David's done this roof bathing, bring her to my chambers trick, I'm going to tell you, you have not watched enough Netflix because that's not how things go. I would be willing to bet this wasn't the first time David had a woman that he found attractive brought to his palace so that he could do with that woman what he wanted to do with that woman. It's not the first time he turned a human into a commodity. So he does what kings do in that situation, and word gets back to him. I don't know. I guess it had to be a couple of weeks later. Bathsheba sent word to David that she was pregnant. And David's like, this is a problem because she's married to a guy named Uriah, the Hittite. Uriah is one of David's mighty men. That's the special forces of the ancient Hebrew army. This is the delta force that's tasked with protecting the king and then also being the forefront, being the tip of the spear in the battles. These were some bad dudes. I think it might be 2 Samuel 17 where the deeds of the mighty men are chronicled, and it's really cool. It's like, I mean, for guys it is. Girls are like, yeah, who cares? But for dudes, it's great. So go read 2 Samuel 17, and it chronicles what the mighty men did, and Uriah is one of those guys. So not only is Bathsheba married, but she's married to a man who lives to serve David, who is one of his best soldiers. And when he finds out she's pregnant, David says, okay, I got to cover this up. So he sends word to Joab on the front lines. He says, send me Uriah back. I need to talk to him. So he sends Uriah back and David says, hey, just wanted to check in with you, see how the war was going. How are you guys doing out there? How's Joab? How's everything going? And he gives him an update and David says, you know what? You're such a great guy, Uriah. You know what I want? Go see your wife. Go see Bathsheba. She's a looker. Just go see her. Spend a night there at your house and then I'll send you back to battle tomorrow. And Uriah refuses. He says, my Lord Joab is sleeping in the field, as are all the men that I fight with. How could I possibly come home and enjoy the warmth of the bed and my wife and be an honorable man? I cannot do it. And so he sleeps on the front step of his house so that all the city knows Uriah didn't go in there that night. So David's little cover-up ain't going to work. I reread the story just to make sure I wasn't misleading you. And something that I hadn't noticed before is when Uriah doesn't do what David needs him to do so that he can cover up his sin, he throws a party the next night. He says, Uriah, stay another day. And then he plies Uriah with wine. And the Bible says clearly gets him drunk and then sends him home to his wife. Maybe this time it'll work. He refuses. He sleeps outside. So the next morning, Uriah wakes up. David hands him a letter. He says, I want you to hand these instructions to Joab the general. They're sealed, so Uriah doesn't look at them. He carries them to Joab, and they're instructions for Joab to put Uriah in the battle where the fighting is the most fierce, and when it gets really intense, have everybody else back away from him so that Uriah is killed. Make sure Uriah dies in battle, is the order. So he does. Joab withdraws the troops. Uriah is killed. Bathsheba is grieving. David, the ever gracious and loving king, brokenhearted for the plight of the widow in his kingdom, does the magnanimous thing and takes her in as his bride and restores her to a proper life. What a good thing for David to do. He is a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer, and he's gotten away with it. Not only has he gotten away with it, but he got away with it, and he found a way to make himself look a little bit better at the end. The very next chapter, 2 Samuel, there's a guy named Nathan, the prophet. And he goes to David, and without belaboring the story, he says, hey, I know what you did. God told me. You need to make this right. And David is brokenhearted. He's crestfallen. Next chapter over, he's on suicide watch. He's brokenhearted at what he did. And what I love about Psalms is Psalms, David didn't write all the Psalms, but he wrote most of them. And it serves us as kind of this private prayer journal of this great king, of this great man, where he writes all the defeats and all the victories and all the laments and all the celebrations and all the times when he's brought low and all the times when he celebrates. And so this moment in his life isn't excluded from his diary. And so we get a peek into his feelings after he's been confronted by Nathan about his sin with Bathsheba and against Uriah the Hittite. And so this is the prayer of repentance that David prays in his worst moment. When his absolute worst moment is brought to life, when his most evil is brought to life, when David has to be confronted with the fact that I didn't even know I could be who I am right now. I didn't know I was capable of this kind of sin, but it just kind of builds and builds and builds until I don't identify myself anymore. And then he's confronted with it. And in that confrontation, he sits down and he prays, and then he writes out his prayer. And I think it's helpful for us to look Against you and you only have I sinned. On one hand, that's not true at all. You sinned against Bathsheba horribly. You sinned horribly against Uriah. You sinned against all the attendants and all the people that you wrapped into your little scheme. You sinned against Joab, who you turned into a murderer on your behalf. You sinned against a lot of people. But at the end of the day, what David is realizing here in this prayer is that, yes, I've sinned against a lot of people, but I have offended no one and sinned against no one more egregiously than I've sinned against God himself, because all of this goes back to him and all of this grieves his heart. So he says, against you and you only have know what hyssop is, it purges. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. I love that part of the prayer. Create in me a right heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. David's acknowledging this is broken. My heart is broken. My heart is sinful. I don't know how I became capable of what I did. Create in me a right spirit because mine is wrong. He's falling on his face before God. He's rendering his heart. And it's easy, I think, to jump into the story at this point and say, yeah, yeah, of course he's praying this. He got caught. I don't see him praying this before Nathan went to talk to him. He was perfectly fine living with Bathsheba, letting her be pregnant, planning on raising this son with his multiple other wives and multiple other sons. David's just sorry because he got caught. And we've seen this. We see this in our children. We've done this ourselves. We're not really sorry for the thing that we did. We're sorry that we got caught doing the thing that we did. And then we do all the things we're supposed to do. And it would be very easy to apply that sensibility to David. But what we see in the repentance of David is this sincere brokenness at who he is and what he's done. And we see it, like I alluded to, in the chapters that follow the story in 2 Samuel. He spends the next week on suicide watch. He's literally laying on the ground. He won't go to bed. He will not eat. He will not drink. His friends and his servants are very concerned for him. They try to get him up. They try to get him to stop crying. They try to get him to eat something. They try to get him to lay down on a bed and not the floor. And he refuses. He is broken. He is broken at the reality of his sin and who he is in light of his sin and how he's hurt the heart of his God because of his sin. And in that brokenness, he writes this prayer, and we see the contrition in verses 16 and 17. These are such important verses for understanding the heart of repentance and what God wants from us. For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it. You will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. Listen, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. See, in the Jewish faith that David was a part of, when you sinned, there were sacrifices that were measured out according to the sin. There was a prescription for what you needed to do. You've sinned this badly, it requires this kind of sacrifice. This was a really bad sense. This is going to be like multiple bulls cut in half, burned, probably some doves, throw in a lamb for good measure. It's like if you grew up Catholic, it's like you got to do this many Hail Marys and Our Fathers and whatever else you're supposed to do as penance for your sin. This is what he's supposed to do. There's a prescription here. And David says, I'm not going to offer you sacrifices. I'm not gonna offer you the Hail Marys. I'm not gonna go through the motions. God, I know that you don't want sacrifices. You know that I'll go kill every bull that I've ever owned. I'll do it right now. But that's not what you want. You don't want me to go through the motions. A broken and contrite heart, oh God, you will not despise. What God is looking for in our repentance is a heart that is broken over what we've done and who we've become. It's interesting to me, and the older I get, and the more perceptive I get of the man that David was, the more the juxtaposition of the two startles me. David's also called a man after God's own heart, by God himself. And it's not for the avoidance of sin. He's a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer. I promise you this is not the first time he's done that. And he was a lifelong adulterer because he had multiple wives for his whole life. And if you read the Bible and be like, how come that was okay back then? It wasn't. David either didn't know or didn't care or some combination of the two. He was a terrible father. Every bit of evidence we have is that he was an absentee father. And yet, God says he's a man after God's own heart, which I can only find encouraging because it tells me I've got a shot. David was a mess. You are a mess. I'm a mess. And yet, David was called a man after God's own heart. How? I think it's because of his repentance, because of his response when he's confronted with his sin, because of how earnestly he returns to the Father and offers him his broken heart. So if we look at this powerful prayer and we ask what we can learn from it about our own repentance, I think the first thing I would point out to you is if we haven't wept over our sin, I'm not sure our hearts are ready to repent. If we haven't been moved to tears, if we haven't been brokenhearted, if our sin and the reality of what we've done and who we've become and who that's turned us into, if that doesn't weight us down so much that we fall on our knees before the Father and beg for his forgiveness, then I'm not sure we're actually ready to repent. Because again, and I said this back in the spring, confession is to agree with God about your sin. Yeah, this thing is wrong. Repentance is to move the opposite direction from your sin. It's to have been moving in this direction towards sin, stop, leave it, and move back towards Jesus. Repentance is moving away from sin and towards the Savior. That's what repentance is. And if we're going to truly repent, our hearts have got to be broken about our sin. I'm not sure what sins that we carry in here this morning. I'm sure I could guess a few. And by guessing a few, I just mean list mine, and then you probably will check some of those boxes too. But I think sometimes we think about repentance as in the big moments, right? Repenting of committing adultery and impregnating a married woman, and then killing her husband to cover it up, and then embroiling everyone else in scandal. I think we think of repentance there, but what about repentance of attitudes that we've carried for years that we've never dealt with? What about repentance of the way we talk to our spouse and how they don't deserve that? What about repentance of these small racist attitudes we carry around and don't address? What about repentance of God needing to teach us the same lesson over and over again? What about selfishness or things in our life that look like greed or materialism? What about that list of things that we've known for a long time we need to stop doing and we're not? Or those lists of things that we've known for a long time we need to start doing and we're not? Repentance isn't just for what we would call big sins. It's probably more helpful for all the little ones that we just carry with us, where good becomes the enemy of great. And what I'm telling you this morning is, I don't think that we can properly repent until we've been actually broken by that sin and who it makes us. And I know that some of you aren't criers, and so the idea of breaking down crying in front of, before the Father at what we've done is probably not realistic. So whatever broken down looks like to you, that's where we need to be if we're going to properly repent. And so it would make sense this morning to invite you into a place of repentance, But what I also know is that some of you are simply not ready for that. Some of us have sins. We know exactly what we are. We know what we're doing. We know who we are. And we know that we're going to go from this place and we're going to do them. And if we're just honest before the Father, what we would say is, I know I don't need to, but I'm going to. I like it in my life. And so that's just how it's gonna be for a little bit. About those things and about everything in between, I think a helpful prayer to move us towards repentance would be, Father, help me to see my sin as you do and so break my heart as yours is broken. I think I would encourage you to pray this prayer. If you know that there is sin in your life, but you've never been broken over it, you feel a little bit bad, maybe that habit doesn't need to be there, but I haven't fallen to my knees over it. I'm not brokenhearted over it. Then I think a very fair and wise prayer is to say, God, I know that this is in my life. Will you break my heart over it? Will you help me see it as you see it so that I hate it like you hate it? Will you help me see how it's hurting me and my family like you see how it's hurting me and my family? So that I would be brought to a place where I'm ready to actually repent? If you're not even ready to pray that, pray this. God, I know there's things in my life that don't need to be there. And you and I both know I'm not getting rid of them anytime soon. Will you please move the needle for me? Will you just move me to a place where I no longer want these things in my life? Will you help me to progressively hate them? Let's just invite God to move us closer to repentance this morning if our hearts aren't moved to be ready for it. But for our hearts to be broken as God's heart is broken, we have to understand, I think, what God sees when we sin. I read somewhere that God's primary emotion towards us when we sin is not anger, it's pity. He hates that we have to do it. It's like a parent watching a child make decisions that are hurting them, and you just have to sit back and watch, and it breaks your heart. And I think what breaks the heart of God when we sin is knowing who you could be and who he created you to be, and knowing that you're allowing that sin to prohibit you from being exactly who God created you to be. Do you understand that when you carry around sin in your life chronically, that you've never even met yourself? Do you understand that? That when God formed you in the womb, he knew exactly who he wanted you to be, and he knew exactly the good work that you were created to walk in. And when you sin, you prohibit yourself from walking in that good work. You prohibit yourself from growing into the person that he created you to be, and so you've never even met yourself. Your spouse is married to some truncated, soul-sick version of you. Your kids are growing up in the home of a half-person who carries around sin. Sin is like a cancer that eats us silently from the inside out and destroys our souls. So when we carry around unrepentant sin, we are a person and a version of ourself that isn't who God created us to be, that isn't who God intended us to be, and no one that we're around gets to experience the fullness of who God is in us because we're soul sick. We're truncated versions of ourselves carrying around sin who have never been able to love our children as God intended us to love them and show them his grace because of our own mess. We're soul sick people who have never been able to love our husband and our wife and give them the spouse that they deserve and let them see God's love through us because we have cancer in our life that we are not addressing. And so it is right and good to learn to hate our sin. I saw this week, someone wrote, we've heard it said that you should love the sinner and hate the sin. He said, I tell you, love everyone and hate your own sin. I think that's a good place to start. So let's ask that God would bring us to that place. And as I dug into this prayer this week to share it with you and the heart of it, I noticed something else come out of David's prayer that I hadn't seen before. I think that when we think of repentance, we think of it exclusively as this thing that brings us low, this thing that humbles us, this thing that brings us to our knees before the Father. Repentance is a low point, and then God builds us up. It's a humbling, and that's it. But we're wrong when we think of it that way, because true repentance doesn't leave us brokenhearted. It restores us to joy. True repentance doesn't leave us brokenhearted. It doesn't leave us down here. It doesn't leave us scraping on the ground. It restores us to joy. It builds us back up. It restores us to our former life. Two times David prays this in a prayer of repentance. He includes this request twice, and I think it's amazing. In verse 8 and verse 12, he says in verse 8, let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. And then verse 12, restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold with me a willing spirit. In the midst of being brought low, you know what David asked for? Restore me to my former joy. Heal the bones that you've broken, God. And I was sitting chewing on that idea. How does repentance restore us to joy? And I felt like I was gaining on it, but I wasn't quite sure. I felt like I had my head around it, but I wasn't quite sure how to explain it to a room full of people to make it come alive for us. And I was just sitting in my office staring out the window for an hour thinking about this. You would have thought I was a crazy person if you walked by just this blank stare looking out the window. But after thinking through it for a while, I think the best way I can explain it is that the joy of repentance is the all clear after the cancer operation. The joy of repentance is the all clear after the cancer operation. You know, my family has been touched by cancer multiple times in multiple ways. And we all hate that C word. We all hate it. And it's touched all of us. It's scared all of us. It's cost all of us. And if you've been through the journey, you know how scary and uncertain it is. There are three families in the church who recently got that news. Hey, we found a mass. And that begins three weeks of praying and of testing and waiting for doctors to call back and uncertainty and trying to have a strong face, trying to put on a brave face, trying not to think about it every moment of every day, trying to get good sleep while you wait for this news. And sometimes you get the news, and it's like, it's benign, it's nothing, you're good. Oh, great. And then sometimes it's not that good news. And then sometimes we have to go through the whole cancer journey, and there's treatments, and there's chemo, and there's sickness, and there's a whole path that you have to go down. And sometimes, if you're fortunate, if they caught it early, if you got the cancer in the good spot where they can go get it and not the bad spot where they can't, sometimes they'll send you to surgery. And they'll go to that surgery, and they're hoping that they found it all. They know right where it is. They can get it, and they can sew you up, and you have a new lease on life. They're hoping they don't get in there and find more. And so if you're really lucky, after going through years of the cancer journey, the surgeon goes in there. He or she gets it all. And then they tell you afterwards, after you come back from the anesthesia, you're good. We got it. You're cancer free. Have you ever heard those sweet words about someone you love? That's the joy of repentance. You're cancer free, new lease on life.. That thing that was inside of you that was eating you from the inside out, that was destroying your body and destroying your health, that's not a part of your life anymore. Walk fresh, walk new, walk into a newness of life. There's going to be some recovery time. Don't like sprint, but you're good. Go. Experience joy. That's what repentance is. Repentance is handing Jesus the scalpel and saying, here, operate on me. I don't want this in my life anymore. I'm tired of this. I don't need it. Please, would you get rid of it and bring me closer to you? That's what true repentance is. And so the joy of true repentance is finding out that this cancer that we had in our soul that was making us soul sick, that was making us offer a truncated version of ourself to ourselves and those around us, what we find out is that's done, that's gone. You don't have to live with that anymore. Now walk in a newness of life that Jesus bought for you. That's repentance. David got that. That's how he was a man after God's own heart. And that's what I want for you this morning too. Those of you who carried sin in here, which is all of us, I want us to repent. I want us to hand the scalpel over to Jesus and say, would you please just come get it? I want you to be restored to joy of walking in freedom, of knowing there's nothing to hide, there's nothing to be ashamed of. I can skip, like Micah says, like a calf loosed from his stall, because we're free to love. That's what I want for you. And that's what repentance is. So in a second, I'm going to pray. And as I'm praying, Aaron's going to start to just play softly behind me. And when I'm done praying, I'll say amen. The lights will be down. And we're just going to be quiet for a minute. At least a full minute. And that's going to be your opportunity to respond to this. To what true repentance is. If your heart is ready to repent, repent. If it's not, ask God in the most honest prayer you can muster to move the needle. Take me to a place where I see my sin like you do. But I didn't want to talk about something like this without giving you the opportunity to respond to it in the moment. So not in the car, not later on, not tomorrow morning, right now, after I pray, you're going to have a silent minute or two to just bow your head and close your eyes and talk to the Father about whatever you need to talk to Him about. Let's pray. Father, You're good to us. Thank you for, through the cross, making repentance possible. Thank you for who you are and what you've done. Thank you for insisting on recording David's worst moment so that we could see what might be his best moment in Psalm 51 and his repentance. I'm reminded, Father, of the invitation to lay our burdens down at your feet, and so I pray that we would do that today. It's my earnest prayer that some of us would walk out this door this morning feeling a restoration of joy that we haven't felt in years. And God, it's my sincere prayer that if it doesn't happen this morning, that it will happen soon so that everyone who is in this room will get to experience the joy of walking with you and the people who are in the lives around the people in this room will get to meet them as you created them to be, maybe for the first time ever. But God, would you move in our hearts that we would see our sin as you see it and so be moved closer to a sincere repentance. Give us the faith and the courage to hand you the scalpel and to surrender to you removing things from our life. In Jesus' name, amen.

I wonder, pals, how long has 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 kids' 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, Samson. All right. Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's been a minute since I preached. The elders were kind enough to allow me to take the month of July off from preaching. And as I said last week, thank you so much for being a church that lets me do that. I'm sure that as I converse with people and continue to process what the month allowed me to do, one of the things that I'm coming out of July with is a profound gratitude for you. I'm so grateful that I get to be your pastor and that I get to be in this place. It is one of the most profound joys of my life. So thank you for letting me serve you in this way. As we jump back into the series, Kids Stories for Grownups, it's kind of born out of this idea that there's these stories. If you grow up in church, there's these stories that we learn all along the way, right? David and Goliath and Noah and the Ark and Jonah and the Whale. We hear those stories and then when we grow up and we still sit in church on Sunday mornings, we don't talk about kids' stories. We talk about important theology and Romans and things like that, but we don't revisit the kids' stories. Sometimes when I put Lily to bed, my six-year-old daughter, she'll ask me for a Bible story, and I love telling Lily Bible stories. I love telling Bible stories to anyone, especially if they haven't heard them before. And it's funny how I'll remember the stories that I liked when I was a kid and I'll think, oh, I'll tell her about Noah and the ark. Oh yeah. I mean, the animals are cute, but like the whole world dying. That's, I don't think she's ready for that yet. So let, not that one. And then, well, maybe I'll tell her this one. Ooh, that's a, that, that, that, that, um, the holy war is, is tricky right now. Let's, uh, let's, let's wait on that one. And then, well, maybe I'll tell her this one. Ooh, that Holy War is tricky right now. Let's wait on that one. And you kind of realize, my goodness, these are not intended for kids at all. These are intended for adults. And there's no story to me that personifies that better than the story of Samson. When you read, when you're a little kid, if you grew up in church, and this isn't everyone's experience. Not everyone grew up in church, and I understand that. And maybe if you didn't grow up in church, you've heard of Samson before, and you know he was like superhuman, like Bible Hercules, that was him. But when you're a little kid and you grow up in church, especially if you're a little boy, Samson's the best. Samson was the Hercules of the Bible. He accomplished things of superhuman strength. He killed 1,000 people with the jawbone of a donkey. And when you're eight, that sounds amazing. When you're 41, you're like, but why did he do that? What's the matter with Samson? That's awful. And when you revisit this story, you realize this guy was a jerk. And I'm saying he was a jerk because it's church and I'm on the stage and there's children in the room. But that's not the word I want to use. I would like to string together more colorful words to describe who Samson was. And so when you go through the story of Samson, overshadowing everything is this constant why. Why did God use him? Why is he in the New Testament referred to as one of the heroes of the faith? How? Why? Why does God continue to use him and bless him? This doesn't make any sense. And I'll just tell you up front, the goal for this morning is not to answer the why question. The goal for this morning is to see what we can see in the life of Samson and how God interacts with him and how that might inform how we interact with God and how God pursues us. But we're going to take a stab at that as we go. But the story of Samson is not the story of a hero of the faith to me, or at least not what you would think it would be. We pick up Samson's story in Judges chapter 13, where we learn that there is a, and I would encourage you to grab a Bible. There's one in front of you. Judges 13 through 16 is where we're going to be today. If you're at home, follow along there. But just double check me and make sure I'm not making this stuff up because it's going to sound like I am, but I promise you I'm not. His life was just nuts. So in Judges chapter 13, we pick up Samson. We learn of a woman who was married to a man named Manoah, and she was not able to have children, but she desperately wanted some. And so she's praying to God that God would allow her to have some children. And this is what God says to her. In Judges 13, verses 3 through 5. Okay, so there's a couple of things going on there. First of all, you see that he can't, no alcohol, no touching unclean things. You cannot cut his hair ever. It's a Nazaritic vow. He was going to make a vow of the Nazarite. And that just means someone who is set aside intentionally and purposefully from birth to be used by God. And so the vow incorporates no alcohol, no haircuts, no touching unclean things and following God's law. So before Samson is born, God goes to his mom and says, I'm going to give you a son and your son is going to be used by me. He's going to take the Nazaritic vow and he can never drink and his hair can never be cut. And I am going to use him to overthrow the Philistines. At which point it's helpful for me to explain that what is going on in the period of the judges. As we read the book of Judges, we're in an era of Israel called the Judges before they had kings. So it's after they wandered into the desert, they've established themselves as a nation, or rather God has established them as a nation. And now they do not have a king or a ruler, rather God is their king. And in his rule, God appoints a judge to sit and do just that, to settle disputes, to help people figure things out, to say you're right and you're wrong and you have to pay them punitive damages and all those things. He appoints a judge during peaceful times to keep everything harmonious. But the role of the judge was also at times to overthrow the other tribes oppressing God's people in Israel. Because the cycle of the judges is God would establish them and freedom and they would be in charge of themselves. He's their king. They would have a judge and they serve him well and in peace. But eventually they would forget about the blessings of God. They would begin to make their own choices, follow after their own gods and go into a stage of rebellion against God. And to get their attention, God would allow them to experience the consequences of their actions by removing his hand of blessing from his nation of Israel. And they would get oppressed again by the Midianites or the Amorites or the Philistines or some other ites until they would cry out to God, we've messed is, I'm going to give you a son who will take the Nazaritic vow, and he is going to become a judge over Israel and will begin to overthrow the Philistine oppressors. That's the promise God makes to this woman. So she has a son. They name him Samson. And we don't know a lot about his childhood. When we see him come on the scene, he's walking back and forth to this village that was, I guess, a neighboring village to where he was, except it was a Philistine village. And one day on his way, it says a young lion attacked him. And it says that the spirit of the Lord came upon him and he ripped the lion apart with his bare hands. So this is where we see Samson's gift from God is this kind of superhuman strength. And while he's in this village, he meets a girl. And he goes back to his parents, and he says to his parents, hey, I've met a woman, and I want her to be my wife. Will you please make the necessary arrangements with her parents, which fellas, if only it were that easy, right? So they say, and this is the response. I love this response. You can find it in the text. When he says, I want to marry this woman over here from this Philistine village, his parents are troubled because he's supposed to marry an Israelite girl. He's supposed to marry a Jewish girl. That's kind of part of the deal. When you're part of the Jewish faith, you don't intermarry with other faiths. You stay with your faith. This is something that's really important to God and the Old Testament. It's really important to Samson's parents, but Samson doesn't care. And so their response when he says, hey, I've met this Philistine girl and I'd like to marry her. Can you make the arrangements? His parents' literal response is, Samson, have you considered your cousins? That's the response. Now imagine some of you have kids that are of marrying age. Let's say they bring them home and you guys are talking and that person goes off to bed or they go to the restroom or whatever it is and you lean over to your child. How bad would that person have to be for you to say, have you considered your cousins? Like what about your family at least? They didn't want to marry her, but he did. And for whatever reason they allowed it. You get the impression that Samson's not the kind of person that you can say no to, so they make the arrangements. And he's on his way to the village for the marriage celebration. It's like a seven-day celebration. It's like a seven-day long wedding reception, which is my nightmare because I hate wedding receptions. But there, which I'm sure no one's surprised by that. Like, I didn't see that one coming, Nate. Yeah, I don't like dancing. All right, they're the worst. So it's a seven day reception to go to for a wedding. And on his way there, he passes by the lion that he killed, except now it's a carcass and some bees have built a hive in it. And there's some honey in there. And so he's like, well, that looks nice. And so he scoops some honey out and he eats some of that honey, which seems like an inconsequential thing, except it's a violation of his Nazaritic vow. He's not supposed to touch unclean things and that was dead. So it's unclean. So Samson already is pretty cavalier about the vow that he made to God, that his parents asked him to make to God, and about his fidelity to this God that's empowering him to rip lions apart with his bare hands. And he gets down there, and at the reception, he's been assigned 30 companions. They've chosen 30 men from among the town to be his companions, to be his friends, which that's 30 is a lot. It's a large wedding party and also does not sound very fun. Like, hey, to celebrate your wedding, here's 30 people that you're going to spend the week with that you don't know. But that's how they did it. So those are his companions. And on the first day of the celebration, he says, hey, I'll make you guys a bet. I'll bet you that I'll give you a riddle. And if you can solve it, then I'll give each one of you a set of clothes. And if you can't solve it, then each of you, all 30 of you, has to give me a set of clothes. And apparently, this was a pretty high-stakes bet, all right? There was no Old Navies. We're not running to the store to buy shorts for $12. Clothes were very expensive. They were handmade, and having one or two sets was a pretty big deal in life. So betting 30 of them is a pretty large gamble, except, and you can read it, it's kind of a dumb riddle, honestly, but it's a riddle that's impossible to solve. The answer to the riddle is this carcass that has honey in it down the street, but you're never going to guess it. So it's a totally impossible riddle. And now you're just going to beat your heads against the wall for seven days. And then I'm going to take all of your money. This is great. So he's made a jerky, impossible bet to his new friends. So as the celebration goes on, the 30 companions are really putting pressure on Samson's fiance to tell him, hey, figure out what the answer to this riddle is and tell us. Like, he's going to come in here and embarrass all the Philistines ever. So you got to figure it out. You got to figure it out. So she's pressing on him to figure it out. He won't tell her. He won't tell her. Finally, on the seventh day, he tells her. So she goes and she tells the guys, and then the guys publicly say, hey, we got it. And they give him the answer to his riddle. And he's so incensed and so angry that they used his fiance to figure it out that they came about it in an unfair way. They didn't just figure it out on their own. They had to cheat to win and now they've won and now he owes them 30 sets of clothes. So Samson, in his rage, goes into town and murders 30 people, and then takes their bloody clothes and goes and pays off his bet like that. What? He just goes into town and kills 30 people, and then takes their, I'm sure, blood-stained clothes and goes and gives them to the people to pay off the bet and then storms away. Samson's evil, man. That's crazy. That's maniacal. That's like the first three murders, okay. But then 27 more. Are you kidding me? That's so bad. So after a period of time, I don't know what kind of cooling off period you need after 30 murders, he goes back to the father of the bride and he's like, okay, I'm ready to take my bride now. And the father of the bride's like, oh, you were, you were so angry that I didn't think you wanted anything to do with the family. I gave her to one of your companions. I have another daughter if you'd like to talk about her, which seems like a totally reasonable response. I just did a wedding this weekend. I went to rehearsal on Friday morning, and then the ceremony was yesterday afternoon. If in between the rehearsal and the ceremony, the groom murdered 30 people associated with the bride, I would just assume that the wedding was off. Like, I don't need a confirmation email on that one. I'm just not going to go. So it's a reasonable response. And Samson is so mad that he then goes, the Bible says, and he captures foxes, 300 of them, we are told. And he ties their tails together and he puts a torch in their tails and he sends them through the fields of the Philistines. Now, I'm not an animal lover, okay? You guys know this about me. That's still crazy. That's still wildly evil to just do that to animals and burn down all the crops of the whole city. These farmers didn't have anything to do with Samson. Just the huge impact that would have on that town. Now, yes, God has raised him up to be a judge and to overthrow the Philistines, but like this? When the Philistines hear about what happened, they send an army after Samson. Samson's cornered, and all he has is the remains of a donkey, so he grabs the jawbone of the donkey, and he starts fighting, and God's spirit was with him, and he slayed a thousand Philistines that day. Now, it's wild to me that after the first, like, 20, he didn't grab one of their swords and make it a little easier for himself. He's like, no, I'm riding with this jawbone, man. It got me here, so let's go. And he kills 1,000 Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey. And in the aftermath of that battle and that life lived so far, we have these verses that kind of sum up this place where the story pauses. And he was very thirsty. No kidding, Samson needed some Gatorade. And he called upon the Lord and said, you have granted this great salvation by the hand of your servant and shall I now die of thirst and fall at the hands of the uncircumcised? God split open the hollow place that is at Lehi, and water came out. And when he drank, his spirit returned, and he revived. Therefore, the name of it was called Enhachor. It is at Lehi to this day, and he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines 20 years. How about that last sentence? I bet you didn't see that coming, did you? This guy that just murdered 1,030 Philistines and burned down their crops and in no way at any point in his life has honored God or seemed to care about him at all. Doesn't care to marry a Hebrew girl like he's supposed to. Doesn't care to honor his vow like he's supposed to. doesn't care to try to be tempered and measure in his character at all like he's supposed to, and then, great, let's make him the judge of Israel for 20 years with God's blessing. What in the world? How can God use Samson? How is that allowed or fair or right? You know, I don't know. But at this point in the story, when you see who he is, you see his stripes, and yet he ruled Israel peacefully for 20 years that God gave him. I can only conclude that it's because God faithfully uses the profoundly broken. He faithfully uses the profoundly broken. We see this over and over again in Scripture. Moses was a murderer. David was an adulterer. Noah was a drunk. And on and on it goes. But we, all of us, ought to be grateful that God faithfully uses the profoundly broken. Because there is not a person in here who isn't. There is not a person within the sound of my voice who has not been at different times in their life for different reasons profoundly broken. Scripture says that God's law is a mirror that we hold up and essentially see our ugliness and therefore need for God. You cannot be a Christian and walk with God for any period of time and not be well acquainted with just how sinful you are. And not at some point be disgusted with what's in here and what you're capable of. Every one of us has walked through a season and gotten to the other side of it and turned around and thought, who was that person? If you have never been profoundly broken, I have good and bad news for you. You will be, and it's for your better. So lest we look at Samson and think it's unfair that God would use him, let's be reminded that God faithfully uses the profoundly broken, those wandering far off, those who do not seem to have a life that's in harmony with the faith that they claim. God still uses those people, and we ought to be grateful for that. We sang, all three songs that we sang up to this sermon were about that. It was about God's pursuit of us, how God doesn't give up on us. This God of revival, pour it out, pour it out. There was no one in need of revival more than Samson, and God continues to faithfully use him. And I've told you guys before, I tell you as often as I can, Ephesians 2.10, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. God has a plan for you. God has a purpose for you. God designed you and intended you to be used and deployed in his kingdom. Who cares if it's in a big way or a small way? They don't matter, but it's in a way. God intends to use you and he will continue to use you despite your brokenness, despite your rebellion, despite your wandering. And the other reason, the other thing that we see in God using the profoundly broken is the fact that he is a God who keeps his promises. He promised that woman before she ever had Samson, I will use him to overthrow the Philistines. He made a promise. And we serve a God that keeps his promises. That's what this means. That's what that tells us. That's what that reminds us of. The cross is a symbol of the fact that we have a God who keeps his promises. There's a scholar named N.T. Wright who defines God's righteousness. If you want to say, what does it mean that God is righteous? How do you define God's righteousness? It's his commitment to keeping his promises. The cross is a reminder that God keeps his promises. That's why I say that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who 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. That he kept those promises and he's going to keep the ones in the future. God made a promise to that woman. And so despite Samson's best efforts, he keeps it. He keeps his promises to you too. We pick up the story 20 years later. Samson's in Gaza. And in Gaza, he goes and he sees a prostitute and he's like, yep, she looks nice. And he goes and he lays with her. They find out that he's there. They want to kill him. He leaves. He rips the gates off the hinges of the town and he throws them into the ground. I don't know why he does it or why it's in the Bible. It's just kind of showing off. Look at this thing I can do that God lets me do. So he just does the gate thing. And we all probably have gifts that God gives us that we've misappropriated somewhere. That's definitely one of them. But the casual nature in which it's written tells me that this was not the first time that Samson went to see a prostitute. If you think that just because it's the first time it shows up in Scripture that it was the first time he did it, then I think that you are stupid. From there, he meets a woman named Delilah. We often think that Delilah was a prostitute as well, but there's nothing in the text to indicate that, that I saw. So she was a Philistine woman. And you guys know how the story goes. The Philistines saw that they were in a relationship and the officials come to Delilah and they're like, hey, we'll pay you a lot of money if you'll figure out what the secret to his strength is so that we can subdue him. She's like, all right, I'll figure it out. So she goes to Samson. Samson, if you love me, if you trust me, if you really want to be with me, you know, all the things, then will you please tell me the secret to your strength? And after a little bit, he relents. And he says, sure. If you get seven fresh bow strings and bind me with them, the strength will leave me. I'll have none of it and I'll be easy to subdue. But don't tell anybody. I added that last part because it makes sense for him to say that. He goes to sleep that night. She gets seven fresh bow strings. She binds him with them. And she tells the Philistines, I've got him. He's in big trouble. And they come in and she says, Samson, Samson, the Philistines are upon you. And he breaks the bow strings like they're nothing. And he takes out his assailants and he defeats them and he's not arrested. And then she goes to him, and this is remarkable. And she says, Samson, you've embarrassed me in front of my friends, okay? You told me that it was bow strings, and it wasn't. And now, don't I look like an idiot? I have no idea about this exchange. Why, Samson was like, yeah, yeah, I mean, that's fair. I did lie, but you also tried to have me murdered, so. So he's like, you're right, baby. I'm so sorry. Here, let me tell you the real secret. Weave my hair into a loom and then that's going to get me. So that's what she does. Falls asleep. She weaves his hair into a loom. Samson, Samson, the Philistines are upon you. He breaks out of there and he defeats them. The assailants are defeated and he's not arrested. And she again, Samson, man, I'm so mad at you. I've got a bone to pick here. You've embarrassed me in front of my friends again. What are they going to think? She presses on and presses on him, and Samson says, okay, fine, listen. If you cut my hair, it's never been cut. The Spirit of the Lord will leave me. I will not have any strength. I'll be like a baby. Which I can only guess. Like, why would Samson tell her that? She's done the other two things to him that he said, and he knows what's going to happen. She's going to do it. The only reason can be that after 20 years of Samson doing what he wanted in the spirit of the Lord being with him, that he started to think he was the man. And he forgot he wasn't. And he forgot he was reliant upon God for that strength. And so he said, yeah, you know what? Forget it. Yeah, cut it. See if I care. I'll be fine. So he tells her. And she cuts it. And they come in. Samson, Samson, the Philistines are upon you. And they take him because he has no strength. And they pluck his eyes out and they put him in a mill grinding grain to live out the rest of his days like livestock. And he is brought low. And it's at this low point that my favorite verse in the story occurs. If you just read the story yourself, my guess is, like I did the first several times, you're going to miss this verse, but I want us to stop and look at it at this low point where his head is shaved, he is bald, he has broken every vow that he's ever made, his eyes are plucked out, he has been forced to live out his days like an ox in a mill. And he was supposed to be the leader of Israel. We get this gem of a verse at the end of chapter 16. But the hair of his head began to grow again after it had been shaved. Just this little pause. Just this little transition in the story. Yeah. Yeah, God says they shaved his head. They didn't scalp him. That hair is going to grow back. And my promises are still true. And I'm still here for Samson to call on whenever he decides he needs me. And I love that verse because it reminds us that at our lowest, God still sees a future for us. At our very worst, at our very least, at our bottom of the barrel moment, whenever that is and whenever it occurs, wherever we are, God still sees a future for us that we have not forfeited. He still envisions a purpose and a plan for us that our sins are not too great for. At our lowest, at your lowest, God still sees a future for you that's better than the one that you would imagine for yourself and it's better than the one that you deserve. While Samson was milling, they came in and got him. There was a large festival going on wherever the Philistines had festivals to their God. And we're told that he was placed in between two pillars for the people to gawk at. He was the entertainment. Look at the mighty Samson. Look at the one who's killed thousands. Now look at him. Look how pathetic he is. And he's placed between two pillars, and on the top of this roof was a couple thousand Philistines, and in the courtyard was a couple thousand Philistines. And Samson asked the girl next to him, can you place my hands on the stones? I just want to feel them. And he cries out to God right as a last act in Judges 16, 28, then Samson called to the Lord and said, Oh, Lord God, please remember me and please strengthen me only this once. Oh, God, that I may be avenged on the Philistines for my two eyes. So there's like some positive and negative there. Oh, God, please be with me this one last time. Like he remembers. He remembers what he was supposed to do. He remembers that it was God who provided him the strength. And so he cries out to God. But then he tacks on to the end of it, so that I may avenge my two eyes. Not like, so that I may avenge you, God, not so that I may bring judgment on the Philistines, not so that I can be your servant once again, but so I can get them back for me to the very end. Samson, jerk. But he cries out to God, and God blesses him. And it's interesting to me, and I missed this, we're going to go back and get it, but it's interesting to me that God only allowed Samson to experience the full consequences of his action once his betrayal was complete. Did you catch that? That hair that Samson allowed Delilah to shave was the last thing tethering him to his God in any way. It was the last acknowledgement, either implicit or explicit, that Samson was tethered to God in any way. It was the last symbol of his fidelity to a God that he had long rebelled against. When he scooped up the honey out of the carcass, he doesn't care about his vow. You're trying to tell me that Samson never had wine? When he's sleeping with the prostitutes, he doesn't care about his vow. When he's marrying the Philistine woman, he doesn't care about his vow. Nothing in his life shows that he cares about his God and fidelity to his God at all, except his hair. It was the one thing tethering him to his father. It was the one symbol in his life that God still mattered to him. And when Delilah shaved it, he said, yeah, you can have that too. And his betrayal was complete. And it's just interesting to me that God did not allow him to experience the full consequences of his actions until he had completed his betrayal. This is not for everybody what I'm about to say, but for some of us who think we've been getting away with things and that we'll never really have to experience the consequences of those actions. Maybe God is just giving us enough space to see if our betrayal will be complete. As he continues to pursue us, and we continue to make rebellious choices. When I saw it as I prepped, I paused. And so I wanted to pause here too. And just submit that to you for you to consider. Now from the life of Samson, what do we learn? What do we see? What can we take from that? I think we're tempted to look at Samson and to look at what he did and to say like, I'm not capable of that. I can never do those things. I'm not going to murder 30 people and sleep with a bunch of prostitutes. I'm not going to do all that stuff. Know what? I would say you're probably right. But here's what Samson did. Samson did whatever he thought he could get away with. Samson did whatever he wanted that he thought he wouldn't have to suffer the consequences for. You've done that, right? We've all done that. Had seasons of life where, you know what, we're just going to do, I'm just going to do whatever I want to do that I think I can get away with. And in that way, we're all like Samson. Because of that, I think we need to acknowledge this morning that a rebellious life is built on small rebellious choices. A life of rebellion is built on small rebellious choices. Look at the progression of Samson. He just wanted to marry the girl he shouldn't marry. He wanted to break that rule a little bit. It's just scooping the honey. It's not that big of a deal. Everybody likes honey. It's got a little sweet tooth. Who cares? It's all going to come out in the wash. I'll just give this impossible riddle and take their money. I'm taking advantage of them. But, you know, everybody does this sometimes and then it's murder and then it's theft and then it's sleeping with people that he shouldn't, and then it's a total betrayal of all of his fidelity to God until one day he breaks the last tether. And he ended up with a life of rebellion, but that life was built on small rebellious choices. I'm going to cheat here. I'm going to lie over there. It's just small lies. It's not that big of a deal. I just need to save face in front of my boss. Just a little flirtation there. I'm out of town. It's not a huge deal. I'm never going to see this person again. We're not going to actually do anything. I don't think I really need to go to church. I'm just going to hang back. I'll catch it online when I can. Not this week. Not small group this week. Not reading my Bible this morning. I'll start that next week. This week's busy. A full life of rebellion is built on just small, inconsequential, rebellious choices, where before you know it, this is just our MO. And here's what I would say based on the life of Samson, that a life of rebellion will always come crashing down around you. A life of unrepentant rebellion will always come crashing down around us. We cannot continue to take these rebellious steps. We cannot continue to move away from God, to wander away from him, to have these seasons where we just don't have any faith and we have very little fidelity to the one that is faithful to us. We cannot walk like that forever and not have that life come crashing down around us. So when I look at the story of Samson, to me, it's a story that's very confusing, very tricky to understand, but also it's a story that's incredibly sad. Because when I look at Samson, I think of the life that could have been. What joys did God have stored up for him that he could have walked in? I think of what if Samson had believed the Psalm of David that would come generations after Psalm 1611 that says, you make known to me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. What if Samson had chosen a life of obedience rather than rebellion? What if he would have trusted, yeah, I want these small joys now, but God, I know that you have a much better plan for me. I know that that's who I want to marry, but God, I know that if I follow your plan and your path, that in your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hands there are pleasures forevermore. I know that the life that I envisioned for myself could never be the life that you have for me. And when I look at the life of Samson, I wonder what goodness did he forfeit? What did he give up? What kind of peace could he have had with the family? What kind of peaceful reign could he have enjoyed? What kind of children could he have had around him? What kind of goodness could he have built in a community of nurturing and loving? Kindness. What did he miss out on by choosing that life of rebellion? I think that we each have a choice too. We have a choice to live a life of small rebellious choices. Or we have a choice to live a life of faithful obedience to the God who is faithful to us. I would put to you in reflection on the story of Samson, which are you going to be? Which life will you choose? Because that life can begin to be built this week. If you, up until this very morning, have lived a life of rebellion, let the hair on your head begin to grow back. God still has a plan for you. God still has a purpose for you. Anytime you want to choose him, you can. He's there. He's waiting. Many of us live a life where we try to straddle the fence. Seasons of rebellion followed by seasons of repentance and obedience. Get off the fence. Let us take the story of Samson as a sobering warning to choose a life of obedience where there are pleasures forevermore, where we'll sit at the right hand of the Father and experience the fullness of his joy. Where from his goodness we have all received grace upon grace. This week we looked at a life of rebellion and we see the results of that. Next week we come back and we talk about Gideon who lived a life of fearful and faithful obedience. And you're going to find out exactly what happens for those who choose to build their life that way. But for now, I would press on you. Which will you choose? You can start building an obedient life anytime. Let's pray and then we'll worship together and close out. Father, you are so good to us and patient with us. Lord, if there are people who hear me, who have wandered, who have left you, who have allowed you to be faithful to them while they are not faithful to you, would you bring them back? God, if there are people who hear me who have lived a life of rebellion, God, would you pull them back to you before they experience the full consequences of their actions? Would you save them in their wandering? Could this morning be a marker for them? Where their hair begins to grow again? And God, would you strengthen those saints who are living lives of faithful obedience? May they experience the depth of joy that you promise us when we walk there too. It's in your son's precious name we pray. Amen.

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 kids' 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, Jonah and the Whale. Well, good morning, Grace Raleigh. My name is Erin, or as I have affectionately somehow been now dubbed, Girl Erin. So I am so glad to be here this morning. I am excited to see these beautiful faces. And so thanks for joining us, whether here or online, or maybe later this week. We appreciate your time. So thanks for being here. I feel like I kind of need to start out our morning with a small confession. And that confession is, I'm a bit of a history nerd. And I'm in love with the Old Testament. And I know there's lots of you in here that are looking at me going, but the New Testament, Aaron, is where it's at. And you know what? Yes, it's the gospel. You know, we get to see all of the creation of the church and then the beautiful letters that show the church how to act and how to behave and how to love each other. And it's great. And I love that part too. But to me, the Old Testament, it just has me. It's got a special, special place in my heart. The 39 books that make up the Old Testament do a spectacular job of showing us the history of God and his people. And it shows us all about Jesus. It continues to point us in his direction. And then it just does a really cool job also of showing us how much God really kind of cares about us and thinks that we're special and our everyday lives mean something. So hear me out on this one because it really is like it's the cool place to be. It's full of really cool heroes that you guys have been seeing, some of them. And I know our world today has all kinds of great heroes too. We got a little Captain America over here. Maybe there's Thor. I think there's a new Thor movie out. There's also some Iron Man. I seem to be stuck a little bit in Marvel for DC folks. I'm sorry. But it's all the heroes. We have sports heroes. We have all these places that we could put and look to to put our faith maybe. But the Old Testament gives us really, really cool heroes too. And what I think makes them the coolest is the fact that they're big old mess-ups just like you and me. And so we have this place to land. The Old Testament tells us the good, the bad, the ugly. There's no filter put on these guys. You know, Instagram has that beautiful filter where everybody looks perfect and pretty and all of the other things. You're going to find in the Old Testament those heroes aren't filtered. They come to us raw and in their natural glory. We have Adam who was God's first creation, the man, but we find out later that Adam is a bit of a blame shifter who lacks some self-control. And then we also have Noah who was considered the last righteous man on earth and yet the minute that the ark landed Noah was over served and ended up falling asleep in his birthday suit and thus embarrassing his sons greatly. And then there's Jacob. We've learned all about Jacob in the past. Jacob from the very beginning was a manipulator. But you know what? Jacob's other name is Israel. So we think he's this big spectacular hero, which he was. But he also has his flaws. He convinced his brother to give him his birth, just like we are. And yet God chooses to use them in pretty spectacular ways. And I want to introduce you to another one of the heroes, I personally think is a hero, of the Old Testament. And his name is Jonah. And you're going to see as we talk about Jonah that Jonah was a little bit headstrong. And Jonah liked to do things his way. And that because of all this, Jonah gets to sit in some pretty stinky circumstances for a little while. But I've gotten ahead of myself. So let me introduce you, first of all, to Jonah before we jump into Jonah's story. You will find the book of Jonah in the back part of the Old Testament sandwiched in between Obadiah and Micah. And if you happen to have a Bible that has sticky pages, which mine can sometimes, you'll miss it because it's four short little chapters long. That's it. And it's back there waiting for us to dig into it. Jonah was a prophet. All that means is Jonah was God's mouthpiece. It was easy and simple. God gave instruction to Jonah. Jonah, in turn, then gave instruction to his people. And that was his job. He lived in a small little village outside of Nazareth. It was called Gas Heifer. Just to give you a little information, that's what it was called. It was called Gas Heifer. It's also speculated that he lived during the time of the Assyrian Empire's reign. And at this point in time, the Assyrian Empire was to the north and west or east, whichever. I'm directionally challenged, y'all. I'm so sorry. But it was up here to where he was down here. How about that? Does that work? And so he's, and this empire liked to try to take over all of the territory surrounding it, which included the lands where the Israelites lived. So unfortunately, or whatever, the Assyrian army was a huge enemy of the Israelite people. That becomes important later, so hold on to that one. The other thing to know about the Assyrians as people is they weren't nice. They were classified as idolatrous. They were proud. They were ruthless. They were bent on world conquest. They were known very specifically for their brutality and torture when it came to how they fought, as well as once they conquered an area, they were then known for their intimidation and fear factors that they used in order to hold these people in their control. So just the kind of people you would want to have as your neighbor. Just saying. Okay, so hold on to all that because, again, that information we'll come back to. So now let me introduce you to the book of Jonah. I did not prepare slides. So you have nothing to look at. I'm so sorry. But you do have your Bibles in front of you. So if you want to pull out and look at Jonah, again, it's towards the back of the Old Testament, you can kind of follow along there. We pick up in chapter one, verse 1, and it starts out and states that the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out against it, for the evil has come up before us. Well, that sounds pretty simple, right? God's doing exactly what it is. He's giving instruction to his prophet, and he's telling his prophet to go talk to people, but the thing is that he's not saying go talk to the Israelites. He's telling Jonah, I want you to get up, and I want you to go, and I want you to go talk to the Ninevites. Any idea where Nineveh is? Ah, Nineveh sits right in the Assyrian Empire. Right in the middle, y'all. So here it is as God's telling him, I want you to get up and I want you to go over here to our mortal enemies and I want you to tell them that they're in trouble. So Jonah, being the good prophet he is, decides to get up, and he decides to go, right? Well, unfortunately, his compass is about as directionally challenged as I am, and Jonah did get up and go, and if you look in verse 3, it says, but, oh, that word in the Bible is never a good thing. But Jonah rose and fled to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa. He found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. So here it is. Jonah is just like all the other people that we've talked about. He's not the perfect little hero that we kind of would hope he is because he gets up and he goes in the direction that he wants to go, not in the direction that God has asked him to go. No, he has chosen, and y'all, this one makes me laugh a little. If he wanted to go from where he was in Joppa to Nineveh where God asked him to go, it's about 500 miles, which is about like going from Raleigh to Buffalo, New York. And instead, though, Jonah has said, no, no, no, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going my way. And his way, though, is to go 2,500 miles in the opposite direction. And 2,500 miles is like going from Raleigh to Los Angeles. So not only is he fleeing, he's fleeing really hard, really fast, and completely in the opposite direction. And why is he doing this? All because it says here he's fleeing the presence of the Lord. So how many times is it that we've done that? How many times is it that we've had some sort of call from God to go and do something, and we've chosen to go our way or to the opposite way? Be honest. What in here is your Nineveh? Everybody has a Nineveh. Everybody has some place that you're avoiding. For whatever reason it is. Maybe it's that it's just too hard to even think about. Maybe that it's a little too dangerous. Or maybe it's going to require a little too much sacrifice on your part. And it's just so much easier to do it your way, even if, like in Jonah's case, it's a whole lot farther in a different direction. Maybe it's a relationship that you're supposed to be mending. Maybe it's something to do with your job. I don't know what your Nineveh is, but you do. So what is it? And I know also you guys are thinking, well, I might have my Nineveh, but I definitely don't run from God. I would never do that. Well, I tell you what. How about if I give you a couple of things to think about to see if you possibly are running from God. What does it look like for you to run from his presence? Are you avoiding those places where he shows up? What does your church attendance look like? Are you avoiding being here on a Sunday morning because you don't want to listen to these worship songs because it may hit someplace? Or you definitely don't want to hear something that Nate may have to say because it's going to convict you and then you're going to have something to do because of it. What does your activity inside of Bible study or small group look like? Are you part of one? If you're not part of one, why? And if you are part of one, are you actively engaged? Are you participating? Or are you trying to stay away from where God may show up? And the last one is, what does your daily time with God look like? Are you spending time with him each day? Do you sit? Do you reflect? Do you pray? Do you allow him to speak to you? Or do you just continue to run? Because, you know, Scripture tells us he's not going to leave us. He's not going to forsake us. But it's us that turns and runs. Thankfully, though, when he sees us on the run, quite often he does something to stop us and move us back into his direction. He tries to fix our compass a little bit. And I don't know about y'all, but I can be stubborn. As my family agrees, I can be stubborn. I can be hard-headed and sometimes I just don't listen very well. So the way that God has to move me, unfortunately, can become a two-by-four situation, like right here between the eyes that says, hey, Aaron, wake up. But then there's others. Maybe y'all are lucky and his still small whisper is what will get you where you need to go. I don't know. But in Jonah's case, we find out that God does a pretty big work to get his attention. So Jonah has moved and he's now on this boat and this boat is heading 2,500 miles away to Tarshish. And all of a sudden, God says, it's time for you to come home. And he sends a mighty wind off to the sea, which creates what they call a tempest. So basically, y'all, this is a big storm unlike anything we would have ever seen before. And this poor little boat is out in the middle of it, rocking and shaking and probably being pushed really, really hard at the seams. The crew that's on this boat knows. They're sailors. They're seasoned sailors. They know that this is not any normal storm. They're trying to figure out how not to sink. So they start picking stuff up and throwing it overboard. Like, I got to get rid of this so that we don't go down in this storm. And all the while, the captain's like, oh, wait a second. We had somebody on board with us. Has anybody seen Jonah? The captain goes looking for Jonah. He goes, y'all, Jonah is down in the hull of the ship, sound asleep. Of all things, it's rocking and rolling and the wind is blowing and it's probably raining and the whole works. And I don't know about you, but I might have been a little seasick at that moment. But Jonah's taking himself a little nap. And the captain looks at him and says, hey, you need to wake up. And you need to start praying that we don't all perish in the middle of this storm. And I hate to say it, but Jonah doesn't pray at this moment. But he does get up, and he does go up onto the deck. And somewhere when the captain was looking for him, the rest of the crew is just trying to figure out exactly what has caused this supernatural storm that's around there. And so they do something called casting lots and it all comes to a point that it's Jonah is the problem. So when Jonah appears up back onto deck, these crew members look at him and they literally start throwing all kinds of questions at him about as fast as you can hear them come out of their mouths. Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation and where do you come from and what is your country and of what people are you? And then Jonah in turn responds, I am a Hebrew and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land. And right there, Jonah just told them everything that they needed to know about what was happening to him and why it was happening. He's a Hebrew, and he worships the one true God, the one true God who made the sea that they're sitting on that's now in this huge storm. And so they know it's Jonah's fault. And so they look at Jonah and say, what do we need to do in order to fix this? Because you're our problem. And Jonah just looks at him and he very calmly says, just throw me overboard. Okay. The crew members have probably got this going in their head though. Like the, the guy, God's already angry. He's already got this sea all churned up. And so if we pitch this guy overboard, don't we think he's going to be even more mad at us because we've just now killed this guy? And so instead of doing what Jonah said, they proceed to row as hard as they possibly can row because they're going to get him up on shore and kick him off and their problem is going to be solved. Well, the faster they row, the angrier the sea gets. And so finally they stop. But before they pitch Jonah overboard, these men stop and they pray. They don't pray to their idols or to their gods. They pray to Jonah's God. And they say, hey, Lord, we're going to do what he told us to do. And we're going to throw him overboard. And please don't let his blood be on our hands. Mind you, Jonah has still not prayed. But these pagans are praying to his God. And so they then pick up Jonah and they throw Jonah overboard and the seas stop. Whew. That was a whole lot in 12 verses. So I'm going to stop for just a second. I'm going to back us up and I want to look at something really fast. We've got our little rebellious prophet who has defied God. He's boarded his ship and I can only imagine what's going on in his head when he boarded the ship was I had a conversation with God. He told me to go to Nineveh. Nobody knows about that but me and God. And so it really doesn't matter that I'm going to get on this ship and I'm going the other way because nobody's for the wiser. It's just between me and God. But what do we see? This is that Noah's disobedience brought calamity to that ship and to all that were part of it. So ultimately what he shows us in this moment is that our obedience and our disobedience affects so many more people than we could ever begin to imagine. There are very, very few instances where our choices only affect us. Our choices echo through generations. A great example of these choices is, let's say, I'm the kids pastor, so I can use this as an example. But let's say you choose to volunteer inside of kids ministry or inside of Kyle's student ministry. You've made a choice to do it. In a lot of instances, it's not like you're getting a bunch for this choice. In most instances, there's a whole lot more sacrifice that happens on your part because you're giving up a Sunday to be hanging out with kids or a Sunday night on your couch to hang out with students. You get to laugh at all the 12-year-old humor, which, y'all, that's the best part right there. You get to answer crazy questions and weird texts and all of the above. But somewhere in there, that time that you spend with these kids or with these students is impacting that generation, which in turn will impact the next generation and the next and the next. You may never see the fruits from all those seeds that you planted, but I promise you heaven does. And there is a party happening because of your yes. And the same thing, though, goes with our disobedience. Let's say you've got that relationship that you know darn well you need to do something about. It's broken, and it needs some reconciliation. But by choosing the easy way and saying no, what have you told that other person? Maybe you've kind of told them that they're not lovable or that when the going gets hard, you're going to pack up and go the other way. What about your kids, your big kids, little kids, any of the above that are watching this. You know, this may be communicating to them too that it's really okay to give up on a friendship. It's really okay to hold a grudge. That forgiveness is not always the way to go. And maybe you have somebody else that's watching this in the background. Maybe it's a neighbor. And all of a sudden, by you choosing the easy way, it all of a sudden validates to them that Christianity is kind of a farce and that somehow most Christians are hypocrites. Our disobedience or our obedience affects so many more people than just us. So let's jump back into where Jonah is. We know Jonah is now overboard, but we also know that God is not done with Jonah. So God sends Jonah his little saving grace, which happens to be a rather large fish that swallows him up. And a bit of a side note, we don't know if this is a fish, a shark, a whale, or some creature that lives six miles down at the bottom of the ocean that we've never seen before. We have no idea. Scripture just calls it a big fish. So I'm going to call it a big fish. It just works that way. And Jonah is given now three days and three nights to sit in his circumstances and the consequences of his actions. And I don't know about y'all, but when I was little and I used to get in trouble, quite often my mama would look at me and say, hey, Aaron, and she used to call me Aaron Beth when I was in trouble. She's like, Aaron Beth, you need to go sit over there and think about what you've done, and then we're going to talk about it. Well, this is exactly what God is doing for Jonah. Hey, Jonah, you've messed up, and I'm going to give you some time to think about it and then we're going to talk about it. So that's what Jonah gets, three days and three nights in the belly of a very stinky fish. And while he's in there, Jonah does sit, Jonah does think, and then Jonah does what we hoped he would have done in chapter 1, and he prays. And all of chapter 2 is Jonah's prayer from his repentant heart as he pours out to God. And so I'm just going to pull out verse 2. I'm not going to give you the whole prayer. You guys can read it. But verse 2 says, I called out to the what that just says to me is that even after we've messed up and even after we're totally disobedient, God still hears our prayers. He still hears us. He still wants that relationship with us. Jesus is currently seated at the right hand of God, waiting to intercede for us, waiting to be able to say, hey, I'm going to give you a second chance or a third or a twelfth or a twentieth, whatever it is that you may need. He wants to give that to us because he longs to be in relationship with us and he longs to take the messes that are our lives and turn them into something very, very beautiful for his purposes. And that's exactly what he does for Jonah. After Jonah pours out his heart to him, God says, okay, it's time. And the fish deposits him on dry land. And again, some of the other reasons I love the Old Testament is it doesn't mince words. And my version says that he vomited Jonah onto dry land. So just add to the stinkiness, okay? So then we come to chapter 3, verse 1, and this is just so amazing because it says straight up, the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time. Again, he loves us, wants a relationship, and he's going to give us second chances. He doesn't need us to accomplish his goals. God, at this point in time, y'all, he could have taken care of Nineveh all on his own. He didn't need Jonah, but he wanted Jonah to join in, and that's exactly what He wants from us. And the next part, if you look down into the second verse, it says, Arrive and go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out against in the message that I tell you. I think this is so amazing too because guess what? Not only is he a God of second chances, but he's also not going to let Jonah off the hook though because he's now telling him to do exactly what he told him to do back in chapter 1. Arise and go to Nineveh. You don't get to, you spent all that time and you were repentant. But you're still going to do what I need you to do. I need you to get up and I need you to go. And so this time, thankfully, Jonah gets up and Jonah goes. And he goes to Nineveh. But the really cool part or the hard part or whatever you want to say here is that Jonah has 500 miles to go. Jonah has some hard work that he needs to do. And that is this hard work of obedience. Because I can guarantee you in this five mile walk, or 500 mile walk that Jonah is about to take, he's going to do a whole lot of thinking. Because here he goes, stepping, hey God, like, I'm doing what you're asking me to do. I'm making this journey. I'm going. But what about like Amos and Hosea who were two other prophets at the same time as Jonah? You know, they're over there talking to the Israelites. Why can't I be over there like them? No, Jonah, keep walking. Jonah keeps walking. Okay, well, could you just send me a friend then so I don't have to do this by myself? No, no, Jonah, keep putting that foot in front of the other. And that's exactly what Jonah does in this act of obedience. And is it easy? No, it's not easy because guess what? Obedience doesn't come with a convenience clause. God doesn't make it easy because God wants you to have to rely on him with each step that you take. So like that broken relationship that we talked about, it may mean that to do the hard work of obedience is that you have to be the first person that puts out a hand and says, can we talk? Is it easier the other way? Of course it is. It's so much easier the other way. Because guess what? The other way is our way. And all we're trying to do is run the other way. He doesn't need our excuses. He just wants our obedience. The other thing to remember about Jonah at this point in time is he's probably a bit of a sight to see. There are actually two recorded versions of men who have been swallowed by a whale and later lived to tell the tale. And these men emerged hairless and covered in yellow and green splotches. And I imagine they smelled really good also. So now I'll get a picture of Jonah also in his 500-mile walk. We don't know if he bathed or not. We have no idea on that one. But he's also walking 500 miles, so we know he probably doesn't smell very good. We also know that he looks really, really strange. This is what he does. This is how he looks as he walks into the city of Nineveh. I'm here. And all that's going through his head at that point in time is like, really? Lord, are you sure about this? These people are going to run the opposite direction. I look pretty scary, and oh, I don't smell very good. And God's like, no, no, no, keep going, keep going. So Jonah keeps going, and he starts crying out, yet 40 days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. And he goes another step and yells again. And all I can think about is at this moment, the Lord is loving the position that he has Jonah in because he loves to put us in these challenging positions where he gets to be who he is. Jonah thinks it's impossible. Jonah thinks these people are not going to respond. There's no way this is going to come out for any kind of good. And God says, oh, but watch this. And in chapter 3, verse 5, it says, and the people of Nineveh believed God. And then verse 10 says, God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, and he did not overthrow them. So here's this one little guy who walks in smelling, and he's full of sores, etc. And yet because he did the work of obedience, these people believed God, and they turned from God. It was an unprecedented response because remember Ninevites are horrible people by nature and yet they turned to the one living God. It was a revival beyond all revivals. And I think it would just be fabulous if we could end right here. We're done. Let's have the baptism. We can call it a day. But the thing is, is if you remember correctly, I told you there's four chapters to the book of Jonah. And we just got to the end of chapter three. Because the fourth chapter does so much to show us Jonah's humanity in full color and full display. And, yeah, hear what happens. Because the beginning of chapter 4, verse 1 says, but, there's that word again, but it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. Come on, y'all. Seriously? Greatest revival ever, and Jonah is now mad because it happened. Why? Why would you be mad at something like that? I think what it really comes down to is Jonah is mad because God didn't do it his way. You see, back then the Israelites all believed that God's blessing and God's favor was for them and them alone. And it wasn't to be shared with others. But yet God said, oh, no, no. These Ninevites are part of my plan. And I need them to be taken care of. And so Jonah's mad. That's why Jonah's mad. But can I ask how many times we've done something like that. Where we've had our plan for ourselves. I am going to, and you know, you've just got it all written down. You know where your life's going. You know what your plan looks like. It's all great and good. And then you walk up to God and go, would you please just, will you sign off on this for me? Give it a good stamp of approval. Because it's my way, right? That's the way I want it to go. But we cannot. We cannot do that to God. We can't do that to ourselves because ultimately what happens is we're putting God in this box. And we're saying that your way, my way, has to be your way. That's not how he works. His ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts. He knows what he wants to do. And we should be just getting out of his way instead. And so I don't know. You know, he's very good at what it is that he does. And I am so not sure why we choose not to trust him and what his plan is for us. And I kind of sat and thought about this. And the thing that I kind of came up with is I think that we're more concerned about ourselves than we are with actually showing others who God is. We don't believe that anything that we do, that the choices that we make, actually affect anybody around us. It's kind of an all about me. And I also think that, again, in that all about me, we don't want to be inconvenienced by having to do some hard work of obedience. But I'm so very thankful that God, in all of our ugly humanness, still chooses to use us. And in this case, we know he used Jonah in a mighty way. Chapter 4, unfortunately, does not tie up Jonah's story in a big red bow. We don't know if Jonah ever even got over himself. And I'm sorry. I like a good ending. This one's not a good ending, and I'm sorry about that. But that's just the way that it is. But I think that the lessons that Jonah brings to us before this ending are ones that we can hold on to for a really, really long time. God wants desperately to be in a relationship with us, but he doesn't need us. He wants us. He wants to use us to accomplish his goals. But the thing is, being the gentleman that he is, he's going to ask. And we, in turn, have to respond. We have to be willing to surrender to him. We have to be willing to do the hard work that he's going to ask of us. And when we choose to do that, we, in turn, bring glory to him. And again, maybe a little growth to ourselves. In the beginning of the book The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, there's an exchange between two characters, two of the main characters, Gandalf, who's kind of a kindly old wizarding folk, and then Bilbo Baggins, who is the hobbit. And the exchange starts like this. Gandalf says, I'm looking for someone to share an adventure that I'm actually in the process of arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone. And Bilbo's response to him is, well, I should think so in these parts. We are plain, quiet folk, and we have no use for adventure. Nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things make you late for dinner. So my question for y'all is, the next time God says to you, I'm looking for someone to share an adventure, or I'm looking for someone to step out to do something for me, are you going to be like Bilbo, and are you going to avoid it at all costs? Because it's uncomfortable. Because it doesn't quite fit in with your plans. Because you just might have to sacrifice something. And maybe something a little bit more than dinner. Or will you be willing to say yes, knowing that your yes is for God's glory and for your growth? And will you all pray with me? Lord, thank you. Thank you, thank you for these examples in the Old Testament, these human characters that give us such a beautiful picture of the fact that no matter how messed up we really are, you can use us. And we ask that as we go through this week that you give us what it is that we need to turn towards you to begin that beautiful walk of obedience, no matter how hard it might be, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. Give us what we need to do that. And Lord, we love you. And it's in your name we pray. 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, my name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. I've got a couple of things for you before I just dive into the sermon. The first thing is that Kyle, who did our announcements, is engaged, man. Yeah. That's right. And she's pretty okay. He's getting older. This is right. No, in all honesty, I can't say much, Kyle. I can't say much. I'm so excited for you. I was sitting over here trying to think about what to say. And I just started like tearing up as I thought about all the things because you guys are perfect. So I'm excited and the church is too. The other thing, let's move away from that quickly so that I can actually preach a sermon. The other thing that I want you to know, and I wanted to say it during this part of the service, not during the announcements, because I actually want you to know about it if you're catching up throughout the week or if you're listening on a walk or whatever it is. I want the whole church to know about this and be prayerful in this. At the end of this year, 2020, what is it, two? Goodness. At the end of 2022, we're going to have three spots available on the elder board. So we're going to spend the rest of this year nominating and naming up to three new elders. And I feel like this is a really big deal because we only have eight elders, including me, max. And so we have an opportunity, or in addition to me, I'm the ninth, Max. And so to put three people on the elder board is a big deal. It impacts the culture of the church. It impacts the culture of the board. And I happen to feel that the people who go on the board are of the utmost importance because I'm trying to constantly remind the elders, this is not Nate's church. It's Nate and Jen's church as much as it's your church, as much as we are partners here and we care about the things that happen here. But this is not my church to lead. This is the elders' church to lead on behalf of the partners of grace. I have been asked to steward grace, but under the direction and leadership of the elders. And the elders, again, represent the wishes of the partners. And I would argue that there is no single portion of grace that has a greater impact on the health, integrity, and character and fitness of the church than to have a board that is healthy and fit and integral. So it's important who goes on that board. So if you are a partner, you're invited over the next month to submit people to be considered to be an elder. The process is we take a month to submit names. We take two months for our nominating committee to kind of talk to those folks and vet those names. And then we take a month for the elders to discuss the people that get there. And then we present them to the partners for a partnership vote. I'll say up front, I don't nominate anybody. I try the best I can to stay out of the process and just receive the people that are nominated by all of you guys. And then we discuss all of that. But I don't want to get too deep into the weeds. I just want you as partners to prayerfully consider who you might nominate to be an elder if you feel led to do that. If you look at the Grace Vine this week, there's a link there. If you scroll down, this announcement is in there. There's a link where you can go to the elder page and there's an online form. We have some forms that you can fill out in person if that's your preference. We just don't have them yet this morning because I oopsied this week and forgot to do that. But we'll have them next week on the information table. So please prayerfully consider that. Now for this week as I get into the sermon finally, sorry for such a long preamble, we're talking about repentance. We've been moving through Lent and kind of pulling different Lenten themes out each week through the devotionals and through the sermons. As I've said each week, I hope that you're being ministered to by those devotionals. I've really, really enjoyed reading through those every week and love all the voices speaking into grace. This week we focus on repentance. And as I got into studying repentance, I was taken aback, honestly, by how often repentance shows up in Scripture. It's all over the Old Testament, this call to repent, to throw off our sinful ways and to move towards God. It's all over the New Testament. All through the Gospels, Jesus calls us to repentance again and again. All of Paul's letters call us to repentance. A lot of the general letters call us to repentance. The end of the Bible, Revelation calls us to repentance. We're called to repentance throughout the whole of Scripture. And as I read that, and as I saw that, and as I studied it, I honestly, I'm not saying this to make a joke. I'm not saying this to make light of anything. I genuinely felt a prick of conviction that I have been your pastor now for five years. Next Sunday is five years, and I have not preached on this. It is to your detriment that I have not. No, it doesn't mean that we haven't talked about the idea of repentance in the service, but I have not slowed down and focused our collective gaze onto this issue that comes up over and over and over again in scripture, and I do sincerely apologize to you for that. I believe I have shortchanged you in not discussing this. And if it is not a part of our regular Christian life, then we have shortchanged ourselves in how we are applying the Scripture. So this morning, I want us to sink in and talk about this principle, this act of repentance. To do that, it's important that we're all on the same page and that we understand what it is. Because repentance can be one of these churchy words like sanctification that we say sometimes and we hear church people say, but if we asked you to say what it was, you would feel very uncomfortable about that. Now, half of you in the room probably know a good definition that I would agree with, which by the way, if I would agree with it, that makes it good. Sorry that that snuck in there. That sounds arrogant. But you would probably have a good definition. But half of us maybe not. So for the sake of the sermon and for the sake of the conversation this morning, we're going to define repentance this way. Repentance is to turn away from sin and move towards God. Repentance is to turn away from sin and move towards God. The word literally means to turn 180 degrees. So the idea of repenting is I'm moving this way. I'm committing this sin. I'm suffering from this addiction. I have this habit. I say these words. I hate this person. I'm moving towards sin and I realize it's sin and I stop. But I don't just stop moving towards that sin. I turn and I move back towards Jesus. So there's an action in repentance. Repentance is not a mindset. It's not a place of sorrow that we reach, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. It requires action of us to actually move away from what we are doing and back towards the Father because, I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but it is impossible to be actively sinning and not also actively drifting away from God. If there are things in our life that ought not be there, if there are things in our life that God would tell us, hey, I don't want that to be a part of your life, then that's sin. And to keep it in our life is to actively and intentionally choose to move away from God. And so when we repent, we acknowledge that that is sin, and we stop it, and we move back towards God. So that's the definition of repentance. As I studied this, I also thought it would be worth kind of detailing, and this is my thought, okay? This is me. You guys are adults. If you're Christians, you have the Holy Spirit. You read the scripture. You decide what it means to you. But for me, I actually see in scripture two different kinds of repentance. I see in scripture kind of a call for what I'm thinking of as initial repentance and then a call for ongoing repentance. So in scripture, I see these calls to initial repentance and ongoing repentance. And I'm going to tell you what I mean. We see a picture of initial repentance in Acts chapter two. In Acts chapter two, Jesus has died. He's come back to life. He's appeared to the disciples. He's ascended up into heaven. He's told them to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, the son, the Holy spirit. And they don't really know what that means. And Jesus told them, just sit in this room and wait until the Holy Spirit comes, and then you'll know what to do. And they're like, all right. So they just sit around in this room and they wait. And they wait, and they wait. And then one day, at what we call Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues. And they go out on the porch and they begin to preach the gospel. And everybody who's there hears the gospel in their own language, in their own tongue. And it's important that we note that the people who are there are presumably the same people who days earlier insisted that Pilate crucify Jesus and kill him on the cross. It's the same crowd, right? And so what is Peter preaching to them? He's preaching to them this message of, hey, you know that guy that you killed? That was Jesus. That was the son of God. That was the Messiah who came to take away the sins of the world. That was the one that Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel had been prophesying about for all those years. All those scriptures that you learned growing up, he was the fulfillment of those things and you killed him. So, whoops. And then their response is, oh no, you're right. What do we do? How do we fix this? How can we be in with God? What we would think of, probably, as being saved. How can my relationship be repaired with God? And Peter answers them this way in chapter 2, verse 38. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is an invitation to what I'm thinking of as initial repentance. And before I go on to explain that as an aside, I'm so glad that this morning the Lord laid on my heart a passage that speaks about baptism because we have Easter coming up. And I think at Easter we're going to have the opportunity to baptize at least two folks. And the whole service really is going to be wrapped around those things because baptism is a picture of Easter. You understand? It depicts the death, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus. It's a reminder of that. It is the oldest of church traditions, and the early church would only baptize on Easter. So if you are one that the Lord has been pricking your heart towards baptism lately, would you please reach out to me? And let's make this Easter one of the most special ones that you've ever had in your life by moving you through the rite of baptism. But Peter calls them to repent and be baptized. And I think an interesting question is, repent of what? Perfectly repent of all your sins? If you need to be right before Jesus, then you need to perfectly repent of all your sins and be baptized and move forward? Well, certainly that can't be the case because no one can repent of their sins perfectly. It occurred to me this, this is true, not even Jesus can perfectly repent of sins because you have to sin first to perfectly repent. Jesus does not know repentance. So literally no one has ever repented perfectly of their sins. So this can't be the instruction of Peter. I think, and again, this is me thinking, that this initial repentance, that what Peter is calling them to repent of is repent of who you thought that Jesus was that you crucified. That guy that you killed, repent of who you thought he was and believe that he was who he said he was. Repent of thinking that he was a teacher or a prophet or an insurrectionist or just some guy or just a carpenter. Repent of those things and believe that he was who he says he was, who is the divine son of God incarnate who came to live a perfect life to die on the cross for you and for me to gain our citizenship in heaven, to secure us a seat at the table for the marriage supper of the lamb for all of eternity. And so I would invite you this morning, if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't yet call yourself a Christian. You have an invitation to the exact same initial repentance that the people in Acts got called to. And I would invite you this morning, if the Spirit so moves in you, that you would repent of whoever you thought Jesus was when you came in here. A historical figure, a humble teacher, a prophet on par with Muhammad or Confucius or Buddha. Repent of who you thought he was and accept that he is who he says he is, the divine Son of God who died on the cross for you and for me to secure your seat in all of eternity and to rectify your relationship with your Creator God. That's who Jesus is. And if you didn't believe that walking in here, you're invited into the initial repentance of walking away from who you thought Jesus was and walking towards who we now believe him to be. That's the initial repentance. But I think after that repentance, that's the moment when our salvation begins. The Bible teaches salvation as a process. So when you're saved, are you saved? Are you secured? Are you going to heaven? Yes, but your process is also ongoing. It reaches its completion in our glorification as we enter into heaven. So yes, that begins the process. But then as we enter into this process of salvation and sanctification that is secured for us, that is guaranteed for us, that we will experience in glory, God continues to call us to ongoing repentance as a portion of our Christian life. And he calls us to repentance in verses like this. I'm gonna read it again. Ed did a great job of reading it as we started, but in Romans chapter 2, do you suppose, oh man, you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness them that God has enough grace to cover over all of your sins. And no, that doesn't mean that you should just go on sinning so that God's grace may abound. That means that you need to realize his grace as kindness and understand that his kindness and his goodness and his grace and his overwhelming patience with you is designed by God and bestowed upon you by God to lead you into a position and a posture of repentance over and over and over again. God's kindness leads us into repentance. We need to be people of ongoing repentance because we are people of ongoing sin. Because we are people that no matter how far we go, there will always be things in our life and in our heart that don't belong there. John Owen, one of my favorite authors, writes about sin that the only way to win the battle against sin is to die fighting it. Otherwise, we just give up. So we are meant to be people who are a people of repentance in an ongoing way. And I think one of the reasons that we don't talk about this as much, and one of the reasons that we get confused about repentance is because we kind of equivocate it with some other Bible terms. We equivocate it with conviction and with confession, I think. That we kind of lump all those together and we make them all mean the same thing. I'm convicted about this sin. I've confessed this sin to God. I'm repenting of this sin. And I think sometimes we equivocate those things and make them mean the same thing, but they are all a part of the same ongoing process of repentance, but they are very different things. So conviction is feeling badly about your sin. Confession is agreeing with God that what it is is sin, and repentance is to actually do something about that sin. Conviction is that prick from the Holy Spirit that we get. Hey, that doesn't belong in your life. Hey, God doesn't want you doing that. Hey, It's really unbecoming to talk to people in that way. Maybe you should think about doing something about this anger issue. Maybe the way you treat your wife, maybe the way you take your husband for granted, maybe that's not holy. Maybe this pattern or practice or habit in your life is not something that pleases God. That's the prick of the Holy Spirit. That's the beginning of conviction. That's where repentance starts. But then from conviction, we're called to confession, where we confess our sin before God, which basically means to agree with God that it is sin, to agree with God that the thing that we're doing that we now feel guilty about is actually sin and is something that doesn't belong in our life. That's confession. And the good news is that 1 John 1, 9 teaches us that if we confess our sins, that God is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So again, I'm not talking about repentance as we earn our salvation. Our salvation is secured. The process begins at that confession, and then we begin to move towards glory as God works to sanctify us, and we work in ongoing repentance. But the idea of repenting requires us to actually do something about it. To illustrate this, I'm going to share this thing about me, and I don't want to share it, all right? This is the very first example that I thought of when I thought of this sermon, and I needed a good example to illustrate this point. And I went to Jen, and I was like, here's what I got so far. I don't want to share it, but I can't think of anything better. And she's like, yeah, think of something better. But I couldn't. I couldn't. I snore like bad. I snore a lot. And I do want to tell you this because A, it's embarrassing, and B, some of you love me and you want me to not experience any displeasure in my life. And so you have advice for me. You have a device or you have an uncle or you have a husband and this worked for them and you're going to want to tell me about it. Okay, but I just, I'm not in a place in my life where I'm ready to receive that. So if you could just respect my privacy during this time, that would be great. But I snore. And when I snore, it makes it hard for Jen to sleep. And when it's hard for her to sleep, it's hard for me to sleep. And I feel bad about it. When we go on family trips, like my sleeping accommodations are sometimes annoying because I snore. And it's a real issue. And every now and again, we'll come to this place where she's like, you should really, like our life and marriage would be better if you would take care of this. And I say, you're right. I agree with you. I've been pricked by you, the Holy Spirit, of my conviction. I confess, I agree with you that it is wrong. It does not need to be a part of my life. And I am sorry that it has gone this far. And then what do I do? Nothing. I go to sleep and I snore. Do I get the devices? Do I like eat well and run and try to get in better shape so I don't snore as much? No, I don't do anything. I agree, I'm pierced with conviction. I confess and agree this is wrong, but I don't do anything. I don't actually take any steps. And listen, if your process ends with confession, then you're just sorry. If your process of conviction ends with confession, then you're just sorry. Do I mean that in the double entendre way of you're sorry that you did this and you're sorry as a human? Yeah, yes I do. I do mean that, let's be very clear. Because you're stopping short of repentance. You're stopping short of action. Sorries don't mean anything. Sorries mean I'm ready to start the path of repentance. Falling on our face before God, you're right, I'm convicted. This doesn't need to be in my life. Give me the courage to get rid of it. That's great. But that's the starting line, man. What are you going to do after that? What are you going to actually do about it? What actual steps are you going to take to make sure that this sin cannot exist and cannot grow in your life? And the other thing is, if we stop at sorry, eventually our hearts get seared. You can't sit in sorry year after year after year and still mean it. Once you sit in sorry long enough, and you who have had crippling and debilitating and ongoing sin throughout your life, you know that I'm telling you the truth. Once you say you're sorry enough times, you stop meaning it and you can't bring yourself to say it because you know that it's as empty as your intentions. And that thing that used to prick you is scarred over now. And that's seared. And we don't experience the conviction that the Holy Spirit has for us. Because we've learned how to mute his voice out of our life by stopping at sorry. When we stop at sorry, we just see our own consciences, and we short-circuit the repentance process. So we have to actually do something. And I work very hard to preach here that it is not human effort that God is looking for. It is the power of the Holy Spirit in us. It is not human effort. It is focusing our eyes on Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith. I preached a sermon in Colossians in February talking about if we want to put on the new self, what do we do? How do we overcome the old self? Will we focus on Christ? And all that is true, but when it comes to repentance, the rubber meets the road and you got to do stuff, man. So think of it this way. The Holy Spirit empowers, but we act. The Holy Spirit empowers us for repentance. Before you knew Jesus, repenting was impossible. The only thing you could possibly repent of was who you thought Jesus was and then move in faith and the Holy Spirit breathed life into you and now it's possible to repent of all the other things in your life. That's what Romans is talking about when it says that we are no longer a slave to sin. Now we have the option to repent. So the Holy Spirit empowers us to repent, but it is us that must take the action. It is us that must produce the activity of repentance. If that's true, then what does it mean to repent? What does it mean to actually repent of a sin? And this is the part, honestly, that I'm most excited to talk to you about. So if you've tuned me out because my word salads have just gotten confusing up until this point, then pay attention now because this is important. How do we actually repent? By taking steps to make it as darn near impossible as we possibly can to not allow that sin to on-go in our life. How do we repent? By taking actual action steps to remove temptation and distraction from our life that will cause us to commit that sin again. Not just white-knuckle discipline of, I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to do that, but to figure out why you do that, to figure out when you do that, to figure out what triggers you to do that, and to remove those things strategically from your life. If your issue is looking at things on your phone that you shouldn't look at, saying another prayer and saying another I'm sorry and doubling down on how much you mean it isn't going to do anything, and you and I both know it. So invite some accountability into your life. Have a scary conversation with someone who will meet you with grace, I promise. Take action steps to reduce your screen time on that phone. Let someone else put a passcode on your phone so you can't get to the apps that tempt you. Do whatever it is you have to do, but take the steps so that that can't tempt you anymore. If you struggle with anger or anxiety to a point where it cripples you and it begins to be harmful to the people around you, if you struggle with those things, go to counseling. Don't just pray, God, please make me a happier person. Make me a more patient person. Please don't let me be angry. God's gonna answer your prayer by going, great, here's a wonderful counselor to help you figure out why you're angry all the time. Go to counseling. If your marriage is rocky, yeah, start praying with your husband or your wife. But also pray that God would find you a good marriage counselor so that you can work those things out. If we want to move away from a bad marriage, we have to move towards a good one. If we want to move away from anger, we have to move towards peace. Take the steps that are necessary to get that sin out of your life once and for all. If it's an addiction that hounds you, shed some light on the dark corners of your life. Tell people about your addiction. Ask them for their help. Get the things out of the house that you're addicted to and refuse to bring them back into the house until you know you can handle them responsibly. Take the steps that you need to take to move away from the sin that is in your life that is entangling you and causing you not to live the life that God wants for you, not to be the person that God created you to be and is experiencing this stunted Christian life here that God does not want for you because we keep the sin in our life. Get rid of it, man. Take the steps. Do what it takes. Don't just be sorry. I don't care if you're sorry. And sometimes, eventually, according to Isaiah chapter 1, God doesn't care if you're sorry either. Do something. Let's take some steps and move away from the sin that hounds us. When we do this, when we repent, if it's true that sin pushes us further away from God, then when we repent, we are choosing a pursuit of his presence. We are choosing to be obedient to what Peter writes as he reiterates Leviticus, be holy as God is holy. We are choosing to pursue holiness and we are pursuing the very presence of God. To repent is to move away from sin and to pursue the presence of God. And my Bible in Psalm 16 tells me that in God's presence, there are pleasures forevermore. the full so that when I pursue the things of Jesus and when I pursue holiness and when I move away from the things that have been dragging me down for years, that I'm actually going to begin to experience the life that God always wanted for me. The rewards of repentance are intuitive. What would it be like to finally walk without guilt for that thing? What would it be like to finally be the person that everybody else around you thinks you are but that you know you're not? What would it be like to finally live a life free of this sin? That's the reward of repentance. The reward of repentance is the presence of God. And here's the thing that dawned on me this week. Repentance affords us the opportunity to begin to experience the fruits of our salvation here and now. Here's what I mean. Salvation is a process. Salvation is not completed until we are glorified in heaven forever. You are secured. I'm not preaching against that, but the salvation process goes on throughout the rest of your life. And in heaven, one day you will be glorified in your new body and you will experience the presence of God. And if we repent, and if that repentance takes us closer to the presence of God, then you have a very real opportunity to begin to bring heaven down into this place to experience flashes and moments of what heaven will be like here in this place when we walk in the goodness and the gifts that God gives us. When I sit with my family and we're all smiling and we're all happy and Jen and I can't believe the blessings that we are experiencing on this sunny day on the floor of our living room, I've got to believe that that's just a taste of what heaven is like. And when we repent and we move into God's presence and into the good things that he gives us in our life and away from the things that would seek to thwart these good things in our life, I have to believe that we are experiencing the presence of God and the pleasure of God and just a small fraction of the eternity that awaits us when our salvation is complete. So when we repent, it affords us the opportunity to begin to experience some of the fruits of our final salvation here and now. I want you to see desperately because it can be a scary thing to repent. If I take the steps I need to take to be serious about this thing in my life, I'm going to be ashamed. Some people are going to think differently than me. I'm going to give up some freedom that I don't want to give up. I'm going to have some accountability that I don't really want to have. And so there's some things about repentance initially that could bum us out. But I've experienced this in my own life and I know that it's true. Greater joy awaits us on the other side of genuine repentance. I don't know what else to tell you, man. On the other side of genuine repentance is a joy that's so much greater than whatever it is that's dragging you down. So I pray that grace will be full of people of repentance. Will be full of people that the Holy Spirit convicts. That we move to a place where we say, yes, this stuff does not belong in my life. Will be full of people who confess and say, yes, God, you're right, I'm sorry. But full of people who don't stop at sorry, but allow the Holy Spirit to empower you to actually move away from things. My prayer as I got up to preach was that God would soften even the hardest of hearts, and that those of us who have soft hearts, that God would cradle those two and usher them into a gentle repentance. Because there is so much greater joy found walking away from sin and towards our God. Maybe that's why we're taught in Romans that it's God's kindness that leads us to repentance. Because he knows what waits for us there. Let's pray. Father, Father, I pray that we would be people of repentance. Give us eyes to see the things in our life that don't belong there. Give us ears to hear your spirit as he convicts us. Give us tenderness in our heart as we confess. And God, empower us through your spirit to move towards you, to leave behind the things that drag us down and to move towards you who gives us life. God, give us the courage, the conviction, the desire to repent, to name the things or the thing that doesn't need to be in our life right now and offer it up to you. And ask you for the power to move away from it and give us the courage to take the steps that you lay out before us. That we would not be people who simply stop at sorry. It's in your son's name we pray. 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, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you on this Sunday. As your pastor, I should tell you that if you attend church on Spring Forward Sunday, you do get an extra jewel in your crown in heaven. That's just scriptural. It's in Revelation. You can look it up yourself, particularly if your basketball team lost last night and then you got up anyways. Boy, howdy. That's two jewels. Well done. Good for you. The love of Jesus is strong in you. That's great. Or maybe after your attitude, you just needed some church. I don't know. One way or the other. Before I just launch into this, I don't do this very often, but I kind of thought it was pretty sweet, and I wanted you guys to be able to just, I don't know, celebrate it, know it too. But Jeff, he's standing up over there, so we can all look at him again. He led us in Amazing Grace. He shared with me before the service that that was the first time that he led Amazing Grace since his dad's funeral. So we're grateful for Jeff. Thanks, man. All right, that's good. Just relax. It's tough enough as it is. Yeah, so we're in the middle of our series called Lent. We're observing Lent as a church for the first time since I've been here, and I sincerely hope that you guys, if you're a partner of grace, that you have been following along, that you've been participating. We've got the devotionals available. There's still some on the information table and they're available on the website in PDF form if you prefer that way. But hopefully you're following along and reading those every day along with the rest of the church. I love all the different voices that speak into it. And as an aside, what a gift when you're a pastor to get to, for me, I write sermons on Tuesday. So what a gift it is on Tuesday to sit down and be like, okay, I'm preaching on this topic this week. Let me open this handy book and see what five wise, godly people in my church think about this topic and then steal their ideas and make it my sermon. Like, this is fantastic. We're going to do a lot more devotional writing, I think. But it's been really cool to let other voices speak into us, and I've really enjoyed that. And I hope that you're fasting as well, that you picked something to fast from during this period. And just by way of reminder, if the fast to you never gets past just grinning and bearing it, like I've given up sweets or I've given up Coke or I've given up whatever it is, and all you're doing is getting through another day and going, yes, I didn't do the thing I wasn't supposed to do, then it's really, the fast isn't really serving you spiritually because a want for that thing is supposed to take us and put our eyes on Jesus. It's supposed to remind us that this is how we should long for Christ. So there's a second place to go when we fast, and I hope that you're going there as you're experiencing your fast as well. Now this morning, as Kyle said at the beginning of the service, we're focused on stillness. We've been talking about stillness in the devotionals this week. That's what you have read this week to kind of prepare our hearts for this service. And that's where we want to put our focus is simply on being still. And so as we put our focus there for the sermon, I would bring our attention to the same place that one of our devotional writers brought it, to Psalm 62. Kelsey Healy wrote this devotion, and I loved the psalm that she kind of used as her launching point, and so I thought I would start us here as well this morning. But in Psalm 62, the psalmist writes this, And I think that that struck me this week as I considered this message and this topic because of that word silence. And I thought to myself, and I wanted to pose to you guys this morning, when is the last time you experienced silence? When is, like, seriously, when is the last time you comfortably and by choice sat in silence? And I don't mean lack of audible noise. I also mean lack of mental noise, lack of distraction, in silence with nothing else, simply waiting on the Father and inviting him to speak. I started out the devotion, I wrote a little note to kind of set up this season of Lent, and I use the passage from Samuel when he says, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. When is the last time in our lives we sat in silence with no noise or clutter to distract us, and we said, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. Like, God, talk to me. I'm listening. I'm here. I'm waiting. Whenever you're ready to speak, I'm ready to listen. Because there's a waiting there. I think sometimes we go, okay, God, I'm ready to hear from you. And then it doesn't happen right away. We don't look up and see the sun shining on a particular bird that tells us a thing that we were wondering about. And so we just go, well, God's not speaking to me today. And we go on with our day, and we didn't sit in silence. And it just made me wonder, when's the last time you chose silence? When it was quiet. And to stifle the quiet, you didn't pick up your phone. You didn't let your mind start to race about that thing that's making you anxious. You didn't start to solve the unsolvable problem and start to try to control the uncontrollable events. When is the last time we sat in silence? And here's the other thing that occurred to me about the effort to sit in silence and stillness before God and wait for him. We exist in a period of time in all of human history where it is incredibly difficult to choose silence. It has never, ever, ever been harder to avoid distraction than it is in 2022. And I mean, I kind of think about that and just the clutter and the noise that exists in our life and how it would be processed by someone who was around in the time of the Bible, by someone who was part of an agrarian society 2,000 years ago, and how they would process all the noise and clutter in our life, I think it would be a little bit like taking them on a tour of a gym. Whenever I go to the gym, which is all the time, I chuckle a little bit because I look at all the contraptions that we have set up and they're really just set up to simulate ancient life because we don't need to do any of that stuff anymore. And I've thought about how fun it would be to take like an ancient hunter-gatherer and bring them to lifetime and just let them look around, you know? And be like, what's that over there? Well, that's a treadmill, man. Well, they're just walking. Like, yeah, that's what you do on a treadmill. Well, why didn't, like, they don't live here, do they? Like, no. Why don't they just, like, walk here? Well, we have, dude, we have cars. What do you think, man? Like, we got cars, buddy. We drive here so that we can walk in place around other people. We don't need to do that anymore. What's that guy doing over there? Well, that's called the bench press. Why is he doing that? Well, so he can develop muscles in his chest. Why doesn't he just like hunt? And like, doesn't his life require him to pick up heavy things? No, never. We pay people to pick up heavy things. We don't do that. Basically, if we don't come to the gym and simulate your life, we waste away as frail and fat, like just fragile people over the course of time, if we don't try to simulate your life. I think it would be so foreign to them what happens there that I think similarly, trying to explain to a person who would have originally read Scripture, to whom Scripture was originally written, trying to explain to them the clutter in our life would be equally challenging. Before electricity, you put the kids to bed, and what do you do? They didn't have books. Only the most wealthy people had scrolls. And if you do, I mean, you've only got a couple. How many times are you going to read that scroll, man? Like, what do you do? You can't pick up your phone and scroll Twitter. You can't turn on the TV. You can't grab a magazine. You can't call a friend. What do you do? You sit there. You just be still. You think about your day. Talk to your spouse. When you're on the hills shepherding all day and the sheep are eating and you can't pick up the phone, what do you do? Well, you sit. You're silent. You wait. And it's worth, I think, pointing out this unique challenge that we face for stillness and silence in our lives. Because it is so vastly different from a large swath of human history. And it makes me wonder, can this possibly be good for us as people, for our spiritual health, for our mental health? Can it possibly be good for us to be so distracted and so diverted all the time? Can it possibly be good for us to cure our boredom this quickly? That can't possibly be healthy. Surely, surely the enemy looks at our devices and is delighted with the distraction that they provide. And surely the Father looks at the clutter and does not marvel at the fact that he struggles to make it through that clutter into our hearts and into our lives and into our ears. And so, I think that the point that my wife Jen made this week as she and I were discussing this is a good one. That being still requires an action step. Now more than ever, if we want to be still, if we want to be silent, we're not going to stumble into it. It's not going to happen by default. It's not going to happen while we're watching the sheep, right? We're not going to stumble on it. We have to choose stillness. It requires an action step. It requires us to actually do it. And this is modeled for us by Christ. Jesus models for us this choosing of stillness. And I can't imagine what it must have been like to be Jesus in ancient Israel. And every city you go to and every little town you go to and every street you walk down, people are clamoring towards you and they want and they want and they want and they need and they need and they need. So the only way for Jesus to just take a breath was to do what is said in Mark 1 35 that Doug read for us at the beginning of the service when he says, and rising very early in the morning while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place. And there he prayed. Jesus models this choosing of stillness for us. And that's not the only place it shows up in the gospels. He does it over and over again where he goes away to pray. And without fail, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's just worth pointing out about our Jesus. I marvel at the fact that he would go and pray and be still. And as soon as he would say amen and take a step back towards civilization, he was covered up with people who wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted. And to me, I don't need anything else to prove to me the moral perfection of Christ than to see his relentless patience and grace with the crowds that swarmed him. Because let me tell you, who would not have that patience? I marvel at that. But Jesus models for us this need to choose stillness. And so I wanted to put in front of you this morning the thought exercise. Let's take a minute, and actually I'm inviting you into this thought with me. You answer this question in your head, not to one another, because that would be distracting to me as I try to preach, but answer this question of what would it look like for you to choose stillness? What would that require of you? What kind of action step do you need to take to choose stillness, to join God in the stillness that he's created for you and invited you into? Is it a quiet car ride? Maybe there's a consistent car ride throughout your week. To work, back home from work, to lunch, something. Maybe there's a daily time when you're in the car and maybe for that car ride, you could choose to put the phone in the center console and refuse to look at it and not be notified about anything and not turn on the podcast and not turn on the music to just drown out the noise, to distract you from the silence, but choose to sit in silence and talk to God and wait on him to speak to you. One of the things that I've tried to start doing with varying degrees of success is that this helps me have a moment of stillness in the middle of my day. When I have a lunch meeting, I usually try to get to the lunch meeting early because I don't like to be the pastor that shows up after the people with real jobs, all right? So I feel like I need to show up early and look good and get a good table for us. And so I'm usually, I've got about 10 to 15 minutes to spare. And I try to sit there and not pull out my phone during that time. And just say, okay, God, I'm here. What do you got? Is there something in this conversation? Is there something in this meeting that I need to listen to or lean into? Is there something coming up? You know, my heart's restless about this. Help me trust you. Whatever it is. it's just a little pocket of stillness that I've intentionally chosen. Like, okay, here I can be quiet and not invite other noise into my life. When I was running, past tense, I would, I looked forward to the runs because I would put in my AirPods and listen to a book. And there were good books. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, anyways, I thought of 12 jokes there that I was like, nope, nope, no, no, can't make that joke. So anyways, they were good books, all right? They were helpful books. But one day I forgot my AirPods. I think I went home from church to run and I left them here. I was like, oh shoot, this is going to be the worst. But I ran in silence with my thoughts and it was great. And so then I started picking one run a week where I'm just going to do this one with just me and God and no other noise. And it was a good time. Maybe for you, you get up early. You go to bed early, earlier than you normally do so that you can get up earlier than you normally do, which I realize is a particularly cruel challenge on Spring Forward Sunday, but let's just consider it. Maybe when we eat lunch in our office, we don't turn on the thing that we normally turn on or read the thing that we normally read. Maybe we just sit and we invite God into that space. What does it look like for you to choose stillness? And as I contemplated stillness this week, it also occurred to me that you don't have to be still to be still. You don't have to be still to be still before God. You can be still before God while you do your yard work. You can be still before God while you go on your hike, while you go on your run, while you fold clothes, while you do the mindless things that life requires of you. We can all choose pockets to be still before the Father, to crowd out the rest of the noise, and to invite him into that space. And to say, speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm listening. What do you have? And in that silence, as we're told in the psalm that we started with, wait. Wait for him. Focus on him. Wait. Allow God in his time, in his way, to speak into you. Don't rush him. His timing is perfect. He will move when He wants. The Spirit will move when it wants. But we need to choose these moments of stillness because we need to acknowledge that they will not happen by default. They will not happen by accident. God ushers us into them, and we should respond to that. All through the Bible are calls to stillness. The most famous instruction is Psalm 46.10, right? Be still and know that I am God. Just calm down. Just stop. Just quit thinking about all the other stuff. The stuff that your mind is racing on, the things that you can't control. The things that you're anxious about. The unsolvable problems that are keeping you up at night. Be still and know that I am God. Trying to figure out Christianity and all the things and what to believe and where to go and what to do and what's going to please God and how do I even navigate this and am I doing it right? Be still and know that he is God. Let's start there. There's a reason that God throughout scripture invites us into stillness with him. There's a reason that Jesus throughout his ministry intentionally seeks that stillness with his Father. And I think that there are more reasons than this, but the three reasons I would give you are this. Stillness tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God where we wait for him in silence. Tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God tunes our heart to his. It aligns our heart with God's heart. It sets us in the morning. It sets us in midday. It sets us in the evening where we are aligning ourselves with God's heart, where we are making space for him to speak into us, where he reminds us that we are his child. The psalmist writes that if we delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord, that he will give us the desires of our hearts. And that doesn't happen. That makes it sound like if we just love the Bible and we love God and we delight ourself in God's laws and he's going to give us what we want. We're going to have yachts and like lots of money and sweet golf course memberships. If we just delight ourselves in the laws of God, then we're going to get all the things that we want. And that's not really how that works. The way that works is the more we delight ourselves in the laws of God, the more we delight ourselves in the presence of God, the more we take joy in the things that bring joy to the heart of God, the more our hearts begin to be attuned with God and beat with God for the same things. And so by delighting ourselves in God's law and in God's love and in God's presence, he aligns our hearts with his so that our will becomes a mirror of his will. And we know that sovereign God brings about his good and perfect will. And then lo and behold, all the things that we want because we've delighted in him and allowed him to attune us to him, they happen. He gives us the desires of our hearts. Why? Because we are attuned to him. Because we are aligned to him. Through making space. Not because we pursued him. Not because of something we did. Through simply choosing to make space for God to speak into us. And I think, for what it's worth, that this is how we be obedient to all the verses that I kind of think of as consistency verses. The instructions in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. How do you do that? How do you go through your whole day in a conversation with God? Well, I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God. I bet it starts with making some stillness and seeking his presence and setting that as the beginning of our day and setting a midpoint and setting an end of our day. I bet it starts with pursuing the presence of God. Philippians 4.8, you know, finally, brothers, whatever things are true or noble or trustworthy or praiseworthy or of good report, think upon these things. How do we do that? How do we think upon things that only honor God and none of the garbage that doesn't honor God? I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God in stillness and in prayer. I think being still intentionally and regularly is something that begins to tune our hearts to God's heart and makes us grow in who we are as believers and walk in obedience to those consistency scriptures that seem so challenging to us. Stillness not only tunes our heart to God, but it settles our heart before God. You know, there's, this has been for the Rector family a little bit of a stressful week. Not for anything extraordinary, just life stuff, man. Just stuff going on. And it's been stressful. And I went to bed last night thinking about things, and I woke up this morning thinking about things. And I was thinking about everything but the sermon. And I got to my office, and I sat down, and I was having a hard time focusing, and so I just prayed. And it occurred to me, I don't know if it was the Holy Spirit or just me actually drinking enough coffee to think, but it occurred to me, why don't you, like, just for once, practice what you preach and be still for a second? And so I was still. And in the stillness, I was reminded, hey, the things that you care about, I care about too. The things that matter a lot to you, they matter to me. And guess what? I'm God. So I'll work it out, man. And the things that are supposed to happen are going to happen. And you can't control them. So why don't you just rest easy in me? Because I've got a plan. And then it's like, cool. Great. Sorry. Sorry about all that. The last 12 hours were dumb. I apologize, God. And then you can just preach and go and do. When we seek out stillness and invite God into our space and wait and listen, the things that seemed such a big deal, the things that seemed so heavy, God takes from us. It settles our hearts. He says, you don't need to carry that anxiety. I've got it. You don't need to try to solve the unsolvables and conquer the unconquerables. I've got it. Why don't you just be still and know that I am God? When we choose stillness, it settles our hearts before God. It offers us that peace that passes all understanding that Paul talks about in Philippians. When he tells us in prayer and in stillness, don't be anxious for anything, but through everything, with prayer and petition, present your request to God and the God of peace, who transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Where is that found? It's found in stillness before the Father. It tunes our hearts. Stillness settles our hearts. And stillness anchors our hearts. The world will send us a lot of messages about who we are. You're attractive or you're not. You're valuable or you're not. You're successful or you're not. You're loved or you're not. It'll tell us a lot of things about who we are. But in the presence of God, we are reminded, no, no, no, you're my beloved child who I dearly love, who I sent my son to die on the cross for, to rescue you and claim you into eternity with me. I love you so much that I wanted to share my perfection in heaven with you. And even though you're so broken that you can't get here on your own, I sent my son to die for you, to claim you into my kingdom. I love you. And when we sit in the presence of God, he has a way of reminding us, you're enough. You don't have to perform. I love you as much as I possibly could. Yeah, I know you messed up. I forgave that already. Just sit still and be easy with me. He reminds us that we are a beloved child. We are a beloved child of the Father. He reminds us that we're good, that we're clothed in the righteousness of Christ and that we are enough. He reminds us that he has a plan for us. And in experiencing that, we're ready to go out and our cup is filled and we're ready to go out and pour out for others, but we are anchored in the knowledge that God loves me, that God invites me into his presence, that it doesn't matter where I've been, that he always is waiting on me like the father of the prodigal son, anxious for my return, that he is always seeking after me, that he is relentlessly pursuing me with his spirit. And when I sit in his presence and allow myself to be caught and held, I am reminded that he loves me. So stillness before the Father anchors us in the knowledge of his love. It settles our hearts when we are anxious about things. It reminds us of his sovereignty and it tunes our heart with his heart, and aligns our will with his will, and allows us to walk as we are called to walk. I would tell you that I believe it is fundamentally impossible. See what I'm talking about? I mean, they're everywhere. It is fundamentally impossible to flourish in our Christian life if we do not choose stillness. If this is the closest semblance to stillness you get every week, worship and my sermons, and then until next Sunday, you can't possibly flourish in your Christian life. And I'm not saying that to convict anybody, make anybody feel bad about the noise and the clutter that exists in all of our lives. I'm just saying that as a friend and a Christian. How can we possibly grow if we don't seek out stillness, if we don't intentionally choose it, if we don't invite God into that space with us? And then here's the thing, and I love this point that Alan Morgan made in his devotional this week. God creates a stillness and invites us into that stillness because he's waiting on us there. He is waiting to meet us there. He's waiting for us to slow down and to settle down and to calm down and to put everything else away in a stillness that he created, that he invites us into, in which his presence is waiting on us. And unless we allow ourselves to sit in that presence and be tuned and be settled and be anchored, how could we possibly expect to flourish and grow in our love for the Father and in our experience as Christians. So this morning, Grace, I just want to press on us to choose that. And normally, when I press on something, I kind of finish a sermon and I say, so this week, focus on blank. But I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna say, so this week, Grace, let's focus on stillness. I'm gonna say, so for the rest of your lives, all right, as long as you've taken in air, make this a priority. Not this week. Not today. Forever. Make this a priority. And choose stillness. And sit with God. And be comfortable in silence and just sit there and invite him in. So I'm gonna pray and we're gonna sing and worship together. As we worship and as we sing, I wanna invite you to do whatever feels most appropriate to you. Stand and sing if you want to sing. Kneel and pray if you want to do that. Sit in silence and invite God into that moment. And then at the end of the song, we're going to have a chance to be still together before we launch back into our weeks and all the things waiting for us outside those doors. Let's take a minute in worship and then in literal stillness to invite God into this space with us. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the way that you love us. Thank you for sending your son for us, to claim us, to die for us, to love us, to show us, to model for us, and your spirit to empower us. Father, we live such noisy lives. You cannot possibly be pleased by all the access to screens and information and distraction and diversion that we have that cannot possibly make you happy. So God, I pray that we would be people who choose stillness. That we would be people who identify and abhor distraction. And I pray for fresh life breathed into us this week by simply choosing to sit and wait on you in silence. Would you please do that for us, God? Would you meet us in the stillness that you've created for us and invited us into? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.