Sermons tagged with Restoration

It's good to see all of you this Sunday. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. I appreciate you being here on this December Sunday as we continue to gear up for Christmas together. I'm really excited about what we have in store for you, not only for Jingle Jam, but also for our Christmas Eve service. This is our series called Joy. Kyle, our student pastor, opened up the series talking about the joy of the light, of knowing Jesus and of sharing that light with others. Last week, I talked with you about the joy of forgiveness, and I really hope, my sincere prayer is and was, that God used that to bring about maybe some reconciliation in your life and in some of your relationships. I hope that you found that to be a helpful way to think about forgiveness. This morning, I want to talk about the joy of gratitude, the joy that we get when we can be people who are thankful, who are grateful people. The Bible has a lot to say about gratitude in the same way that it has a lot to say about forgiveness as it encourages us to forgive over and over and over again. The Bible encourages us to be grateful many, many times in many ways in many different places. In the Old Testament, David tells us that we are to enter God's courts with thanksgiving in our hearts, that we enter his gates with praise. And so it's kind of gratitude is the posture through which we approach the Lord. In the New Testament, we're told over and over again to be thankful in all things, be thankful always, pray without ceasing, and be grateful for everything. Everyone tells us that. As Jesus tells us how to pray in the Lord's Prayer, He models for us a daily gratitude, thanking God for the blessings that we have in our life. We're even told by at least three different authors in the New Testament to be grateful when life is hard, to be grateful when we are in struggles, to consider it pure joy when we endure trials. So the Bible has a lot to say about gratitude. And I think it's because gratitude is one of the more underrated things or character traits that we could have. Fostering a spirit or a heart or a character of gratitude, I think, is something that we forget to do, but it's underrated in its power and efficacy in our life. And I hope today, as we leave, as you guys go back out into your week, that you have a new appreciation for what it means to be grateful and to have a grateful heart. To do that, I want to first talk about a picture of ingratitude, what the opposite of gratitude looks like. So last week I was doing my weekly Sunday tradition, particularly in the fall, which is to kind of go home and collapse. My whole week, the rhythms of a pastor kind of build up to the sermon. You're stressed about the sermon all day. I hope it doesn't suck and that people aren't disappointed who brought their friends and the whole deal. And I hope this honors God. And I hope that I'm not an apostate and the whole deal. And so you just kind of, you focus on the sermon all week and then I give it and I go home and I'm like, ugh. And I just kind of want to shut down for a while. And so in the fall, it's perfect because I get to watch TV. And so last week I'm watching football and the four o'clock game comes on. It's the Chiefs and the Patriots. And something incredibly interesting happened at halftime of this Patriots game. Now, for those who don't know, you may not know who the Patriots are. You may not be, that's football, by the way. You may not be into football, and that's all right. You don't have to know football to appreciate what I'm about to say. I'm going to kind of lay some groundwork for you, all right? So for those who don't know, the Patriots have had what I think is the best 20-year run of any sports team in the history of sports teams. I'm not talking about the best 20-year run in the last 20 years. I'm talking about besides maybe the 1920s Yankees have had the best 20-year run of any team in the history of teams. It's been amazing. It's been absolutely historic. I went back and counted. In the last 20 years, the Patriots have made it to the Super Bowl nine times. They've played in almost half of the Super Bowls. The other years, they came almost just one game short almost every year. To be a Patriots fan is to over and over and over again get to cheer for a winner. It's an incredible privilege to be a Patriots fan. I know this because I'm a Falcons fan. Okay? It is not a privilege to be a Falcons fan. I'm from Atlanta, and statistically speaking, if you combine all of the seasons without a championship, so you take in Atlanta at one point, that was four seasons in one year, hockey, baseball, basketball, and football going consecutively without a championship. Atlanta is the losingest city in the country. And that's statistics. That's not hyperbole. I have longed to be a Patriots fan. I wish that I could celebrate that sort of success. During those 20 years, they've been to nine Super Bowls. They've won six of them. There's only one other franchise that's won six Super Bowls, and they would even trade their last 20 years for the Patriots' last 20 years. They have the best coach to ever coach a sport. They have the best quarterback to ever play the game, and that pains me to say because Peyton Manning's my favorite football player of all time, but Tom Brady, man, you can't argue with rings. To be a Patriots fan has been an incredible privilege for the past 20 years. Yet, on Sunday, the Patriots are playing, playing the Chiefs, and the Patriots this year are having a good season, not a great season. There's some rumblings in their fan base that they may not be as good as they once were. It's looking like they may not win the Super Bowl this year. And at halftime, the Patriots are running into the locker room down two scores, 21 to seven. And as they're running into the locker room at Gillette Stadium, do you know what those Patriots fans did? Booed. They booed them. Can you believe this? After one bad half of football, and it wasn't even that bad, they booed them. They let them know loudly and clearly, you stink and we're dissatisfied and we deserve more from you. And I sat on my couch in shocked disbelief and I thought, and I'm sorry, you bunch of entitled jerks. Do you have any idea what I would do for the last 20 years that you've just gotten to enjoy as Patriots fan? If you're a 10-year-old Patriots fan, you just figure that they win the Super Bowl. That's just what happens. It's your birthright. Do you know what I would do to trade places with you? Try being a Falcons fan for like a season, you jerks. Like, it made me mad. They were so entitled. And as I thought about that, and listen, we have some Patriots fans at the church. They're lovely people. Steve, our worship pastor, he's kind of a Patriots fan. He's not really a sports guy, but if he were, he claims to be a Patriots. From everything I can tell, he seems to be a great guy. And so I'm not trying to run down all Patriots fans, but the ones in that stadium that day, my goodness, the entitlement on them. And I sat on my couch and I was kind of stewing and calling the names in my head and couldn't get over the audacity of it, texting my friends, did y'all see that? But of course, as I sat there, anytime you cast blame on somebody else, my mind begins to go, well, am I guilty of the same thing? And I realized we all are. We're all of us in that way, this pains me to say, we're all in that way Patriots fans. We all act like that because they were simply entitled. And to be entitled is to be forgetful of the past and desirous of the future. To be entitled is to forget everything that got us here, is to forget all the blessings and all the things I've enjoyed up to this moment, and then to not be aware or cognizant in this moment and just desire us of the future. And isn't that what they were? As they're in the stands and they're watching this one singular bad half of football, totally forgetting the last 20 years that they've had, that they've gotten to enjoy being a fan like nobody else on the face of the planet. In that moment that they booed and expressed their displeasure, aren't they simply forgetting all the things that they've enjoyed up to that point and only thinking about what they want in the future? Haven't they forgotten their past and become desirous of the future? And isn't this what we do? Haven't in our lives, all of us, at different points, been entitled jerks? If you don't think you have, look at your kids at Christmas. Come on, your kids expect stuff, right? They're not like hoping that maybe they get a present. They gave you a list in September. My three-year-old already has this figured out. Everything she saw over the course of the list, can you make sure and tell Santa that that's a thing that I want? Our kids grow up entitled. Entitlement says, I deserve this. It's my birthright. This is something that I've earned. You should give it to me. I don't have to be grateful for it because I deserve this anyways. That's what entitlement is. If our kids aren't enough to help us realize that this is a path that we are all on, how long does it take you and your life right now to get tired of the new shiny thing? How many weeks or months after that promotion, you finally get the job, you finally get the promotion, you finally get the thing, you get the position that you wanted, you've closed the sale that you've wanted, you're so happy about it, praise God, this is great. How many weeks does it take you to resent those coworkers too? How long does it take you to think, I wonder what's next? How long does it take you to forget what got you there and be desirous of what's ahead? How long does it take for the new car to become the one that you want to sell? How long does it take after we buy a new house to put the Zillow app back on our phone and just see what's out there? How about this? How long did it take you after you got married and all the happiness and all the pomp and circumstance around that day to have an evening where you looked across the living room and you thought to yourself, I could have done better than this. For Jen, it was about three days. How long does it take us to be dissatisfied with the blessings that we have, to forget our past, to be totally lost to the present and be desirous of the future and in our own way be booing our life because of a simple bad half? To be shaking our fist at God and saying, God, why do I have to deal with this? Why do I have to go through this? Why can't I have that thing with no mind at all to everything that he's already given us? How long does it take us to become entitled? And the problem with entitlement is it's the antithesis of gratitude. If the Bible tells us to be grateful, to be thankful, to give thanks in all things and at all times and in all circumstances, if that's a characteristic that we're supposed to embody, then we should acknowledge that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. It's the exact opposite of gratitude. And we should also acknowledge that there is a natural drift towards it. You haven't all been entitled jerks because just in your soul you're a bunch of jerks and we're a bunch of brats. It's all us. We're all that way. Gratitude is something you have to choose on purpose. We don't naturally drift towards gratitude. We naturally drift towards, I deserve, I earn, this belongs to me. We naturally drift towards being forgetful of our past and desirous of what's in the future with no mind to what's going on in the present. That's a natural drift that we have. I don't think, and I'm not here this morning so that anybody feels badly about it. I'm just here so that we will acknowledge it and understand that entitlement is the antithesis of gratitude. Because entitlement says, I deserve this. And gratitude actually confesses something. I learned this in my research from an Irish monk, and I thought it was a good way to think about gratitude. Gratitude is a confession. To be grateful for something confesses that this is a gift that I do not deserve. Gratitude says, this thing that I have in my life, this person, this relationship, this material possession, this house, this opportunity, this skill set, this location in time and in space and in geography, all the things in my life, gratitude acknowledges this is a gift that I do not deserve. To go back to our original illustration, those Patriots fans have not done anything to win those Super Bowls. Nothing. They've not done anything that any other fan base hasn't done. They just have the luxury of being born in New England and getting to cheer for Patriots. And good for them. But it's a gift that they got that they did not deserve. Being a Falcons fan is a punishment that I've received that I do not deserve. God and I are still working that out. But to be truly grateful for something is to confess, this is a gift that I've received that I do not deserve. If you feel like you deserve it, if you feel like you've earned it, then you can't be grateful for the thing. If you're a salesperson and you go out and you slay the dragon and you get the big commission check that comes from slaying the dragon, you don't walk into your boss's office and go, thank you so much for this check. This is such a sweet thing for you to do. No, it was negotiated. You earned that. You deserve that. The gratitude comes in when we reflect on the skills and abilities that got that deal done, and we thank God for blessing us with those. But gratitude has to confess that the thing that I'm grateful for is a gift that I do not deserve. The other thing that gratitude does that I think is so very powerful is it anchors us in the present as we remember the past. Gratitude anchors us in the present as we remember the past. We're not fast-forwarding ahead. We're not looking to the next thing. We're not anxious or desirous about the future. We haven't forgotten the past. We're reflective on the past, the moments that conspired to bring us here. We're anchored in the present, and we remember the past. The best example of this I've seen that I think of often is, I call him my Uncle Edwin. He's really Jen's Uncle Edwin. Jen's dad, John, has a twin sister named Mary. She married a guy named Edwin, and they live in Dothan, Alabama. If you didn't follow that, Jen's aunt and uncle live in Alabama. And every Thanksgiving, we go down to Dothan, Alabama, and we have Thanksgiving with the Morrises. Jen's family, the Vincennes, go down with the Morrises, and we get together and we have Thanksgiving. And Edwin and Mary have three daughters that are about our age, and they have kids now too, and it's just a really great, sweet time. It's one of the great gifts in my life to have been grafted into that family. I'm very grateful for that. And when we go to Thanksgiving, we have the meal. It's a big, good meal. It's one of the best ones I have of the year. There's still an adult table and a kid's table. The parents sit at one table, and the average age of the kid's table now is like 36, but it's still the kid's table. And we have way more fun at the kid's table. There's always much more laughter going on as we swap stories and catch up and reflect on old ones and things like that. And at one point or another, I've caught Edwin doing this several times. He comes into, he leaves the adult table to have his cup of coffee or a camera or dessert or something, and he'll stand off in the corner. He's not trying to be noticed. He's not trying to speak. He's not trying to get anyone's attention. And he'll look at what's happening in his kitchen, And he'll just grin from ear to ear. And sometimes I'll watch him kind of wipe away a tear. And I've never spoken with him about those moments. But I know that Edwin is a man that loves God very much. And I'm certain that in those moments, he's standing there and he's just soaking in what he considers to be one of the great blessings in his life, of the family that he has. He's anchored in the present and he's thankful for the past. And in that moment, he's grateful, acknowledging this family is a gift that I did not earn. And it's tempting to jump ahead. It's tempting to be desirous of the future. It's tempting to be anxious about what could happen. And there's different times and different seasons of life with the Morrises that he could have jumped ahead. During one of those Thanksgivings, he had a daughter that was going to vet school who dropped out to go to art school, which no parent wants to hear. Now, fast forward that, and it worked out really well for her. Another time, he had a daughter who was dating a guy that he was actively praying against every day. Not in a funny way, even though it is funny, but in a very serious, concerned dad kind of way. And God answered those prayers too. But in that moment, when he's standing there, grinning from ear to ear, grateful for what's going on in front of him, he's not anxious about the future. He hasn't forgotten the moments that have got him there. He's anchored in the present, and he's grateful for God's gifts. But more than those things, more than humbling us so that we acknowledge that things in our life are gifts, more than simply anchoring us in the present and helping us reflect on and be grateful for the past, I think there's something far more powerful that gratitude does. And I think we see that in a story tucked away in one of the gospels, in Luke chapter 17. If you have a Bible, turn to Luke chapter 17. I'm going to start in verse 11, and verses 16 through 19 will be up here on the screen. I want to read it for you. On the way to Jerusalem, he was passing between Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered a village, he was met by 10 leopards, talking about Jesus, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices saying, Jesus, master, have mercy on us. Okay. So I want to say something very, very clear right here. He's going through Samaria. There's racial tension going on. The racial tension going on there. There's a whole separate set of issues that we could talk about. But there's 10 lepers. And in the ancient world, leprosy was the death knell. It was the death knell. It was the worst possible disease that you could get. It was the worst possible diagnosis that you can receive. If you received leprosy, it was contagious, so you were ostracized. You had to go live in a colony with a bunch of other depressed people who were losing their skin and their limbs and their digits all at once and just marching towards death together. It was a really, really difficult diagnosis. And so there's 10 lepers, and they cry out to Jesus. And look what they cry. They say, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. So what do all 10 of them already know? That's Jesus. He's the Son of God and he has the power to heal us, right? They already are acknowledging that that's Jesus and we believe he's the Son of God. They've admitted that. Then Jesus answered, were not 10 cleansed? Where's everybody else? Didn't I heal 10 of you? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? Look at this, this is so powerful. And he said to him, rise and go your way. Your faith has made you well. Let's not miss what's happening in this story as we reflect on gratitude together. These 10 lepers looked at him and they said, Jesus, Master, we believe in you. We believe that you are who you say you are. We believe that you have the power to heal. Will you please heal us? He says, yeah, go and show yourself to the priest and you'll be healed. And so they run off to go to the priest and on their way, they are healed. And as they are healed, we can only assume. Now, we don't know. There's not a lot of details. This is conjecture. But something happened in the minds of nine of them that they didn't think it was important to go back and thank Jesus for what he did. I like to think that their minds immediately became desirous of the future. They became desirous about who they were going to tell and what they were going to do and who they were going to see and all the next things that they wanted to do in light of this healing. Maybe in their head, they went, gosh, that Jesus is a great guy. And they went on and they did their thing. But what they didn't do is express gratitude. What they acted like was that they were entitled, was that they somehow deserved that healing. Jesus is the Savior of the world. He's the Son of God. He has the power to heal. He sees us. He should heal me. He owes this to me. That's what God does. God heals, so heal me. Thanks, great, and then they move on. Only one of them was so moved by his experience with Jesus that he went back to him and he said, thank you. Thank you for healing me. And in that moment, we see gratitude. We see an acknowledgement. This gift of healing is a gift that you gave me that I did not deserve. Thank you. And Jesus' response is fascinating to me. After he notes what the others did, he said, your sins are forgiven. Your faith has made you well. That dude just got saved. You understand that? We call it getting saved when someone is returned to harmony with God. Our souls were created to be in harmony with our creator God. They were designed to be in union with him. Our sin breaks that union. It is forever broken. There is no way to restore us into that union. So God sent his son to die on a cross so that we wouldn't have to, so that by placing our faith in him, we can be restored into union with our creator God. Your soul longs and clamors and claws for harmony with your creator God. That's what it does. If you're here this morning and there is an unease in your soul, if you're not a believer yet, but there is something that you just can't seem to wrap your mind around, if you've clawed for happiness in your life and then gotten there and found that it was empty, it's because your soul was designed to claw for harmony with our Creator God. And Jesus restored the soul of that leper. Gave him what his soul really longs for. And why did he do it? Because the leper was grateful. Don't you see? It wasn't enough to just go, hey, you're Jesus and you can heal me if you want to. Thanks, see you later. No, the leper came back and was grateful. Thank you for what you've done. And Jesus says, your faith, he doesn't say gratitude. He says faith because the faith is implicit in the gratitude. To be truly grateful, you have to admit, you've done something that I couldn't do for myself. Thank you, Jesus. Your faith has made you well. I'm worried as I read this story that we don't understand that gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God. Gratitude is the gateway to harmony with God. Don't you see that these nine lepers did what so many of us do, particularly in the South, just give mental assent, acknowledge, you're Jesus, you're the Son of God, and if you want to, you can do these things for me, but it never goes beyond that. They had the beginnings of faith, but they weren't truly grateful for who Jesus was and what he did. And because of that, they never received the actual blessing that Jesus came to give them. He didn't go through Samaria that day to heal people of leprosy. If he did, we would have seen him healing a lot more people. He walked through Samaria that day to bring some souls back into harmony with God. He walked into Samaria that day to save people. And the only one that got saved was the one that expressed gratitude for what he did. And I worry about how many of us can sometimes be like the lepers. And once we receive the blessing from God, once we receive the taste of Jesus, once we receive a little bit of the blessing, we go, thanks, that's good. And we don't stick around for the true blessing that God has for us because we're entitled. I don't want us to miss the power of gratitude. This guy didn't have to pray the sinner's prayer. He didn't have to have everything figured out. He didn't have to understand the ins and outs of the New Testament. He was from the priest that Jesus sent him to go see wasn't even a Jewish priest. It was a hybrid religion. He didn't even understand what it meant to have faith or to be a believer. He was simply grateful to Jesus for what he did. And to Jesus, that was enough. Your faith has made you well. We cannot miss the power of gratitude. It's a gateway to harmony with God. And I really think that what happens when we're grateful is that all paths lead to God. I think gratitude always leads to God, which in turn always leads to joy. I think gratitude is a gateway to harmony with God, is a guaranteed pathway to joy. That if we can begin to express gratitude in our lives for anything at all, that what that will ultimately bring us to is gratitude. It doesn't take me very long to do that in my life. If I look at the things I'm grateful for in my life, I look at Jen and I look at Lily. It doesn't take me very long to end up thanking God for those things and to find joy and harmony with God. If you look at the things in your life, it doesn't take you very long to think of the things that you're grateful for and find a path that leads us back to God. I think it actually kind of works like this. As I was thinking about it this week, I thought of this map that I remember seeing online. If we can put it up there. This is a map of all of the streams and rivers in the United States and how they all lead to the ocean. Every last one of them. You can pick any tendril that you want to and at one point or another, it's going to end up in the ocean. A brook is going to lead to a stream, is going to lead to a creek, is going to lead to a river, is going to lead to a bigger river, is going to lead to a basin, is going to lead to an ocean. And I think that gratitude works the same way. Even if you think about the things in your life that you think you've done, the accomplishments that you think you've made, the businesses that you think you've built, the children that you think you've raised, who gave you the gifts and abilities to do those things? Who decided in his sovereignty that you were going to be born in the United States in a first world and even have the opportunity to exercise those gifts? Who decided that you weren't going to be born in the slums of Delhi and instead were going to be born here? God did. Our very gifts, our very location, our friends, all of our blessings are a result of God's goodness in our life. That's why I think that all gratitude is simply a path that leads us back to God, that leads us to joy. That's why I think that the Bible tells us over and over again to be grateful in all things, even in the hard things. I think that even if Christmas is difficult, because for some of us, Christmas is a reminder of loss. If we want to find a path to gratitude, even in the midst of a Christmas that reminds us of loss in our life, that loss hurts so much because there were times that were so sweet. And we become grateful for those times. And we see God working in them. And it serves as a pathway that ultimately leads us back to God where our souls will find harmony with Him and we will find joy. Gratitude is incredibly powerful because it is a gateway to harmony with our creator. All paths of gratitude lead to him. And I am convinced that once we are in harmony with our God, once we are grateful to him, all those pathways lead to joy. So let's go and let's be grateful together. Let's be anchored in the present, remembering the past, and be grateful to our God for the things that He has done in our lives. Let's pray. Father, we love You. We truly are grateful to You. We're grateful for the memories that we have. We're grateful for the scars that we bear and the lessons that we learned as a result of those instances. God, we're thankful for all the different blessings that you've placed in our life, for the relationships, for the possessions that bring us joy, for the places that make us feel safe or cozy or happy. God, we're so grateful for all of those. We're thankful for the means to earn those things, to make the sale, to close the deal, to figure out the account. We're grateful for the discipline to go to work and to learn more and to sharpen our sword. We're grateful that you built us all with our gifts that allow us to go out and serve you and enjoy the blessings that you've given us. God, may we actively fight against entitlement. May we be people who acknowledge every day that the things in our life are gifts from you that we have not earned and acknowledge that in your goodness, you've given them to us anyways. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

My name is Nate. It's good to see you. Thanks for being here on this August Sunday. I hope that you've had a good summer as they're winding down. We're winding down our summer series as well called Obscure Heroes. And if this is your first exposure to it, the idea is we kind of know the heavy hitters in the Bible, right? We know some of the main characters. We know the Davids and the Moseses and the Abrahams and the Pauls the John's and Peter. We know those folks. But tucked away in the Bible. Sir, if you could please find your seat. I just always want to do that. Tucked away in the Bible are these folks that we just see for a chapter or two. We just get little snippets or little glimpses into the lives of these folks, but the examples that they leave through their stories are profound. And we wanted to take some time in the summer and focus in on some of these stories. So this morning, we're looking at the story of a woman named Rahab. Rahab, when we meet her, we meet her in Joshua chapter 2. Now, Rahab lived in a city called Jericho. To understand why that's important, what we have to realize is that the people of Israel, God's chosen nation, have come out of Egypt. They've come out of slavery. They've lived in the desert for 40 years, and now they're about to cross over the Jordan River. They're on the east side of this river. They're about to cross over the river and go on a conquest to conquer what we know as the modern day nation, land of Israel. To them, it was the land of Canaan. And Joshua was going to lead his armies over the river and then through the nation to sweep through and take over all the cities for themselves per God's orders. And like good war planners do, they had to go get some intel. So Joshua finds two spies and he sends them into Jericho to go see what they could see and come back and they would come up with a strategy on how to attack this city. So when the spies go into Jericho, they end up in the house of a woman named Rahab. Now Rahab was a prostitute. And I like to think that these men were there not because they were of a weak moral fiber, but because it made sense for people coming in and out of town to spend the night at her house, because this was something that was done a lot. So this would kind of throw people off the scent. It makes sense for some transient businessmen to come in, spend the night there, and then leave the next day without raising too many eyebrows. So I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. But when we meet Rahab in Joshua chapter 2, one of the first things we learn about her is that she was a prostitute. She was used to this kind of thing. But the men come in and somehow or another, the king of Jericho, the authorities in Jericho, get word that there are some spies in their city. And so they start trying to find them. And then they hear that they're probably in Rahab's house. But Rahab, who has every reason to hand them over to the king, she doesn't need this stress in her life. She doesn't need this drama. I don't know what her life looked like at the time, but I'm sure it had plenty enough drama that she didn't need to be hiding spies from the government. It would have been way easier for her to just let the king in and say they're right there and go get them. But that's not what she does. She actually, we see, she goes up to them. They're sleeping on the roof. And we see in Joshua 2, verse 8, that this is Rahab's response when she encounters God. Before the men lay down, she came up to them on the roof. Verse 9, and she said to the men, I know the Lord has given you the land and that the fear of you has fallen upon us and that all the inhabitants of the land melt away before you. And she goes on. She goes on and she's talking about their fear and she makes a deal. She says, so here's the deal. I'm going to hide you. I'm going to protect you. I'll lie to the king for you. I'll give you an escape route. But I need to know that when your armies come through Jericho and conquer us, that you're going to protect me and my family. I'll make a deal with you. And I love this response from Rahab because what we'll see as we move through her story is that Rahab's response to God was faithful obedience. Rahab's response to God was faithful obedience. Think about it. This is a woman that's presumably grown up in Jericho. We don't know what their religion was, but it was what we would refer to as a pagan religion. She didn't worship the God that we worship. She didn't worship the Hebrew God. This was a land and a time when each civilization and each culture had their own gods, and they would always vie for power with each other. That's why the 10 plagues in Egypt was actually a strategic affront to 10 different gods of Egypt to show the nation of Egypt that the Hebrew God is more powerful than your God. And so if you had any national pride at all, if you had any cultural pride, you would always say that your God was stronger than the other gods. Except when she encounters the Hebrew God and hears of the stories of the Hebrew God and what they're doing and what he's doing for Joshua in his army, she responds in fear. And then that fear produces obedience because she had a choice. She can hand over the spies and do what's easy for her, or she can protect them and take that on. And she chose in faithful obedience to protect them. And I call this obedience to God. And here's what I think is super interesting about this step of obedience that Rahab took. Would we call her a Christian? No. Was she a believer? Was she in? Was she a Hebrew? Was she practicing? Was she following the law and performing the sacrifices and going to temple? Did she know the Torah, the first five books of the Bible? Did she know even who Moses was? Did she know the story of Abraham or Noah? Did she know any of this stuff or any of the things around the religion that she was being obedient to? No. She just knew that God was coming and she wanted to be on the right side of things. So she took the step of obedience that was in front of her, and she helped the spies. I love that response from Rahab. So she tells the spies, I'm going to hide you. I'm going to lower you out of my window because she had, her house was actually in the city walls of Jericho. She says, from your window, then we promise that we will protect you and anybody who is in this house. They say, okay, deal. So she lets him down. Sure enough, King knocks on her door. She gives him the old that away. You know, they went over there and lies to him, which is an interesting thing to know because God counts this to her as righteousness. So sometimes lying is okay. Just so we're clear, there's a hierarchy of things that we're supposed to do to love others. And in this situation, she was supposed to love on the spies and obey God by deceiving the king. So this absolutism of morality doesn't really work sometimes. It's just a useless aside for you. But she lets him down the window. They get away. She sends the king in another direction, and everybody's safe. And then a little while later, we have the famous Battle of Jericho, where God's strategy from on high was to march around the city seven times, which seems, first of all, ineffective, and second of all, tiring. But I've actually gotten the chance to be at Jericho and see the size of it and actually look down in a dig and see the excavation and the layers of the walls. And towards the bottom, there's this one black layer of soot from the walls being burnt down this one time, which is super interesting. And the whole size of Jericho is maybe the size of the parking lot that's across the street. So walking around it seven times in a day isn't unfeasible. It's not like a triumph of the human spirit or anything. So that's what they did. And on the seventh time, the walls fell down, the armies of Joshua swept into Jericho, took over the city, but because the cord was hanging from Rahab's window, they protected her and her family and grafted her into the nation in a way that you'll see in a minute. And I think that Rahab's faith is remarkable. One of the reasons I think it's remarkable, and I don't know how much time you've spent thinking about this, probably not much. I tried to really think through it this week. And I have to make some guesses here, but I think that you'll give me the license and the liberty to make these guesses? What was Rahab's life like? What happened in her life that she ended up as a prostitute? Women in that day, and it goes without saying that it's totally wrong, but women in that day had very little value outside of being a wife. They could not have a profession. They had no opportunity to make money. And so to be on your own as a woman is to have very few options. And so she took the only option that was in front of her. And so what it tells me is she either experienced loss or rejection or both in her life. Maybe she had a husband and he passed and so now she had to fend for herself. Maybe she wanted to be married and she couldn't. Women in that culture very much wanted to be married. They had no way to provide for themselves. They needed to get married. And so it's safe to say that almost every woman in that culture had this innate desire to find a husband. And for whatever reason, she finds herself without one, either through loss or rejection. I wonder what kind of number that would have done on the psyche, on the self-image, on the hope of this woman. More than that, she's a prostitute in ancient Jericho. What was that like? There's no justice system there. If there was, it was nothing like ours. It was a place where might made right. It was a patriarchy. I don't know what she had to do to avoid abuse from some. I don't know what she had to do to gain the protection that she was afforded. I don't know the kinds of awful things that she saw that if we closed our eyes, we would still be seeing. I don't know what that woman's life was like, but I guarantee you it's harder than mine. I guarantee you she saw and experienced things that you can't unsee. I wonder what it would be like for Rahab to sit in the office of a therapist or a counselor. I wonder what layers would have to begin to get peeled back from her about trust that she lost early, about feeling worthless, about feeling shame over who she was. I wonder what it was like when Rahab was being honest to look in the mirror. I think that Rahab was a broken woman. And in that brokenness, when confronted with God, without understanding all the ramifications about it, she chose obedience. And for that, it's amazing, for that, this foreign woman who had the worst job that churches think you could have, she is put in the Bible dozens of times. God shares her story throughout the Old Testament. She's mentioned again and again. And she shows up two places that I know of in the New Testament. And in the New Testament, she shows up in one of the most famous chapters in the Bible, Hebrews chapter 11. We're going to finish the series with looking at Hebrews chapter 11. Some people call it the hall of faith. The book of Hebrews is easily the most beautifully written book in the New Testament. We don't know who the author was, but it's so eloquent and good that we go, that probably is not Paul because we've read a lot of his books. It has the highest view of Christ, of Christology in the New Testament. It really holds him up as the high priest and the sacrifice and the Messiah once and for all. It's a beautiful book and absolutely worth delving into. And in chapter 11, the author wants to make the point of how important faith is, how impactful faith can be. And so the author goes through the heroes of the Old Testament and says, you know, by faith Noah built the ark, and by faith Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac, and by faith Noah or Moses led them through the desert. And he goes on and on and on until he gets to Rahab, who by faith protected the spies in Jericho. And here this foreign broken prostitute is laid right next to these Jewish men who are heroes of the faith. And God says, the things that they did to me are the same. The things that they did to me have the same faith, have the same obedience, have the same heart. And she's held up as a hero of the faith alongside with these men who made the choices that they made. And God says they're equal because she responded to God with faithful obedience. That's remarkable to me. It's remarkable to me because do you know how concerned God is with the Jewish lineage in the Old Testament? He tells them over and over and over again, do not intermarry. When you move into this nation, do not take wives or husbands from the surrounding cultures. And he even punishes them for doing it sometimes. He'll ostracize them for doing it, but yet here in Rahab, he's grafted in someone into his people, into his family, who is a foreign woman of ill repute. And it goes to show us that God was never concerned with protecting the genetics of his people. He was always concerned with protecting the faith. He doesn't care about what our makeup is or what we look like or how we were born. He cares about our faith as we respond to him. And so because Rahab responded with faith, he grafts her into his family. But to me, as I researched this, I knew that Rahab was in Hebrews chapter 11, so I turned to that and I read through that and kind of let that soak in. But I also know that she shows up in one of the most boring chapters in the Bible, Matthew chapter 1. Matthew chapter 1 is the begats. It's so-and-so had so-and-so had so-and-so had so-and-so had so-and-so all the way down. It's a whole chapter. It's really fun to read it out loud and see how good you do at pronouncing the names. It's fun if you're like a huge Bible nerd like me. It's like a great time. Let's sit around with our friends and pronounce Bible names. But you can go through that, and it's just super boring, man. It's hard to read. Like if that one shows up on your quiet time that day, you're going to fold it up and be like, God, I got nothing. I'm so sorry. There's actually a great sermon there, and I want to do it one day, but I have to get my ego out of the way because I really want to say that I've done a sermon out of Matthew chapter 1. But there's really a great sermon there. One day I'll share it with you. But Rahab shows up there too. And we can put it up on the screen. This is where she shows up. I thought it was remarkable as I read this. It says that she married a man named Salmon, and together they had a son named Boaz. And Boaz with Ruth had a son named Obed, and Obed had a son named Jesse,. There's a whole lot going on there. Now, I'm going to make some guesses about Rahab if you'll give me the chance to do this. Rahab married a man named Salmon. Maybe the Jews pronounced it Salmon, but I can't bring myself to do it. She married a man named Salmon. Salmon was from the line of Abraham. Salmon took great pride in his forefathers. He had to have. The whole line of Abraham did. It would have been a huge deal for him to marry a foreign woman who used to be a prostitute. So my guess about Rahab is, after taking that initial step of obedience when she encountered God, is that once she got grafted into the Hebrew culture and the Hebrew faith, and she began to look around, and she began to step into synagogue where she would find community, and she began to adopt the values of the people around her, that she continued to respond to God and his word, and that she grafted herself into the faith, and that she continued to take steps of obedience. I doubt very seriously that after the battle of Jericho, Rahab ever returned to her previous profession. I think God got a hold of her and moved in that way. Can I tell you the main reason I believe that? There's this old saying, I don't know if you guys have heard it before, but you can't fake good kids. When there's a group of brothers and sisters coming out of a house and they're spiritually strong and they love God and they have good character and they're great folks, you have to, whether you like them or not, give credit to their parents. You have to look at their parents and go, I don't know what they were doing, but it was good. You can't fake good kids. Now, sometimes kids can come out of messes and become really great humans, but that's not typically how that story goes. Usually, if you have a great kid, you can find some great parents. Rahab and Salmon had a great kid. Their kid was a guy named Boaz. Boaz stands out in the Old Testament as an example of what the Messiah is going to look like. You understand this? There's a girl named Ruth. She was a Moabite woman who had no options and no hope. She wasn't very different than, I guess it was her grandmother Rahab. Or was it mother-in-law? Is that how that works? I don't know. I should have planned this part of the sermon. She wasn't very much different than her. And she comes in. She's hopeless, she's a beggar, taking what she can at the corners of fields. Boaz says, we need to protect her, nobody lay a hand on her. And then going to look like when he gets here in the New Testament. And that's Rahab's kid. And I don't think that he comes from that home with those values if Rahab doesn't continue to respond to God in faithful obedience. And Ruth and Boaz have Obed, who has Jesse, who has David. Because of her faithful obedience, God didn't just pluck her out of the life that she was living and give her a new life. He didn't just put her on the pages of Hebrews thousands of years later to be displayed for all of time with an equivalency to all the other people of faith who had preceded her. He wrote her into the genetics of his son and used her to bring about two pictures of his son in David and in Boaz. God had an incredible story written for Rahab. And so as I look at her story, and I think about this woman in Jericho who must have felt hopeless and broken, and what God saw in her, and why we even get to see the story of Rahab in the Bible. What I see is that God made beauty out of her brokenness. God made beauty out of her brokenness. I picture Rahab as this vase or a bowl or a vessel that's just been shattered on the ground. I wanted to bring in like a clay pot and shatter it, but that would have been dangerous for like Holly and other people around me. So I had no way to do that. But that's how I picture Rahab, just broken and shattered on the floor. Irrevocably damaged. And in different ways trying to grab pieces of her life and put them back together in a way that feels whole, in a way that feels healthy, in a way that can at least look from the outside in like it's beautiful. I imagine her trying to assemble the pieces of her own life, and I think many of us can relate to this. I think many of us are broken. Listen, if we're being honest, we all are. We're all broken. And I don't mean that in some dramatic way. Some of us are walking through really difficult things. Some of us have walked through incredibly difficult things, and it doesn't feel like our life is ever going to be the same. Some of us can relate to the brokenness of Rahab, just sitting amidst your life feeling like it is in shatters. Some of us remember that and have pieced things back together. Some of us, maybe we're not broken into a thousand pieces, but it's a couple. We all struggle with value. We all struggle with feeling good enough. We all struggle with unselfishly loving others. We are all, in our own ways, broken. And so as I thought about Rahab and her brokenness, and us and ours, I wanted to find a picture of something beautiful being made from something that's broken. So I did what any good pastor does and I googled things. And I found the perfect picture. I want to show you guys this bowl. That bowl is an example of the Japanese art of kintsugi. That's how you know I Googled it. I don't know what that is, man. I just started learning about this this week. That's an example of the Japanese art of kintsugi. And what kintsugi is, is to take something that's broken and fashion it back together in a way that is beautiful. And what they would normally do, what you normally try to do when your bowl was broken is you try to piece it back together so that nobody would ever know it was broken, so that when you used it as a dinner party, people wouldn't know that you had dropped it on the floor once and no one would ever know that it had been broken before. But Kintsugi says, no, we're not going to do that. We're actually going to make the brokenness beautiful. We're going to fill the cracks with gold. And we're not going to try to hide the past from anybody. And in doing this, it actually becomes more beautiful than it was before. And I think that this is a picture of what God does with us. God took Rahab, this broken prostitute from Jericho, and wrote her into his family story. So that when we look at her story now, when we look through Matthew now, when we look at those names, married to Salmon and then had Boaz and Obed and Jesse and David and on down all the way to Jesus, we see the bowl. We see the thing that God pieced back together. We see the brokenness and all of its beauty. And God doesn't attempt to hide it. He doesn't say that there was a woman of faith from Jericho. He tells us who she was. He doesn't attempt to hide her faults. He makes them beautiful. And I want us to know this morning that if you feel broken, whether it's completely shattered or just missing a couple pieces, if you've been scrambling to kind of try to fix your life and put it back together in a way that makes sense, in a way that feels whole, in a way that feels beautiful, in a way that gives you meaning, I want you to know that God is doing that for you. And that you don't have to hide those cracks. And you don't have to pretend like you were never broken. And you don't have to pretend like you were always right. Because God is making something beautiful out of you. And all we have to do is respond with faithful obedience. Now some of you might not believe me. Some of you might think I've heard stuff like this before. I've got too much sin. I've got too much stuff. God's not going to use me. He's not writing me into his family tree. He doesn't have any big grand plans for me. I guarantee you, if you went to Rahab a month before those spies hit out at her house, and you said, hey, Rahab, you want to know something cool? The Hebrew God that you're scared of, he's going to use you. He's going to set you up for all of history on par with all the heroes who have preceded you. He's going to write you into his family tree. And he is making beauty out of your brokenness. She would have told you you were crazy. She would have sat right where you are, thinking right what you're thinking. Not me. Not possible. That's silly. Here's what I want you to know. When God looked at Rahab, he didn't see what she was. He saw what he was going to make her into. When God looked at Rahab, he didn't see what she was. He didn't see a broken prostitute in Jericho living a hopeless life. He saw the great, great grandmother of King David. He saw the mom that he was going to entrust to raise Boaz. He saw somebody that he was going to write into his own son's family tree. When God looked at Rahab, he did not see what she saw. He saw what he was going to create. And I want you to know that God looks at you with those same eyes. And all Rahab did was respond with the next step of obedience. She didn't understand all the things. She didn't get all the religion. She didn't know where it was going to go. She didn't understand the Bible. She couldn't quote to you verses. She didn't even know what theology was. She wasn't even a Christian. She just took the first step of obedience. And God began to craft beauty out of her brokenness. And I want you to know this morning that God wants to make something beautiful out of you. Not just in the way that he removed Rahab from her life immediately, but as he wrote a beautiful story about her for generations to come. God has beauty that he's creating you into. You have no idea who your children will come in contact with. You have no idea what kind of grandchildren they're going to have. But God sees them already. And he's fashioning you into that beauty. And all we have to do is to continue, like Rahab, to respond with faithful obedience. And I believe that God will make beauty out of our brokenness as well. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for the story of Rahab. Thank you for including people like that in your Bible. God, we love to learn about David and Moses and these men who were leaders. But God, sometimes that feels so far away from us. We thank you for regular people that you used in extraordinary ways. Father, if we are broken, I just pray that we would trust you to restore us and to make beauty out of that. Father, I pray that we, me, maybe most of all, would see what you see when we look at ourselves. We thank you that you don't see us now as we are, but you see us as what you want to make us into. And I just pray for us that you would give us the courage and the faith to take the next step of obedience as you make beauty out of the things in our life that are broken. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning, I'm Doug Bergeson. Wait, wait, you've got to be kidding me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it just a few months ago when Kyle Tolbert, our youth pastor, came up here to speak? And before he uttered a word, before a single word, good or bad, was out of his mouth, you were applauding him. What do I get? I'll tell you what I get. I get bubkis, nada, nothing. Let me tell you something. It's not lost on us, those of us who are asked to speak in the middle of July, but never ever at Christmas time, and for sure not at Easter. It's not lost on us that we're not on God's A-team. We get it. We're not stupid. So given that, it might be nice if you tried to be a little bit more encouraging and supportive. So let's try this again. I would not have done that. You know, the Bible's very clear that we're to test and approve what we hear, to be discerning about what's being taught, not just to accept it willy-nilly. And here you all are already clapping for me, and you haven't the faintest idea what I'm going to say. Come on, people, you're better than that. Anyways, hopefully it's obvious that I'm just goofing around, as I'm not only thrilled to be here, but I feel immense privilege to be sharing this morning. And just for the record, far from expecting applause, my desperate and sincere prayer and hope is that God will make what I say clear and useful to you all. I'm really excited about this new sermon series that we're starting. In the past, when I've been asked to speak, I've always kind of hemmed and hawed, wanted to think about it. But when Nate called me this time and explained that the new series was going to be on the obscure heroes of the Bible, I was, for some strange reason, I was enthused, and I immediately jumped at the chance. A big part of it might be that it's just different than the norm, and different is sometimes really good. Mix it up a little bit, move off the beaten path. But more than simply serving as a nice change of pace, there's a much more consequential reason for studying these obscure heroes. They have a lot to teach us. Now, there are plenty of times when I wish the Bible was easier to understand and didn't avoid so many questions that I'd like answers to. Wish that it explained a whole bunch of things better. A little less ambiguity and mystery would sometimes be nice. But in response to that wish, I've heard it said that God, whose Spirit inspired every word written, must have included what He thought was important, what He thought we needed to know. So rather than worrying about the stuff that wasn't included, we'd be much better served paying attention to the things and those people and those events that God did include in his word to us. And that brings us back to our sermon series. God saw fit to tell us about these characters and their stories. And for that reason, we are not going to ignore or gloss over or relegate these heroes to a footnote any longer. Instead, we're going to exploit them for all their worth and see what they can teach us, what they can reveal to us, how they might strengthen and encourage us. The Apostle Paul said it this way, for everything that was written in the past, even obscure heroes that maybe we've never heard of, was written to teach us so that through endurance and the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. As I said, I was surprisingly enthused when Nate called me. Not only was I pumped for the series, but one name immediately popped into my head and I knew that was my guy. That was who I was going to talk about, Gamaliel, the great Pharisee and teacher of the law, and what he wisely concluded when confronted by the incredible boldness and defiance of Peter and the other disciples in the earliest times of the Christian movement. Now, how many of you have heard of Gamaliel? You don't have to raise your hands. You know, just wink or smile as I look around the room. Nothing but a sea of blank, expressionless faces. That's perfect. But before we get to Gamaliel, I need to set the table a bit for you, provide the backdrop to help explain why what he does, what he acknowledges is so valuable to me, that his was the first name in all the Bible that popped into my head. In other words, I need to make sure that we're on the same page with respect to one significant foundational point in order for us to see why Gamaliel, who himself is not even a believer in Jesus Christ, is a hero for us today. The key foundational point is to identify the overarching story of the Bible. Some of you are probably going, oh, sheesh, we're not going to be out of here until Tuesday. Not to worry, not to worry. It's not that daunting a task. In a nutshell, the opening chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, reveal that God's loving intent was to provide all that we, His creations, need. Our job, our part of the bargain, is to trust that He is both able and willing to do that on our behalf, and for us to resist the temptation to want to decide for ourselves what's best. The rest of the Bible is just a long and involved telling of our incredible struggle to trust in God rather than ourselves, as well as the remarkable lengths God goes to to make it possible for us ultimately to place our full and abiding confidence in Him. Now, most of you are probably familiar with the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The garden was a fantastic place. Those two have a great life. It's a really sweet setup. There's only one rule, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now, growing up in church, I didn't fully understand the significance of the boundary God established for humankind. My general sense was, you know, God likes rules. He's kind of a stickler about rules. And Adam and Eve got in pretty big trouble because they broke one of them. Well, as I've later come to understand, what actually happened was a much bigger deal than simply breaking a rule. What actually happened struck at the very heart of God's intent for creation. In allowing them to eat from any tree but the one, God was establishing the critical boundary for Adam and Eve and for every human since. God was saying, if you want to enjoy all of the good of my creation and live in my kingdom, you have to trust that I and I alone know what's best for you. And even more than that, you have to trust that I'm both able and willing to provide it to you. And so the questions that's faced Adam and Eve, as well as you and me, is do you believe that? Are you convinced that God knows what's best for you and that He is intent on providing it at all times and in all circumstances? When Eve first faced that question, the fate of all humanity hung in the balance. And what did she decide? Well, it turns out Eve wasn't completely convinced that God could be trusted. And she decided and felt the need to trust in someone else. Eve, that's who she decided to trust. She just trusted in herself instead. And now the serpent was cunning and planted the seed in Eve's mind that although God was certainly able to provide what was best for her, He wasn't willing but was holding something back. The serpent said, come on, Eve, you won't die. God's only worried that if you eat that fruit, you'll be like Him and be able to decide for yourself what's best, then you'll be your own God. And that has been humankind's struggle ever since. In the last book of the Bible, Revelation, it wasn't a question of God was willing to provide for his people, but if he was even able. Written at a time when Christ followers were just undergoing terrific persecution, with their very lives at stake, the facts on the ground were so difficult and so dire that only a nut job would conclude that somehow God was still in control and still in charge. And into that terrifically difficult and stressful situation, the Apostle John shared a vision of being transported up to the throne room of heaven where God sort of pulls back the curtain for a second just to show what's really going on behind the scenes. The message, no matter how things look from your perspective, I am God and there is no other. I have your back now and I have it for all eternity. Nothing can ever separate you from my loving care. Your faith and trust are well placed. God is asking each of us, do you believe, are you completely convinced that I'm both able and willing to provide the very best for you? That's the central question running throughout the entire Bible, and it's the central question of our human existence. But our struggle, our temptation, is to say in all different ways, well, God, to tell you the truth, in this particular area of my life, or in this particular relationship, or in this circumstance at this particular time, I'd like to have a say. I'd rather decide for myself what's best for me, what will make me most content, most comfortable, most safe, most fulfilled, most affirmed, most successful, most happy. After all, wouldn't I know better than anyone else what's in my best interest? That's exactly what Eve did. That's exactly what I do. And that is the root of all sin, a failure to trust in God's promise. We're just not entirely convinced, not enough to give up complete control. A famous passage from Proverbs that many of you probably know by heart is, trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight. But that's not easy. Our world and our culture constantly bombard us from every conceivable angle with arguments that God, even if he does exist, is neither able or willing to provide what's best for us. That life demands we take charge and we're better off when we do. Non-stop appeals to be our own little lords of our own little lives. Now we're going to do a little audience participation here for just a minute. I'd like you all to close your eyes. Alan, keep your eyes closed. Okay. Imagine that you're on the seventh floor of an office building. You are alone, and it's dark. An electrical short circuit has knocked out the lights and started an intense fire, which has engulfed the entire floor and will soon breach the room you're in. The smoke coming in under the door and through the vents is overwhelming, forcing you to drop to your knees. Your eyes are burning and you're beginning to cough uncontrollably. You can open your eyes now. Suddenly, off to your right, you hear a violent pounding on the outside of the far wall. Then the blade of an axe comes crashing through and soon the shape of a firefighter appears in the opening and he shouts, come on, follow me, I'll get you out. Wouldn't he be surprised if you yelled back, oh, thanks, buddy. I'm good. I got this. Of course, no one would do that. No one trapped and on the brink of perishing would respond that way. We would not only listen to the firefighter's commands, we would literally cling to him. We would follow his every word because we implicitly trust him. Not only does he know what he's doing, but he went to great lengths to find and rescue us. And it's plain as day that we desperately need his help. My illustration borders on the ludicrous because we'd never do that. Yet that's what we say to God all the time. I'm good. I got this. Now maybe some of us hear this illustration and say, that's not me. I'm good at trusting. My faith is rock solid. Maybe that's true, at least on the surface. But even for those of us who trust God fully in most areas of our lives, I bet that there are little nooks and crannies. I appreciated you using that earlier. Little pockets where we don't. A relationship, a decision, a priority, a behavior, perhaps, for which we're not convinced God's preferred course of action serves us best. So we plot the course by our own wisdom. We decide for ourselves what's best. And when we do that, we forfeit some portion of the abundant life that God so desperately wants for us. Sadly, doubting God's promises, not being fully convinced that he is both able and willing to provide the best for me in all of life's situations, happens far more than I even recognize. The decision to trust in my own judgment is typically very subtle. So subtle, in fact, that I don't even realize that I'm doing it much of the time. I'll share an example from my own life, but first I have to give you some context. Twenty-six years ago, we moved down here from New Jersey. I quit a really good job on Wall Street. We sold our dream house that we only lived in for two years. We left our beautiful little town and all our friends. We had a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a newborn. We moved for a lot of reasons, but chief among them was my concern that it was all too consuming and that only over time does the true cost of that kind of investment in one's career become apparent? And by that point, it's often too late. The damage has been done. I believe back then, as I still do today, that wherever your treasure is, wherever you invest most of your time, your energy, your ambition, that's where your heart will ultimately be found. And I knew that for me, I couldn't keep doing that job in that city for very long without it, for all practical purposes, becoming my treasure and stealing my heart. Okay, so we did everything they tell you not to do all at the same time. Moved to a different part of the country, changed careers, sold houses, bought houses, had another baby. Deb had just turned 33, and I was 35. The plan was that I would invest our modest nest egg in the financial markets to support our new downsized life, and we'd live happily ever after. Now, fast forward 15 years. I'm meeting Jeff Hancock, who is Grace's teaching pastor at Carolina Ale House. I think it was on a Wednesday afternoon because that's when they had their specials. It's true. Jeff and I had a relationship built largely on a strong and abiding shared love of beer and for the places that happen to serve beer. Is there any stronger foundation for a friendship? Nevertheless, that was ours. So we'd get together every so often. And that particular afternoon, as soon as I sat down, Jeff asked if there was something wrong. And I started weeping and began to share with him how I was in the midst of suffering what for me was a breathtaking financial loss in the futures market. How I couldn't sleep, how it had stolen all of my joy, how it affected all of my personal interactions, including my most cherished ones with my wife and kids. Excuse me. With the child in college and two in high school, how it jeopardized everything Deb and I had planned. That loss was wreaking havoc in my life. Now, I shared with Jeff that afternoon that, yes, I was obviously sad to have lost so much of our nest egg at such a critical time. Yes, I was sorry for my stubbornness, my stupidity. Yes, I was sorry for my arrogance not to respect the markets. All that was true. Yet the reason I was weeping, what most undid me, was what the loss revealed about where I placed my trust. How it betrayed the fact that much of my confidence, my security, and my hope was wrapped up in our little nest egg, and that the notion that I trusted God was clearly not true, if not a bald-faced lie. And that is what makes it so tricky, because a lot of the time our struggles to trust are in those gray areas, things which in and of themselves don't strike us being all that bad or sinful. Nevertheless, we are not doing what God is asking us to do, to trust him with everything and in every situation. We simply aren't convinced that his way is always the best way. In answer to his question, do you believe that I am both able and willing to provide all that you need, we are saying no, not always. In the example I just shared from my own life, my answer was clearly no, I'm not completely convinced. In addition to trusting you, I would like my nest egg back. When we worry about things, even very serious things, we are wrestling with the question, will I trust God with my crisis? Is He capable to handle it on my behalf? Once again, our worrying says no, as it reveals that we're simply not convinced that God can handle the situation, or at least not to our satisfaction. According to the Bible, worry is the opposite of trust. When we choose not to forgive someone, contrary to God's clear desire and instruction, what are we doing? In not so many words, we are saying, I don't believe that God knows what's best for me. What about how we spend our money? I like to think that I include God in those discussions. But what I really do is only involve him in the discussion about the small portion that I might realistically earmark for charity. Concerning the other much bigger chunk, the 80, 90, or 95%, I say, wait just a second, God. Stay in your lane, buddy. I gave you some. This over here is for me to decide what to do. Scripture encourages us to confess our sins to one another, even and perhaps especially the deepest, darkest, and most shameful ones. My immediate response is to say, no, thank you, over my dead body. No way can that possibly be in my best interest. We're encouraged as believers to always be prepared to share why our hope is in Jesus Christ. I don't do it. I don't want to offend this person or turn them off. I don't want to be thought a weirdo or a creep. I'm a confident person generally. I'll share my opinion on almost any topic with almost anyone. But for some strange reason, I don't trust that God will have my back if I share my faith. God says be thankful at all times and in all circumstances. But I don't want to always be thankful, and there just so happens to be things in my life that I'm not thankful for. Yet having a spirit of appreciation and thankfulness is one command of God's that I've come to acknowledge clearly leads to joy and abundant life. I think of the people I know who are most pleasant and encouraging to be around, the ones that are most nutritious for me. Almost without exception, there are people who live life in a spirit of thanksgiving. The old saying is true, it's not happy people who are thankful, it's thankful people who are happy. Ironically, even knowing this, there are still times when I choose to defy God's good intent for my life and instead choose the way of the woe-is-me, self-pitting grumpus. Now, I could go on and on, but if each of us took a deep dive into our motivations for doing some things and not others, for worrying about things over which we have little control, for habitually engaging in certain behaviors or responding in certain ways, for placing so much importance on what others think, we would understand more clearly that, at least in those instances, we're not fully convinced that God always has our best interests at heart or that His way is always best, that He is completely trustworthy in all of life's circumstances, that He is intent on giving us life to the full, the life that is truly life, if only we would trust. And that, at long last, brings us to our hero, Gamaliel. What he offers is a simple proof, evidence to bolster our conviction that the God we worship deserves our full confidence and trust. I've never been a fan of belief for belief's sake. Don't care how sincere it might be. In other words, if I'm going to believe that God always has my best interest at heart and is able and willing to provide it to me, I want it to be true. More than that, I need to be convinced that it's true if I'm ever going to fully trust in it. Otherwise, as we've seen this morning, I'm going to succumb to the temptation to lean on my own wisdom and judgment. This is where the battle lines are drawn and the war for my trust is waged. And this is where Gamaliel's cool logic and reasoning come through in the clutch. Now let's go to the story in the book of Acts and jump into the action. Our story takes place in Jerusalem, not long after the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. The Christian church is in its infancy and growing rapidly. The Jewish establishment is nervous and on edge. The disciples, Peter and John, have just healed a beggar who had been crippled from birth. Everyone was amazed, and when Peter saw their reaction, he said, men of Israel, why does this surprise you? Why do you stare at us as if it's by our own power or godliness that we had made this man walk? You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this. By faith in the name of Jesus, the man you see and know was made strong. It is in Jesus' name and the faith that comes through him that has given this complete healing to him, as you can all see. While they were still speaking, the Jewish leaders, none too pleased with Peter and John's message, arrested them and threw them in jail for the night. The next day, they were brought before their rulers and elders and teachers of the law who questioned them about the healing. By what power or what name did you do this? And Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, replied, Let me interrupt our story for just a second to point out what remarkable change can happen in the hearts and minds of ordinary men and women when convinced of God's truth and imbued with His Spirit. Just a short time ago, these same disciples were the gang that couldn't shoot straight, timid and wavering, untrusting, unreliable, and unconvinced. Now look, there's hope for all of us. Now back to our story. The Jewish leaders were astonished by the courage of Peter and John, especially when they realized they were ordinary unschooled guys and weren't sure what to do as they had to admit that the healing was a fantastic, outstanding miracle which they couldn't deny. And they couldn't really punish them because everybody was running around praising God because of that miracle. So they issued some threats and ordered Peter and John not to speak about this Jesus. However, even after the imprisonment and threats, the disciples continued to preach, teach, and heal until the high priest and his associates could not stand it any longer and arrested them again. But that night, an angel of the Lord opened the doors of the jail in order the disciples to go back to the temple and tell the people the full message of this new life. When all the rulers assembled the next morning and sent for Peter and John, they were surprised to learn that although the jail was locked and secure, nobody was inside. The Bible says they were puzzled by this. I love the understatement. I bet they were puzzled when they later learned that the men were back in the temple court preaching and teaching. They went and got them, but not by force for fear of what the people might do. The high priest again questioned them, and now reading from Acts 5, 28 through 39. This is the high priest. We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, he said. Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man's blood. Peter and John and the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him. When they heard this, they were furious and wanted to put them to death. But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law who was honored by all the people, stood up in the Sanhedrin and ordered that the men be put outside for a little while. Then he addressed them, men of Israel, consider carefully what you intend to do to these men. Some time ago, Thudas appeared, claiming to be someone, and about 400 men rallied to him. He was killed, and all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing. After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too wasailed, and the apostles were let go. And now here, for you all this morning, is the $64,000 question of the day. If Gamaliel, the wisest and most esteemed teacher of the day, could be here with us this morning, is there any doubt that he would conclude if their purpose is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men. You will only find yourselves fighting against God. Well, it hasn't been stopped. There has been nothing like it in all of human history. No other power or movement or belief system has come close. Down through all the centuries, across every people group and culture on earth, and reaching the furthest corners of our planet, God has been on the move, faithful to all his promises. The prophet Isaiah wrote about God's faithfulness this way. and my thoughts than your thoughts. As the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth. It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. And that's why Gamaliel is a hero to me. His wisdom and insight remind me again that God is true to his word always and is going to do what he promised to do. If I'm going to trust God completely and not rely on my own wisdom, but surrender control in all areas of my life, not just some of them, I need that assurance. Our God is both able and willing to provide all that we need. My hope and prayer for all of us this morning is that the words of the Apostle Paul might be our words. I know whom I have believed, and I'm convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day. Thank you. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for loving us. Thank you for all these people who carved out time on a hot Sunday morning to come to know you better and to worship you. Lord, thank you for pursuing us. Obviously, forgive us for all the times that we are trust wavers. We're simply not convinced that you're completely trustworthy in all of life's situations. Thank you for the hope that you give us through your son. And it's his name we pray. Amen.

My name is Nate. I'm the lead pastor here. Thanks for being here on this Sunday, the last Sunday in our series called Best Practices. The idea behind this series is that I believe that there are some habits or some practices, some disciplines that we can develop in our life that are really the best disciplines or the best practices that anybody can develop ever. That if we'll develop these, if we will make these a part of our life, they will make us better wives and better mothers, better husbands and better fathers, better children, better employees and employers, better friends and better neighbors. They will make us better people. More importantly than that, if we will instill these disciplines in our life, we will know God better. We will know him more deeply. We will experience the joy and the peace that we believe God offers. So here's what I'm doing as we move through this together. I'm assuming that if you're here in June, that you care at least a little bit about your relationship with God, okay? I don't you know this in church parlance, in the church business, or whatever you want to call it, but summertime is not like high visitor attendance time. Summertime is people who mean it come to church. So if you're here, I'm assuming that you do care to some degree or another about your relationship with God. If you're here because you are checking it out and you're not sure yet and you wouldn't even say yet that I do have a relationship with God, then I hope that this is a way for you to just assess some things and analyze some things and kind of look at and get a peek at Christianity. But as we've been going through the series, we looked at some practices that are really best for us, like reading the Bible on a regular basis. We kind of looked at how to do that and what keeps us from doing that and how we can make that a part of our life. We looked at worship in the second week. Last week, we looked at prayer and this idea of reducing ourselves to the need to pray. Don't wait for life to do that to us, but go ahead and every day admit that there's things that we need God for and spend time in prayer. And in that way, we can move further to being obedient to that command to pray without ceasing, which is a really challenging instruction in Thessalonians. This morning, what I want to do is kind of clean up the series and mention a couple best practices, a couple spiritual disciplines that maybe are a little bit less heralded, a little bit less known, a little bit more forgotten. These all probably deserve their own week, but I'm excited about our next series. I wanted to get to it. This one's a tight four-week series, so we're going to kind of hit three different things this week. So my hope for you is maybe all three of these things are great for you and you can instill all of them. Maybe you're already doing one or two, but I hope that everybody today can take home something that they want to begin to instill in their life or a discipline that they want to renew in their life. So that's my goal for you. So as we look at these three practices that we're going to cover today, one of the less heralded spiritual practices or spiritual disciplines that I wanted to talk about is the practice of giving, the practice of being generous, the practice of giving of our finances. Now, as I say that, if you're thinking along with me, okay, if you're anything like me, then your thought process might go something like this, okay? We're doing a sermon on spiritual disciplines. First thing out of the gate is that I need to give to the church. It's pretty self-serving, dude. Like, you're going to get up there, you're going to tell me these are things God really wants me to do, and then the very first one is, bam, you should give to the church. Okay, listen, I don't blame you for thinking that. I would be thinking that if I were you, but a couple of things to clarify. First of all, when I talk about giving, it's only the second time I've talked about it since I became the pastor here two and a half years ago. But every time I do talk about it, I want to be sure that we cover this thing biblically. And I want to make some points. There's some ways that we talk about giving that just aren't true. The New Testament, which it doesn't mean the Old Testament isn't valuable, but the New Testament is our authority as we look for ways to live our life. The New Testament doesn't tell us to give 10%, and it doesn't tell us that we have to give to the local church. So when I say that we should give, that we should instill the spiritual discipline of giving, I'm not telling you that you should give 10% of your income to grace. That's not what I'm telling you. So in that way, it's not self-serving. What I'm telling you is the New Testament says that we should be a people who are generous, that we should be a people who give. Jesus talks about giving in such a way that he assumes that you will do it when you give. So it's to happen, when you give, give in such a way that the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing. We see a story about a widow that gave out of her poverty, and Jesus says that's a better, that's a bigger gift, a more meaningful gift than the wealthy person who gives out of their wealth, because her gift required faith, right? We see these instructions about giving, and we know that to give is a good thing. We know that that's something that the Bible talks about. But again, we're to give to God, give to things that are building God's kingdom. So it doesn't necessarily mean the local church. Paul does talk about this idea that if somebody is ministering to you and you're benefiting from that, that we should make it possible for them to continue to do that, that we should support them. But that's as close as we come to me being able to leverage the Bible to say that you have to give your money to grace. So that's really not what I'm talking about. Now, if grace is doing things that you believe in, that you want to support, then support it. Like Mikey, the guy that did the announcements, which is so well, I mean, he knocked those out of the park. When Mikey did those announcements, he told you guys that we were in Mexico right now, that we had two, that we had a team of students down in Mexico and that we're building two homes. I'll just tell you, those homes are $6,000 a piece. The missions committee that we have here, in their generosity, said, we want to go ahead and pay for you guys to build two houses so that two families who live on a dollar a day or less can have a home that they so desperately need just across the border in Mexico. They were able to do that because 10% of everything that's given to Grace goes to ministries happening outside the walls of grace. So if you've ever given, then you are a part of that. If you'd like to be a part of that moving forward, then you can give and you will be. Or if you'd like to be a part of other things moving forward, give to Addis Jamari, a great ministry going on in Ethiopia where they are cutting off sex trafficking at the front. They're nipping it in the bud before it even starts. They take girls that age out of an orphanage and they put them in a home and they disciple them and they teach them skills because there's a very high likelihood that they would end up in some sort of trafficking industry if they did not. And now they're going to the families that have to put up kids for adoption because they simply can't afford the children that they're having, and they're giving them training and investing money in them so that on the front end, those kids don't even have to go to an orphanage. So be a part of something like that. Be a part of faith ministry where our kids are now building homes for families that desperately need them. The instruction in the New Testament is that we should give and that we should be generous, that we should be conduits of God's generosity. And you may think, how is this a spiritual discipline? I know that that's something that we're supposed to do. I get it that that's instructed in the New Testament, but how are we supposed to do that? Why is that a spiritual discipline? And I would just submit that maybe we don't think about giving as a spiritual discipline because we've heard it taught poorly, or we've thought about it in incorrect ways. I've sat in services and listened to sermons before where people talk about giving as if it's some sort of investment scheme. They'll quote a verse in Micah, and they'll say, if you bring your tithe into the storehouse, then God's going to bless you and fill your barns. And it's almost this idea that if you'll give to the church, God's going to give you even more money. That's dumb. That's not how that works. Charitable giving isn't some sort of divine investment scheme, okay, where God just makes you rich because you give to other people. That's how jerks take advantage of ignorant people. That's how that works. So that's not true. It's not some investment scheme. Will you get blessed when you give? Absolutely. Is it going to be by more money in your account? Probably not. So that's not how that works. The other thing is we get guilted into it, right? God's done so much for you, the least you could do is give a little bit for him. And then it feels like this thing that we have to do out of obligation when really that's not what giving is. The reason I think that giving is a spiritual discipline is because giving builds your faith while we participate in God's goodness. Giving builds our faith while we participate in the goodness of God. I'll tell you why I think this. This was, and I have to preface this story. Jen is against me sharing this story because in this story, we stumbled into some obedience. I feel obligated to remind you that I'm an egotistical jerk and that I don't always do good things. But in this story, I'm going to do something good, okay? But now I feel like everything's balanced and that we're fine. About four years ago, I guess it was, it was December. Lily was due in January. Our only child was due in January. And we had managed to save up some money to have the kid and take the hit of Jen not being in work. Jen worked part-time. I worked at a church. I was a student pastor, a small groups pastor. And believe it or not, I did not make a ton of money. So for us to have money set aside was a big deal. We had about $5,000 set aside. And I'll just be transparent with you. we had not had that much money set aside in our marriage ever. So we were pretty thrilled that we had this amount set aside to be able to have Lillian be responsible for us to miss because she worked part-time as an office manager and she wasn't going to get those hours and we're going to have medical bills and you know how it goes. So we're feeling good about that. Well, then in late November, her car stopped working. So I had it towed to a guy that went to the church, a guy named Kelly McCart. And Kelly was looking at the car. He calls me one day. I was on the golf course. I mean, it's hard. We didn't have any money. By the way, I was golfing during work hours. I was on the golf course. He calls me. I said, hey, dude, how you doing? He says, I'm doing better than you will be. And I went, oh, no. I said, what's up? He goes, it's the engine. I said, ugh. He said, it needs to be replaced. And I'm like, what do I do? Do you think I should do it, or do you think I should just trash it and buy a new car? He goes, I think you should replace it. It's a good car. It's a Toyota 4Runner. I said, all right, how much is it going to cost? He said, $5,000. Son of a gun. So I had to go home, and I think I waited a day or two to tell Jen. You know, like, how's the car? Eh, it's fine. You know, I didn't, I just didn't, she's a very pregnant lady and I didn't want her to have to deal with the stress that I was dealing with. Because it's like, my goodness, how, how are we going to pay our bills in January? Like, how are we even going to make it? I don't want to do the humiliating thing of going to my parents and be like, we're, we're screw ups. Can you please give us money? Like, I didn't want to do that. So I was just really stressed. In the midst of this, it was time to give the Christmas offering at the church that we went to. Jen and I had prayed about it, and we had conferred, and we had each agreed that we, that year, wanted to give $500. But then this thing happened, and now we don't have any money. But it's time for the Christmas offering to happen. And I prayed about it, and I just kind of felt, you know, if I can trust him with $500 when we feel secure about our finances, then I ought to be able to trust him when I don't. And I feel like this is what God has asked us to do. So we said, all right, we'll do it. And we gave the $500. Two days later, friends of ours from the church, our age, not like grandparents or something, peers come up to us, come up to me after a service, and they said, hey, we don't know why, but the Lord just kind of put you on our heart this week. So we just wanted to say Merry Christmas, and they handed me an envelope. I take the envelope home, and inside is a check for $500. Yo. So I kind of start crying a little bit. I show it to Jen. And to me, that was God's way of saying, I'm going to take care of you. I have 1,000 sheep on 1,000 hills. I have all the money that I can possibly need. I'm going to take care of you. You did the right thing. I'm going to take care of you. I have a thousand sheep on a thousand hills. I have all the money that I can possibly need. I'm going to take care of you. You did the right thing. I'm going to take care of you. I wish I could chronicle for you the ways that God showed up in January and February so that we didn't have any need. The way that he just took care of all the things that we were concerned about. I think because we were able to stumble into obedience in that situation. But the reason I'm sharing that story is because do you not think that after we decided to give that money and then saw God deliver us in that way, do you not think that built my faith a little bit? Do you not think that helped me trust God even more? And then the cool part is the family that did it, a family called, named the Calders, they had no idea what was going on in our life. And then after they gave it, I shared with them our story. Do you not think that built their faith a little bit? Of them just sitting there going, I feel a prompting that we should try to take care of Jen and Nate. You don't think that built their faith to do that? I think that when we give, we create opportunities for God to show up and show us that he's going to take care of us. When we give, we create opportunities to be on the other end of stories like that, to know that what we gave was used for something far better than whatever we were going to spend it on to begin with. And when we do that, not only does it build our faith, but it allows us to experience the goodness of God as we are conduits of his generosity. That's why I think that giving is a spiritual discipline. Because I think it's something that builds our faith. So if that's not a part of your life, I know, I know that's a tough thing. That's a hard thing. Just practically, it's a hard thing. And there's questions around giving. Do I give 10%? I think that's the tithe. Listen, the New Testament doesn't really tell you a percentage. I think 10% is a good baseline. But I would tell you to just try to get into the habit of regularly giving anything to any ministry that's building God's kingdom. And let God show up. Let that build your faith. Get some experience in participating in the goodness of God in that way. If that's not a part of your life and you want to know God and you want to follow these steps and you want to instill these practices in your life, just find a way that feels right to you. Pray about it. Father, what would you have me do? And give in that way and watch God show up. So that's the first thing that I would encourage you in today is the practice of giving. The second thing is the practice, and you guys are going to be like, what in the world is he talking about? The practice of content consumption. The practice of content consumption. Here's the idea. I'm not going to spend long on this. I don't think I need to make a whole bunch of flowery points around it. I think that you guys can understand this, okay? There's a verse that I love in Philippians. It's one of my favorite verses. It's in chapter 4, Philippians 4, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Now that's a challenging voice. That's a challenging verse. If you think about the things that you allow into your life, the things that you watch, the things that... This steps on my toes, too. The things that you're not even sensitive to on Netflix anymore. Right? The shows that you watch. You're like, but that show has all that stuff in it. Yeah, it doesn't really bother me. Should it? Think about the stuff that you allow into your life. And if it's obedient to this, whatsoever things are just, pure, lovely, commendable, honorable, excellent, there's anything worthy of praise or praiseworthy. Think about these things. How good are we doing at that? And so I just kind of think, if this is something that I want to do, if I want my mind focused on things that are obedient to Philippians 4.8, that are praiseworthy and honorable, and all of those things, that's what I want. How do I do that? How do I organize my life around those things? I think part of it is the content that we consume. And I would ask you, for in your life, besides Sunday morning, besides whatever comes out of my mouth on Sundays, which, that's a low bar, what spiritually nourishing things are you getting in your life? What else is spiritually nourishing you? Outside of random conversations you might have with your friends that you do find encouraging or conversations that you might have with your spouse that you find encouraging, what is in your life that is there to spiritually nourish you, to build you up spiritually? For years and years and years, for centuries, the only option has been to read. And if you're not a reader, if you don't like doing that, which I totally understand, then it's really difficult to consume any spiritual content during the week that's spiritually nourishing in any way, because reading was the option. If you are a reader, I would encourage you, make books that are spiritually encouraging a regular part of your discipline. In my personal quiet time, when I'm really doing it well, when I'm really walking in consistency, I'll read the Bible. I'll let that push me into a time of prayer. And then when I'm done praying, I'll read a spiritually formative book until Lily wakes up. That's kind of how it goes. So if you're a reader, then choose books that nourish you spiritually. But if you're not, I just want to, on a practical level, let you know that there are some really great options out there for you. And I want to talk to you about this idea of harnessing the dead spaces in our schedules because we're all very busy. But there's these things called podcasts that you should really listen to. They're phenomenal. If you don't know what podcasts are, ask someone around you after the service. We will give you a one-day moratorium of not making fun of you or even calling you names for that. Just ask somebody around you, what's a podcast? How do I find them? How do I assess them on my phone. All of you have phones and you can get podcasts on all of them, okay? These podcasts are great because all of the sudden I can listen to sermons from all over the world. I can listen to people have discussions about things that are spiritually formative from all over the world. I can listen to all kinds of people. Do you understand that for centuries and centuries and centuries, the only spiritually building, nourishing thing that people got was whatever their pastor said on Sunday. And that's a bummer. Now you have access to the best pastors in the world who are preaching every week and you can listen to their sermons every week. So I want to encourage you to look for the dead spaces in your schedule. If you have a commute over 10 minutes, use that to listen to something that's spiritually formative. If you go on a walk with your dog, put in some headphones, listen to something that nourishes you spiritually. When you're at the gym, can we just all agree that almost everybody in this room is old enough to no longer need pump-up music? Nothing that you're doing requires you to be pumped up, okay? Nothing. Nobody in this room, I'm looking at you right now, nobody in this room, except for maybe Mikey, is lifting any amount of weight that requires you to be jacked. So just listen to something. Listen to something that's helpful. Listen to something that informs you, that nourishes you, that encourages you, that's spiritually formative. I have a buddy, he goes to the church, I'll tell on him. He's not here this week, and we'll see if he mentions anything to me because he listened to the sermon. But Shane Smith, and he has Smith, he has to drive to Durham every day for work, and he started listening to sermons on his drives. That dude texts me questions a couple times a week. He's asking me stuff. He's wanting to understand Scripture. He's saying, hey, I heard this taught to me. What do you think of this? He is chewing on it. He's considering it. He shows up to my 6 a.m. Bible study. I have watched his life change over the past several months. And one of the biggest things is because he takes time in his day, he looks at that drive not as a burden but as an opportunity to consume some content that's going to nourish him spiritually. And it's changed him and his family. Look for those opportunities in your life and find things that we can listen to. On your bulletin there, I emailed some people in the church who I know listen to podcasts, and I compiled some there for you. So there's recommendations there if you need some. The other thing I would say on this point is there's an app called Audible. And that you can subscribe for like 14 bucks a month and download books. You get one book a month and then they read it to you. You can listen to it. So if you're not a reader, but you're jealous of all the people you know who do read and seem to have things to contribute at parties and at like Bible study and stuff, and you'd like to be one of those people, you can game the system and have somebody else read it to you while you cut the grass. That's really great. So you can subscribe to Audible and you can get these books going in your headphones. So I just want to impress upon you this idea of consuming content that can help you. I think it's a discipline that we should all have and be careful with. The last one I want to talk about today is the practice of fasting. The practice of fasting. Now, fasting's an interesting thing. Fasting shows up in the Bible a lot. And fasting, if you spend any time around church, is something that we've heard of. If you grew up in a Catholic environment or an environment that observed Lent, then you know the idea of fasting for 40 days from certain things. And so we all kind of understand what fasting is. But as I thought about it this week, to put it in front of you, there's a couple things that I thought were interesting. First of all, we can fast for a bunch of different reasons. In 1 Samuel, we see David fast because he's mourning. He's lost his son. He's mourning the loss of his son. And so he fasts and he's brokenhearted before the Lord. We also see David fast in repentance. He's done something that he very much regrets. He made a moral misstep. He sinned before the Lord. And as a form of repentance, he pursues God by fasting. And maybe that's what some of us need to do. Maybe some of us have something in our life that's just eating our lunch that we'd love to not be a part of our life, but it just persists and it just pervades and it's just always there. Have we ever fasted over it and said, God, please take this from me? There's this really interesting passage in the New Testament in Matthew where Jesus says that this type of demon is only cast out through fasting and prayer. Like it somehow intensifies our prayer. We can fast when we're seeking guidance. In Acts chapter 13, it says that the church was getting together, and after a season of prayer and fasting, that they set aside Paul and Barnabas to go on their missionary journeys. We can, when we don't know what to do, when we don't know what's next, we can set aside some time to fast and pursue God in that. But I think maybe the most interesting thing that I saw about fasting is that Jesus just assumes that you do it. See, I think that when we hear fasting, there's a part of us that goes, okay, that's for like, that's for the ninja Christians, right? That's for the Navy SEAL Christians. Like, I'm just regular, just getting by, trying to not do dumb stuff Christian. That's for like super intense, big time Christian. Okay. Do you know in the New Testament, there's no delineation. There's no stages of Christians. You don't get to be like a white belt while that dude's a black belt. You don't get to do that. We're all on the same path moving towards the same goal of walking with God and being disciples of God. And part of that path is this assumption by Jesus that we would fast. Because he tells us in Matthew, he says, when you fast, don't do it like the religious hypocrites do it. Don't walk around with a sunken in face and all sad and be like, what's wrong with you? Be like, I'm fasting because I'm super spiritual. Don't do that. Splash water on your face. Fake it. Try to sneak it by people. Don't let anybody know what you're doing. But the interesting thing to me is this assumption by Jesus that it's a part of your life. And I know that for me, I'm not speaking for you. I'm sure that I'm behind the bell curve on this and you guys are all way ahead of me. But for me, until recent years, that was not a regular part of my life. I still, I fast with the elders from time to time, and I'm still bad at it. Honestly, half the time I fast with the elders, I have to email them the day before and be like, guys, I'm so sorry. I made a lunch appointment tomorrow, and I'm definitely going to eat tacos. So I kind of ruin that for us. It's true. The elders are nodding their heads at me right now, like, yeah, we know. And they're secretly grateful for it, so don't let them talk bad about me after this. They like it when I do that. But it's not really a part of our lives. We don't do it as a regular thing. I bet most of us in here can't remember the last time we did it. But see, Jesus assumes that we fast. And he doesn't assume that it's for, the super intense believers. It's for all of us. And the more I looked into it and thought about what it meant and what it was and why would Jesus assume that we did this, the more apparent it became that it's this picture of something. There's a book by a girl named Margaret Feinberg. I think that's her last name. Is that her last name? Yeah. And it's called Taste and See. Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, told me about it, and I started reading it. It's really good. It's gotten me firing on a bunch of different things. I'm really considering doing a whole series on food. I feel like I'm an expert on this. I could bring a lot to the table. See what I did there? Yeah. Okay, I feel like I could do a lot with that, and I want to expound more on this later. But fundamental to this book is this idea that God could have created us any way he wanted to. He could have had us nourish ourselves any way he wanted to. We could have gotten our energy from the sun. We could have worked on photosynthesis like plants. He didn't have to make people who had to eat. He didn't have to make people who had to eat so often, but he did. And it's interesting to think that maybe he did that as a constant daily reminder of our spiritual need for him. As a constant daily reminder that our appetite for food, our body's appetite for food should be the same as our spirit's appetite for God. And in that way, fasting is a physical reminder of a spiritual need. The more I started thinking about this, the more I realized that food is a picture. Every time we sit down at a table and we eat because we need it, that's a physical picture of what our spiritual body needs. And so when we fast, it's an acute reminder of that. It's an intense reminder of that. It forces us to focus on this picture that exists with us every day of our life. And every time we feel the hunger pangs in a fast, that's why some people say, well, you can fast from different things. You can fast from alcohol, or you can fast from social media, or I'm going to put down my phone, or I'm not going to do this, or I'm not going to do that. I'm going to fast from TV. And those are fine. But there's nothing quite like fasting from food. Because it's a physical reminder of a spiritual need. And as we feel those pangs of hunger, gosh, I wish I could eat right now. That's a reminder. This is how your spirit longs for God. I've even gotten to the habit of, on the occasion when I'm actually good at fasting, I'll get a little headachy. And it's really tempting because I still have a lot to do in my day. I'm usually still about to go to an elder meeting. I have other things that I have to accomplish. I'm trying to get a sermon done, whatever it is. And it's tempting to eat something because I've got to stave off this headache because I can't really do my job if I'm not feeling well. So I need to take care of myself. And I'll start to go down that road. But it's a reminder. The way that your body begins to ache because you haven't had food is the way that your spiritual body begins to ache when you're not locked into God. We don't feel it as acutely, and we don't feel it as immediately. And I think that's why God gives us this physical reminder all the time. When we don't eat, we know it. And when food is good, and the meal is good, and we're around other people, and we're around our friends, it's one of the best experiences in life. And I just think it's this one-for-one picture of our need for God. So fasting serves as an acute reminder of our spiritual need. And if nothing else, it brings to the forefront of our mind our spiritual need for God. And so if fasting isn't a regular part of your life, I would encourage you to try it. Try it and let that drive you into prayer. Try it and let that take you into a place where you admit and acknowledge your spiritual need for God. I had a friend who, he's got three boys. This is the worship pastor I used to work with in another church. For all three boys, the week they were born, he fasted for a week and prayed for them. Because those were his boys, and he wants them to grow up to be godly men, and so he pursued the Lord after them. If you've got a big decision coming up and you don't know what to do, have you fasted about it? If there's a sin in your life that's just kicking your tail and you'd love to be done with it, have you fasted about it? If you'd like to get into these spiritual disciplines more but can't seem to find that in yourself, have you fasted about that? I want to encourage you to consider the spiritual discipline of fasting. Now, as we wrap up the series, to me, there's this key question, the answer to which dictates all of our actions after being asked the question. So as we wrap up the series in light of all of these practices, the practice of reading scripture, the practice of worshiping God, the practice of prayer, of giving, of consuming the right content, of fasting, all these different things that we can instill in our life so that we could pursue God better, I think that there is a key question. And when I say key question, what I mean is the answer to this question really determines all of your actions after you answer it. And I get this idea from a book that Jen and I have recently been given. A lot of you know that cancer has become part of our reality and our family in 2019. And so when that became a part of our reality, people started giving us different things and somebody gave us a book. It's called Chris Beats Cancer. And at the beginning of this book, there's a question. And the question is, do you want to live? And it may seem like a simple enough question, but it's really profound in how you answer it. Do you want to live? Because what's about to follow in that book, what he's about to tell you to do, is for most people a radical change in your lifestyle and your diet and your habits. So he sets it up with, do you want to live? The implication is, if the answer is yes, then you'll be willing to do whatever it takes to live. If the answer is no, that's a different conversation. And for those battling that disease, that's a more tricky question than you would think. So I think it's this key question. Do you want to live? If you do, then you will do whatever it takes to accomplish that. And I think that there's a key question for us as we consider our relationship with God, and it's this. Do you want to know God? Do

Well, good morning, Grace Raleigh. Good morning. Oh, thank you. First service didn't do that. So, appreciate it. Nice, warm welcome. As Nate said, I am Erin. I'm one of the pastors here, and I am beyond thrilled to be up here this morning. I'm getting a chance to kind of hang out with you. You know, there's a calendar kind of in the preaching world, and that's very interesting. And so Nate just did 12 weeks on John, and then he starts next week with the forgotten God. So there was this blank Sunday that just kind of sat in the middle. And so I get to be that middle, which is a really cool place to be. But I also meant that I got the chance to kind of pick what I wanted to talk about, which is even cooler yet. So not being part of the series, I get the opportunity to do my thing. I'm not alone kind of wrapped up the John series, and I was caught at that moment by this interaction between Peter and Jesus. As he wrapped up the John series, he talked a whole lot about Peter's restoration, and there's this moment that after Peter has denied Jesus, Jesus has died, he's risen, he comes back to his followers, and he has this really sweet moment with Peter. And he says, Peter, do you love me? And Peter's response is, yes, Lord, you know I do. And at that point in time, Jesus looks at him and he says to Peter, then go and be who it is that I created you to be. Stop dis believing a lie that somehow his past and all that he had done previously was disqualifying him for being all that God had created him to be and to do. And so I wonder who else out there has actually believed this lie? Because like I know I have. About seven years ago or so, I joined Grace Raleigh's staff team as an interim. I came on, I was a long-term volunteer inside of the kids program and there was a need and they tapped me and said, you're going to come do this, right? And I said, excuse me, long-time volunteers take that into consideration what happens. So they tapped me. I said, yes. I stepped in as the interim and about thinking, you know, they're going to hire somebody else and we're all good. Well, nine months later, there's still no director. And at this point in time, God is starting to do a little work in my heart that says it's time for you to step up and to make application. Wrong. That was my response to God. I actually looked at him. I kind of unrolled this long litany of reasons why I was not the right person to do this job. Here, let me tell you why, Lord. Let's see. I work already with my husband. I have two kids at home. I have to shuttle them back and forth. Let's see what else. Oh, wait. These might be biggies. I don't have a degree. I have no seminary training. I am not your girl. Thank you. End of discussion. And so again, like Peter, I'm choosing to believe that because I don't have a piece of paper or I don't have some sort of, pedigree that I can't be used by God in the way that God wants me to be used. I have somewhere, somehow forgotten who God is and who he has said that I am. So Grace Raleigh, what lies are you guys believing currently? Are you a parent who maybe looks at your kids and goes, Lord, why? Like, why did you trust me with these kids? I yell. I know I'm somehow going to warp them. They're going to come out rotten children. Or maybe, yeah, I've done it, y'all. I have said that in my head before. Lord, please don't let me warp them. But or maybe you're the parent that believes that your child's poor choices are somehow a reflection of you and your parenting skills. Or maybe you're in a relationship. Spouse, not a spouse. Maybe you're just in a relationship. And you're all of a sudden looking at this going, we've got a problem. I can't be this spouse. I come from a broken home, which means that ultimately my home's going to be broken too because I don't have what it takes to be the good wife or to be the good husband. Or maybe there's a broken relationship between you and your parents and you're like, done. End of story. I've done way too much. I can't make that connection again with them. Whatever it may be. Or maybe, just maybe, you're sitting in this room going, but Erin, my past is just too colorful. It's too full of sin. It's too full of mistakes. There's no way that God could possibly use me and all of my baggage. So today what I want to do is I want to introduce you to a guy. His name is Gideon. And Gideon is just like us. He's living in this place of being doubtful of who he is. He's living in this place of fear and saying there's no way that he can be used by God. So today we're going to hang out in Judges chapter 6. So if you want to grab your Bibles, you can do that to follow along. You don't have to. We'll throw scripture on the screen. It's totally up to you. But Judges chapter 6 is where we're starting. So let's give you a little background to help maybe understand where Gideon was. Judges chapter 6 is a place where we meet the Israelites or see the Israelites, which were God's chosen people. And they're in between Joshua, who led them into the promised land, and then their king in Saul. So they're in this period where there's not really a leader or a ruler, and so they're kind of left on their own. They're hanging out in this land that God's provided for them. So it should be a great place. But there's also other people that live in this land. And the other people that live in this land follow other gods and do bad things, for lack of a better word. And so what happens in Judges is this moment with the Israelites were left to their own accord. They start to follow the ways of the others. They start to worship other gods and they start to do, as scripture put it, what's evil in the sight of the Lord. Well, as you and I both know, the Lord doesn't sit really well with all of that. So he takes them and he says, okay, well then it's time for a little punishment. He sends in an oppressor. They spend a period of time with the Israelites, pushing the Israelites down to a point where they then all of a sudden, at a point of desperation, they cry out to God and say, save us. And because our God is so merciful, he looks at them and says, okay. He sends them a judge. The judge helps them to defeat their oppressors. There's peace in the land. And then the judge dies. And guess what happens? It starts all over again. In our house, when my kids were little, we called this the vicious cycle. Somebody's got to be willing to hop off or the cycle continues, right? So Israel, though, isn't willing their oppressors. And so the Israelites lived in this beautiful, fertile valley. They would go in and they would plant their crops and they would raise their animals and the world was just fabulous. And then guess what? Here comes time for harvest. And instead of seeing the Israelites go into their valley and do their harvest, you saw them run in, grab what they could possibly grab, and run for the hills. They'd hide in caves and cower in fear because if you looked to the east, here comes the Midianites and all of their friends. It wasn't just the Midianites. It was the Midianites and all of their friends. They decided to have a party. They would come in and drop into this valley. And once they were there, they ate all of the grain. They took their animals. Then, because they were so numerous in number, and Scripture states that you couldn't count them. There were so many of them. They would in turn just destroy the land. Once it was done, there was nothing else for them to plunder. They would pick up camp and they would leave. Our poor Israelites would then come back out of the mountains down into this desolate hole where it's laid waste. There's nothing. And they'd have to start over again. So here they are. And when we see them, they're in the seventh year of this. Somehow after year one or two, I would be like, hey, God, help me out. But no, they're a little prideful, a little stubborn. Seven years into this, they're still at this place of desperation. I imagine they're tired. They're hungry. And so they finally come to a place where they cry out and say, hey, God, can you come help me? Because we're kind of done here. We've got nothing, absolutely nothing left in us. And so that's where our God, because he's so wonderful, begins this process of sending to them their next judge. And so when we pick up in verse 11, we meet the angel of the Lord and Gideon. The angel of the Lord is hanging out underneath the tree. And our friend Gideon is in a wine press hiding from the Midianites and actually beating wheat. There's a couple interesting things about this passage. First of all, the angel of the Lord is there. But Gideon doesn't see him, y'all. It just states that the angel of the Lord is just kind of hanging out underneath a tree. Gideon's hanging out in his hole in the ground. And so why is it that he doesn't recognize him? We're not sure. The rest of the places in scripture talk about the fact that when an angel appears, everybody gets excited and then they end up on their face because they know it's an angel. They know it's come from the Lord. They have this knowledge. At this point in time, Gideon's clueless to the fact that he's even sitting there. And what we see is that we see that Gideon is hanging out and hiding in his wine press, beating wheat against a wall. And what's so interesting about that is the fact that during the normal harvest, when the wheat was cut off, it was actually supposed to be taken to a place called the threshing floor, which would have been up on a mountain or up on a high hill, completely out in the open. And so what they would have done is they would have taken all of this wheat, they would have thrown it onto the ground. They then would have brought in like an ox and had this ox run circles, stamping it out so that they were separating the chaff and the grain and getting it all chewed up, for, again, lack of a better word. And so then what would happen is that after all that, they'd reach down, they'd grab it, they would throw it in the air. And at that point in time, all the useless chaff, the wind would blow away, the grain would fall to the ground, they could collect the grain and then take it off the store to use for food later. Well, guess what? Gideon, y'all, is in a winepress in a hole. A winepress was a hole in the ground. It's not out in the open. There is no wind around it. He's literally hiding in a hole. There's no ox. There's nothing that you would normally have to do this process. Instead, he has his little shoots and stalks of wheat, and he's beating them against a wall trying to get them to separate. So it's this moment where you see Gideon at this place of desperation. He's trying very, very hard inside of his little hole in the ground to do all the work himself, to find just a little something for his family. They're tired. They're hungry. But his circumstances have gotten himself so desperate and so overwhelmed that he doesn't know what else to do anymore. So he's going to try to do something. So where is it that, like, we get stuck in those moments when we feel like we're in this place and we've got these circumstances that are just us down, and we're like, the only thing I can think to do, and you grab at straws, literally, just trying to do something to improve your situation. But the really cool part is, and you'll see in the next verse, in verse 12, this is where God meets us so very often, is in our wine press. Because verse 12 states that the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon. Why all of a sudden Gideon looks up and realizes that there's an angel standing in front of him, we don't know, but it just states that he did. They make eye contact, and the angel looks at him and says to Gideon, the Lord is with you, oh mighty man of valor. Some of y'all's verses may actually call him a mighty warrior. I'm sorry, at this moment I thought about what was running through Gideon's head, and I can only hear him going, can I interrupt for just a minute? Did you not notice, A, I'm a farmer, and B, I'm hiding in a hole right now. There's really nothing, absolutely nothing about me that you would call courageous or mighty. And then he also proceeds to say in verse 13, he's going to have to argue just a little bit with God at this point about the fact that he says the Lord is with him. And when I read this passage, I thought wine, like whiny. I was like, hmm, because Gideon says to him, please, my Lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has this happened to us? Why? Like, can you hear that? Like in your head, He's like, but why is this happening to me? And why is the Lord allowing all of these bad things to happen? Do we not do that sometimes? Like, come on. Why me? Why? Why? So he asks all these. He asks these questions. And the Lord responds to him in the next verse. But the Lord says to him, What do you notice there? He didn't respond to the why. He didn't respond to sweet Gideon's little rant about, like, why am I in this position? And, y'all, it's really the best thing that I can come up with as I read through this is that he did it because, Gideon, you know why you're here. Y'all have done evil on the side of the Lord. You've been doing it for seven years now. That's kind of why you're stuck in this place. So you know the answer to this. But I don't want you to think about what's happened in the past. What I want you to do is focus on the fact that go in this might of yours and do what I've called you to do, and that's to defeat the Midianites. Which is all cool, because here God is seeing a potential in Gideon that Gideon has never seen in himself and probably never will unless. But he chooses at this point in time not to believe these words that God speaks. Because Gideon is still stuck in his wine press. He's still in this place where his circumstances are still so heavy on him that he can't, for anything, see past those. He can't see that mighty man of valor that God says he is. And so what he does is he then replies to God with his list of excuses. Just like we have ours, Gideon responds in turn with his list of excuses. Excuse me, Lord. Hey, remember I'm a farmer. I'm not a soldier. So there's one. And let's see. Oh, my clan that I belong to happens to be the weakest in the area. If you didn't know that already. And oh, wait, here's the cherry on top. I am the weakest in my family. So there is nothing about me that's mighty, and I just can't do what it is that you want me to do. So again, Gideon, just like we are, has this huge line of excuses as to why he can't do what it is that God says he can do. But thankfully, we serve a very merciful and very patient God because he turns and he says to Gideon what I would say are five of the most life-giving words in the Bible. And those words are, I will be with you. So keep up your excuses, but I will be with you. When he calls us, he's going to provide us with anything and everything that we need. Those places where we're the weakest, he's going to give us the strength to do what it is that he has called us to accomplish. Because guess what? It's through his strength then that he's glorified. Because if it was through our strength, God's not the one getting the glory. It becomes all about us and not about him. There's some really cool moments where this I will be with you pops up. Moses, God calls him and says to Moses, Hey, I need you to go be my mouthpiece with Pharaoh and free my people from Egypt. And Moses looks at him and he's like, Have you not heard me talk? Y'all, I have a small speech impediment, God. God says, no problem. I will be with you. And then when Joshua, now all of a sudden is charged with taking the Israelites into the promised land. That wasn't what was supposed to happen. Hey God, it was supposed to be Moses. Like what? God says, it's okay. Just like I was with Abraham and how I was with Moses, I will be with you. If you go into the Psalms and you read through, the Psalmist tells us over and over and over again, the Lord is with you. The Lord will be with you. And Paul speaks of a time when he's in Corinth speaking to a whole group of people. He's got all of this oppression on all sides. And it's hard. And he's in one of those places where the circumstances are starting to do this. God appears to him in a dream and says to him flat out, don't stop speaking. I will be with you. Wow and wow. Because the thing is right here, these guys all believed it too. They all heard God say it and then they believed it. And you can't do it if you don't believe it. Gideon, you are a mighty man of valor. You are going to defeat the Israelites. Gideon's still in his hole. He hears this again and again, and he has to make a choice. Is he going to believe that I will be with you and step out of his hole? Or is he going to stay there with his overwhelming circumstances and just continue to try to do things in his own might and his own power? Because see, the thing is, is that our capabilities are directly proportioned to our beliefs. What we can accomplish through God or God can accomplish through us is directly proportioned to what we believe. And so here it is. If we choose to believe what the world tells us about who we are, we're not good enough. We're not strong enough. We don't have the right pedigree. Whatever the lie is, if we choose to believe that lie, then what God can accomplish through us is totally limited. But if we instead choose to believe and operate in who God says we are, then what God says and what he can do through us is limitless. And as I was doing some research, I found this excerpt from a book called What God Thinks About You. Just listen and a worker. And through Jesus, you are victorious. You have a glorious future believe that through Christ we're victorious and that we are an ambassador for his son, what he can do through us is limitless. It puts us in this cool place for his power and his glory to be shown. And you know, seven years ago when I took that step of faith, it was a step of faith and I had to make a choice. And I promise you, though, each day for the last seven years, I've had to rely very heavily on the I will be with you. Because guess what? Nothing about my circumstances or my situation has changed. I still don't have some advanced degree. My kids are different now. So you can take that one into consideration. They're all older and on their own in a lot of cases, but I don't have the things that should or that the world says I should have, especially to stand up here in front of y'all today. But I had to choose to believe who God said I was, and I have to choose to believe in him and his, I will be with you. So if your capabilities, Grace Raleigh, are in direct proportion to your beliefs, what are you all believing today? Are you going to believe what the world says? Or are you going to choose to believe, like Gideon did, that who God says you are? Because that just might mean that somewhere along the lines, he may look at you and call you my mighty man or woman of valor. Will you all pray with me? Lord, thank you. Thank you that you love us and that you promise that when we step out in obedience to what it is that you have called us to do, that you will walk with us. We just ask that you don't allow us to believe the world, that you don't allow us to hear the voices that tell us that we're not good enough, but instead we hear all of those voices that tell us that because of you, we are victorious. And we love you. And it's in your son's name we pray.