Grace Raleigh Sermons

Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making Grace a part of your Sunday morning. If you had a hard time parking, get here sooner. I don't know. I don't have anything else I can tell you. All right, we've got so many spots. That's it. And then you're at Big Lots or whatever that's about to be. Thanks for continuing with us in our series in Mark. As we approach this week's sermon and text found in Mark chapter 7, you can go ahead and turn your Bible there if you like. Many of you know, if you've been coming since the beginning of the year, that I started going to the YMCA this year. I started going to the YMCA in January to exercise. Brad Gwynn sees me there. He's my accountability partner. I'm told that there has been about six people who have checked in with him to say, is Nate really going? Is that really a thing that's happening? Yeah, I'm going. And I like it there. I like going to the gym at the Y. There's a lot of things about the Y that I like. I like when you walk in, there's a sweet lady named Miss Ellen that says hey to you and learns your name. And when you leave, she tells you to have a fantastic Monday or have the best Wednesday. And then she hits a little secret button under the desk and it opens both the doors for me. So I don't have to touch them. That's fantastic. There's the soft, there's a soft, chewy ice that you can get as soon as you walk in that normally you have to overpay for at Chick-fil-A, and now it's just there, free. It's great. And you go, and then you work out. It's so fun. But my favorite part, my favorite thing about the YMCA over there on Six Forks, or off Six Forks in Bailiwick, is, and this is why it's probably my favorite gym that I've ever been to, is there is not a single person in that gym that's good looking. Not a single one. Every single one of us are just middle-aged, average people trying to stay on top of things, right? Just trying to get the blood pressure down. That's all we're doing. There's nobody in there preening and praning and taking pictures of themselves. There's no cute outfits or chiseled bodies. We're all just moms and dads trying to get ahead of it. That's all we're doing, and I love it. And it's different than the other gym I used to go to. I used to go to another gym down the street. It's a little bit more expensive than the YMCA. That's a fancy gym. And I was easily, without question, the ugliest person in that room every time I exercised. Except sometimes I'd run into Alan Morgan and then I had some company, you know? But for the most part, it was just me and all these millennials that were chiseled as all get out. And I'm just like, they, to me, those people, those people work out to get better at working out. You know, at some point or another, like you got to exercise to be healthy. You have to, you don't have a choice. Somebody told me that when you turn 40, you get on a downward escalator and the, unless you exercise, you can't even stay at the same level of health that you were. So you've got to exercise to be healthy to some degree. And everybody at the Y is there to be healthy. People at this other place, they're there to look better than everybody else. You know, they've got their phone set down and they're taking pictures and they're looking at themselves in the mirror and they're doing all of this stuff. And the stuff I would never be caught dead doing in my whole life because I have dignity. And also no muscles to speak of because that would be a waste of time. But I look at those people and it's like, gosh, you're working out to get better at working out. You're exercising to get better at exercising. Like at some point or another, there's a diminishing return on the health value of this. and now you're just making your whole self about it just so you can get better at exercising. And then sometimes, and not all those people, I know some people who exercise to exercise, they're in tremendous shape, and they're wonderfully generous, kind, great people. But then there's others who really highly prioritize it, and then that kind of becomes their value system. They start to judge other people based on how good they are at exercising and what you're allowing into your body and what you're doing. And I'm doing this thing and I'm eating, I'm eating nothing. But what are those things that Aaron has in the refrigerator next door? Protein balls. I'm eating nothing but protein balls. This is a thing now. I thought it was leftover cookie dough from something and I threw it away. I got in trouble because I downed her lunch. But that becomes like a whole subculture where they exercise seemingly just to get better at exercising and then to let other people see how much better they are than them at exercising. And it's not the kind of exercise that I want to do. And I bring that up because in Mark chapter 7, I believe that what we've got here is an instance of the Pharisees acting like some folks who exercise just to exercise. My thought here is the Pharisees based their spiritual worth on how well they exercised. The Pharisees based their spiritual worth on how well they exercised. They based their spiritual worth, their holiness, their spiritual maturity, their spiritual health, and the spiritual health of others on how well they exercised, on how well they followed the rules, on how well they performed their faith. And I'm going to show you what I mean. In a minute, I'm going to read verses 14 and 15. But the preamble, excuse me, I'm going to do that a little bit, getting over a cold this week. The preamble begins in verse 1 of chapter 7. And you can look there if you want. Jesus is sitting down with the disciples. This is somewhere around the Sea of Galilee. So some folks from Jerusalem had come up to talk to Jesus. And they sit down and they're eating a meal together. And the Pharisees and the teachers of the law notice that the disciples didn't wash their hands before this meal. And so they go up to Jesus and they go, why is it that your disciples don't honor the traditions of the elders and wash their hands before they eat. They are unclean and should not be eating that food. Not to mention the laws from our elders about ritualistically washing pots and kettles and cups and plates. They are violating all sorts of rules right now, and you don't even seem to care, Jesus. What's the deal with that? And Jesus says, essentially, yeah, the rules you're talking about were made up by men. They were made up by your forefathers and our ancestors and our elders. And now you apply them as if they're gospel truth, but those are not the rules of God. Those are the rules of man. And you've gotten so good at following the rules of man that you are willing to set aside the laws of God and not follow them so that you can follow the laws of man. You have it exactly backwards. What's going on in this Pharisaical culture and the culture of the Pharisees is that they based spiritual health on how well they exercised. It was a competition to see who could follow the rules better. In ancient Israel, there was 630-ish laws. You have to say ish because rabbis don't agree on how many they are, which is, you know, that sounds about right with the rabbinic culture. So the Pharisees knew every single one of these by heart. They knew what they were. They knew how to follow it. They knew what it meant. They knew how to stay in line with it. And they followed every one. And they were meticulous in their rule following. Down to the types of garments they would wear during the day. Some of them considered it work. If you had a nail in your sandal, that was metal and you can't lift that on the Sabbath. So you can't wear those sandals on the Sabbath. They were that strict about it. When the Pharisees, when the super religious would tithe, they wouldn't just tithe from their money. They would go into their pantry and tithe off their spices, their thyme and their cumin and their paprika. They would go in there and they would literally tithe 10% of everything that they had to the temple. And they took great pride in how well they followed the rules. And they took great pride in following the dietary restrictions and only eating what they're supposed to eat and only eating after they've ritualistically cleansed and only eating off plates that are approved by God and by their elders. They were incredible at following the rules. And the problem with this is they got so high-minded about it that they just followed the rules to get better to follow the rules so that they could remain in power and oppress the people they were supposed to be serving. So they're supposed to serve the children of God and spur the children of God on towards God and encourage them and model for them what it is to walk with God in a mature and godly way. And instead, they lorded the rules over people and criticized them for not being as good at it as they were. And they discouraged the populace. Can you imagine growing up in that kind of environment, what your response would be as an independent thinking kid, you wouldn't want any part with your parents' religion. I can't imagine that this would turn generations on to the idea of following God. It pushed them away, and it made God more untouchable, and it was just a way for them to establish their power and their superiority and keep their thumb on the people of God. That's what they did. And so Jesus says, God didn't make up those rules that you're worried about. People did. And then he says this. This is the statement of the day. Mark 7, 14 and 15. Again, Jesus called the crowd to him and said, listen to me. Everyone understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them. So Jesus gets everybody together. He's been questioned by the Pharisees in front of a crowd of people. And so now they went public with it. He's going public with it. He says, hey, hey, listen, I want to tell you something. Listen to me. Nothing that goes into the body from the outside can defile it. What defiles somebody is what comes out of their body. And so the Pharisees are saying, no, no, no, we're righteous and we're holy because we refuse to eat these things and we wash these things and we follow these practices and nothing comes into our body that's not ritualistically clean. And Jesus says, yeah, that means bupkis. That doesn't matter at all. What matters is what comes out of your body. Think about it this way. God is far more interested in our productivity than our receptivity. God is far more interested in what we produce from our bodies than what we receive in our bodies. He's far more interested in producing within us the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. He's far more interested in watching you increase in those fruits in measure over the course of your life and your walk with him. And God is far more interested in the fruit that you produce than what you choose to drink at the end of the day. He's far more interested in what you say and what you do and what you produce than what you intake. He's far more interested in how you treat other people than what your threshold is for what you will and will not watch on Netflix. He's far more interested, our God is, in what you produce with your body than he is in what you receive with your body. And when I say what you produce with your body, I think back to what we talked about last week and this idea that I harp on as much as I can and I will continue to do it. My biggest prayer for anyone that ever calls grace home is that you would increasingly understand yourself as a kingdom builder. We have the simple concept that everybody spends their life building a kingdom. Everyone does. And so the question becomes, whose kingdom are you going to build? Are you going to build your own temporary kingdom that will fade away and ultimately not matter? Or will you invest your life building, being part of building an eternal kingdom that will never fade away? My goal and prayer for each of you for as long as you call grace home is that you will become increasingly aware of the fact that you were created as a builder of the kingdom of God. And so when we say productivity, God is interested in what we produce and in what we do. What we mean is we want to produce godly character, fruits of the Spirit. We want to be sanctified, grow closer to Him. But He also wants us to produce for His kingdom. And last week we talked about this. It's a good segue from last week into this week. It's funny how the Holy Spirit works sometimes. That to produce in God's kingdom, to build God's kingdom, to be productive in it, is to grow His kingdom in breadth and depth. To grow it in breadth by reaching people and inviting them to Christ and inviting them to church and having spiritual conversations with them. And in today's day and age, simply showing them that it can be normal to be a Christian and you don't have to be an unreasonable nut job. We can kind of hold it together. And to grow the church in depth. To grow us in our spiritual depth, that's discipleship. Evangelism, breadth, discipleship, depth. So it is our job to be productive in that way. And last week, I challenged you. Think back to the wake of your life. Are there people in your life who would say, I'm closer to Jesus now because I met that person. I'm closer to Jesus now because God moved them through my life. That's the kind of productivity that God wants to see in his kingdom. And he's far more concerned with how well you love other people and push people towards Jesus than he is with how well you follow the rules and how buttoned up you are. And this is hard because as believers, we tend towards legalism. We always do this. We want to know what the rules are. We want to know how well we're supposed to follow them so that I can be either good or bad. When I was growing up, there was a phrase, and if you did this, you were a good kid, that I don't smoke and I don't chew and I don't go with girls who do. And if you did that, you're a good kid. Now, I'm so glad that I changed my standards on that because Jen smokes like a freight train and I love her to death. The joy of my life. I think she tried a cigar one time. Did you try a cigar one time? Yes, you did so. You lie. I'm in trouble. That's all right. Well, we always like to set up these standards about personal holiness and the rules that we should follow because it kind of gets easier. And then we start following the rules to get better at following the rules. And we forget that it's far more about what we produce than what we receive or how buttoned up we live. God cares about us loving our neighbor towards him. He cares about us being people of grace and kindness and authenticity. He cares far more that you are a person of generosity than he cares about how much you chose to spend on your car. You understand? He cares far more about how you treat other people than the specific language you use when you're treating them in a certain way. He cares far more about what comes out of you, about what we produce, the love that we produce in others, than he cares about the standards that we would hold for ourselves. And that's the point that Jesus is making. Because the Pharisees are the far end of rule following equals spiritually good. And what Jesus is showing them is you're hypocrites and your hypocrisy is actually destroying your faith and the faith of those around you. This is why Jesus says that he wants people who worship in spirit and in truth. And when I think of productivity, what I want to produce in my life, there's these two verses that haunt me because they make the bar so very high and I am so very far from hitting it. But I've always said I'd rather look at the standard and be honest about not meeting it than lower the standard so I can feel better about myself. And I've always invited you to do that with me. But there's a passage in Matthew, Matthew chapter 5, the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus says, let your light shine before others so that others might see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that we should live our lives in such a way that people who come into contact with us, even if they don't speak to us, even if they don't ask us about our God, even if we don't get to talk to them about church and about faith and about what we do and why we do it and what we believe, even if we never get to do that, all they do is see us. All they do is watch us interact with the cashier or interact with the co-worker or move through a crowd or be in a space. All they do is see us. All they do is watch us interact with the cashier or interact with the coworker or move through a crowd or be in a space. All they do is watch us, but that we should let our good work shine before men so that by simply watching us interact in the world, they would see our good works and so glorify our father who is in heaven. What God wants for his children is for your walk to be so radical and your love to be so noticeable and your generosity to be so mind-blowing and your kindness to be so unusual that as people watch you, they go, that person is different and I want what they have. That's the productivity that Jesus is talking about. He's far more interested that people would see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven than we would follow the right rules at the right time. The other standard I think of, and I love this one, is in Colossians 3. It says that Jesus leads us in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You know when you walk past somebody that smells good? You weren't thinking about it. It just kind of wafted over to you, and all of a sudden you're like, oh, that's nice. That's how it should be when people interact with us in the world, That through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God. That simply by interacting with us, by moving past us, they would go, huh, that's different. That's nice. It's this standard that's so high and so seemingly impossible to reach, but that's who Paul tells us we are in Colossians, and that's what I want us to be. What if, what if, Grace, we were like this so much. What if we held ourselves to that standard that through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. This unaggressive, unobtrusive, unobtrusive just scent that wafts off of us that these are people who know and love God. What if that was so pervasive that somebody brings a friend to big night out and they go, these people are different, this community is different, and I think I want to be a part of it. What if that fragrance were so pervasive in us that by someone just coming to our worship or by someone just sitting in with us or by someone just watching us interact before and after a regular Sunday service, when none of us did anything intentional, they got an impression that these people know and love God. What if we were that productive in our faith? That's what God is concerned with, not the rules and how well we follow them. Now, this so far is a particularly grace message because grace people are not rules not rules people. I don't know how long you've been here, but those of us who have been here for a while, we don't care for the rules. We don't follow them. They're there to be broken. We're pretty irreverent about the rules. And so, so far, all the grace people are like, yeah, this is great. God cares way more about productivity. And if we were the kind of church that said amen sometimes, we would have said it by now. Because this is what we believe in. Yes, absolutely. I need Bill Gentile here this week. Bill Gentile, some of you know him, about four times a year, he says, man, I was so close to amen this morning. I needed him here this morning. Bill, darn you. We like that message. God doesn't care about the rules. He cares about love. And so the implication is, so go do whatever you want. I mean, go behave however you want. Go consume whatever you want. Go put whatever you want in your body. Go watch whatever you want. Go do whatever it is you want. Just make sure that what comes out is love. Here's the problem with that. The right results demand the right input. The right results demand the right input. If what my real goal in my life is, is that through me would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God, how is that possible if I am not daily consuming his word? If I am not daily pursuing him in prayer? If I am not daily tracking down older, wiser, more experienced people in my life who've known God longer than me and asking them questions about how they know God and how they follow God, how can the fragrance of the knowledge of God permeate out of me and into the people around me if I'm not spending my days pursuing that knowledge? How can someone see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven if you're too busy to do those good works? If you're not focused on pursuing God yourself. How can someone see the way you interact with a cashier, the way that you handle things in traffic, the way that you interact with a coworker, the way that you de-escalate something tense at work? How can people see you do that if you're not pursuing God and you're not growing in those areas? How can people see the fruit of the Spirit in your life if you're not walking in the Spirit? So I'm not here to tell you what Netflix shows you should and should not watch, but here's what I know. There comes a point at which too much of that one thing, too dark of that one topic, too much of that kind of input is going to begin to affect the output. It's going to begin to affect how we love and what comes out. Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. I'm not here to tell you what language to use and not. I'm not here to tell you what you should consume and what you should not. But what I am here to tell you this morning is what you consume through your eyes and through your mouth and with your body, the receptivity, the things that you receive from the world into you, what you consume absolutely makes a difference in what you produce. We know this to be true. So this is not a sermon begging you to come up with standards. It is one that is telling you that they matter. And when we read passages like this and Jesus says, listen, the rules don't matter. It's about what you produce. Yeah. That's why he reduced all the laws down to one thing. Go love others if I have loved you, which is the most impossible law to follow in the world unless you're following the essence of the other 630. We have to be people who love God and love others. And that has to dictate to us what we allow to come into our bodies and the kinds of things that we are receptive to because how can we ever possibly be the Christians, the kingdom builders that Jesus calls us to be if we're not consuming him and the things of him always. It reminds me of that verse that I love, Philippians 4, 8, finally brothers, whatever things are good, right, noble, trustworthy, of good report, think on these things. If that's not our standard for what we're consuming and what we hold ourselves to, then how can we possibly expect to produce what God wants us to produce? How can we possibly expect to hold up our end of the bargain? See, what we like? We love the no rules thing. We love the standards don't matter thing. That's fun. But if that's really what we think, how can we ever become the people that God has created us to be? How will the fragrance of the knowledge of God ever waft out of us if we never, ever, ever care about the standards that we set for ourselves and what we pursue? And I know this is true because Jesus says this in Mark slander, evil, malice, lust, adultery, lewdness, folly, all those things, they come from inside of me. They come from a value that I've espoused in my own heart. They come from the people that I allow to be around me. And all that stuff gets in there from what I consume, from what I watch and from what I joke about and from what I read and from what I talk about and for the kinds of friendships that I have and for the standards that I hold. All that stuff gets poured in. And if I hang out with people who love money more than anything and love success more than anything, then I am going to adopt their value system. And in my heart, I will allow that seed of greed to grow, that seed of arrogance to grow. And I will begin to make decisions about money and about success and about power and about career that are not in line with producing the righteous life that God desires. Out of me will come that selfishness. Out of me will come that influence from other people. But here's what I think has to be true. If these verses are true, 20 through 23, then the converse must be true as well. If malice and slander and greed and arrogance pour out of my heart because of what I've poured in, then the opposite has to be true, right? That when love and kindness and generosity and mercy and grace flow out of my heart, flow out of my mouth. It is because of what God has placed in my heart. It is because of an earnest pursuit of God. It is because of a healthy sanctification and desire for him. It is because of intentional choices. See, we don't get to produce that fruit by default, okay? You don't just become a Christian and then go about your day as normal, not changing a thing, and then all of a sudden just pouring out of you is love and generosity and kindness. No, there's intentional, difficult decisions that you have to make about how you want to prioritize your time and your talent and your treasure so that God can get a hold of you and move you forward. Last week, I talked about how one of the greatest tools of the enemy is that we're so distracted. We're never quiet anymore ever. We've lost the power to think and to ponder and to wonder. How can we produce what God wants us to produce if we won't stop and take in from him? So when we hear this story in the future, because this is a famous one, when Jesus says what goes into a person doesn't defile them, what comes out does. Often we use that to decry the Pharisees and the hypocrisy of their life, and the rules don't matter, it's all about love, and that's great, and that's true, and it is. But what I think grace needs to hear more than that because if we're going to, listen, church, if we're going to miss the mark on this, we're going to miss it in favor of love and do what you want. Okay? That's our culture. So what grace needs to hear is, yeah, love, but that pours out of what we pour in. That comes out of what we let in. So I have two things for you guys to think about as we wrap up today. First one, and I asked you this in another form last week, but I want you to think about it again. Am I producing, as honestly as you can, am I producing what God wants me to produce? When I look back the last one year, three years, five years, do I see an increase in the fruit of the Spirit, love and joy and peace and patience and all the rest? Do I see myself growing in generosity and kindness and patience? Do I see evidence that the Holy Spirit is working on me and that I've subjected myself to him? Am I producing in the kingdom? Am I pointing people towards Jesus? So it's well and good to not care about the rules. It's well and good to understand this and be like, yeah, I don't have to judge my spirituality and my spiritual health by how well I follow the rules. That's fine. But how well are you producing? And then the second thing I would leave you with this morning is this question. Are the things that I'm consuming helping or hurting my productivity in God's kingdom? Are the things that I'm consuming in my life on the screen, the radio, the phone, the scroll, through the conversations, what I expose myself to willingly and habitually, are the things that I'm consuming in my life helping or hurting my productivity in God's kingdom? I'd love for you to think about those two things as I pray for you, and then we sing to finish up. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the way that you work in our lives. Thank you for being a God that, yes, doesn don't know if I'm producing what I'd like to be producing. I don't know that I'm being used like I'd like to be used. God, would you create in them a fire to make some intentional decisions to put their hand to the plow in your kingdom? Would you show them and show us what we can do and how you'd like to use us? And would that begin by just a simple pursuit and step towards you. And God, as we consider the different things that we consume, I know as I've thought through it, convict us where it's needed. Let it move us to better choices. And God, with the conviction, with that seed of conviction from your word, land on good soil that takes root, that isn't a flash in the pan, that isn't emotional, that doesn't get swept away. But God, as we consider those things in our lives, help us be people that stick to it. We thank you for your son. We thank you for your sacrifice. And we thank you for this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everyone. It's so good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. I kind of had a feeling that this Sunday would look like this. Last Sunday, people begged out because of the weather, and we have a pretty good every other week crowd. So if everyone didn't come last week, I thought, you know, we might have some folding chairs up this week. So it's good to see everybody. I hope that you had a good week. For those of you that were able to enjoy the snow, I hope that that was fun and a nice reprieve for you. This morning we continue in our series called Mark's Jesus, where we're going through the Gospel of Mark, just looking at different stories and aspects of the life of Christ that Mark records. This week, we get to probably the most famous parable that Jesus teaches. Parables are the way that Jesus chose to teach most of the time. And parables are short, made-up stories that are told to make a point. And stories stick with us better. They help us think through things. They tend to drive the point home a little bit better. I've told you before, in a previous life, I was a Bible teacher and an assistant high school football coach. And the head football coach was a guy named Coach McCready. He was a recon Marine in Vietnam. I love that man so much. And whenever I'd ask him a question about what to do in life, he'd go, baby. And he'd tell me a story. He called everybody baby or everybody sugar. So sugar, sit down. And he'd tell me a story about him and Nam and the way that he had to handle some troops sometime. Or he did about when he ran an envelope factory after that in the 70s. He'd tell me about a problem employee that he would have. And he would never answer my question. He would just tell me a story. And I'd be thinking like, this old man's crazy. Like he's just, he's lost it. He's not paying attention to me anymore. But by the time he got to the end of the story, I realized, oh, and I had some clarity about what I needed to do in a situation. And so Jesus taught in similar ways. He taught through telling stories. And part of this, he tells us, is so that you kind of have to work to understand it a little bit because some of the Pharisees, he says, are ever seeing, but never perceiving, never hearing, never understanding. And so he wanted to teach this way to make things more memorable, to help you along, and to make you work for it a little bit. Now, you may have your favorite parable. You may know a bunch of parables. One of my favorite parables is the one about the unforgiving servant, the servant that was forgiven a ton by the king, this huge debt, and then turns around and he won't forgive a much smaller debt to a peer, and he gets in trouble for that one. And there's different, there's the workers in the vineyard, there's the pearl of great price, there's a bunch of different parables. But this parable that we're going to look at today is actually kind of the apex parable in that Jesus tells it to help us understand how we are to process the rest of the parables and the rest of the teachings of Jesus. So rather than sum up the parable, I'm just going to read it to you. It's in Mark chapter 4. We're going to look first at verses 3 through 8. Then we're going to look at verse 14. Then we'll go 15 to 20. So we're going to do a lot of work in Mark chapter 4 today. So if you have a Bible or you can reach that one in front of you, grab that and let's go through it together. I always try to encourage you, bring your Bibles to church, mark them up, take notes. I've been told recently I'm starting to make up words. So you could keep a list of the words that I'm making up. Tom was right last week. I made up the paralyzation. Yeah, yeah, paralyzation. That's not a word. Paralysis will do fine. You don't have to say paralyzation. So you can keep a list of those if you want to. But bring your Bible, mark them up, and let's have a spiritual track record of where we're going and what we're learning. This morning in Mark chapter 4, Jesus shares with us the parable of the sower. And it goes like this in verse 3. Listen. and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among the thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew, and produced a crop, some multiplying 30, some 60, some 100 times. So when you hear this parable on the surface without any context, it is a little bit difficult to understand. Like, okay, great. There's a farmer, throws out some seed. There seems to be four different kinds of soils. Four different things happen on those four different kinds of soils. Only one of them's good. But what are you talking about, Jesus? With no context, it's a little bit tricky to understand. And so the following verses, 9 through 13, are the disciples saying, hey, what are you talking about? What do you mean by that? And when you read the Gospels carefully, you see the disciples doing this often. What is he talking about? Maybe they don't even ask each other or ask him because they don't have the guts to do it. But he leaves and Peter will be like, did anybody get that? And they're like, no, we have no idea. And then they just have to try to pick it up the next time. But in this particular instance, lucky for us, Jesus explains it. And we have access to this explanation. Now here's one of the things that's really interesting to me as I dug in and studied this parable this time around. Many, many, many, I'm not going to raise your hand because I don't want to embarrass people who don't raise their hand, but I would bet that most of you in this room have heard that parable before. Most of you in this room, if I say the parable of the sower, you can at least, before you walked in today, you could have at least gotten two out of those four soils right. You know what I'm talking about. And so if you're a church person, we tend to think that that seed that goes out is the gospel. That's us sharing our faith, going throughout the world and planting the gospel. And we tend to make this parable about what we should do to plant the gospel of Jesus Christ, what we should do to share the good news of Jesus Christ with our unbelieving friends, neighbors, and cultures. And when we do that, it makes it reductive. It makes the parable smaller than it's supposed to be, I think. Because we make it this one-time deal. We make it this one-time thing where we throw the seed out, and if you respond to the gospel, there's four different ways to respond to the gospel. Three of them are bad. One of them are good. I'm going to throw out this gospel seed and hope that it lands on the good soil, and then I'm going to keep moving on. But it doesn't apply to us anymore because I'm a Christian. And when the seed landed on me, lucky me, I was good soil, and now this plant springs forth, and I have a spiritual life. So this is good. The way that the parable of the sower applies to me is that it's my job to sow the seeds because we say that the seed is the gospel. But that's not what it says. And that's not what Jesus says. Look at verse 14. This will not be on the screen, but look at verse 14. This is Jesus explaining the parable. The farmer sows the word. The farmer sows the word. The seed is the word, not the gospel. It's the word of God, not the gospel of God. Now, is the gospel part of the word of God? Yes. But so is Ecclesiastes, and the gospel is not abundantly clear in Ecclesiastes. Is the gospel part of the word of God? Absolutely, but God's word is so much more expansive than simply the salvation message. Now, everything in scripture points to Christ in one way or another. There's a scarlet thread woven through all 66 books where you can go through any portion of scripture and show how that eventually is pointing you and leading you to Christ. That's the whole point of it. But when we say God's word is the gospel, we either expand the gospel to include every possible thing that God says, or we reduce the word to just the gospel. And that's not right either. So when Jesus says the farmer sows the word, what he means is the word of God. So for us, that's any teaching based on scripture, any song that we would sing that's based on scripture, any word that we have from Jesus, anything that comes from God's word, any words that come from God, when we hear those, when we are taught those, when we sing those, when we talk about those, when we discuss those, that's the word of God. And so what he's saying is, what Jesus is saying is, the farmer sows the word. And if that's true, and the seed lands more than one time on us, but it's not just when we receive the gospel, it's every time the word of God is spoken or preached or sung, then what we see in this parable is this. This parable shows us that we can be different soils in different seasons. This parable shows us that we can be different soils in different seasons. So for us long-time Christians who always hear the parable of the sower and think it's my job to spread the seed. I've already received the gospel. I'm good. You have received the gospel. But you are, hopefully as a Christian, regularly, daily, multiple times a day, through a quiet time, through prayer, through what we're listening to, through what we consume, through our discourse, hopefully multiple times a day, the seed of God's word is landing on our soil. And this is helpful because we are reminded that we can be different soils in different seasons. I heard one time somebody said that a good book is 50% content and 50% timing. That you can read one great book in one season of your life and it just doesn't hit right. And you can read it 10 years later and oh my gosh, this is the most amazing thing I've ever read. I suppose that works for movies and TV shows as well for you Neanderthals who don't read. But I think that that's true. And I think that that's true of different sermons. I know for me, there are sermons that I preached. I'll just be honest with you, okay? Haley Lee, she did our announcements last week, did a phenomenal job doing the announcements. She and I were talking before the service and she said, nobody's coming this week because it was just because the weather was miserable. And word had gotten out that she was hosting, and so people said, I'll mail this one in. And I said to her, and I meant this in all sincerity, I said, that's fine with me. This sermon is the worst one I've preached in like six weeks. She goes, what? And I go, yeah, I don't like it. It's not very good. Like I, it is, it's, it honors the text. It is what it is. But the last five I've preached, I've liked more than this one. And she was like, well, do your best. And I tried. And the wild part to me is, um, I'm almost eight years in now. It'll be, it'll be, uh, Easter will be my eighth anniversary. So I'm almost eight years in here. And after doing this for eight years, week in and week out, you know, there's some sermons that you preach. And the only people who say a word to you about them are the ones that happen to make the mistake of looking you in the eye in the lobby. And they kind of see it and they're like, good job. Like, right? And it's only because they saw you. They don't mean it, and I know you don't mean it. That's fine. But then there's others that people, like, pull you aside, and they want to talk about it, and yada, yada, yada. You can kind of tell based on the feedback. And after I preached this one last week, the feedback I got, I was like, oh, okay, God. That must have landed on good soil. That must have been something that people needed to hear. So it's sometimes you preach a sermon, and you think it's going to be great. I'm going to rip their faces off. I'm going to light them on fire. This is going to be fantastic. And people are like, yeah, good job. And then other times I'm like, God, I'm sorry for this one. I'll try better next time. And then he uses it. So different, different teachings, sometimes different songs, sometimes different conversations we have with godly people who love Jesusesus and we just talk about spiritual things hit differently at different times of life and i think that this is tremendously encouraging particularly for those of you with children their soil changes season to season what they reject at one age they may receive at another what the enemy snatches up at one point may actually have time to germinate at another. Those of you sharing your faith and sowing seeds with your coworkers and with family members and with friends and with loved ones, keep spreading it. There's different soils at different seasons, and it may catch them differently if it got rejected the first time. But I think it's tremendously helpful to approach this parable not as a depiction of what happens when we share the gospel. That's a limited understanding of it. But let's approach this parable as an explanation from Jesus himself of what happens when we receive teaching about God's word, when we hear the good news of God's word, and how we receive that and what happens when we do. Because in that way, it continues to apply to us until we enter into eternity. So let's look at the explanations of Christ of each of the soils and understand what they are and what they're doing and identify those things in our own seasons of our own lives. Let's look at Mark 4.15. He describes the first one. Some people are like seed along the path where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. Okay. So that's the first kind of soil. It's like seed that's thrown along the path, never even has a chance to get into any soil at all, lands on concrete, lands on hard ground, cannot germinate, and Satan comes by and he scoops it up and he knocks it away. Okay. So how do we understand this soil in our own life? Well, we don't talk a lot about Satan around here. I've found that doing sermons on the devil are not the most fun. So we don't talk a lot about him, but when Satan comes up, I try to remind you guys that here's what's true, whether we're comfortable with this idea of an enemy or not, that Satan is real and he is against you. Satan is very much real and he is very much against you and your family and your children and your spouse and your friends. And he is constantly scheming on how to break up what God is doing. God is about the kingdom of God and inviting us to be in, participate in the building of the kingdom of God. Satan is about the tearing down of the kingdom of God. And anytime we get serious about building God's kingdom up, Satan gets serious about tearing us down. We're told that he prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, that he is a liar and the father of lies, that his native tongue is lies. So we know that Satan is real and that he is against us. And the last thing Satan wants is for God's word to land on someone's life and take hold of it. So he's constantly trying to sweep those away. I don't have specific guesses for how Satan is active in our lives and in our world and in our communities. I don't have guesses for you there. But I do think that in the United States that Satan doesn't have to work very hard. I think he may have even set us on cruise control and gone and tended to other countries where the church is flourishing. Because I think that one of the greatest tools of Satan, I'm absolutely convinced of this, particularly in this generation, in this day and age, one of the greatest tools of Satan is simply distraction. He will just distract you. You stop at a red light. How many of you, don't raise your hand, how many of you, you can't just sit at a red light in peace. You reach down, you grab your phone, you start to do this. You can't just sit for 30 seconds. You're in the doctor's office, the wait is five minutes. You're picking something up to read or do. Because you look like a psychopath if you just stare at the wall. You've got to at least not intimidate other people even if you're not doing anything. But we are easily the most distracted, when I say generation, I mean historical generation, like people who are alive. I'm not talking about X's and millennials. I'm talking about everyone in the room, one generation of history. We are easily the most distracted generation in history. And I believe that that distraction is a tool of Satan to keep us from thinking about what actually matters, to keep seeds from germinating in our lives. We might be very moved by what happens in a service on a Sunday morning, and then as soon as we exit those doors, what do you want to do for lunch? What do you want to do about this? What do you want to do about this? We get into the car, whatever was playing on our phone that morning when we got to church, it starts to play again. And that begins to distract us. It takes our thought away. We've removed all time for contemplation. We've removed all time for stillness. There was one time, some of y'all will remember, I got so concerned about the distractions of the world and our need for stillness and silence that I tricked you guys. I didn't tell anybody. I brought you in here for a Sunday morning service. Emil knows what I'm talking about. Emil, our keyboardist, he remembers this. Me and him were laughing about it because I tricked everyone. And then we did a silent service. I shut the lights down. We played soft music. I put words on the screen and I made you preach to yourself through God's word and I didn't say anything. And some of y'all were like, that was amazing. And others of you said, never do that to me again. You've got to tell us. That's not fair. We have so little space for silence and contemplation in our lives, and I believe that that's absolutely a trick of Satan to keep things from germinating that should take hold. So if you are a person who's constantly distracted, who's constantly looking, who's constantly watching, who's constantly listening, who has no stillness, who has no peace, there's always noise in your life, I just want you to think about whether or not that's a trick of the enemy to keep you from thinking about what you really need to think about and to keep God's word from germinating in your life in the ways that it needs to. The other reason I think Satan doesn't have to work very hard in our culture is that, and I don't want to get too existential here, but we are the result of Greek thought as a culture. We are materialistic. And when I say materialistic, I don't mean we're greedy and we want things, although we are greedy and we do want things, and we are materialistic in that way. But I mean materialistic in that in our culture, if you can't taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it, it's not real. We insist that everything makes sense to us. We have even reduced emotions to chemicals in our brains. And until we can understand how those chemicals interact, we refuse to believe that emotions actually exist. We think that we've fabricated everything. We have no space for wonder left in our culture. We have no space for the fanciful. We have no patience for not understanding. And I think it is to our detriment that when we walk outside, we can't see stars anymore because we live too close to the city. There's this great book. I'll just throw this out here. This is for only one person, and I don't know who, but maybe it's you. Write it down. Abraham Kuyper was the Dutch prime minister, I think, in about 1900. He was a Christian, and he was a scientist, and he wrote a book called Wisdom and Wonder about this, about the things that we should try to know and the things that we should be so glad that we don't know and wonder at. We've lost our childlike ability to wonder and to wonder. And when we insist that everything makes sense to us all the time, I think we become way overly reductive with our faith. Because if you're trying to shrink it to what you can understand, I don't need to finish that thought. It's very easy to have a quick emotional response to a sermon or to a song or to a discussion. It's very easy to feel that quick conviction. Churches even know how to do this. Sometimes there'll be a cue at the end of the sermon, and Aaron knows that at that cue, when I say this word, you come up and you start to play soft music behind me, and it's going to make what I say a lot more impactful, right? Like we know those little tricks. I try not to use them very much because I'm not good at them, and then I feel this undue pressure to actually say something that matters at the end, and I'd rather just coast it out. But we know how to have emotional responses to things, and oftentimes church does this. How many times have you left, because I say this all the time, you guys know that I say this all the time. There's no more important habit that anyone in their life can develop than, a lot of you can complete the sentence, than to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. How many of you have heard me preach a sermon on that and prayed at the end and said, God, I am reading my Bible every day, and you didn't make it a week? Multiple times, I bet, we've done that. How many times have I been convicted? I've had more day ones at the gym than anybody that's 44 ever. How many times do we hear things we should do, we receive conviction about it, and we go, yes, this is what I'm going to do, and then we flare out. That's the gospel landing on rocky soil. It flourishes, it shoots up quick. But it doesn't have any roots. And we don't tend it. And it gets crowded out. And we forget it. This is what happens. I've seen this over and over again. I don't mean to be too cynical. But I've seen people who come to church. They're new. They're coming from a different church. Or they're moving into town. Or they started to go to church again or whatever. And they come. they want to meet everybody. They meet everybody. They're such sweet people. They want to meet me. They want me to hear their story. I want to hear their story. They come to the very first Discover Grace that we have or the very first newcomers class that we have, and they sign up for all the things. They are on fire. I just know, I just know, this person's going to leave as easily as they came. There's other people who come and they sit back there and they're just kind of, who are these weirdos? What are they about? Sometimes their worship pastor stops singing and the rest of them just kind of keep doing it. What's going on? Is that pastor for real? Is he always like that? Yeah, yeah. And there's just slow germination. And then after about a year, they're like, maybe I'll help you hand out some bulletins. Great. Often that's signs of seed germinating and taking root because they're taking their time and there's deep soil there. I can remember going to camp when I was 17 and I came home absolutely on fire for God, camp high. And I told my dad, my life has changed. I'm going to make disciples. I'm giving my whole life to Christ. I'm doing all the things. Dad, I just, I can't wait to serve God. And my dad's response was, that's great, son. Be nice to your mom and your sister. Let it take root. Otherwise, I don't believe you. This happens to us, these flash-in-the-pan convictions. So my encouragement to you is if you're convicted about reading your Bible, don't tell anyone that you're going to do it every day. Just set your alarm. If you're convicted about praying with your spouse, don't tell her that you're going to pray with her every day. Just go grab her and say, can we pray? If you're convicted by God's word about something that you need to do or change, don't tell anybody. Just do it and let other people notice your conviction. But let's not be the flash in the pan faith that happens with this soil. The next one, 18 and 19. Still others, like seeds sown among thorns, hear the word, but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. This is a picture of a cluttered life, of a life that's not correctly prioritized. The seed of God's word lands in a place that's able to convict us, lands in a place where it's able to germinate. The problem is our soil is so riddled with weeds and other things that it has no space where it can grow and call its own. This is a life where we've over-prioritized career. We've over-prioritized physical health, physical fitness. We've over-prioritized sometimes even family or friends. Often it's a life where we've over-prioritized pleasure and rest. And God's word starts to germinate in our life, but as it does, it requires of us. It requires space. It requires energy. It requires effort. It needs to grow. It needs the resources and nutrients offered by the soil that we're following along with the parable and with the metaphor, it needs its resources, but we're taking the resources that are needed to allow God's word to grow in our life and to grow us, and we're allocating them to other things that are not as important. This is the description of a life that's not correctly prioritized. Yeah, I know that I should probably go to a women's group, but I've got work. I know that I should probably go to a women's group, but I'm already out three nights a week, and so I can't add another night. And so instead of thinking about what's taking us out the other three nights and going, that can't possibly be as important as the spiritual health and the seed within me that is germinating. That can't possibly be as important. So let me rearrange my schedule around allowing God to grow me. We just say, I can't do that right now. I'm not available for that. I'd like to go to small group, but I'm shy and I don't really feel comfortable doing that. So I'm not going to prioritize that. I know I need to get up early and read my Bible, but it's just, I'm so tired in the mornings and it doesn't occur to us. Okay, well, what were you doing last night? That's making you tired. How late were you up? How do you, how do you, how can you recalibrate? I'll just tell you this, this year, one of my, one of the things I've been doing this year is I try to get up every day at five. I just, I just feel like that's a healthy pattern for me. I try to get up every day at five. And at first it was really tough because I'm not getting tired until 1130 or 12 o'clock at night and I'm only getting four or five hours of sleep at night. But you know what started happening? My body changed. Now at like 845, I'm like, Jen, we gotta get in bed. I got one episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine in me and then I'm out. And now I wake up at 430 with no alarm. My body just changed. I said, okay, if this is what you're going to do, let's do this. So we come up with excuses to not follow through on the things that we're convicted about without thinking about how do I actually tend my soil to make space for God's Word to grow. This is what the author of Hebrews is talking about when he tells us that to run our race well, we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. The things that we have in our life that prevent God's word from growing and taking hold and taking root and radically changing us aren't always out and out sin. It's just things that we allocate energy to that is displaced. So I would challenge us this morning as we reflect on this soil, how much are you prioritizing your spiritual health and allowing God's word to grow in your life? And how much have you just allocated just a passive corner of your lot to it so that you can tend to everything else. Lastly is the good soil. Verse 20. Others, like seeds sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop, some 30, some 60, some 100 times what is sown. This is obviously what we want to be. This is obviously what we're hoping for when we share God's word with other people. But here's what's interesting to me about this good soil. In both the telling and in the explanation, Jesus makes sure to make that point, and it reproduces some 30, some 60, some even 100 times. I'm reminded of the parable of the talents, where the expectation of the master going out of town, who he gives the talents to his servants, is that they would produce more, that they would double what they're left behind. We are always expected to produce. The vine and the branches illustration in John chapter 15, abide in me and I in you. I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and you will bear much fruit. Here's the thing, is good soil always bears fruit. Good soil, where the seed is growing, where there is good healthy life, a good spiritual life will always, always, always bear fruit. We cannot both be flourishing and barren within the kingdom of God. Do you see? If we are growing and flourishing, if that seed has taken root, if we are becoming the people that God has created us to be because we are his workmanship created for good works, if we are doing that, then we will absolutely produce fruit without question. Now, what does fruit look like? That's an important thing to understand, and I think it's an important thing for us to have a communal definition of. To produce fruit, and there's a bunch of ways to explain this, but let's explain it this way. Let's understand it this way this morning. To produce fruit means to grow God's kingdom in breadth or depth. That's what it means. If you are producing fruit in the kingdom of God, God is using you to grow it in its breadth or depth. Grow it in its breadth, evangelism, telling other people about Jesus. If you have been producing fruit by growing God's kingdom in its breadth, then in your wake, in your past, in the last six months, three years, five years, there are people who would say, because this person is in my life, because Jim Price is in my life, I am closer to God than I was when I met him. It's a wake of people who do not know the Father or are far from Jesus who have moved closer to him because God has placed you in their life. It's growing the kingdom of God in breadth. And so I would ask you, Christians, are there people in your past, in the last six months, three years, five years, who would point to you and say, because you exist in my life, I moved from being very far from Jesus to much closer to him. If that's true, then God is using you to produce and to bear fruit. And then hopefully they do that and they do that and they do that. And that's how it gets to 30, 60, 100 fold. And when we produce fruit, we grow the kingdom in depth. We disciple other people. We help people along in their sanctification journey. We help people become deeper in their spiritual walk to take their faith more seriously. And this way you look at the wake of your life and there are people who are in your life who say, yeah, when I met Jeff Lemons, I knew Jesus, but because God placed him in my life, I now know him in a more deep and passionate way. I would never know Jesus as deeply as I do if I had not been friends with Linda Sartorius. When people start to say things like that about you, that means that you are producing fruit. So if we are going to be the good soil, we will bear fruit. It's not we must bear fruit. It's not that we have to try to bear fruit. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. All we have to do is try to follow Jesus. All we have to do is make ourselves receptive to God's word. He does the rest. We don't have to come up with some plan. He handles it. Which is why I'm so confident that a byproduct of walking with Jesus is producing fruit, growing God's kingdom in breadth and in depth. And that's what we should be doing. And I would say this, if you look at your life, I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad, but if you look, if you've been a Christian for three years, at least, and you look at the last three years of your life, and you ask yourself, who's closer to Jesus because God placed me in their life? Who have I had the honor and privilege of walking with as I watch them grow in their faith? If you can't point to anybody, there's a good chance that some of those other soils are happening in your life, that your priorities are crowding out God's word, that the schemes of Satan are actually working on you and keeping things from taking root. There's a good chance that the first three might apply to you. And that's for your soul to search. That's a question for you to answer. But here's how this applies to all of us. Because this is true that this parable, because this is true that this parable isn't just about the moment that we receive the news of the gospel, but it's about every moment that we receive the teachings of God's word. And it's ongoing for our whole life. We're different soils at different seasons because it continues to apply to us both as we share and as we receive. What should we do in light of this parable? What would Jesus have us do? I think it's this, keep spreading and keep tending. Christians, keep spreading God's word. Keep teaching God's word. Keep sharing God's word. Keep singing God's word. Keep inviting people into God's word. And keep tending. Keep tending your soil so that when you hear God's word, you can be receptive to it. To this end, this is not my point. This is a point that I heard another pastor named Alistair Beg make, and I thought it was fantastic. He didn't say it like this, but I am. Beware the spiritual atrophy of the informed. Church people, beware the spiritual atrophy of the informed. Here's what I mean. When you've been going to church long enough, when you've heard enough sermons, it doesn't take you but a minute or two to get into a sermon and figure out what the pastor's going to be talking about. You start a sermon, pastor says, open up John 15. You go, okay, we're doing Abiding in Christ this morning. Cool. Open up to 1 Samuel 17. Oh, good, we get to do David and Goliath, right? Open up to Philippians 3. Oh, I can do all things. Or 4. We know what it's going to be about. What I said this morning, we're going to be talking about the parable of the sower. A lot of us went, okay, I know what that one is. And what happens when we already know is that our knowledge inoculates us against truth. We're callous to it. I've heard that before. That's not for me. I actually know some people. I love them very much. They do not go to this church all the time. They have told me. They have told me that they don't go to church on Christmas and Easter because church is always really crowded on those holidays, and they already know those stories. They know what the message is going to be. The message is not for us. It's for the people who don't come very regularly, so we want to make sure that they have a parking space and that they have seats, which is an incredibly well-tuned argument of bullcrap. It's just a smoke screen for we don't want to deal with the crowds. That's all it is. That's all it is. But here's the sad part about that. How do we get to a place as Christians where we say, the message of the resurrection is not for me? The pastor, listen, I'm not complaining, okay? I'm not complaining, I'm not whining, but I know what it is to listen to sermons too. And I know that when I listen to sermons, you know what I want? Tell me something about this passage I don't know yet. Take a different angle. Ooh, I haven't seen it done that way before. We want something new. We want something shiny. We want something that we can chew on. We want something different. We don't want same. And in that way, our knowledge inoculates us from truth because we're not receptive to it anymore. May we Christians, longtime Christians, who already know where the sermon is going before it starts, may we be people who freshly open up our hearts to the truth of God's word so that it might take root in ways that it hasn't in years. And maybe, maybe, if we're not producing very much fruit, maybe it's because we're in spiritual atrophy because we know too much. And those of us who do, let us open our hearts in renewed ways to God's word that it might grow and produce a fruit 30, 60, and 100-fold. I'm going to pray, and we're going to move into a time of communion together. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for the truth that is in it. Thank you, God, that its depths are unfathomable. Thank you that we can read the same book in your Bible two dozen times and have it mean something different and reach a different part of us every time. God, for those of us who have allowed our knowledge to inoculate us from your truth, would you please cure us of that? Would you please help us wonder again? Would you please help us be receptive to your word in fresh ways? God, for those of us who are distracted, for those of us who insist on making everything make sense, for those of us who have our priorities out of order. God, I pray that we would see those tendencies in ourself and that we would take very seriously tending our soil to prepare our hearts for your word. And God, here in this family of faith, would you build up healthy people who are flourishing in you and producing fruit beyond their wildest imaginations in whatever way you would have them do that in Jesus name amen

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If you were here this morning, thank you so much for braving the elements and coming. You had to really, really want it. If you're home watching in your warm, dry sweatpants, nobody likes you today. You made a selfish choice. But we're glad you're joining us online. This is the second part of our series called Mark's Jesus, where we're walking through the Gospel of Mark all the way up through Easter. So for several more weeks, we're going to be entrenched in the Gospel of Mark, and we're calling it Mark's Jesus because it's a view of Jesus through the lens of Mark, which comes through the lens of Peter. And I realized in the fall that we have not spent time together in the gospel of Mark. And so it's high time we do that. And so what I would say to you as a disclaimer is the way that I laid out the series is just to go through the series or go through the gospel of Mark and kind of make a note. Anytime I got to a passage that I thought, yeah, I want to teach that. Yes, I think that could help grace. Yes, that's something that we need to talk about or discuss or bring up or whatever it is. And so I just kind of went through and haphazardly just kind of wrote things down and then planned out the 12 or 13 weeks or however long it is. So what I would say is I'm not going to cover every chapter of Mark. I'm not going to cover every story. I'm not going to encapsulate the whole book in this series and in what we're trying to do. So I would highly encourage you, if you're going to be a part of Grace for this whole series, grab the reading plan. Kyle, I assume the reading plan is going through Mark, yes? Twice. Okay, two times. There you go. Kyle does our reading plan. It's back there on the information table outside the doors. Grab that reading plan and go through Mark with us. Allow God to speak to you from the gospel of Mark in ways other than what is dictated by the whims of Nate. All right. Let God walk you through that book as we go through it as well. As we approach the text this morning, I'm reminded of a story that happened about 10 years ago, I think maybe even a little bit before that. This is back when I lived in Georgia outside of Atlanta, and one night, I'm somewhere in the threes, 3.30 or so, Jen jostles me awake, and I can tell that it's a little bit urgent, and she says, I can't remember if she said, your sister's on the phone, or I just talked to your sister, but for some reason, my sister had called in the middle of the night, and I looked at my phone, and I had several missed calls from my mom, and at the time, my phone was on silent, so it didn't wake me up. So somehow it's relayed to me from my sister that mom has fallen. She's home by herself. She's fallen going to the restroom in the middle of the night and she's called the ambulance and somebody needs to get over there and I lived really close. So I scramble downstairs. I get in my car and I go see my mom. And when I get there, she's on her bedroom floor. My brother-in-law's there, but he doesn't really know what to do. She's on her bedroom floor laying on her back with a gash over her eye. And her glasses kind of shattered. And there's a big old split in her forehead. And there's blood everywhere. And it was a big, scary mess. It's not the way you want to see your mom. And she had gotten up to use the restroom in the middle of the night and came back and had lost consciousness. And when she did, she fell against the wall and hit a doorframe with her forehead. And there was a big pool of blood there where she had hit. And then she managed to get over to the bed and call the ambulance and start calling family. And this is not something that was expected. My mom would have been 53, 54 at the time, which is not when you expect people to start falling in the middle of the night. I don't know what the age is that you get to where when your family gets the call that mom and dad fell in the middle of the night, they're like, yeah, that probably checks out. It's probably Doug's age. Whatever Doug, whatever you are, Doug, that's probably what it is, where Molly would be like, yeah, that makes sense. Walker, go check on dad. But it's not 54, all right? That's not it. And so it was a little bit unusual. And I'm with mom. The paramedics get there, and I'm trying to walk them through some stuff. And they get her loaded into the ambulance, and I decide to follow. I'm going to the hospital, following the ambulance to the hospital. And I'm praying the whole time. I'm thinking about her. I'm thinking about, like, let's not let the scarring be bad. Let's get her stitched up. Let's let her be okay. Let's not let her have a big, gruesome scar over her eye because dudes think scars are cool. And my understanding is that women are not as inclined towards scars as we are. So she probably didn't want that on her forehead. So I'm worried about that. And I'm just worried about in general that she's going to be okay. And so I'm praying for her. And we get there and they put her in the ER. And I'm standing next to the table holding her hand. And a nurse comes in and starts stitching her up. And there was a few different times where I had to kind of like look down or sit down because I was about to lose consciousness too. I would make a terrible, terrible nurse. I cannot do that. I can't handle it. But we got through it. And the whole time, I'm just kind of, God, let this go quick. Let somebody get to her quickly. Let us not have to wait for a long time. Let's let her be taken care of. I'm talking to my dad. He's out of town. He's on his way back now in the middle of the night and all those things. And so they get her stitched up, and she's fine. She's lucid. She was good the whole time. But they said, we want to try to figure out what was going on. So they asked her, like, what was happening? And she said, well, I was just having severe abdominal pain, and I think I passed out just because of the pain coming back from the restroom. And so they ran some tests, and they found out that she, is it pancreatitis? Is that what it is? When your pancreas is going to burst? What is it? Appendicitis, thanks. Yeah, she had appendicitis. Pancreatitis is a different thing. She might have that, I don't know. But at that time, she had appendicitis, and her appendix was going to burst, and it was causing a great deal of pain. And because she was at the hospital, they were able to get in there and remove it and get that out. And it was actually turned out to be a good thing that this is what happened. I've got a good buddy who goes here to the church, and some of y'all know him, know his story as well. A few years ago, his appendix burst, and they didn't know about it until it ate away at his intestines. And then he ended up in the hospital, and his wife was told he might have a bag for the rest of his life. That's bad news. And what he's had to walk through for the last two years is way worse than a gash in the head. I guarantee you he would trade a few weeks of recovering from a gash over his eye for the last two years that he's had with his guts and his organs because his appendix did burst. And so this whole time when I'm going to mom and I'm seeing her on the ground and I'm looking at her and I start to pray for her and I start to be concerned with her, in my mind, her most urgent need is this gash over her eye. Her most urgent need is to get that stitched up, to get that healed up, to get that knot scarred up, and to move on with her life. That's her most urgent need is we're going to the hospital. That's the thing I want to get addressed the most. As we're there and I'm holding her hand, that's what I want to get done the most is let's get this thing stitched up. What I did not know is that there was something far more urgent going on with her that I couldn't see and that I wasn't aware of. And if I'd have known that, I would have been praying that that got healed up. But because I didn't know that, if you somehow made me aware that mom was up in the middle of the night and that she was experiencing some pain trying to get back to her bed and that she was about to pass out, I would have prayed, God, don't let her pass out. Let her make it to her bed. But what she needed to do is pass out to go to the hospital so she didn't wake up with a burst appendix. God was actually, I believe, moving in that moment to get her where she needed to be because she was home alone and too stubborn to call the hospital and get there on her own. And it could have been a very different story had that fall not happened. And I bring that up because I think we see a similar dynamic in this story in Mark chapter 2. Mark chapter 2 is home of what I believe to be the most audacious ask for a miracle in the whole Bible. And when I say that, I'm just going to let you guys in on this because it's driving me nuts. I said that when we were going through the walkthrough. I said, hey, I was telling Laura who's running the slides, hey, I'm going to talk about the most audacious ask that's ever been made about yada, yada, yada. And then Greg Roberg, the keyboardist, said afterwards, he goes, did you say bodacious ask? And I said, no, audacious. And he goes, oh, because all I could think was good gracious ask bodacious. So if you are from a generation that knows why that's funny, laugh it up. All right. If you don't actually hear, let's make this easier. This side of the room, ask this side of the room after the service. They've got you. All right? So now that's messing with me. And I was like, Greg, you couldn't tell me that after the sermon. You had to mess me up before I get up there and preach. But in this chapter, we have, I'm going to call it a bold ask for a miracle. And you probably know what it is, but I think we have some lessons that we can learn from this. So what I want to do is kind of go through it a few verses at a time and talk about what's happening and see what we can learn from this person getting healed by Jesus. Starting innaum, the people heard that he had come home. They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door. And he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing them a paralyzed man carried by four of them. Okay, so here's what's going on. I read one verse extra. I just want to set the scene. Jesus is going back home to Capernaum. We know that Jesus is from Nazareth, but at some point in his adult life, probably being trained in the temple there in Capernaum, he made Capernaum his home. Capernaum is on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. So if you go to Israel and you think about the type of topography and landscape that you would expect to see there, what you'd probably expect is kind of a desert, rocky, mountainous terrain. And in the southern part of Israel, that's absolutely the case. But in northern Israel, it's very lush. And there surrounding Galilee are green hills and mountains and trees and vegetation. And it's really, really pretty. And so nestled into this, along with the villages all around the Sea of Galilee, is Capernaum. It's a prominent fishing village in north Israel. And that's where Jesus is. And he goes home, it says, to preach to the crowds. And it's standing room only. People hear that Jesus is coming back, and they start clamoring in. There's no room anywhere. It's like the opposite of this room this morning. There's no room anywhere at all. Everyone's coming in. They're standing out in the lobby. They're standing outside. They're standing on the roof. They're standing on the front porch. They're all craning their neck to try to hear this Jesus teach. There's no space at all. Everyone's clamoring in towards Christ. And in the midst of this, we see this happen probably a couple of hundred. And these guys show up with their friend. Four of them are carrying him on a mat, ostensibly a cot, one on each corner. And they're trying to carry him to Jesus to ask Jesus to heal him because he's paralyzed. And I don't know if they were disorganized, hopeful miracle receivers and just got there late. I don't know if they found out late after everybody else. But for whatever reason, when they get there, they can't get to Christ and Christ can't see them. So they start figuring out what to do. And it's always been wild to me that they decided, this version says to dig a hole in the roof. Some versions say to cut a hole in the roof. I could do, I thought about doing some research on what ancient Israel, Israelite roofs were made out of. So I could give you the correct way that this happened, but I decided that would be pretty useless because it doesn't matter to help us understand the story. So they're going through the roof, digging through it, cutting through it, whatever it is they're doing. And I've always wondered this. I don't know if you guys have wondered this, those of you who have heard the story, like what was it like in the room? Like if I'm just in here and then all of a sudden, like a saw just shows up, you know, like I'm not going to keep teaching. I'm going to stand. I'm going to be, let's get out. Let's evacuate. All of us, all of us leave right away. This is how it happens. Let's go. But like, is there debris coming down? Is rubble involved? Like, how long does Jesus just keep going? And then you have to imagine this is not a short process. They didn't have power tools. It wasn't a quick process by which they cut a hole large enough for a grown man to be lowered by some sort of elaborate pulley system down in front of Christ. But at some point or another, his friends get up on the roof with a body on a cot, and then they cut the hole in the roof with some tools that they probably had to find. I doubt any of them brought shovels and saws. And then through a great effort, lower this person down into the middle of an assembly where all the focus was on them. That is a lot of effort to get your friend healed. And in their mind, what was their friend's most urgent need? That Jesus would help him walk. That Jesus would heal him physically. They got up that morning when they heard Jesus was coming. And they said, Jesus can heal. Let's take our friend. Let's take him to Jesus and let's let Jesus heal him. He will, if we can get to him. I just know that he will. This is the most important thing we can do with our day. And they marshaled all of their resources to get that man up on that roof, down in front of Christ, so that Christ could help him walk again, could perform a miracle and heal him physically. And instead, when that man lands in front of Christ, Jesus says, because of your faith, you may rise and walk. No, because of your faith, son, your sins are forgiven. And now we're going to read the verses that follow in a second. But what we see in the narrative is that it takes a beat between your sins are forgiven and rise and walk. And I want us to put ourselves in the position of the men who had just lowered him down. And they hear Jesus say, because of your faith, and then their hearts leap in their chest, yes, rise and walk. Because of your faith, your sins are forgiven. What? That's not the need, Jesus. That's not what he needs. He needs to walk. That's not what we're asking for. That's not what we're praying for. That's not what got us up this morning. That's not what got us up onto that roof. That's not what we were praying for, hoping for when we were digging. That's not what we were implying when we lowered him down, that you would forgive him of his sins. That's not what we wanted, Jesus. And in that moment, whether it lasted a couple of seconds or a couple of minutes, in that moment, I think we stand united with those men who lowered their friend in front of Christ because to be a Christian for any length of time is to pray a prayer that you believe is urgent about a thing that matters very much to you only to hear Jesus not give you the answer that you were expecting. No, Jesus, that's not it. This is far more urgent. Again, if I'm somehow able to pray for my mom, don't let her fall. Let her get back to her bed. And Jesus lets her fall anyways. In that moment, I feel betrayed by Christ. No, that's not her need. Her need isn't a gash in her head so she has to go to the hospital. That's not what she needs, God. This is more urgent. Why don't you see what I see? Why don't you understand what I understand? Why don't you do what I think you ought to do? In this moment, we can share in their disillusionment in Christ because he didn't do what they thought he was going to do, what they thought he should do, and what they had been hoping and praying that he would do. And it reminds me of one of my most favorite moments in Scripture. Early in Jesus' ministry, we find the story in the Gospel of John. When John the Baptist is arrested, and he's being held as a prisoner in Herod's dungeon, in Herod's palace. And he has a pretty good sense that he's going to die down there some way or another. And so he gets one of his disciples, John had disciples, and he sends one to Christ. And he says, will you ask Christ if he is the coming one? And this is a, this is a Ram as it's a hint or a clue. It's an allusion to an old Testament text in Isaiah, I believe maybe 35 or 43, where Isaiah prophesied that the one who is to come, the coming one, when he arrives, the deaf will hear, the lame will walk, the blind will see, and the prisoners will be set free. So John sends his disciple to Christ to say, hey, are you the coming one? Are you the one who is to come? Because if you are, then I should be set free from prison and not die here. So are you the Messiah? Are you the guy? Or should I keep waiting? And Jesus tells the disciple, go back to John and tell him that the lame do walk, the blind do see, the deaf do hear, and the prisoners will be set free, but not you, John. And then Jesus says this, and I think it's an amazing, amazing line. Blessed are those who do not fall away on account of me. What that means is, blessed are those who get disappointed by me because I don't do what they think I'm supposed to do. Because I don't do what they think they want me to do. Because I don't do what they think I need to do. And yet they choose to follow me anyways. Do you see that? Blessed are those who do not fall away on a part of me. Blessed are those who are disappointed in me because I do not meet their expectations in the way that they think I should and still choose me anyways despite not understanding. This is the moment that these men are having. This is the moment that we've had. When we're sitting in the middle of a situation and there is a very clear and urgent need and Jesus doesn't meet it and God doesn't answer it that way and we're thinking, no, don't forgive him of his sins. Help him walk, man. That's what's needed. Let's do that instead. We've all been in a place where we've been a little bit disillusioned with Christ. That's why it's important, I think, to continue the story. If we pick it up in verse 6, here's what happens. Now, some of the teachers of the law were sitting there thinking to themselves, why does this fellow talk like that? He's blaspheming. Who can forgive sins but God alone? Immediately, Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, why are you thinking these things? Which is easier, to say to this paralyzed man, your sins are forgiven, or to say, get up, take your mat, and walk? As soon as he says your sins are forgiven, the Pharisees and the teachers of the law begin to conspire. And they go, who does this guy think he is? Only God can forgive sins. Who is this guy? What is he doing? This is blasphemous. And Jesus knows their thoughts. And so he looks at them very pointedly. And he says, why are you upset? What's harder to say? Your sins are forgiven or rise and walk? Which one's more difficult? If I say your sins are forgiven, nothing happens. You can't see anything happen. You don't know if that worked or if it didn't. But if I say rise and walk and he doesn't, then you know that I am impotent. He stops them and he says, what do you really think is the most urgent thing here? What do you really think is most important? Why are you thinking this way? The harder thing to do is to heal them, not what I just did. To you is to heal them. And physically, not what I just did. But I'm telling you that the harder thing to do is to forgive him of his sins, and it actually carries weight and merit and warrant. So then he continues in verse 10. But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. So he said to the man, I tell you, get up, take your mat, and go home. He got up, took his mat, and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone, and they praised God, saying, We have never seen anything like this. I think it's really important to understand that Jesus didn't heal this man of his paralyzation until after he had been challenged about forgiving his sins. And he healed him to prove that he had the authority to forgive him. Do you see that? He said, which one's more difficult? It's harder. It's easier for me to just say, I forgive your sins because nothing happens. You don't know if it worked. But if I say rise and walk and then he doesn't, then I'm up a creek. Then I'm exposed. So here, tell you what, because of their faith and because I want you to know that I'm the son of man and I have the power and the authority to forgive sins. And that phrase son of man is from the book of Daniel. It's a quote where he's claiming to be the Messiah, the divine son of God. And he says, because I'm the son of man, I have the authority to do this. Rise and walk and go home. And the paralyzed guy wakes up, rolls up his mat and walks out in full view of everyone that he just got carried past on the way in. And the people saw it, and they were amazed, and they praised God, and the implication is they believed and the kingdom was grown. But look at me. Jesus healed that man to prove that he had the authority to forgive sins. He did not heal that man for the sake of healing that man. And I think that many of us probably think that that's what Jesus should have set himself about doing. Do you ever wonder why Jesus didn't go around ancient Israel with all of these maladies and all of these sicknesses and early infant death and low life expectancy rate and probably terrible cavity issues and all the different maladies that would afflict a low income population like this, why didn't Jesus just set up shop in Bethany just north of Jerusalem and let the whole country come and just heal, heal, heal, heal all day long? I have a feeling that if we were to walk around with Christ and watch how he spent his days, that we in our piety would have a real issue with his priorities. I'll bet that if we were to follow Jesus around and saw how few people he healed that asked him, and saw how few miracles he performed when he could have. And he didn't offer an explanation to us that satisfied us. I bet, and I'd be the first one in line gossiping with the rest of the disciples, I bet we would disapprove of how Jesus spent his time. Because sometimes things to us are far more urgent than they are to him. What Jesus knew is, if I heal this man of his sins, I give him an eternity. And in that eternity, he can walk and hop and skip and run in his new heavenly body. And this life is a mist or a vapor. This suffering compared to eternity is nothing. It doesn't matter. It's inconsequential. And so if you said, if you asked his friends, would you rather him help your friend walk or would you rather him forgive your friend's sins? The implication is that they would have said, no, make him walk. We'll figure the sin out thing later. And Jesus is like, no, you don't understand. That's not the most important thing here. And so what I see in this story and what I want us to reflect on and admit is we are not always right about what is most urgent. We are not in our finite human, always right about what is most urgent. And we have, all of us, prayed prayers where the issue was simple. Heal them, protect them, make this thing go through, make this thing fall through. Heal that marriage, heal that relationship, heal this, heal that, God be in this, God be in that, where we see the most urgent need, protect my children from these things, protect my husband from those things, protect my wife from that pain. We see these things that feel so urgent to us and we lower them down in front of Christ and we go, don't you see what I see? And then Jesus answers those prayers in that urgency in a way that we would not expect and that we would not choose and that we would not ask for. And then we get disillusioned with Christ because he didn't meet our expectations. We don't know what's most urgent at all times. If I could have protected my mom from that fall and saved the gash on her head, I would have done it. And in so doing, I would have made the decision that ruptured her appendix and put her in much more grave danger than that fall. Because I don't always see what's most urgent. It's why I'm so grateful that Romans chapter 8 and verse 26 tells us this, that in the same way the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans or groanings too deep for words. We are taught in Romans, the greatest chapter, Romans 8, that the Holy Spirit, we don't know what to pray for as we ought because we don't know what the most urgent need is. And so the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. The Holy Spirit is literally in the throne room of God as we pray, saying this is what Harris prayed, Lord, but this is what he really wants. This is his heart, but this is what he needs. It tells us that Jesus is our high priest and that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. This is what Anna prayed. This is what she really needs and wants, God. This is what's going to be best for her. Don't give her what she asked for that's going to be worse. And listen to me. It makes me so grateful that there is a Holy Spirit in heaven who hears my prayers and translates them correctly to the Father. I am so grateful that I have a Holy Spirit interceding on behalf of Lily and John, my children. That I have a Holy Spirit interceding on behalf of Jen. How many things would I choose as a father or as a husband to protect them from? How many things would I choose to fix? How many things would I choose to just wave a wand and make go away? Because clearly it's the most urgent need in their life. If you're a parent and you've ever watched your child go through pain, and listen, Lily's nine, so the kind of pain we're talking about is pretty minimal. Some of you have watched your kids struggle to have children or deal with addictions or deal with failures or deal with hardships or deal with being alone. You've watched your children walk through real pain. And if you could wave a wand because it's their most urgent need, you would wish that away. But aren't you glad that the Holy Spirit is interceding for you at the throne of the Father to make sure that your prayers are the right prayers when they get to God's ears. I know that I am. Because I don't want my wisdom and my viewpoint to dictate what happens to my children and to my church and to my friends and to my wife. I want to entrust that to a Jesus that has a different plan than me, that sees things more urgently than I do, and that correctly prioritizes what me and the people around me really need. We have a hard time with this, and I know many, many people, me included, and close friends, who have entered into a rocky time in their faith because Jesus didn't see an urgent need that they did. Because Jesus didn't think something was as urgent as they did. Because Jesus didn't answer the prayer the way that they had hoped he would. And because of that disappointment and disillusionment in Christ, they've moved sometimes away from Jesus, sometimes further away from Jesus, sometimes they've allowed that disappointment to drive a wedge between them and Jesus. And I just want to submit to you that if God isn't answering your prayers the way you'd like, maybe he has better plans. Some of you have petitioned God hard for things, and you've not gotten the answer you wanted. Is it possible that he sees a more urgent need than you? If I think about the things that my parents would have prayed away for me as I was growing up and some of the different struggles that I had, I'm so grateful now that there was a Holy Spirit interceding that allowed those things to go on because they made me into who I am. Now this doesn't work, and I'll be the first to admit, this doesn't make sense of every unanswered prayers. There's some prayers in my life, there's some things that were urgent in my life that I took to Christ and I took it to him for years and I saw it as very urgent and he could have healed if he wanted, he could have prevented if he wanted, and he didn't. And it still doesn't make any sense to me that he didn't. I still don't see the better good that came out of that. So this idea doesn't cover every unanswered prayer that we'll encounter in our life. But for a lot of them, if not most of them, maybe Jesus isn't answering our prayer the way we want because he's got a better plan. And if we'll just wait and see, one day we'll see it. I'll close with this story I'm a great time in there. I Had a friend growing up named Jenny pain and As adults we ended up in the same church and she was a small group leader for me and and she told me this story one time and a testimony video that she did. And I did not know this growing up. But Jenny was a little girl, I don't know how old, four or five years old, and she had two brothers. And she found out that her mom was pregnant. And so she immediately, in the way that earnest children do, she immediately got on her knees and started praying every day for a baby sister. She desperately wanted a baby sister. And she even went as far as to ask for a baby sister named Jessica. That's what she wanted specifically. I would like for that child to stop making that noise. Pray with me about that. Thank you, Ms. Erin. Don't we have a hallway czar? This is unbelievable. I can power through. I can power through normally. This is great. Yeah, go bang on the wall there, Haley. All right, we're going to agree to be grown-ups and tune that out. Jenny prayed for a baby sister named Jessica. And however many months after those prayers began, her mom had a baby. That was a little boy named Johnny. And Jenny was devastated. It took her several years to believe in the power of prayer again. Her parents could not convince her to pray because she had prayed, and she got John, not Jessica. John grew up, got to the age where you go to college, went to college, started making some poor choices with poor friends. I mean low-quality friends. I don't mean they were low socioeconomically. And he washed out of college. And those bad decisions caused him to join a construction crew down in Florida where he continued to kind of let his life not reach its potential by continuing to make poor choices. And at some point or another, he met a girl. And that girl really wanted him to go to church. And through her influence and her being a little bit different cut of cloth than the girls that normally talk to him, he started to get his life back together. He started to pursue God and make wise choices. And before you know it, Johnny's a respectable adult. He's engaged. And Jenny finds herself sitting in the wedding party of her new little sister named Jessica a few months after that. God had a plan. He knew that Johnny was going to need that Jessica more than Jenny did. And so even her most urgent prayers didn't get answered the way she wanted because God saw something different. And I don't know what you're praying for. I don't know what you're lowering down in front of Jesus. I don't know what you see as most urgent in the lives of the people around you. But I do know that Jesus may not see it the way you do. And because of that, you should be grateful. You should be grateful that you're trusting things to the wisdom of Christ and not yours. And in time, he will answer those prayers in the way that is best for us because we know that for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, all things work together for good. On this side of eternity or on that side, we know. We can trust a Jesus who sees things differently than us. Keep praying your prayers. Keep your faith. Blessed are those who do not fall away on account of him. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your servant Mark who wrote these stories down for us. We thank you for a Jesus who sees us and who knows us. God, we thank you for a Holy Spirit that intercedes for us and groanings too deep for words. And that we are entrusted to their wisdom and not our own. God, if we find ourselves in a situation where we're praying and we feel like something is so urgent and we know exactly what you should do and we know exactly how you should address it and we can't stand to see this pain and we can't stand to see this hardship and God, don't you care too and can't you not stand to see it? God, give us patience for your perspective. Give us a faith in your sense of urgency and let us entrust ourselves and those we love the most to you and watch your plan unfold in their life. Give us faith, God. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. If you're in the back there, that looks pretty crowded. You'd like some more room. We got two completely empty rows right here in the front. Just get up in front of everyone and come sit right here. That's where we make the latecomers sit, so we parade you in front of everyone. This is the first part of our new series called Mark's Jesus, where we're going to be going through the Gospel of Mark for a long time. For about 12 weeks, it's going to carry us all the way until Easter. And so I'm excited to kind of steep in this book together in Mark's Gospel. As we approach the gospel, it begins in a way, at the beginning chapters of the gospel of Mark, there is a story that's ubiquitous in all of the gospels, and they all have this towards the beginning. And it's kind of, in my view, a story about people who had disqualified themselves from a particular service. And we'll talk about why in a minute. But it reminds me of a time when I disqualified myself from something, which was my freshman year of college. You may not know this about me. I got my degree from a small Bible school called Toccoa Falls College that I would not recommend to anyone. That place was boring. I did meet Jen there, though, so that's nice, but we both hated it. But my freshman year, I went to Auburn University. I went there because it was February or March, I think, and I had not taken the SATs or applied to a college yet, and one of my good friends that I played volleyball with every afternoon said, hey, I'm going to Auburn, would you like to be my roommate? And I said, do you have an application? And he goes, yes. I said, will you fill it out for me? He goes, yes. I said, great, send it in. And so then literally two weeks later, I get home from school, and my mom's like, what's this? It's an acceptance letter from Auburn. It was never even on the radar screen so I'm a freshman year I go to Auburn University Auburn does not have an intercollegiate men's soccer team but they did have a club team and for those of you who don't know what a club team is it's it's a glorified intramural team you try out for it and then you go play other schools in the area that also have club soccer teams and so I thought I'd go out for this team because I play, I'm not trying to brag, I played all four years in high school. I was a four-year letterman at Killian Hill Christian School. Now, it didn't matter to me that the entire high school consisted of about 100 students. Roughly 50 of those are boys. Roughly 20 of those have ever touched a soccer ball in their life. And about five of us had, like, played consistently. So that didn't factor in. I thought I was good at soccer. My junior year, we won the state championship. I was the MVP of the state championship game. My senior year, I made All-State. So I go to tryouts at Auburn thinking I'm somebody. Michelle Massey's back there grinning at me because she even played actual Division I soccer and knows the difference, right? She knows what I was about to walk into. She succeeded where I failed miserably. So I go to tryouts the first day and there's like 250 people there. 250 to 300 grown men are there. I had, the most people I'd ever seen at a tryout was like 25 and everybody made it,. The coaches took him because he felt bad for him that's why we got pudgy seventh graders with state championship patches on their arm right now because the coach felt bad for them. So I go to tryouts and I'm looking at my competition. Now when I was a freshman in college this may be hard to believe but I was a hundred and fifty five pounds soaking wet. All right I it's a little, I put on a few since then. I was a skinny little nothing. And I'm looking at these guys that I'm now trying out against and they have like hairy chests and muscles and stuff. And I am out of my depth. And I was just immediately so intimidated. And that was the, that was the day where I realized I wasn't an athlete, right? I had, previous to that day, previous to that tryout, I had always thought I was pretty athletic. And then when I went to that tryout and I watched other athletes actually do athletic things, I realized you're a coordinated white kid. You are not an athlete. And so I did the best I could to go through the tryout, had a good attitude, tried to keep my head up, do the best that I could. But by the end of it, I just realized this ain't it. And so they got us together and they said, hey, listen, we're going to whittle. There's 250 of you. We're going to whittle it down to 50. If you're invited to the tryout tomorrow afternoon, we're going to put your name on a list in the student union. Go to the student building, whatever it is. go there and the Foy Student Union Center and We're gonna post a list of 50 names if your names on the list you're invited to come try out again tomorrow We'll whittle it down to 25 Well, I got up the next day and do you want to know what I did not go do? That's right walk to the Foy Student Union Center to see if my name was on the list I knew pretty good good and well it wasn't. I took myself out of the running for that. I went ahead and told them, you don't fire me, I quit. Before you, even if my name's on the list, I'm not trying to, I don't like your attitude. Like I'm not going. I knew that my name wasn't on that list, not even worth the seven minute walk across campus to figure it out. I completely took myself out of the running. And what we see at the beginning of Mark is something that we see when this happens in the other Gospels, where we have some people who have either been told by themselves or by others, you're not good enough to make the team. You're out of the running. You're disqualified. Now, as we dive into Mark, I would be remiss if I didn't give just a little bit of background on it. I'm not going to do much because not much is required, but every gospel, all four of them, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are written to different audiences. Mark is written to the Romans and it depicts Jesus as a servant. So Mark is the fastest moving gospel in the Bible. It's very quick, very fast paced from task to task to task because Mark is painting Jesus as a servant. That's what he's doing, and he wants to see that this is where we see like he must become greater, I must become less. This is where we see the greatest, whoever is greatest of you must be the servant of all. Those are Mark's words. And I would tell you if you've never read a gospel before, Mark is a great one to start with. It's incredibly, as far as gospels are concerned, action packed. It just goes from event to event to event. He doesn't dally in the inefficient details. But that's the gospel of Mark, and that's where we're going to be. And the series is called Mark's Jesus. This is the Jesus that Mark saw as he heard the stories from Peter. And so in this first chapter of Mark, the other gospels tarry a little bit at the beginning. Matthew and Luke kind of focus on genealogy and the Christmas story and the early years. And then the Gospel of John focuses on the ministry of John the Baptist kind of paving the way for Christ. But Mark jumps right into it. And halfway through the first chapter, Jesus is already calling his 12 disciples. And we have maybe the most famous call here in Mark chapter 1, verses 16 through 20, where Jewish educational system. Because if we don't understand the Jewish educational system, then some of what happens here doesn't make a whole lot of sense, right? Some of what happens here is curious. Have you ever wondered why the disciples just immediately, he's in the boat with his dad. He's doing his job. This is his future. And Jesus says, follow me, I'll make you fishers of men. And he's like, see you dad. And he goes, he leaves his job. We'll talk more about the call of Matthew, the tax collector, but Matthew's collecting taxes when Jesus calls him and he gets up from his career and he follows Jesus immediately. Have you ever wondered why they do that? I think when I was growing up and I was, and I encountered these passages, I just assumed that it was because they know who Jesus is. Jesus is Jesus, and so they want to be around Jesus because they've heard about Jesus and they want to follow Jesus. And that's not true. They didn't know yet that he was the Messiah of the world. They didn't know yet what that meant. So they're not following Jesus because he's Jesus. There's something more at play there. And when I explain to you kind of how the educational and rabbinical and discipleship system work, I think it might make sense to more of us. So I'm going to get in some details a little bit, but this helps us understand the calling of the disciples and then therefore our call so much better. So if you grew up in ancient Israel, if you grew up at the time of Christ, then you would start Jewish elementary school at about five years old. And Jewish elementary school would go from the age of five to 10. Boys and girls would do it together. And in these first five years, you would study the first five books of the Old Testament, what they called the Tanakh. And this was the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. You'd spend the first five years of your education studying those five books, and the goal was to memorize those five books. This is a culture with oral tradition. Memorization is heavy. People aren't writing things down and taking notes. So the idea of memorizing large swaths of text like that is not as anathema to them as it is to us. It was very approachable for them. We've lost that part of our brain a little bit with the ability to write things down all the time. But they would try to memorize the first five books of the Old Testament and become a master of those. Then at the age of 10, you would graduate to what I believe was called Beth Medrash Middle School. From 10 to 11, the girls, the Jewish girls, would learn Deuteronomy. They would focus more in on Deuteronomy for the worship aspects of it, and then they would look at Psalms, and they would look at Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, the wisdom books, because the women in Jewish history at this time carried the bulk of the load for the worship. So they were the ones that led the worship at the beginning in the temple. Now you guys can do what you want to to make jokes about Aaron's profession in your head, all right? I'm too dignified to do that, so I'm just going to let you do it. But that was the women's responsibility early on. And so from 10 to 13, middle school girls focused on that. And at 13, middle school girls graduated. Now help your mama, help your grandmama participate in the gathering, participate in the leading of worship. That was the role. But little boys would study the law and the prophets. So they would study the rest of the Old Testament or the Tanakh, and they would try to become masters of that. Then at 13, they would take a little break and they would go home and they would learn their father's profession. So if your dad was a fisherman, you'd go, you went home and you learned how to fish. If your dad was a tax collector, you'd go do that. If your dad, if your dad was a carpenter, you'd go be a carpenter, right? That's why it's important that we know what Joseph's profession was because that was Jesus's future had he not stayed in the educational system. So you would go and do that. And then around age 15, if you wanted to do more than that, if you wanted to continue your education, you would go find a rabbi that was legally allowed within the church to have disciples. And you would say, can I follow you? Will you be my rabbi? And if that rabbi said yes and accepted you as a student, which was very exclusive and very, very difficult to get into, listen to me, this is not an exaggeration. To become a disciple in ancient Israel at the time of Christ is not dissimilar at all from getting a scholarship to an Ivy League school. It's not dissimilar at all from going to Harvard or Yale or Georgia Tech. It was really like elite. For the new people, NC State stinks and Georgia Tech's the best. That's the basic line of joking that's been present for the duration of my tenure. But it was not dissimilar to getting to go to an Ivy League school. Your future is very bright. And only the best of the best get accepted, get taken on as disciples. And you wouldn't wait for the rabbi to come to you. You went to the rabbi and you would say, can I follow you? And what that question really means is, can I be who you are? Do I have what it takes to do what you do? And the rabbi would decide yes or no, whether or not to take you on as a disciple, as a student. And then from 15 to sometimes as late as 30, which makes sense why Jesus's ministry started at 30, you would train under your rabbi And he would teach you to do what he did. And there was a saying, may you be ever covered in the dust of your rabbi. May you be following so closely behind him on the dusty streets of Israel that his dust is kicked up on you and you are covered in the dust of your rabbi. You're following him to learn to do what he does. Okay? Understanding that, looking back at the text that we read, when Jesus sees Simon, Peter, what are they doing? They're fishing. What does that tell you about where they were in life and what the educational system had told them at some point? Because if at any point you weren't progressing as a student, if you're doing middle school and your teacher's like, nah, you're not really getting it, that's okay. Go home, be a godly fisherman, come to the temple and tithe and serve God in other ways. We're going to let the more elite students serve you in that way. If your rabbi said you're just not getting it, go home at 20 years old, be a godly carpenter. We love you. You're a good person. Serve the Lord in different ways. You're not qualified for this way. So the fact that Peter and James and John are at home with their dads fishing tells us that at some point or another, voices from within or without disqualified them from further education. And make no mistake about it, it's not as if they weren't interested. The ancient Hebrews, ancient Israel, didn't have professional sports. There was no gladiatorial arena. There was no way to make it. There was no way to ascend to the next level of society. There was no way to make your name great. There was no way to get famous. The only path forward to do any of those things, to make something of yourself, to be somebody, was to be a rabbi and hopefully elevate to Pharisee or a member of the Sanhedrin. That was the only way to climb the ladder in ancient Israel. So every little boy wanted to be a disciple one day and wanted to be a rabbi one day. And every father wanted their little boy to be a disciple who becomes a rabbi. That was the almost ubiquitous dream of ancient Israel. And so Peter and James and John fishing with their dad tells us that at some point a voice from within or without told them that they were not qualified to continue in service to God's kingdom in that way. Do you see that? And when I say from within or without, it could have been a voice within, like my voice at Auburn, going, dude, you don't need to go look at that list. You're not making it. Maybe they never went to a rabbi and said, can I follow you? Because they just knew what the answer would be. Or maybe they did go to a few and they kept getting shot down. But for some reason or another, what it tells us is that a voice from within or without had told them that they were not qualified. Somebody told them they weren't talented enough to do this. And then I also think of Matthew and his call. Matthew, who's the author of the first gospel in the New Testament, was a tax collector. Tax collectors were deplorable in ancient Israel. They were deplorable because they were turncoats and they were traders to their people for the sake of their own pocketbook, for the sake of their own greed. Here's how the tax collecting system worked in ancient Israel. Israel is a far-flung province of the Roman Empire, headed up by a likely failed senator named Pilate, because you don't get sent to Israel to be the governor from Rome unless you're terrible at your job and the emperor doesn't like you anymore. It's like being the diplomat to whatever the heck, okay? Go out here. We're going to put you in the wilderness for three years. Pilate's leading ancient Rome. His only, or leading ancient Israel, his only job is to keep the peace and keep the money flowing. That's it. Squelch rebellion, keep the income coming in. How do they make income? They tax the people. They tax the people at a rate that they had never been taxed before in their history. And this rendered many, many, many of the families in Israel as completely impoverished. They are living lives of what we would say is abject poverty. And the way that those taxes got paid is the tax collector, you'd go to the tax collector to pay your taxes, and Rome said it's a 20% tax on all goods and income, and the tax collector would go, oh gosh, looks like it's 22.5% this year. Looks like it's 25% this year. They would just tack on a few extra percentage points to make whatever they could make to get money off of you by being a toy of the empire of Rome. They were turncoats who rejected their people for the sake of their own greed. They were disrespected. They were considered sinful and sinners. They were considered unclean because they handled money all the time. To be a tax collector is to disconnect from your spiritual heritage. It's to choose to live a life that you know disqualifies me from service in God's kingdom. I have put that thought away. I will never think about it again. So Matthew was a person who had chosen a path in life that was completely separate from a religious path and had at some point or another inevitably made the decision due to the cognitive dissonance of the two existing of, I am not going to embrace that religious faithful life anymore. I'm not good enough for it. I cannot do it. I cannot serve it. That is not me. I'm going to make a decision for myself to live greedily and selfishly and indulge in my own sin and in my own desire. That's what he did. So he had chosen a life that anyone around him, including himself, would have said, I am not worthy to be used in the kingdom of God in any way, and I'm good with it. And yet Jesus goes to him and calls him too. Now here's what's remarkable to me about the calling of these disciples. One of the things. Jesus had every right as a rabbi who had achieved an authority that allowed him to call disciples. He had every right to sit back and wait for young men to come to him and ask him if they could follow him. He had every right to stay back and say, hey, I'm a rabbi. Now's the time. If you want to come work for me, let me know. And he doesn't do that. We see him pursuing the disciples. He doesn't wait for Peter to come to him and say, Jesus, may I follow you? He goes to Peter and he says, would you like to follow me? He goes to John and James and says, would you like to follow me? He goes to the tax collector who would never, ever, ever have the audacity to go to Jesus, the rabbi, the son of God and say, can I please follow you? No, he would never have the audacity to do that. His life of sin had disqualified him from approaching Christ. And Christ doesn't wait for him to get over that to invite him. No, he goes to Matthew in his sin, in his deplorable life, in his feeling like crud, and he says, would you follow me? And what do they all do? They all immediately throw down everything and follow Christ. And what we see here is that Jesus has a remarkable pattern of pursuit. Jesus, like his dad, has a remarkable pattern of pursuit. In the Old Testament, God called out to Abraham and told him what to do. He showed himself to Moses in the burning bush and told him what to do. He showed himself to David and told him what to do. He pursued his children in the nation of Israel over and over and over again, generation after generation after generation, despite their rejection, despite their betrayal, despite their refusal to obey him and to follow him and to serve him. He pursues and pursues and pursues. And when that pursuit isn't enough, he sends his son as a personification of divinity to pursue us in human form. It is. That's very good. If you didn't hear that, somebody's phone in the front row, Siri, just to find personification for us in case you didn't know what that was. It's in the back next week. We see Jesus early in his ministry display this pattern of pursuit where he goes to the disciples. He doesn't wait for them to come to him. We see later on when Jesus teaches about the 99 and he says that a good shepherd leaves the 99 and pursues the lost sheep. We see him telling a story of a rich man whose son went off and squandered his money on wild living. And as he came back home, the rich man saw him far off and he went running to him. He pursued him. Our God does not sit back and wait for us to come to him. Jesus says he stands at the door and knocks, waiting for us to let him into our lives. Our Jesus chases after us. He pursues us. He does it gently, but he does it relentlessly. And many of you, I would wager all of you, at one point or another, even at your worst, sometimes especially at your worst, have felt this gentle, relentless pursuit of Christ, have felt Christ whispering to you in the shadows and in the isolation that he still loves you, he still cares about you, he's still coming for you. You've seen how he pursues people in your life. You know experientially how Christ never gives up on you. There is no barrel that has a bottom too far down for Christ to not chase you there. He has an incredible pattern of pursuit. And Jesus continues to pursue us to this day. He continues to pursue you. And what I want you to hear this morning more than anything else is, that invitation that he extends to these disciples that he pursued, Come and follow me. Very, very simple invitation. It's the same one that he extends to you this morning. Come and follow me. Come follow me. Now, here's what's so important to understand about this call and this invitation. The disciples, Peter, James, John, Matthew, Andrew, the rest of them, Thomas, they did not know then at their call, Nathaniel and Philip, they did not know at their call that Jesus was the Messiah and they didn't know what it meant to be the Messiah. The only person on the planet, I believe at this point in history, who knew who Jesus was and what he came to do was marry his mother. I don't think anybody else had an accurate clue what he was doing. So the disciples definitely don't know that he's the Messiah and they don't even really know what the Messiah is. They don't even yet know that he's the son of God. That has not been revealed to them yet. Jesus has not made that public yet. And what we see in the three years of ministry, what we'll see throughout the rest of the gospel of Mark is this progressive revelation and understanding amongst the disciples about who Jesus is. We fast forward a year in and Jesus comes out on the boat and he calms the storm, right? He says, wind and waves be still. And he calms the storm and he goes back down into the hold and he goes to sleep. And what did the disciples say? Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him? The last week of his life, Jesus is walking into the city of Jerusalem and James and John are lagging behind him arguing about who gets to be the vice president and the secretary of defense. They still don't get it. So when Jesus calls them and they receive the call, they were not encumbered with all this sense of belief that we encumber that with. They simply responded to who he was and said, okay, I'll go. They didn't know all there was to know about Jesus. They didn't even fully believe in Jesus yet. But they responded to his invitation and they followed. And the same invitation with the same parameters and expectations around it is extended to us and every generation through the centuries to simply follow Jesus. Here's another thing I love about this invitation from Jesus to follow him. He didn't just give them protection. He gave them purpose. He wasn't just offering them, because when we think about Jesus extending an offer, us follow me and I'll make you fishers and men, come follow me, come let me in, I stand at the door and knock, let me into your life. When we think about responding to the invitation of Christ, I think we typically take that to the moment of salvation. I'm going to respond to the invitation of Christ by letting him into my life and I'm going to become a Christian. That's typically where we go with that. But I would say, first of all, I think that this is a daily response to choose to follow Jesus every day. Second of all, when we reduce following Jesus, that moment of salvation to just now I'm in, now I'm a Christian, and that's it. When we make that the inflection point, we reduce the call of Christ down to mere protection. Protection from hell, eternal separation from God, protection from our sins, I no longer have to pay the penalties for those, protection in taking us to heaven, protection in overcoming sin and death. If we've've lost a loved one who also knows Jesus then we know that one day we get to see them again that when we say goodbye to them on their deathbed it's goodbye for now not goodbye forever so we're offered protection over sin and death and sometimes we reduce the call of Christ down to this offer of protection follow me and I will protect you from your sins and from the judgment of God and from the pains of death. And then one day everything will be perfect in eternity. Just hold on until we get there. But no, he doesn't just offer them protection. He offers them purpose. Because what does he say after he invites them to follow me? Follow me and I will make you fishers of men. Follow me and I will imbue your life with a greater sense of purpose than you've ever had. Follow me, I have things for you to do. Follow me, I believe in you. Follow me, we're going to do great things. And I'm going to equip you for everything that I want you to do. And he imbues us with purpose that he's got plans for us in his kingdom. And just like then when Jesus asked them to follow and said, come and follow me, I'll make you fishers of men. He also tells us vicariously through the Great Commission, the last thing that Jesus instructs the disciples to do, go into all the world and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Don't go into all the world and make converts. Don't go into all the world and offer my protection and that's it. Go into all the world and offer them my protection and my purpose. Make disciples and train them to do what I trained you to do. Go and make people who contribute to the ministry and the kingdom of God. We're all kingdom builders pushing this thing forward. That's how we talk about it around here. So he imbues us with purpose. And the same invitation to the disciples there is the one that he offers us this morning. Jesus is not, when he comes to you and he says, follow me, just follow me, just do what I'm asking you to do. It's not a simple offer of protection. It's an offer to imbue your life with purpose. I'm going to make your life matter in the kingdom of God. I want you to experience what it is to do my work and to love my people. It's a remarkable, remarkable invitation. And even as I articulate those things, I am certain that most of us in this room have already found ways to disqualify ourselves with the voices from within and from without from this call of Jesus. I'm certain that there are plenty of you who are sitting there during this sermon, hopefully thinking along with me, nodding along with me. Yes, believe all that. Yes, he calls us and he equips us. Yes, I agree with that. Yes, Jesus offers that same invitation. Yeah, they were unqualified. I feel unqualified, but I'm not yet sold. This sermon is for other people with more talent. It's for people who are younger than me. It's for people who are more charismatic than me. It's for people who have more potential than me, who are better looking than me, whatever it might be. So yeah, I agree, Nate, with the points that you're making, but that's not really for me. And what I want you to see is that that's your disqualifying voice coming from within or without that's telling you stuff that's not true about yourself. There's got to be a handful of us in here who go, yeah, I'm just a mom. That's what I do. I'm just a mom and my world is so small. God can't possibly have a plan for me to be used in incredible ways to build his kingdom. That's not true. We're told that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. God has a plan for you. God has something he wants to do with your life. He has a way that he wants to use you. He has a load that he wants you to carry joyfully and gleefully as you go through your life doing his work. He's created you for that. The problem, and he invites us this morning just as he invited the disciples to walk in that purpose and in that usefulness. The problem is we continue to have these voices that we believe in our head that tell us that we're not good enough, that we're not smart enough. I'm too old. I just teed off on 18, buddy. Like I'm looking at the sunset. That's a young man's game. Let somebody else do that work. I'm coasting it in, loving my grandkids. That's not for me. Or I'm too young. No one's going to listen to me. Or I don't have enough education. I'm not qualified enough to do this. Or I'm too inconsistent in my walk. Or I feel like Matthew and the choices that I've made in life have utterly you that you're not qualified for service in the kingdom of God do not come from God. They come from the world. They come from you. And they come from the people in your past who, well-meaning or not, damaged you and told you you weren't good enough and that you couldn't do it. I carry myself plenty of wounds from people that I respect a lot who indicated to me directly and indirectly that I would never make it in ministry. You've had people in your life, well-meaning or not, who have indicated to you in different ways, directly and indirectly, that you don't really have a lot to offer the kingdom of God. You've told yourself that so many times that you now can't even sort out the truth of where these voices are coming from. But here's what I want you to understand this morning. We are not qualified for ministry by our talent. We are qualified by our Savior. We are not qualified for service in God's kingdom by the gifts and abilities that we bring to the table. We are qualified by our Savior and by him alone. Do you think for a second there was anybody in Peter's life? If you know what you know about Peter, Peter was ready, fire, aim. That was him. Peter having nothing to say, thus said. He was always the one out in front, sticking his foot in his mouth. Do you think anybody looked at Peter at this point in his life on the banks of the Sea of Galilee outside the city of Capernaum and went, you know what this guy is? This guy's probably going to be like the very first head pastor of this movement that Jesus is about to birth with his perfect life and death. I bet he's going to be the guy. Nobody said that about Peter. Do you think anybody looked at John, who was maybe 10 to 15 years old at the time of his call? Do you think anybody looked at John and went, you know what John's probably going to do? John's probably going to write a gospel that's different and more influential than the others. He's going to write three great letters that are going to be included in the canon and printed for all of time. And he's going to write the apocryphal book in the New Testament that tells us about the end times. And he's going to die a martyr. He's going to be the last of the generation of disciples to die on the island of Patmos, an honorable death. And he's going to be so close to Christ during these next three years that the Savior of the universe is going to refer to him as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Not even John's mom thought that was possible. Nobody thought that was going to happen to the two boys called the sons of thunder, James and John, the sons of Zebedee. Nobody looked at Matthew collecting taxes and thought, you know what? This degenerate, who's totally rejected religion religion and the world and rejected his community and the people around him, he's going to become a disciple that writes one of the four gospels that's read by more people in human history than any other book. That's probably what Matthew's going to do. Nobody, nobody but Jesus looked at those disciples before their call and had any clue or any vision about how he could use them in his kingdom. Nobody but Jesus would have believed the plans that he had for those young men. So who are you to look at Christ and tell him that he can't use you? Nobody but Jesus knows what path you can have from this day forward. Nobody but God has the vision for what your life can be in the years that he is giving to you. Nobody knows what your potential is, least of all you. Our talent does not qualify us for service in God's ministry. Our Savior does. But we're so busy avoiding the walk to the student union because we are certain that our name is not on the list, that we don't even try, and we disqualify ourselves from service in God's kingdom. And I just want to remind you of this, that God alone can cast you aside, and he's promised never to do that. You can't disqualify yourself. Only God can do that. And he's promised to never forsake you. Only God can cast you aside and he will not do that. So quit casting yourself aside. This morning comes down to two simple thoughts. Whose voice are you going to believe about who you are and what God has planned for you? The world's or God's? Because a lot of us have been spending a lot of time listening to the world, believing that God's voice is for other people beside us. And the second one is this. Will you accept that simple invitation that tumbles down through the centuries from our Savior, that is the same now as it was then? Will you accept Christ's invitation to follow him and go where that leads? Let's pray. Father, thank you for being a God who pursues. Thank you for being a God who chases. For a God who believes and equips and calls and qualifies. Lord, I lift up those of us in this room who feel particularly unqualified. Who feel that our poor choices, our bad decisions, our lack of discernible skills, at least according to us, disqualify us from any kind of use in your kingdom. Father, would you help our eyes open to the reality that no one but you knows what your plans are. No one but you knows what you can do with a willing servant who will simply follow you. No one but you knows the potential of use and blessing and life that exists in this room. And so God, I pray that we would follow you. And I pray that we would begin to choose to listen to your voice about who we are and what we can do. And that we would refuse to listen to our own that doesn't tell us the truth. Help us to be followers of you and imbue us with purpose to build your kingdom. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here and making grace a part of your Sunday. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service if you'd like to do that as well. This is the fourth part of our series that we're kicking the year off with called Prayers for You. So it's different aspects of life and kind of prayers over those things for 2025. And so we've looked at marriage, and we've looked at kids and legacy. We've looked at life in general. And this morning, we're going to talk about finances. We have a prayer for you with your finances in 2025. And now as I say that, that this morning, I'm going to do the sermon about money, the whole room tightens up, right? Some of you brought guests and you just thought, are you serious right now? This is their first time and this is what you're going to preach. Some of you are probably here for the first time. You wandered in, maybe you've watched a few online and now you're like, okay, I'm going to go kick the tires. And on your very first Sunday, you're like, I'd like a pass, please. Can I come back next Sunday when we're not talking about money? And so I know that the room gets tight when this topic comes up. I'll be honest with you. I don't love talking about this either. And I'm going to tell you why in a minute. But just because I know that that's in the room, I want to say the quiet part out loud to diffuse maybe some of the discomfort around this topic, particularly in a church setting. This is the first thing on your notes. If you have a bulletin on the top of your notes, there's no fill in the blanks. This is just a statement that I'm writing for you that I'm going to say out loud and we are going to acknowledge. This morning is not a thinly veiled attempt to use the Bible to guilt you into giving us your money. Okay? That is not what we are doing. I've been in those. I've sat in those sermons. And they strike me as incredibly disingenuous. And if you have been a part of Grace for any length of time now, I've been here since 2017, April of 2017. I'm finishing up, believe it or not, my eighth year here. You know that I don't preach like that about money. You know that it is really important to me that this not be self-serving. And that's why I don't love to talk about it all the time, because it's really, really hard to thread the needle of appropriate biblical teaching on the topic that doesn't come across as self-serving for me. Because, let's say this part out loud too, I have a vested personal interest in you getting good at this. Right? I do. But that's not the place that I'm coming from. I just have to acknowledge that as true. I actually, and so I know that this is going on. This is kind of the reason why I don't, I'm not, I don't just jump at the chance to preach about money all the time. I was talking to a buddy yesterday and he said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? He doesn't go to church here. He lives, he lives down in Fuqua. He said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? And I said, I'm preaching about money. And he goes, ah, the obligatory money sermon so you can get that building built, huh? And I went, sure. But we know that that's in the mix, right? We know that those thoughts exist. And I can acknowledge that too. And I've been on both sides of it. So the absolute last thing I want to do is be disingenuous in what I'm sharing with you this morning. But here's the reality. The Bible talks about giving and finances a lot. If you do a quick Google, you'll find people out there who say that money is the topic that Jesus spoke about the most in his ministry. Now that is misleading because I'm not going to get into why because I have a lot to cover and I don't have time to get into why. That's misleading. I don't think it's fair to say that the most important topic to Christ in his lifetime was money. He gave a lot of examples that involved money, but he wasn't talking specifically about giving or about finances. But the reality is that this topic comes up a lot in the Bible. And if you were to make a grid of all the topics in the Bible, all the things that show up throughout Scripture, and then look at how often in my nearly eight years I've addressed those things, one of the things that the grid would reveal is that I have fallen woefully short of my responsibility to teach us about this topic because it is one that shows up with great frequency in Scripture and does not show up with great frequency in my preaching calendar. So let's talk about money this morning because the Bible talks about it way more than we do. To illustrate this point and to give us just a good swath of the philosophy of giving from Scripture, and then to draw out a singular point that I believe jumps out of the text of all of these verses, I want to read to you six different passages on money. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. They're going to be on the screen. You read with me. This is an overview beginning all the way back in Deuteronomy, moving all the way to the book of James, kind of a sweeping view of how God thinks about giving in his children. We're going to start in Deuteronomy chapter 15. He writes, there will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be open-handed toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land. There's always going to be poor people, and you should always give to them. This is an instruction from very, very early on. Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Bible, and it means the law repeated. So it's really just a summary of the first four books, more specifically Leviticus and Numbers. So this is the very beginning, the foundation of faith. He is saying from the get-go, you will always have needy people around you. Be the people who give to them. And then we jump to the end of the Bible, James chapter 2, suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, go in peace, keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? What good are you? You're just a well-wisher. I remember years ago, and I told, sorry, Andrea, I told Andrea, who's running our slides very faithfully this morning, that I wasn't going to talk in between these verses so she could leave them up there. So now there should be a blank slide, but there's not because I'm going to tell you something real quick. I remember a few years ago when Jen and I first moved here, we lived off of Tealbrier, right there off of Spring Forest. And so we would go to the Harris Teeter and there's a St. Jacques used to be in there. And next to it, some store went out of business. And then another store called Pet Wants was going up in there. And because I frequented the Harris Teeter, I noticed that they were there. And I noticed it was kind of a mom and pop operation. It looked like family was doing it. They were working really hard in the store for several weeks to revamp it. And one night I was at the grocery store late. Probably when you live 35 seconds away from the grocery store, your nine o'clock purchase of Ben and Jerry's statistic goes through the roof. Okay. So I was heading over there probably to get a pint of Ben and Jerry's Americone Dream. Thank you very much. And I noticed that they were working in there. And I was just touched by how hard they're working on this place and the hopes that they must have for this place. And so I went and I knocked on the door and some guy looks at me like, what, we're closed, you know? And I go, and so he opened the door and I said, hey, I just want to say, I've seen you working really hard. I've seen what you guys are doing here. I think it's great. I hope it goes really well for you. I hope this is a fantastic store. And he goes, thanks so much. We're actually having a friends and family sale tomorrow if you'd like to stop by and get anything. And I went, okay, yeah, great, thank you. And the door shut, and I was like, no way. I'm not buying anything from there. I don't like my dog. I'm not going to go spend money on a thing I don't want. I don't even want to spend the money we do spend on her. I'm not going in your store ever. I just hope it goes well. And what I realized is it's one thing to be a well-wisher. It's another thing to be bought in. James says, don't be a well-wisher. Oh, you're cold and you're hungry and you need? Be warm and well-fed. I'm going to keep my wallet in my pocket. Don't be a well-wisher. Malachi 3, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house. Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it. Then Jesus in Mark chapter 12 tells us this, but a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes about giving. Remember this, whoever then last, Jesus in Matthew chapter 6. This is a big verse about giving that is really indicative of the culture of giving a grace. And so while we're here, I just wanted to share this little bit about the way that money is handled here, because if you haven't been going here for a long time, you may actually not know this. But at Grace, this predates me. This was the culture when I got here. They've always taken very seriously, we've always taken very seriously, this direction from Christ to not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, to give in secret and to give in private and not ostentatiously. And because of that, when you give, there are only two people on the planet who see what you give. One is our office manager, Julie, our children's assistant office manager, Julie Sauls, but that's because someone has to manually process the check. So if you write a check, someone has to fill out a deposit slip and put that in. Someone has to see it, and so that's her job. That falls to her to do it. The only other person who sees what is given, this includes elders and this includes our finance committee, is our finance manager, a guy named Tom Ledoux. Tom lives in Michigan, and you never have to look him in the eye, so it's a really great setup for you, right? You won't find yourself in Bible study with Tom feeling uncomfortable because he knows some things. Those are the only two people. No one else knows, no one else has access, no one else sees, and so this is something we take very seriously. But as I looked at all of these verses, I don't know as I read through those what kinds of themes leapt out to you. I don't know what you perceived. I don't know what kind of impression they made. And we could probably look through those six verses and do 12 sermons out of them. There's enough things in there that are worth talking about and unpacking. But the thing that I saw the most as I went through those verses, because it wasn't just those verses that I read. When I sat down to do this and to start preparing for the sermon, I just read all the verses I could find on giving in Scripture. And one of the things that was incredibly apparent as I read through those, and I think is's highlighted specifically in these verses is this. Giving has never been optional. Giving for God's children. If you call God your father and Jesus your savior. Giving has never ever been optional. If you look back through the verses. Especially that last one. Jesus' words about giving to the needy and not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing, how does it start out? So when you give to the needy, not if, when you do it. Deuteronomy, very beginning, there will always be poor people. Be people who give to the poor people. James, when you encounter someone who is needy, and you will, be the person that gives to them. Malachi, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse. The tithe that you're giving, that you're expected to give, that's going to be given, bring it into my temple. When Jesus looks at the poor widow and she gives two cents, I think sometimes we would think that he would go to her and he would say, hey, you take that back. You need that more than the church does. You take it. That's not what he does. Instead, he honors it because of the assumption that this is something that she is going to do. In Corinthians, whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly and vice versa. But he says, when you give, not if you decide to give, but when you give, determine what you want to do, not out of a sense of ought, but out of a sense of want to, because God loves a cheerful giver. But what I see as I read through these scriptures and I read through the rest of the Bible about these scriptures or about this topic is that giving is not optional at all. In fact, giving is essential to becoming a mature, healthy believer. It is part of the essential nature of sanctification and growing in our spiritual maturity and in the depth of our spiritual lives. As a matter of fact, I would say it like this. Thinking that you can become a healthy Christian without the discipline of giving is like thinking you can become a healthy person without the discipline of exercise. If you want to be healthy, if you want a good heart rate, if you want your blood work to come in right, and I'm about to be 44 next month, so I'm getting to an age where I have to start caring about those things, and I'll probably know what my cholesterol is here in the next few months. If you want to be a healthy person, you can eat right. You can eat like a rabbit. You can monitor what goes into your system. You can be careful about not consuming alcohol or not consuming other chemicals or whatever it is. You can be careful about what goes into your body. You can be careful about what you eat. You can be diligent about your sleep time. You can do a lot of healthy things. But until you're exercising, until you're getting your heart rate up for 30 minutes a day, you will not be a healthy person. And I believe that trying to be a healthy Christian, trying to grow in our faith and in our spiritual maturity without the discipline of giving is just as silly and as much of a pipe dream as it is to try to be a healthy person who does not exercise. Which is why it's important for us as we look through scripture to acknowledge giving, in God's view, has never been optional. And I don't think that that's how we think about it. I think for a lot of us, we do think of it as optional. Maybe not intentionally, but by default and behaviorally, we approach it as something that maybe I need to do one day sometimes. I used to joke, I used to be, when I would drive, I was a bit of a speeder. Our state patrol person is not here today. So yeah, I speed all the time. And the older I get, the less I do it. This morning I was driving in, it's 0 dark 30 on 540 to get here. And I looked down, I went, because I was driving and I literally thought, am I going too fast? And I looked down and I was doing 58 miles an hour. So I was, it was under control. So I don't speed very much anymore, but I'll still do it sometimes. And I'm always going to go a little bit over the speed limit because, come on, no one wants to be. Don't be the jerk that goes to speed limit. Nobody likes you on the road if that's what you do. Get out of the way. And so I used to joke because sometimes it would come up in different circles, especially like pastor circles where you're trying to out-compete each other in righteousness, and someone would be like, yeah, I don't speed because I believe it's a sin and it's wrong. And I would just say like, you may be right, but God hasn't gotten that far down the conviction tree on me yet. All right? There's some bigger fish to fry in my life than going eight over. All right? So I haven't gotten to that portion of conviction. I think some of us think about giving that way. Yeah, that's a thing I need to do one day. I know that's an essential part of the Christian life, but, but not yet. There's some bigger fish to fry. And I think what these, what these scriptures show us is no, no, that's a pretty important one. That's what, that's essential to the nature of being a Christian. It's an expected thing of believers. But I think that even in light of that, maybe we don't put it off and go, gosh, one day I'm just not there yet. Later on in my spiritual maturity, I will get there. Maybe we think of it like this. Maybe it's just hard for us to do it. Maybe we don't have a lot of extra right now. I mean, inflation's up. Things are tough. That's a bit, I mean, everybody, a lot of people that I know have had to tighten the purse strings a little bit in the last two years. And so maybe for us, the idea of giving is something that we want to do, but we just don't feel like we can afford it. Or we just don't feel like it's wise. And so we put it off. But whenever I think about that, first of all, if you look at the way that Jesus applauds the old lady who gives out of little, that's a good indicator that that may not be a good way to think about giving. I can't afford it, so I'm not going to do it. Another thing that informs my thinking on this is a conversation I had with Jen years ago. Early on in our marriage, I was a poor student pastor and she was a poor private school teacher. And we bought our house. We got married in 2006. We bought our first house in 2007. Excuse me. We bought our first house in 2007, which is wonderful because we bought it, I think, for like $180,000, our very first house. It took 10 years for that house to be worth $180,000 again. It was just right at the brink of the recession. By the next year, that thing was worth $125,000. Great. So we're not living in plenty. We are living in very close to want. We don't have a lot. And Jen's dad has always been a remarkably generous man. And I remember making the comment to her, I hope one day we make more money and live more comfortably so that we can be generous like your dad is. I want to have that experience and be that kind of, now the word I would use is be that conduit of grace to other people. And Jen said, yes, I hope so too, but my daddy always taught me that the way you give when you don't have a lot is the way that you will give when you do have a lot. So the generosity trait starts early. And his larger point was, if we are people who think one day when I have more margin, I'll be more generous. There's no magical generosity button that gets hit when you have plenty. However generous you are with little is how generous you will be with a lot. So if you want to be generous one day, then you need to start being generous today. It's never been optional. And because of that, the encouragement today, what I want to press upon you is just the idea of being faithful in your giving. My prayer for you, these are prayers for you. My prayer for you for your finances this year is very, very simple. My prayer is that you would be faithful in your giving, whether you're giving out of little or you're giving out of much. Each one has different kinds of pains associated with it. But my prayer is that you would be faithful to what God expects of his children, understanding that giving is what's best for you. Being a generous person is what's best for you. Understanding that you will not mature as a Christian into full maturity if this is not a part of your regular discipline. So my prayer for you is that whether you give out of little or you give out of a lot, that you would simply be faithful in that giving. And like everything else, when God tells us we have to do something, when God says do this or don't do that, it is always because he has our best interest in mind. So giving and being a generous person is actually what's best for us, which is why I'm preaching the sermon today. Because if you study scripture, it's very clear that this is what God wants for us. And if I don't tell you that, then I'm derelict in my duty. So we can be adults and have an honest conversation about it. Giving is something that God wants you to do. It has never, ever been optional. Now, the question then becomes, okay, if it's what's best for me, why is it what's best for me to give away the money that I feel like I've earned? Here's why. Three reasons. There's more than this, but three reasons. Giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. The act of giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. Here's what I mean. The act of giving reminds us, first and foremost, that what we're giving is not ours to give. We are simply giving back to God what he has entrusted us with. It is the idea of stewardship. The act of giving, whether it's to the church or to a nonprofit that you believe in or to anything else that's going on in God's kingdom, the act of giving to God's kingdom is a reminder every time I am giving out of my allotment that God has assigned to me, I am not giving out of my possessions. Do you see the difference? God has allocated his resources out amongst us, and he's trusted us to be good stewards of those resources and to direct those in ways that build his kingdom, not our own. This is the idea of kingdom builders. This is also the idea of being a conduit of grace. A conduit connects to one source and funnels those resources to another source. So when I say at grace, we are conduits of grace. Yes, we offer grace to one another, but we're also, we also understand and see our lives as a conduit from God to the people and to building his kingdom. And so when we give, we are reminded of that conduit status. We are reminded of who we are and what we have. And we're even reminded if we're willing to take it a step further. Okay, I have these resources and I'm reminded that they're God's, they're not mine. I would take it a step further and I would say, yes, and the talents and abilities that you applied to garner those resources were also given to you by God to be a steward of and to use. So the fact that he allowed us to have resources is his gift and grace anyway, so we continue to be a funnel and let those resources flow out of us in generosity. It reminds us of how we should think about our finances and our resources. It puts us in the proper perspective. A wonderful thing about giving, maybe the best part, is that it invites us. You could say it invests us here too, but giving invites us into ministries that we might not be capable of doing ourselves. It's one thing to go to a charity dinner, to a charity gala where they're going to give you a cold chicken or a cold barbecue or something and a salad that's really terrible. Like we've all been. It's like $150 a plate and I'd rather go to McDonald's. But you go and you sit and you hear about the ministry and you hear about the thing and maybe you write a check for $200 or whatever it is you do. It's one thing to go to a charity gala or a charity dinner. It's another thing to be a giver to that ministry and go participate in the blessing of what God is doing and where he is doing it, to be invested in this ministry so that when you hear the stories of the families that are reached, when you hear the stories of the children that are no longer orphaned, when you hear the stories of the women in third world countries who have been equipped with skills and have been running a successful small business on their own that is sustaining their family in ways that they were never capable of, you get to feel like a participant in that. You realize that your participation in that nonprofit, in that entity, in that institution is something that can be celebrated by you because I'm a part of this. It invites you into areas of God's kingdom that you might not otherwise go, and it invests you in what those people are doing. And I say this with all candor. God may not have put you in a situation in your life where you have the time, the skill set, the life circumstances that allow you to go to an African country and start a ministry that prohibits children from becoming orphans and trains up their moms so that they can sustain their family. You might not have the bandwidth to go to another country and start that ministry. But somebody else has had that bandwidth. And somebody else has done that. And you've got the bandwidth to go make money. God's given you those gifts to do that and you're good at it. Maybe you're good at it so that you can funnel those gifts into other areas of God's kingdom where his work is being done and where God is showing up. And now I might not have the skill set to go down the street and start the nonprofit and do English as a second language for Spanish-speaking parents who are just trying to navigate their kids through middle school. But I have the resources to help and to fund those who do have those gifts and talents. And so the opportunity to give invites us into ministries and into opportunities and into blessings that we might not otherwise have based on our gifting and our life circumstances and where we are. It invests us in what's happening there. And it's a tremendous privilege to do that. I think one of the great benefits of investing our lives in things that build God's kingdom is that he gives us front row seats into places where we would not otherwise get to go. One of my great joys of being a pastor is the sacred spaces that I get invited into because of my position. Sitting in the hospital room in the middle of fear and praying with people. I realize that's not a normal place for people to get invited. Being entrusted with people who come and sit down in my office and ask for help in certain areas of their life or ask for prayer about this or advice about this, I realize that that's not a typical life experience for everyone. Having the opportunity when there's something on my heart that I really feel like I need to say, I have a platform where I can do that. There's different things about my position that give me access to front row seats to what God is doing in different places that I might not otherwise get. And by being a person who is a generous giver, we now have front row seats into different places where God is doing work and we're showing up to build his kingdom and we get a unique perspective there. It's an invitation into the blessing of what God is doing. And then finally, candidly, giving fuels us. It fuels our desire to give more, to be more, to be involved more, but it also fuels the ministries of God. This is an undeniable fact. The very first time God instructs his people to give is in the book of Numbers. And do you know why he does it? He says, bring your tithe to the temple because the Levites are not allowed to have jobs. They do this all the time and we need to be able to sustain them as a society. So the other 11 tribes, you give 10% of what you have to the Levites so that they can serve us as our priests. It's God said to begin to give, to fuel the ministries that he is doing. And so giving, quite literally, fuels the ministries going on around us. To this end, grace is fueled by our partners. And this is where I just want to speak to you directly because you're grownups. This church is fueled by the generous giving of our partners. If you guys don't give generously, this all goes away. We have four full-time staff people. We have three part-time staff people. We pay them. If we don't give, Miss Erin is the first one on the chopping block. Out of here. Right away. No kids ministry. We have to pay rent. We pay $13,000 a month for this dump. All right? We do. We can't even get the pole removed. And every year they charge us more for common area maintenance so that our grass can look cruddy out there and we don't have any. We have to keep the lights on. We fund different ministries through the church. The reality of this place is that it is fueled by the partners. And if that's not happening, then this place doesn't happen. So one of the things that I've started doing in our Discover Grace class, if you want to be a partner of grace and you come to the class, I think we're going to have one in February or later this month, I guess. At some point we go, okay, what is required to be a partner here? And it's not in the writing yet, but I've started to say, if you want to be a partner with us, nothing's compelling you to do that. If you're here this morning and you're not a partner of grace, which we have partners, we don't have members because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's how we do it here. If you're here and you're just like, man, I'm kicking the tires, then what I would tell you is this part's not for you. It's for you one day, wherever you go, what I'm about to say is for you. But if you don't call yourself a partner at grace, then this part's not for you. But for the folks who come to Discover Grace, we say there's nothing compelling you to be a partner. You can come, and you can volunteer, and you can be in small group, and you can be an active participant in our church to whatever degree you want to be besides sitting on a committee or becoming an elder. But if you want to partner with us, then partner with us and support us financially. So here's what I would say about that. Scripture, and this is important, does not explicitly say anywhere that you should give to your local church. It does not come out and say that anywhere. But I think that's because the concept of a local church hadn't yet been, it was just the church, the church in Ephesus, the church in Rome, the church in Thessalonica. It was just the church. And in those churches, the expectation is you are giving because that's always been the expectation because the entire scope of scripture assumes that we know that. So what I would say is, even though it doesn't explicitly say it in the Bible, that I believe that you should give to your local church. I really do think that, and it took me some years to be able to say that, but the more I think about it, the more I study, the more I talk about it, the more I'm convinced that if you are a Christian, you should A, be a part of a local church, and B, you should give to that church. So I know the implications of that. We can all connect the dots. If you're a part of grace, you should give to grace. That's what Nate's saying. Sure. But here's what else I'll say. If you are a part of grace, and I don't think a lot of pastors would say this, and maybe the finance committee will get mad at me for saying this, but if you are a part of grace, but you don't give to grace, you need to find a church that compels you to give and go there. You need to go to a church that does inspire you to give. Because what I believe is, if you're here and you're thriving and your spiritual life is becoming healthy and your kids are thriving and they're being taught about Christ and you're experiencing community community. And you would call grace a blessing in your life. And you feel like you or your family or you and your spouse have benefited from grace. Then you ought to support grace so that other people can benefit in the same way. Because we are fueled by that giving. And if the ministry that you are experiencing from us is not compelling enough to make you want to partner with us in giving, then because I believe you should give to a local church, I have to believe that you should find one that compels you. But that's the encouragement this morning. Plain and simple. Adult to adult. This is what scripture teaches. We should be givers. We should be compelled to give to God's kingdom, particularly the parts of it where we are personally benefiting from that. So if we are a part of grace, we should give. Which brings me back to my prayer for you this year, that you would simply be faithful in your giving. I always say this, and I know a little bit contradictory to what I just said, but I can also be honest with you enough to say this. If you are someone, or if you are a couple, who is not in the habit of giving, and this is going to be a new exercise for you, and it feels remotely manipulative or self-serving that I'm trying to get you to give to grace, I would encourage you, as your brother in Christ, begin to give to things that aren't grace but that God is still doing. Begin to give to God's kingdom. Become a giver. And then in time, as it feels right, because God loves a cheerful giver, direct some of that towards your local church. But if you think that what I'm saying is self-serving, then don't give to grace. Don't do it under compulsion. But I would encourage you to begin that discipline and watch what God does as you become generous with your resources. So that's my prayer for you this year. And every year as we move forward. That as God's children, as believers, you would take seriously the teaching about giving in Scripture. And that you would be a person who is a giver. My prayer is that whether you have a little or a lot, that you would simply be faithful. Because that's what God calls us to. Let me pray that over us. Father, thank you for what we have. Thank you for what you've entrusted to us. I pray, God, that we would be good stewards of the resources that you've allocated to us, whether that's time or talent or treasure. Father, I pray that for those of us who are not yet people who give, for whatever reason, that we would be convicted and compelled to take steps towards becoming those people. That we would quit viewing this as something that's optional for your children, but view it as something that's necessary and good. Let us step into that generosity. Father, for those of us who were convicted by this long ago and are regular givers, I pray that we would be inspired. That we would be encouraged. That we would be grateful for all the opportunities we've had to give and all the times we got to sit on the front lines of what you were doing because you invited us in there through giving. But God, more than anything, I just ask that grace would be a church filled with faithful people, faithful to your word, faithful to obedience in you, and faithful to entrust you with their finances. God, we ask these things in your son's name. Amen.