Sermons tagged with Faith

Well, good morning, Grace. Good to see everybody. That music makes me feel like I'm waiting for a table at some sort of nice lounge or something. So you get three more weeks of that. That'll be great. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Happy New Year to everyone, and thank you for making Grace a part of that new year for you. I would just say this. If your church attendance this morning is reflective of a New Year's resolution, that's great. My gym attendance in the morning is going to be reflective of something similar to that. So, Brad, I'll see you at the YMCA bright and early. But if it is reflective of a New Year's resolution and this is something that you want to do more often, I'm just so grateful that you've entrusted that to grace. I hope that we serve you well. And I say this in all sincerity. If you're here because of a New Year's resolution and we don't serve you well and you drive home thinking that wasn't worth it, it's not because church isn't worth it. It's because we didn't do a good job. So give another church a chance to do a good job, but don't quit on church because this sermon stinks, okay? Keep at it. It's super important. Church is absolutely vital to us as people. We were created for church community. As Aaron mentioned earlier in the service, Aaron, our worship pastor, we like to start the year with prayers for grace. We'd like to start these January series now with kind of some hopes and some prayers that we have for grace in the coming years. Last year, we spent all four weeks of January in one of my favorite prayers in the Bible. I have it stenciled out and hung up in my office at home. This is the prayer I pray over new married couples, over new babies. This is the prayer I pray, at least quietly, when I get calls about diagnoses that are tough. This is the prayer I pray when I hear that someone is struggling and might be in their last days or weeks of life. This is the prayer I pray when I go visit people at the hospital. It's in Ephesians chapter 3 verses 14 through 19. We're going to be focused this morning on Colossians chapter 1, which is basically a long form of the Ephesians prayer. Ephesians is a more succinct version, but it's basically praying the same thing. So as we start 2025, I want to remind us of this prayer for grace that we find in Ephesians. And last year we gave out magnets with this prayer on it. So I hope that some of you still have that magnet, have it in a place where you see it. I'm seeing some nodding heads. That's very good. But I just wanted to start this year out by reminding you of this prayer. And then what we're going to do is look at another version of what I believe is virtually the same prayer in Colossians and talk about the different implications of that prayer. But this is what Paul prays for the church in Eph that in the Colossians prayer. But I did want to place that in front of us and be reminded of it as we go into this prayer in Colossians. Now, as I was reflecting on this prayer, and if you have a Bible, I want to encourage you to go ahead and turn to Colossians. We're going to go through, this is going to be in my head, kind of an old school sermon, the kind of sermon that I grew up with. Now, a new modern sermon, what I try to do, what I would typically try to do, and what I started out trying to do this week is to read verses three through 14 in Colossians chapter one, where this prayer is, and try to distill it down to this one point. What's the fulcrum? What's the focus? What's the anchor of this prayer? If there can only be one takeaway for us, what should that takeaway be? And then I would spend the entire sermon trying to preach to that takeaway. But as I look through these verses, there's just too much good stuff to sweep it aside for the sake of making one point. So instead of that, we're going to go verse by verse through these 11 or 12 verses. And I'm just going to stop and go, this is what he prays here. This is what it means. This is why we need to talk about it and think about it. So this is going to be an old school five point sermon where we talk about the verse and then we talk about what it means and how it applies to us. I feel like my pastor growing up who I this is just a blow up of the bulletin is what you have on the back of your notes. This is all I ever have. But there's a lot here. And as I look at it, I think in about 25 minutes, I'm going to be halfway through with this and go, OK, we got to go fast. And then I'm just going to start summarizing things, which is what my pastor used to do. So anyways, let's get started. As I was reflecting on this prayer in Colossians, something occurred to me. And I had not really thought about this before as it relates to the prayers in the New Testament. First of all, it's important that we understand what the book of Colossians is. Colossians is what's called in theological circles a Pauline epistle. It's a letter that Paul wrote. So Paul wrote two-thirds of the New Testament. Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. He wrote those. And if you think what I was just doing was showing off, I have a master's degree in this. If I can't do that, I am the stupidest person that's ever gotten a master's degree. But those are the books that he wrote. And all of those books are letters to either a church, like the church in Rome or Corinth or Colossae, or to individuals like Timothy or Philemon. So in these letters, he's writing to instruct the churches that have been founded by him or his ministry. We get a clue in this first chapter, and we'll see that he sent out one of the pastors from amongst his team, a guy named Epaphras. And Epaphras originally shared the gospel, the good news, with the people in Colossae, and they formed a church around this good news. And now they're going and blowing. Now they're growing, and now they have a church. And so Paul spends his life going around Asia Minor planting churches and then writing letters back to the churches that he planted. And so what occurs to me is he's writing this letter to the church in Colossians, which is unique because it's actually to Colossians and Laodicea. Because he says, when you get done reading this, take it to Laodicea and read it there too. This is also for them. It's just called Colossians because they were the first addressee of the letter. But what occurs to me is he might not ever get to share with them again what he prays for them. He indicates in scripture that he prays for them frequently. But by this point in his life, he may never go to Colossae. He may never see these people in person. He may never write them another letter. He might not have that opportunity. It was expensive and time-consuming and laborious to get them a letter. He might not ever be able to share with them again what his prayer for them is. So he's got one shot at articulating a prayer for this church that they can cling to for the years and the decades to come. And I think it's really interesting in that situation to think about what does this founder of the churches, this incredibly influential apostle and missionary, what does he pray for the churches? And I think that's an interesting question because I think it's an interesting question if I could sit down with the parents in the room and ask you, when you pray for your child, when you pray for your children, what do you pray? We've got a mama holding a newborn baby back there. That baby's been prayed over. When you pray for that baby, what do you pray? If you're a grandparent and you pray for your children and your grandchildren, what do you pray for them, what would you write out? When you pray for your friends, what do you pray for them? Small group leaders, if you pray for the people in your small group, and I hope you do, what do you pray for them? When I pray for the church, when the elders pray for the church, what do we pray for you? I think those are interesting questions because you can really get a sense of someone's priorities, someone's heart, someone's clarity of vision, someone's faith by what they pray for the people that they love the most. And so I think we can get a really good glimpse at the heart of Paul and in turn the very heart of God when we ask, what does he pray for the church in Colossae? And what's interesting to me, and I pointed this out last year when we talked about the prayer in Ephesus, it's just as interesting to me what he prays for as what he doesn't pray for. Because you can read this prayer as many times as you want. What you will not find in this prayer is Paul praying for circumstances, or health, or prosperity, or success, or even growth of the church. He doesn't pray for any of those things, some of the things we think we probably find in that list. You will not find them there. So like I said, as I move through this prayer and began the task of trying to distill it down to one point, I just thought it was a disservice to the whole thing to blow by some things and not favor them in favor of making one universal point. So we're going to go verse by verse, and I'm going to occasionally highlight a phrase, and you'll see it when it's on the screen to get your attention. And that's what we're going to key in on and talk about that. So let's look at this prayer in Colossians. Let's think about taking at least aspects of it and making it our prayer for 2025 for you and for the church. And let's see what we can learn from it. We go back to that previous verse, Miss Andrea, is we always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we pray for you because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all God's people. I think that is an incredible compliment. What if Jesus were to come down and say, could I give the sermon this week? That'd be fine, Jesus. Go ahead. And he started it off and he said, Grace, I'm grateful for you because I know and I've heard of the faith you have in me and the love that you have for one another. What could be a better compliment to a church than that? Than to be known for your faith and love? As an individual, what could be better than that reputation to precede you, that you are known for your faith in Christ and your love for one another. What could be better? How could it possibly be better to be known in any other way? I thank my God because of you, because of your success, because of how effective you are at making money and closing deals. I thank my God because of you, because of your wisdom, because of your leadership, because you seem to be disciplined in staying in shape, because your kids seem all right and they like you. Like what other things could be as good as being known for your faith and for your love? What an incredible compliment to pay a church. It's a compliment that I hope and pray grace can receive or be thought of in that way. And I can't help but wonder then, what must you do to be known for your faith and love? What do you think it takes to become the kind of person whose reputation precedes you in such a way that when someone meets you, they go, oh, I've heard about your faith and your love. I remember my senior year, I played soccer for my high school, which I'm totally bragging about. There was 100 people in my high school. Anybody could have played soccer. Yeah, anybody could have played soccer. But we got a new teacher my senior year, a new computer teacher named Mr. Keithley, and I went in and introduced myself. I told him I'm Nathan Rector because in high school I was Nathan. I wasn't Nate, incidentally, until I waited tables at Macaroni Grill and you had to write your name upside down on the table and I shortened that real quick. That's when I became Nate. And I met Mr. Keithley and I shook his hand and said, hey, I'm Nathan Rector and he goes, oh, I've heard about you. You're the soccer player. And I was like, you're right. I am. I'm one of the best of the 45 males we have available who are willing to play soccer. So, yeah. It's an interesting thing when your reputation precedes you. What must you do to be the kind of person who's known for your faith and for your love, and what better could you be known for? There are lots of answers to this question, but very simply, at the beginning of 2025, the way that I would answer it is, if you want to be known for being a person of faith in Christ and love for one another, then you must become a person of devotion. At Grace, we have five traits. We have five things that we want every partner at Grace to be, and one of those things is to be a person of devotion. And one of the things we say all the time, I say it as often as I can, and I haven't said it often enough lately, so I'm going to start beating the drum again, is the single most important habit that anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in God's presence through prayer. The single most important habit. There is no other habit more important than that in your entire life. And there are a lot of things I think you need to do and ways that you need to behave to be known as a person of faith and love. But foundationally, fundamentally, it starts with becoming a person of devotion. So here at the top of 2025, as we launch into the new year, the very first thing I want to challenge you to do in your new year is be a person who wakes up every day and spends time in God's word and time in God's presence through prayer. If you don't know how to do that, I wrote in this last year a devotional guide that's on the information table right outside these doors. Grab it, read through it. It's meant to help you and jumpstart you in that. But if you are a person for whom that habit has waned, if you are a person who's never successfully begun the habit, if you're a person who's never attempted the habit, if we want to be a church that is known for our faith and for our love, That begins with becoming people of devotion. Let this year be the year that you read your Bible and you spend time in prayer. And if that's what you're going to do, if you just went, you know what, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to wake up tomorrow. I'm going to do that. Great. Give yourself grace for it. You're going to mess up and the heavens are not going to part and angels sing down on you the first time you read your Bible. Stick with it. Give yourself grace. And being a person of devotion will absolutely change your life and change who you are. That's how we become known for that. Then after he tells them what they're known for, he moves on in his prayer and he just makes this interesting note. I'm not going to linger here long, but I do think it's worth pointing out and who also told us of your love in the Spirit. So if we go back to the beginning, Paul says something really interesting there. He says, in the same way that it's borne fruit with you, the gospel is bearing fruit throughout the whole world. We see already that Paul has a heart for the world, That Paul is encouraging them to think outside of Colossae and Laodicea. And think about all the other places where the gospel is flourishing. Don't see yourself as this isolated church battling on your own in this province of the Roman Empire. But understand that as far as the Roman roads spread, so does the gospel. It is spreading throughout the entire world. And I just wanted to pause here to make this statement because I think it's so important. And it's, listen, this is something that we don't talk about enough. And when I say we, I don't mean Christians, I mean me. I mean, I don't bring this up enough in our church and I need to do a better job of it. But this is true, and this is why I wanted to stop here. Mature believers allow God to foster within them a heart for the world. Mature believers, people who are growing in Christ, allow God to foster within them a heart for the world, a heart for our international brothers and sisters. I think our temptation with our faith, like anything else in our life, is to become very myopic in that faith. To just think about that faith in terms of me or my immediate family or my children. Maybe if we're generous and magnanimous enough, we care about the faith of the people around us, and we hope to see our friends grow deeper with Christ, and we hope to see them flourish spiritually. Maybe, maybe if we've been around church long enough and God's really fostered a heart, we have a genuine heart for our small group, a genuine heart for our church, and we want to see the people at Grace come to know God in a more deep way, and we want to see spiritual lives flourish here. But what I've found is rare is the believer who has a genuine heart for their international brothers and sisters. Rare is the believer that thinks about church on a global scale, understanding that there were people worshiping in Korea 16 hours before us on this very same Sunday, singing to the same God. And I think that mature believers begin to get a grasp of the global church and seeing God in action everywhere. And I'll tell you when this clicked for me. I'm blessed to have parents that have been going on mission trips since before they were cool. They went to Jamaica in like 1991 when no one was taking mission trips. I went to Costa Rica when I was going into the eighth grade and started taking mission trips often there. But it wasn't until around 2010 that I was in Cape Town, South Africa, visiting a ministry called Living Hope, which is a phenomenal ministry. My family was involved in it. I wanted to see it, so I went down with a team. And in Cape Town, South Africa, they have these things called townships. And townships are a remnant of apartheid. If you don't know what apartheid is, I do not have time to explain it to you this morning. Google it or ask someone old. The townships are remnants of apartheid. And typically speaking, it's low socioeconomic families that continue to live there. And they run the gamut from hovels and tin roofs and pallet walls to homes that would seem relatively normal to us. But it tends to be low socioeconomic status. And there's one called Masi Pumaleli. And one Sunday we got to go to church there. We go to church in Masi. It's a small white building. We go inside and there was no single worship leader. I still don't understand the organization of it. I have no idea who was in charge. All I know is that there was about 10 South African women dressed the same who were just moving around the room singing. And the words were on the screen, and you sang too, and it was awesome. And they had these things, I'll never forget. There was these like burgundy leather pillows that strapped to their hands, and when they would hit them, it would make this loud percussion noise. I have no idea what it was. But they're doing that and tambourines and one person on the piano, because you you got to have a pianist if it's going to be real worship, and they're going after it. And they're singing some song in their native language that I recognized. I knew the tune to it, and I'm singing along in English. And I was so moved by it that I left the church. I walked outside, and I looked up in the sky, and I listened to the song of praise pouring out of that church being lifted up to my God. And I was reminded of Jesus' instructions to the disciples to go and to spread the word in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and even to the ends of the earth. And I thought, here I am at the literal end of the earth, at the tip of the continent of Africa, 2,000 years later, and there is a church full of Masi people singing praises to my God, a song that I know, and I can sing along with them. Well done, disciples. You carried the gospel to the ends of the earth. And it made an indelible impression on me that we exist in a global church. And it is right and good to care about our international brothers and sisters. In March, a friend of mine is going to travel to Istanbul. And when he gets to Istanbul, he's going to meet with 15 or 20 Iranian Christian pastors who have to go to Istanbul because they can't train in Iran because their churches are illegal and they're putting themselves and their families at risk for even going and participating. And they're going to receive training so that they can go back into their communities and they can reach people for Christ. We should care deeply for what happens over those few days. We should care about those pastors and what they're doing. And that's not unique. There's underground churches all throughout China. The church is flourishing like crazy in places like Korea and in Africa and in South America. We should care about those things. So this year, maybe for you, is the year that you allow God to begin to expose your heart to things that happen internationally. Maybe this is the year you go to Mexico with our team that goes in October. Maybe you go see what's happening in Ethiopia and visit AJ. Maybe you go to Cape Town and visit Mbuntu and see what the princes are doing there. Maybe you find another way to be exposed to what's happening internationally, but I think it's vitally important for mature believers to allow God to foster within them a heart for the global church and our international brothers and sisters. And so as I was reading through this prayer and I saw Paul's commentary there, I couldn't pass it up and not mention it to you. Now we get into the heart of the prayer. This next verse is the anchor of the prayer, and it's why I say that this is a long-form version of the prayer in Ephesians, because it's praying virtually the same thing. Just verse 9. For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives. That phrase, we continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of His will, is still very similar to the Ephesians prayer. When Paul prays there, we pray that you would be filled to the fullness with the knowledge of God, that you would know the love of Christ that surpasses understanding. He prays more than anything else that you would know God. To Paul, his top priority for his churches, his top priority for you, his top priority for anybody in his life that they knew is that they would know God. That's number one. There's not a close second that they would know God. But as you go year to year, you would grow in your depth of knowledge. When you think about the person in your life who seems to be the closest to God, who exudes his love, who just oozes wisdom and compassion and grace, Paul's prayer for that person is that they would know God more. If you think of yourself as someone who's very far from God and doesn't know him very well at all, you're not even really super comfortable with this Christian thing. Paul's prayer for you is that you would know God more. If you've been languishing in your Christianity for a decade and feel not much closer to him now than you did 10 years ago, his prayer for you is that you would know God more. And when earlier I asked, parents, what do you pray for your kids? Grandparents, what do you pray for your children and their children? What do you pray for your friends? What do we pray for churches? What do we pray for people in our small group? I hope that whatever else you pray follows. Father, I simply pray that they would know you more. The way that we say it here is this. We pray this. Would the events of this life conspire to bring you closer to God? I believe this so fervently that when I get the news that someone has cancer, which has touched my life in multiple ways, I've lost multiple loved ones to cancer. So it's not callously that I pray this. But when I hear that someone is sick, the very first thing I pray before I pray for their physical health is that the events of this battle would conspire to bring them and those around them closer to you, Father. I pray that this would drive them into a deeper depth of knowledge of you. And then I pray for healing. When I hear a marriage is struggling, before I pray that that marriage is healed, I pray that the path to that healing would bring them to a deeper knowledge of you. When I pray over a new baby, I don't pray for circumstances, and I don't pray for prosperity, and I don't pray for success, and I don't pray for health. I pray that the events of this child's life and the things that surround it would conspire to bring this child closer to you. There can be no more important thing that we pray. That's why this is the anchor of this prayer. This is the stud and the wall on which the whole prayer is hung. Before it is, hey, I know about your faith and your love and the gospel's flourishing in the whole world, but here's what I really pray for you, that you would know God. And then we get two results because of two things after this that we're going to talk about. Because I'm praying for you to know God, I want you to know this and this. But this is the anchor of the prayer. If I were going to distill it down to one thing, to one verse, to treat it how I would normally treat it, we would be entirely focused on verse 9 this morning because there can be no greater priority that we can have for ourselves or for anyone else than that they would know God more deeply. That's the prayer. I hope that you'll pray that for yourselves, for your families, and for our church. That's the biggest priority. Now, why is that the biggest priority? Why is that the anchor prayer? Because of what we see in verse 10. Verse 10 says, why do we do this? So that, I love this, you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way, bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God. I don't think we put that thought in front of us often enough. Why does Paul pray that we would know Christ in increasing measure? So that we can live a life worthy of the Lord. So that we can live a life worthy of him who loves us and sacrifices us and created us and pursues us. I don't know how often you put that thought in front of yourself. Am I living a life worthy of my calling? But the reason we pray that our children would know God deeper. I always pray for my kids that they would know you soon and love you well. That they would love you better than I did. That they would obey you better than I have. Why do I pray that for my kids, John and Lily? Because they have things to do. Because I want them to live a life pleasing to God. I want them to live a life worthy, more worthy than what I have lived. This is why we pray this over the people who would follow us and over the people around us. Simply put, Paul wants you to grow in your knowledge of God because you have stuff to do. He wants you to grow in your knowledge of God because you've got things you need to get done. Because you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. You've got some good works to do. You guys, the apex goal for everybody at Grace, if you're a part of Grace for a year or two decades or more, the thing I want for you more than I want anything else in the whole world is that you would become a kingdom builder. That you would understand that you spend your entire life building a kingdom. And that it is a waste of your time to build your kingdom or anyone else's. The only kingdom worth building is God's eternal kingdom. And when we build God's kingdom, we grow it in breadth and depth. We add to the numbers of it and we grow the spiritual depth of it. And that's the whole reason that you exist is to be a kingdom builder, to leverage every gift and every talent and every treasure and every resource you've ever been blessed by and leverage that for God's kingdom rather than your own. And I believe that to be a Christian is to have a progressive revelation of what exactly that means. Because I thought I knew what it meant seven years ago when I took the job. And now these seven years later, I have a wildly different impression of what that actually means. And it's far more challenging than I ever thought it could be. So to be a Christian is to have this progressive revelation that my life is not my own. It does not belong to me. My resources and my time and my talents and my treasures are not my own. They do not belong to me. I am a kingdom builder. I have stuff to do. So why do we pray that you would know God more, that you would know Christ more deeply? Not only because it's what's best for you and will bring you the most peace and bring heaven down to earth here as we begin to experience the presence of God, but also because he's got a plan for you. And unless you know him well and are known for your love and for your faith, you're not going to be able to execute that plan of what he wants you to do. You're not going to be able to build his kingdom like he wants you to use you to build it. So we pray that people would know God better because we've got stuff to do. We are kingdom builders. God has a plan for you and a way he intends to use you. But the more years we fritter away not pursuing him fully, not being known for our faith and our love, the less we get to execute the plan. And we watch someone else do what God might have used us to do. We are kingdom builders. We can't do that unless we're growing towards God in a deeper, in a greater depth of knowledge. The other thing there that I didn't want to pass up. If we can put that verse back on the screen, verse 10, please. This is here so so that you would live a life worthy of the Lord, and then look here, please him in every way. That arrested me as I read it this week. I don't know how many of you have a life in such a way that it pleases God, joy to him. I think if most of us are being honest, the highest mark we ever hope for as it relates to how God sees us and has an impression of us, I try to live my life in such a way that I quell his disappointment or mitigate his anger. Right? Just don't be mad at me today. Just tell me I was good enough today. Just this week. I mean, honestly, this week, I pray every time before I'm about to preach, I pray just to get my mindset right and remind me of what's important. A vast majority of those prayers are thinking through the week and thinking of if I feel worthy or not to come do this, which is stupid because the answer is no, I'm never worthy of it. But it's like, have I ticked you off this week? Have I disappointed you this week? Have I lived a life worthy of you this week, or have I let you down again? My greatest hope when it comes to God is that I simply don't disappoint him that day. But I was reminded in this verse and in this prayer that it's actually possible for us to live a life that pleases him. For us to live a life that brings him joy. To live our life in such a way that he's proud. That he smiles in heaven because of us. And let me just tell you, as a parent, like all the parents here, I'm sure, I have days when I feel like I've been a good father, and I have days where I don't feel that way. And on the days when I'm not a good father, when I'm selfish or curmudgeonly or grumpy, the greatest thing my daughter Lily, who's almost nine years old, which is weird to say, the greatest thing my daughter Lily can hope for is that she doesn't tick me off that day. That she wasn't annoying that day. That she avoided my wrath and my frustration that day. She can live her life in such a way that she doesn't incite me to frustration. When you have a bad father, that's your greatest goal for that day in that relationship. But on days when I'm a good father, when I'm patient and kind and gracious and present, when I think about the negative, when I think about how often I'm getting on to her versus how often I'm praising her. When I think about what is she hearing from me? Is she hearing any encouragement? Is she hearing any support? Is she hearing any love or is she only hearing frustration? When I think about those things in those days, what I see in Lily, not in myself, what I see in my daughter is a smile, a smile, is this exuberance, this, this ability to know that she's making me proud. And when I stop and tell her, Hey, I saw the way you handled this with your brother. I'm very proud of you for that. When I sent her upstairs to clean a room and she actually does it miracle of miracles. And I sit her down and instead of just not getting mad at her, I go, I trusted you to clean your room. You did it. This is awesome. Thanks so much. That's the exact kind of little girl I want you to be. And young lady, I want you to become. You're growing in your trustworthiness. That's wonderful. When I stop and I do that like a good father and I encourage her and she has this vision for her days that she can live in such a way that it pleases her mom and I and makes us proud. There is a different aura around her. I see it bring joy out of her. You guys have a good father. The greatest goal for a bad father is to simply avoid their anger. And often we treat God like he's not a good father. But he is. And the greatest thing we could hope for day in and day out is to live our life in such a way that it pleases him. And let that give us an exuberance and a spring in our step and a greater vision for who he is. It'll allow us to hear his encouragement from the people He uses to speak things into our life. Maybe for 2025, you simply need a greater vision of who God is and what He expects from you and how proud He is of you and how much He loves you. Because if you think God just goes through His days being disappointed in you, you're wrong. I was listening to a song this morning. And it basically said that he's never loved you more, more wildly and more passionately than he did on your worst day. We can live lives that please our Heavenly Father because he's a good father. And I think we need to have a vision for that. We wrap up the prayer with the last three verses. This is very simple. So he says, I pray that you would know God more deeply, that you would know his will. Why? Because you have things to do. You need to live a life worthy of Him. You can actually please Him if you get to work on building His kingdom and follow Him faithfully. And in doing those things, we see these words highlighted that you may have great endurance and patience and that you'll be reminded that you've been qualified to share in the inheritance of His holy people in the kingdom of light. Simply put, a faithful life gives you patience for the promise. A faithful life gives you patience for the promise. Paul talks about perseverance a lot in scripture. Jesus talks about perseverance. The other authors talk about perseverance. The reality of the Christian life is that faith is hard sometimes. I think that one of the greatest blessings of heaven that we don't talk about very often is that once you get to heaven, you no longer need your faith. Not required anymore. You can set that down. Because Romans 8 tells us who hopes for what he can see. I don't know if you've ever thought about that at all, but when you get to heaven, you don't need faith anymore. Faith is choosing to believe. Sometimes in spite of sickness. Sometimes in spite of disappointments. Sometimes in spite of doubts and questions. Sometimes in spite of a lack of clarity. Or a life and a culture and voices that will clamor it out and make it difficult to hear God. The reality of the Christian life, and those of you who have lived it for a while know this to be true, it's not always easy to cling to your faith. It's not always easy to walk as stridently with Jesus as it has been or as it will be. And it's possible that we let go of that faith because we don't persevere in it, because we let the things of the world drown it out. But what Paul says is, if you're known for your faith and your love, you care about the global church, if you grow in your knowledge of God and his will, and then as a result of that knowledge of God, you're a kingdom builder who lives a life worthy of the calling that you've received, and you live in such a way that it pleases God, then in doing all of those things, you will have patience for the promise of the kingdom for which you await. So I'll be direct with you. I don't expect that all five of the points that I just made and the things that I highlighted are deeply resonating with every person in the room and you're going to do all five things. But what I really genuinely hope is that one of them got you. And that maybe 2025 is the year that you commit to becoming a person known for your faith and your love. And so to take that step, you become a person of devotion for the first time ever or for the first time in a long time. Maybe that's what you need to grab onto. Maybe you realize and are convicted, I don't have a heart for the global church, and this is the year I'm going to open myself up and allow God to begin to point me in that direction and develop a heart within me for my international brothers and sisters. Maybe this is the year that you see and prioritize, man, there's nothing more important than knowing God deeply, and that's what I'm going to pray for me and for the people around me. Maybe this is a year that you realize, gosh, I need to get to work. I have things to do. I'm a kingdom builder and I want to go live a life worthy of my Lord. I want to live in such a way this year that I actually bring joy to my Father who is in heaven. Or maybe this is the year that you just need to be encouraged to follow God and pursue Him and He will give you the patience and the perseverance to cling to the promises that he's made you. I don't know which one of these resonates with you the most, but I hope one does and I hope that you'll cling to it as we go out these doors today. I'm going to pray for us. We're going to sing and then Mikey's going to dismiss us. Father, thank you for a new year. Thank you for what it represents, for the fresh start for those of us that need it, for new opportunities for those of us that want them. God, give us a vision for living a life that pleases you, to thinking beyond you simply being disappointed in us. Remind us that we have a good father. God, I pray for everybody in this room that they would know you more deeply this year than they did last year. That they would grow in their depth of knowledge of you and your will and in that growth, God, that you would begin to put their hand to the plow and they would begin to do your work. And they would experience the joy and satisfaction that can only come from being used by you. God, we pray over grace in 2025 that you would bring to us people that need to be a part of this family, that we would be good stewards of the people who come here. God, that this would be a year marked by spiritual flourishing, by a strength of community that even folks who have been coming here for decades would mark this year as a time of flourishing for them. We pray for the weeks and the months to come. We pray that we would honor you. We pray that you would draw us close. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Good to see you during this Christmas season. December is my favorite month of the year at Grace. Before I just dive in, a couple things. First of all, it's Gibson's birthday today, so don't do it right now because we have more important things. But if you get a chance in the lobby, just wish him a happy 48th. And then also, it looks great in here. Aaron Winston did Yauman's work this week to get this done. Carly was a big help there, too. So say thank you to them. They took good care of us, and everything looks great. So we are festive and in full swing for Christmas. And as we do that, as Michelle mentioned at the onset, we're going to be looking at prophecies about Christ. We're going to be looking at Messianic prophecies from the Old Testament that tell us about the Jesus that we are celebrating here in December. This morning, we're going to be looking at what I think is probably the most famous Messianic prophecy. It's at least the most famous Christmas prophecy. Isaiah chapter 9, verse 6, when I read it, you will absolutely recognize it. It was made popular by a guy named Friedrich Handel, who wrote Handel's Messiah, that great song that we hear every Christmas. It's really, really good. I tried to get Gibby to robe a choir and hire an orchestra so we could do it big this morning, but he has no passion or willingness to dream. His mind is very small. And so he keeps us from great and grand things here. So maybe next year, let's work on them together. But this is the prophecy that we all know. I think it's the most famous one that we'll talk about. And it was almost the entirety of the whole series out of this verse. I'll tell you why in just a minute. But Isaiah chapter 9 verse 6 says this. These are familiar words. For to us a child is born. To us a son is given. And the government will be on his shoulders, and he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. So I think it was back in the spring, Jen told me that she was doing a devotional. Jen's my wife. She's back there teaching the fourth and fifth grade right now. She told me that she was doing this devotional, and the devotional focused on this verse. And she said, I think it can make a great Christmas series, and here's why. And it almost was the Christmas series, and it's actually the reason why we landed on focusing on prophecy for the Christmas series. I just wanted to cover more than just this verse. But one of the things that the author of this devotional noted that I thought was an interesting point that I had not pieced together before, which is a low bar, but I saw that there was, or she points out that in these names of Jesus, there are four distinct roles and four distinct descriptors of each of those roles. So we have four distinct roles. We have counselor, God, father, and prince. And then we have four unique descriptors for those roles. Wonderful, mighty, everlasting, and peace or peaceful. He's the prince of peace. And I think it's worth it to take a look at each of these roles and descriptors, each of these names for Jesus, and think about what they mean, why they were chosen, why it's so significant that he's a wonderful counselor, a mighty God, an everlasting Father, and our Prince of Peace. Why those names? Why does Isaiah say this is what he will be called? Why did God direct him to write those particular things down? Why are they so powerful? And how can they encourage us in our faith today? And I thought it would be a great morning to just kind of sit in this reality of who Jesus is. That's what we're going to be talking about this morning. The Savior that we claim, that we sang to, that we said, yes, I will cry out to you no matter what my whole life, for all my days, I will claim you. Who is this Jesus that we claim and that we are celebrating this month in particular? And I think these four descriptors, these four roles are a great place to camp, to acquaint us with our Christ and hopefully leave here more desirous of him than you were when you came in and feeling like you know your Jesus a little bit better. So I want to look at these four titles and roles of Christ, these four names for Christ described by Isaiah through an angel. And the first one is that he is a wonderful counselor. Isaiah leads with wonderful counselor. Now this word counsel or counselor there, and I don't do a lot of like particular word work a lot, but it's relevant this morning because it's the type of counsel that advises, that purposes someone with a plan, that guides and directs. It's the kind of counsel that you go to to get advice. What should I do in this situation? That's kind of the implication here. That's the kind of counsel that Jesus is offering, and he is a wonderful counselor. And so it's worth asking, well, why is he wonderful? What makes him and his counsel so wonderful? And I think it's this. It's an obvious point, but when you think about it, it's such an important point. His counsel is wonderful because it is always right and always loving. His counsel is wonderful because it is always right and it is always loving. I don't know how often you guys find yourselves in situations where you're serving someone as a counselor. Where they're coming to you for advice. They're talking about their marriage. They're talking about their family. They're talking about their kids. They're talking about their career, they're talking about inner family dynamics, whatever it is. I don't know how often you counsel someone, but the more regularly you do it, the more difficult you understand it is to be both right and loving in the counsel that you offer. It's hard to be either one of those things. I remember as a pastor, people asked me for advice way more than they should based on my limited experience in life. When I was a student pastor at my last church, a dad came in. Him and his wife had divorced. He had a daughter. His wife had disparate standards for his daughter than he did, so it was causing some tension between him and his daughter when she would stay with him, and she was starting to rebel, and he didn't know what to do, so he came to the youth pastor. How do I maintain this relationship with my teenage daughter who's pushing against me because her mom gives me, gives her more freedom than I do. And I said, well, you're in luck because I am 29 years old and I have no children and I know the exact right answer to this. And I honestly, I said, his name was, his name was Carson. Great dude. I said, Carson, I don't know why you're here. He goes, you're the pastor. I said, I don't even have any kids, man. I don't know how to get a dog to keep liking me. Like, I don't, I can't help you. And to his ever-loving credit, Carson goes, you know what? You're right. I don't know why I'm here. Thanks for your time. And he left. He just walked out of my office. That was loving counsel. It was not right counsel. It gets more serious when we think about the counselors that we have in the world. I've got a really good friend. One of my best friends in the world and his marriage is really struggling right now. And he and his wife, like all of us, are broken people who brought in broken pieces and created a broken marriage. She is seeing a counselor on her own. He's seeing a different counselor on their own. Then they're seeing another counselor together that's supposed to be like the foremost marriage and family counselor in their area. And they've signed agreements for all of the counselors to talk to each other about the best plan of action for this particular couple. And yet, after his last session on Thursday, he called me to let me know how it went. And he said, I've never been more confused about anything in my entire life. I don't know what to do. He used to claim a faith, now he does not, nor does his wife. So you can't just say, hey, this is what scripture, I think, would have you do. I think this is what God's desire would be for you. I can't just give him that counsel, he's not going to receive it. I do think that in a marriage where there has not been infidelity, where there is not abuse, and where there is not abandonment, where both parties are in and they want to see this thing work, that the absolute best and right thing to do for everyone involved is to keep working at that for as long and as hard as you can. And I think that if they would just give themselves over to it and shut that back door of stepping out of the marriage and going separate ways and say, we're in, we're here, how do we do this? How do we find a path to happy together? I believe that they could, and I believe that the counsel of God, which is in scripture, correlates with that and agrees with that, and that is both right and loving counsel from our wonderful counselor. But instead of following that counsel, they're following the counsel of the world, and it has left him in a place where they are counseled out of their mind, to the hill. They are up to here in counseling appointments. And he left the last one saying, I've never been more confused about anything in my whole life. Jesus is our wonderful counselor. If we want to know what to do, we go to him in prayer. If we want to know what the plan is, how to handle a situation, we go to his word and we see if there's anything here that can guide us. We go to people who know us and know his word and we ask them what they think and we ask our friends to pray for us and we ask people to gather around us and maybe even lay hands on us and pray for us. What do we do? And we ask and we plead for the direction of God. I can't tell you how many times in my life I have not known what to do in a certain situation, making a big decision, facing some uncertainty or whatever it might be, and I've just prayed to God, would you please just make your will clear? That's all I need. I'm not asking for a particular outcome, but would you help me walk in confidence and faith that I am taking the steps that you want me to take? Will you please do that? And whenever I'm telling you the truth, whenever I have prayed that prayer, God has been faithful to make my path forward as crystal clear as possible. And when you do that, when it's a no, and you feel like God has said, don't do that yet. There were times in my last church where I prayed, God, can I please look for another job? I'm not happy here. And I felt like the answer was no. That's not my counsel for you. That's not what I would have you do. And I wasn't ready, and I didn't do it. I didn't go, and I stayed. But I had peace in staying. And then eventually, it became yes, go. And then eventually, it became yes, grace. And he made it so clear along the way that these were the steps that he wanted me to take, that he had orchestrated for me. And there's confirmation after confirmation that I was following God's counsel in being here. And what that also helps with is when things are tough, when you get discouraged, when, say, a global pandemic happens and your attendance is reduced by 95% and you have to hit the reset button on the whole church, you start to doubt whether or not I heard that counsel right. But you know that you did. And so following God's counsel, knowing that he knows the perfect plan, having confirmation that this is what he wants you to do, keeps you faithful in the path because we have a wonderful counselor. I was reminded as I was thinking of this, as one of my favorite verses, I remind you of it often because it's so simple and yet so powerful. John 10.10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says, I have come here so that you would have life and have it to the full, so that you would have the best, most rich, extravagant, adventurous, deep life possible. The best, the most full life possible for you. Now, his definition of that is going to look different than ours might, but when we experience his, we'll change our mind to his definition. Jesus says, if you'll just follow my counsel, I will lead you down the right paths. In Christ, we have a wonderful counselor whose advice is always right and always loving. The next thing that we see is that we have this mighty God. We have a mighty God. And I thought about how do we make a mighty God relevant in 2024? Certainly that resonates a little bit differently than it did in 800 BC, right? We live in a different timeframe, a different context. So how does that resonate for us? And I was reminded of a sermon that I like to do on David and Goliath. I did this sermon my first summer here, and I haven't done it again. Maybe it's time to polish it off because I really like doing it. I love telling the story. I think it's an amazing story. But in the story of David and Goliath, for those who have existed like in a space station for 30 years, David's a little guy, he kills a giant with a rock. I'd like to ask, as we look at that story, what made David so different than the rest of the fighting men of Israel? David's this ruddy teenager, 15, 16 years old. He goes to the front lines. He's there with all these fighting men, all these courageous men who have gone to battle, and it's a horrendous kind of battle where you hack off more limbs than your opponent does. It's a terrible, terrible way to do war, and they have faced it, and they are ready to face it, and yet there's this one giant Goliath of Gath who stands in the valley and blasphemes them and their God every day, making fun of them. And they won't even make eye contact with him. They're terrified of him. And when David sees Goliath, he goes, who's this guy? Who's this jerk? Who does he think he is? And then he says, I'm going to fight him. Then he says, I don't need Saul's armor. Then he goes out there and Goliath talks smack to David and David gives it right back to him. And then he slings the rock and he drops Goliath. And so the question is, how is David able to confront Goliath and respond to Goliath in such a vastly different way than everyone else in his country? And a lot of times people say faith. David was a man of faith. He had great faith. He knew that God was going to do it. And I just simply am not satisfied with that answer. Because I think that there was many men of faith in that army. Certainly of a more mature and seasoned and deep faith than that of a 15 or 16 year old. I'm not sure that David was the most faithful person in Israel. Maybe he was, but that doesn't resonate with me. Even Saul, the king, was a man of faith at that time in his life. My answer to what causes David to see, to respond to Goliath differently is that when everyone else looked at Goliath, they compared the strength and the might of Goliath to themselves, and they said, I am inadequate for this task. I cannot handle it, so I will not fight him. When David looked at Goliath and heard him blaspheming God, he compared the strength and the might of Goliath to the strength and the might of his mighty God, Everlasting Father, and he went, dude, you're in trouble. And so when David goes down to fight Goliath, it's not with his own might. It's not with his own strength. God didn't need that. God just needed a warm body to go do what he told him to do. And now it's just God's might and God's strength at play. And what we see, and this is so important, is that when we talk about mighty God and why that matters, it's because his might makes ours obsolete. The might of God makes our personal fortitude and might and strength and stick-to-itiveness and determination and all the things that we like to say about ourselves. It makes those obsolete. When we do things in the might of God, we don't need ours. All we need to do is be a warm body that's willing to do what God tells us to do. And if you think about this, even the strongest of you, even the smartest of you, even the mightiest of you, there are myriad things in your life for which you are inadequate. It does not take you long to have children and realize I am inadequate for the task of parenting them well. I am inadequate for the task of parenting them perfectly. I am not going to thread this needle without sending them to counseling for something. It's just I'd like to send them for as little as possible. That's my goal with John and Lily. I want to release into the wild capable adults who love Jesus and are self-actualized and have as few reasons to do counseling as possible. That's the goal. When you get married, you realize very quickly, if you're paying attention and you're not a moron, that you are inadequate for this task of being the spouse that your husband or that your wife needs. It's just not in there. You're going to make mistakes. We are inadequate to be perfect friends for each other, to be perfect confidants and counselors for each other. There are myriad ways in life. In most situations, if we would really just think about it, what we should admit is that every single one of us has imposter syndrome about something, and we are inadequate for the task that we face. That's good, because God isn't. So quit comparing yourself to the task and finding yourself lacking and start comparing the task to God and finding him sufficient. He is our mighty warrior. He fights our battles for us. It is not my job to lead grace according to the standards of Nate. It is not my job to make us successful or not successful. It is my job to be a warm body that gets up here on Sundays and does what God asks him to do. It is not your job to make your things successful. It is your job to be obedient because we have a mighty God that goes before us and fights our battles for us. This next one is interesting. We are told that he is our everlasting father, which is interesting for multiple reasons, not the least of which is Jesus is not referred to as God the Father in Scripture. This is the only place I can think of where Jesus is referred to as Father, and so it's interesting wondering why. And really, that word is just a general descriptor for a parental figure. He looks out for us. He nurtures us. He protects us. He guides us. He's a safe place for us. Jesus is fatherly in his behavior towards us. It's kind of a placeholder for that. And as I was thinking about what it means, not only that this is one of Jesus's roles, that he's a father figure for us, but that the descriptor that was chosen was everlasting. And I thought, there's got to be something to everlasting. There's got to be something to why that word was chosen. And as I thought about this, I was reminded of how I think about parents. I think that when you're born, if you're born into a half-decent family, it doesn't even have to be a great family, just a half-decent one, they're going to provide you with food and shelter. They're going to shelter you. They're going to give you a safe environment in which you can grow up. For most of us, that's our experience. So I've always thought of my parents as my shelter. And then at some point or another, they're going to send you out into the big, bad world, and you're going to face it alone. And you're going to see if you can go it alone. And you're going to see if you can make it. But here's what I know, and this makes me emotional every time I think about it. What I know is, I'm out here, Jen and I are out here on our own facing the big bad world. But I know that if it gets too stormy, I always have a shelter I can run to. I know that if things go sideways and we shut the doors and I'm jobless and useless because I have no marketable skills, I know that I can take the family back to their house and we can find our path again. I don't want to, mom and dad, if you're watching, I don't want to do that at all. Sounds terrible. But I know that we could. I have a shelter. And sometimes in life when the storm comes, when I'm getting, and this happens from time to time, it's bound to in this role, really harsh criticism, when I'm trying to determine if it's fair and just, when I'm really discouraged, when I don't know what to do, I can always pick up the phone and call mom and call dad and get advice from people who love me and love Jesus and aren't trying to get me to perform as their pastor. They just want to see what's best for me. I know that when the storms come, I can call and I can hide under that shelter for a little bit. And it always makes me sad when I do the funeral of a parent, whether they're 85, 95, or older. And what a blessing it is to have our parents for that long if we do. Or whether that parent is 55 or 45. Because it makes me sad for the kids, usually adults, that are left behind because their shelter is not here anymore. You're your own shelter. And I think about how lonely that must feel. There's a singer-songwriter named James Blunt that wrote a song about this, sitting next to his dad as his dad was dying of a disease. And he wrote a song about saying goodbye to your parents. And this is the chorus of the song. I think it's so powerful. He says, I'm not your son. You're not my father. We're just two grown men saying goodbye. No need to forgive. No need to forget. I know your mistakes and you know mine. And while you're sleeping, I'll try to make you proud. So, Daddy, won't you just close your eyes? Don't be afraid. It's my turn to chase the monsters away. Jeepers. The reality is, and I know this is heavy for December 8th, at least it's not Family Jammy Sunday. That would be weird. This occurred to me as we were walking through the process of losing my father-in-law, John. That when you are born, best case scenario in your life, you bury your parents. That's the best case scenario. Because if you don't, something more sad than that happens. Because here's the reality about our moms and our dads. They are not everlasting. And one day, we'll say goodbye to them. And when we do, it'll be our turn to chase the monsters away. But in Christ, we have an everlasting Father. And because of that, because of His eternal nature, means we never have to face the world alone. His eternal nature means we never have to face the world alone. We always have shelter. We always have someone to run to. We always have someone to cling to. We always have someone to call. Because he is our everlasting father and we never have to say goodbye to him. And I know that for some of you, you're big and tough and you're stoic and this emotional stuff doesn't do it for you. First of all, you need therapy. Second, you may have been fighting the monsters for a long time on your own. It may be a long time since you lost your mama or your daddy. Or maybe you're one of the unfortunate ones whose mom or dad ran out on you quick, and you've never really had that shelter to run to. And you've been fighting by yourself for a long time and you're tough. I'd be willing to bet you all my money that there have been times in the years and decades since you lost them where you thought to yourself, God, I wish I could talk to Dad. I wish I could call my mom. I wish I could just talk to him. Or maybe, I wish I had a dad that ever gave me good advice, ever. I just wish they were here. That's what makes this promise and this title of Christ so powerful. He is our everlasting Father. We never have to say goodbye. We never have to face the world alone. He is always there, constantly looking, constantly protecting, constantly guarding. And we can always, always run to him. And we'll never have to be on our own with what we face. Because of all these things, I believe, Isaiah calls him and finishes with the Prince of Peace. Jesus, he says, is the Prince of Peace. Why is he the Prince of Peace? His peace is the only possible consequence of his attributes. His peace, the peace of Christ that transcends all understanding and guards our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus, this peace of Christ is the only possible response and consequence of his other attributes. If you really believe that Jesus is a wonderful counselor and that his advice and his counsel is always right and always loving and that all you have to do is walk in his counsel. All you have to do is follow his advice. All you have to do is walk the path that he's laid out for you. I don't have to worry about everything else. I just need to walk this way and I know that Jesus will take care of me. If you believe that's true and if you believe that Jesus is your mighty warrior who goes ahead of you and fights your battles for you, who makes your personal might obsolete, who only asks of you for a warm body that's willing to do as he instructs, if you believe that's true and it takes the mantle of the battles off of you that we fight and it places it on his more sturdy shoulders and all you have to do is walk behind him, if you believe that he's a mighty warrior that goes before you, and then you believe that he's an everlasting father that you can always run to for shelter, that you can always run to for comfort, that you'll never have to say goodbye to, that is the reason that you'll never have to face the world alone or chase the monsters on your own, if you believe those things, how could we not arrive at the conclusion that he is the Prince of Peace and experience that peace? Jesus says in the Upper Room Discourse that we focused on last spring, John chapter 14 through 16, before he prays the High Priestly Prayer in 17, he finishes the Upper Room Discourse in chapter 16, I believe verse 39, and he says, I say these things to you that you might have peace, that you might rest, that you don't have to worry anymore. Just walk in me and walk towards me, and I will take care of everything else. It's why I think these four titles of Christ are so powerful together, because they flow one right after the other, and they lead us into this place of perfect and uncontested peace, so that if we really believe those things about Christ, we will not be like the proverbial duck on top of calm water looking calm and placid on the surface but legs flailing like crazy underneath. We will be like the disciples on the boat after Jesus groggily comes up and calms the storms and calms the winds and the rains and says peace be still. And then he goes back down to continue taking his nap, and the disciples look at each other and they go, Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him? Look at him. Perfect peace. How did he do it? That's how we should feel when we reflect on who Jesus is and what he is for us. So this Christmas, when you hear Handel's Messiah, when you hear the great chorus swell, when you encounter this verse and you're met with the reality that he is our Prince of Peace and you understand more fully how we arrive at that peace, I hope and pray that the person of Christ will be brought freshly to your mind. And maybe not all four of these titles will resonate with you, but maybe the one that did the most is the one that you'll be reminded of and that this Christmas you'll experience the peace of Christ and you'll celebrate the peace of Christ. And we'll remember to do this as we celebrate together with our families, that we will never hear this messianic prophecy, this Christmas verse the same, but that will always remind us of the peace that we find in Christ and make us more desirous of the Savior that graciously offers us that peace. Let's pray. Father, you are good to us. We love you. We praise you. We thank you for the gift of Jesus, for sending us your son, so that not only would he come to reconcile us to you. To reconcile your creation back to you. To give us a hope for the future. But God in so doing. Also becomes our wonderful counselor. Our mighty God. Our everlasting father and our prince of peace. Father I pray for for us that we would know Jesus better as we leave here. That we would seek Him more, be more desirous of Him as we leave here. And that God, those of us who are not experiencing Your peace, those of us who need a Father to run to, those of us who need a wonderful counselor, who need a mighty God to fight a battle for them. Lord, I pray that they would be heartened by these words, that they would be encouraged as they go. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Good morning. Welcome to Grace. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. Happy Christmas Sweater Sunday. I was definitely aware of the theme when I got up and got dressed this morning. That's 100% why I chose the sweater. It's not random. I actually showed up and the band was wearing Christmas sweaters and I said, is today Christmas Sweater Sunday? And they said yes. And I was like, oh, okay. That's nice to know. I also would like to just offer this disclaimer. If this sermon isn't good, it's Keck's fault. Keck. Hey, Jacob. Jacob. Hey, come here, buddy. Come stand right here. This is the single ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life. I hate it so much. I'm a Falcons fan. This is terrible. And you're sitting on the front row. The front row. My gosh. All right, thanks, buddy. I just wanted everybody to see that online so you know what I'm dealing with. You win the day, Keck. Well done. And go Bucs, because that's who you're playing today. This is the first part in our Christmas series. The series this year is called Foretold. We are going to be looking at prophecies from the Old Testament that tell us about the Messiah that is to come. And so this morning we are looking at kind of the apex prophecy, kind of the big overarching prophecy that dictates the rest of them. It's this promise in Jeremiah 31 of a new covenant. And so this morning we're going to be focusing on the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant. To do that, we need to have a working understanding of what covenant is and what it means and how we define it. I'm sure that's a word that you've heard before. Most of us are church people. And for those of you who are here with family, thanks for being here. Thanks for entrusting your morning to us. We're going to try to be good stewards of that. But I'm sure that most of us in the room have heard this word covenant before. And all of us, if I said, what is a covenant? You would probably give me a pretty well-reasoned definition of it. But so that we're on the same page this morning, and if you have notes, it's a great morning to take notes. I've got a lot of them for you. This is a little bit more of a professorial sermon. So for those of you that like the nitty gritty details, this one's for you. So we're on the same page. Let's define covenant this morning. A biblical covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. When I say that we're going to examine the old covenant, the new covenant, a covenant is a binding agreement between God and man. And what's expressed in covenants is God says, if you do blank, I will do blank. If you do this, I will do this. If you offer me this obedience, this sacrifice, whatever it might be, I will offer you this blessing, whatever it might be. And you may not know this, but the Old Testament is actually divided into five different covenants. I'm not sure if you're aware of them or you know what the covenants are. I'm positive that most of you have heard of all of these, and none of this will come as a surprise to you, but just so we're on the same page, and for those of you who are interested in things like this, these are the five covenants of the Old Testament. Let me see if I can do them from memory. The first one is the Noahic covenant, the covenant that God made with Noah, where he said, I will not flood the earth again until the end of days. I will never do this again. And the seal and the sign of that covenant is the rainbow. After the Noahic covenant comes the Abrahamic covenant. In Genesis chapter 12,osaic covenant, where God gives Moses the law. And he says, if you follow these laws and you teach your people to follow these laws, I will bless you in these ways. It's the Old Testament covenant of law, the binding agreement between God and man. After that, in 2 Samuel chapter 17 comes the Davidic covenant, where God reminds the people of Israel of his promise to Abraham. And he says, not only will one of your descendants bless the whole earth, but David, that descendant will come from you and will sit on your throne. And we see that come to fruition in Matthew chapter 1 in the genealogies of Christ where we can track Obed and Jesse and then King David in the genealogies of Christ. That's the Davidic covenant. And then the fifth and final covenant in the Old Testament is Jeremiah 31, the Jeremiac covenant, where God promises in Jeremiah to make a new covenant. We're going to walk through bits and pieces of this covenant together this morning so we can understand it well. But simply in chapter 31, verse 31, he introduces it like this. The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. So that's just a little teaser that just lets us know what's going to happen. There's a discourse here from 31 to 37 in that chapter. And he opens it up by saying, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant. The days are coming when there's going to be something new, something different. And so he's introducing this idea that with Jesus, he's going to usher in a new covenant, a new and final binding agreement between God and man. So what I want to do this morning is spend a bulk of our time comparing and contrasting the old covenant of the Old Testament, all those covenants combined, the Noahic and Abrahamic and Mosaic and Davidic and Jeremiac, all those combined with the new covenant that we have in Christ, the covenant that's promised in Jeremiah 31, and that's fulfilled in the coming Christ in the New Testament that we celebrate at Christmas. So I want to show you five ways in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant. The first way requires us to maybe learn or be reunited with some vocabulary words that I will explain to you. The old covenant was centripetal. The new covenant is centrifugal. Old covenant, centripetal. New covenant, centrifugal. Shane has never heard these words in his life. I'm going to tell you what these mean, okay? He got a look on his face like his head was about to explode. Here's what I mean. Okay, I was at Thanksgiving. We were hanging out with our family in Dothan. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. I hope and pray that you guys had as rich of a time with your family as we did with ours. I was talking with one of Jen's cousins and they had recently gone to Huntsville with their daughters to, I believe it's the Kennedy Space Center there. If not the Kennedy Space Center, there's a space center there. And growing up in Atlanta, it was a rite of passage. Eventually you're going to go on a field trip to the space center in Huntsville. And when you go, does anybody know when you go to the Space Center and then you go to the gift shop, what do you have to eat? What do you have to try? Does anybody know? Dry ice cream. That's right. Astronaut's dry ice cream. It's the best thing on the whole planet. It's also the best thing in the space station. All right. It's universally the best, the dry ice cream. And I asked my friend, I said, or I asked my cousin, do they still have that ride? There's a ride that demonstrates the power of centrifugal force where you get into this circular room, there's a rail in the middle and the wall kind of tilts and so you lean back against the wall and you hold your hands like this and the room starts to spin. And it starts to spin and the faster, eventually it gets fast enough that the floor drops out of the bottom of it. You've done this Elaine. It drops out of the bottom and you stay pressed against the wall with the centrifugal force. It's to demonstrate to you what that force does. Centrifugal force pushes out. It goes outward. Centripetal force sucks everything in. It brings everything to the center. And so the way to think about the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the evangelism plan of God in the Old Testament, the idea of spreading the good news of who he was, was centrepital. Everyone come to Israel. Everyone look at Israel. Everyone look at my people. They're going to obey me so well and be so holy that they will stand out like a beacon amongst the nations and people will flock to them to pursue their God. That's the idea. Follow the rules well enough, live holy enough, and you will exert this centripetal force in the regions around you and they will be so attracted to your God that they will flock to you. That was the idea. Because we're human, it didn't work. So the new covenant ushers in this idea of evangelism as centrifugal. Now we go outward from the church. Now we go outward from Jerusalem. Jesus institutes this in his ascension when he gives us the great commission. And he says, go therefore into Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the earth, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Go through the whole world and spread my name. With the new covenant with Christ, instead of just staying in our bubble and living holy and expecting people to flock to God because of how we behave, now it is our job. Peter calls us in his letters, the living stones. We are told that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. In the new covenant under Christ, this new binding agreement with God, it is now our job to go out and to spread the news of Jesus amongst the nations. This is why I'm always telling you that the only reason you exist after becoming a Christian, why when you become a Christian, the very second that you believe in Christ, does God not suck you up right to heaven so you can begin to experience eternity now? Why does he not do that? Because he loves you so much. The only reason he does not snap you up into heaven the very second you become a Christian is so that you can bring as many souls with you to heaven on your way there. It's centrifugal force. That's the new covenant. We look outward. We evangelize. We see him articulate this, Jeremiah, in verse 34. No longer will they teach their neighbor or say to one another, know the Lord, because they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord, for I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more. So this first difference in the covenant that Jeremiah is speaking of is that we now go out. We now bear responsibility for evangelism. It's centrifugal force. We push out and reach the world. The second difference is this, and I like this one. The old covenant had this picture of God above us. The new covenant, God is with us. Emmanuel. At some point this Christmas season, you'll hear that song, Handel's Messiah. You'll hear, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, his name shall be called Emmanuel. You'll hear that. And when you hear that, Emmanuel means God with us. In the Old Testament, God existed above us. God existed as this sort of, it would be easy to have mistaken God for this divine constable overseeing our lives and making sure we're following the rules well. It would have been easy to see God as a divine judge or a divine parent looking into our lives, making sure that we're doing right and not doing wrong. It would be easy to have this picture of God over us or lording over us or above us judging our behaviors. But in the New Testament, we see Jesus himself condescend from his divine nature to take on human form and be God with us, to walk amongst us, to exist in the squalor and in the day-to-day drama that is humanity, to experience tragedy and loss and sadness. And I do think it's worth noting as we talk about this idea of Jesus being God with us, it's worth noting that where he chose to show up is remarkably bad in the scheme of human history. If you gave me all of human history and you said, hey, you need to make an appearance somewhere in here, when would you like to do it? I'd be like, I mean, I don't know, like suburban Raleigh 2024. That's pretty great. That's pretty cush. That feels nice. Here's what I wouldn't choose. You know where I'd like to go. I'd like to go to a third world country at the height of the Roman empire and be a far flung province that doesn't matter. And that lives in squalor where a vast majority of the people live day to day and don't know where their next meal is going to come from. And I'd like to come from a backwater town in that backwater province in an empire that doesn't care about me. That sounds fun. Jesus had the entire scope of human history and decided that he was going to show up in Nazareth at 0 BC, however that date works out. And exist in this far-flung province of an empire that didn't care about him. And take on human form there. And then, at the end of his life, we focused on this back in the spring when we looked at the upper room discourse. Some of the most profound words in all of Scripture, John 14 to John 17. I love those chapters. Those chapters are dear to us and to me, and they should be. In those chapters, as he's leaving, he tells the disciples, it's better for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus, and he says it's good for you that I'm leaving, which seems absurd. If you're living life in the presence of Jesus and he says, it's good for you that I'm leaving, that doesn't make any sense. But he says, it's better for you that I'm leaving because since I'm leaving, I'm going to leave behind for you the Holy Spirit who will dwell in you and walk with you every day. And in this new covenant, this didn't happen in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God was above us. He was distant from us. He was other. He was out. But in the New Testament, in the new covenant, God is with us through the spirit. He walks with us daily. The spirit, the Greek name is paraclete, which means to walk alongside. He is with us, convicting us, directing us, helping us decide, giving us wisdom, giving us insight into scripture, helping you discern what's important about what I'm saying and what's not. The Holy Spirit walks with us every day in the new covenant. We have God with us. And I think we very often fail to realize the power of that, that God is with us. Another way in which the new covenant is superior to the old covenant is that the old covenant was focused on rules. The new covenant is focused on love. Old covenant focused on rules, new covenant focused on love. We see this in verse 32 of the discourse. It will not be like the old covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them, declares the Lord. And then in verse 33, this is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. So in the old covenant, when God makes that Mosaic covenant with his children, he gives them 630 some odd laws. There's disagreement on exactly how many there are. About 300 and change thou shouts and a few less thou shalt nots. And in the old covenant, there was a one-to-one exchange on your spirituality and your ability to follow the rules. The better you followed the rules, the closer to God you were. The more things you did right and didn't do wrong, the more spiritual you were. And this begat the hypocrisy of Pharisaical spirituality that we see in the New Testament. When we read our Gospels, who is enemy number one of Jesus in the Gospels? It's not Satan. It's the Pharisees. Who's he always arguing with? Who's he always putting down? Who is he always correcting? The religious leaders. The ones that should have known better. And I am firmly convinced that these men that Jesus is putting down throughout his life, that he's quarreling with throughout his life, that he's debating with throughout his life, that he's constantly showing up and showing out because of, I am convinced that those Pharisees did not mean to be sinful. They were not intentionally wrong. They were not intentionally vile. They were not intentionally hypocritical. I believe the Pharisees meant well. I believe the Pharisees, the vast majority of them, actually believed that they were living out the will of God and that they were living holy lives and that this upstart Jesus of Nazareth was actually a bad actor. I think that they actually believed that and they believed that because they had allowed the Old Testament covenant to skew their spirituality in such a way that it was performance based. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. And so Jesus comes on the scene and he offers this incredible teaching when he's talking with a young ruler, a young lawyer, and he says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Amen. And love your neighbor as yourself. And the rest of that verse, you guys know, on these hangs the whole law and the prophets. What Jesus teaches in those verses is, if you will simply focus on loving God and loving others, then the rest of the rules will fall into place. You don't have to worry about those. Don't focus on the rules. Focus on love. That's the new covenant. And can I tell you, honestly, who's taught me the most about the beauty of this new covenant? It's you. It's grace. I grew up in a Southern Baptist tradition in suburban Atlanta. This is no critique of that tradition, although it is a little bit. It's no critique of my parents. Let's say that. They did the best they could with the information they had. They chose the best church for us. Everybody makes mistakes. This was not a great environment. It's just the environment that I grew up in. And in, some of you guys know this. I don't know your traditions and where you came from and what they hold, but if you have my tradition, you'll understand this. Southern Baptist evangelical 80s, I actually heard a comedian, Nate Bargatze, who's fantastic. He said, there's never been anyone more spiritual than evangelical parents in the 80s and 90s. That even Jesus looks at those parents and is like, y'all should have a little fun. Like you should loosen up a little bit. That was my childhood, okay? And my childhood was very much Old Covenant. The better you follow the rules, the more spiritual you are. We were all teetotalers. Nobody had an ounce of alcohol ever. There was no dancing. I went to a private school that had a junior-senior dinner. We did not dance. It was not prom. Not allowed. Junior-senior banquet is what it was called. We did not watch rated R movies. We did not have secular music in our house. My mom hid it in her car and listened to Dirty Dancing and her sunbird, but that was foreboding. Dad did not know about those tapes. We lived under the rule of law. And the better you followed the rules, the more spiritual you were. The problem with this for me was, I saw, and it was mostly men in that time leading the church, I saw men leading the church who were jerks. They were jerks. By any stretch, they were not people you'd want to spend time with. But they were the most spiritual. And to me, this didn't make sense. Then I come to Grace. And when I come to Grace, Grace is a different kind of church than I've been a part of before. And there are people at Grace who do not follow the rules very well. I mean, some of y'all, if y'all went to my church, you would be subject to church discipline very quickly for your language and for your consumption habits. You are not, you do not follow the rules well. But I watched those same people who would really stink at following the rules in the 1980 Southern Baptist Church love on their neighbors because they love their God incredibly well. And I've watched some of the leaders of this church love consistently over the years in unmistakably holy ways. He's grinning at me back there. Doug Funk's one of them. Doug Funk would be a terrible rule follower. You're terrible at the rules, Doug. But watching Doug live out his faith has shown me the efficacy and truth of this new covenant. Hey, you worry about loving the people around you and the important parts of the rules will fall into place. Grace has taught me the truth of that teaching. You're good at that. Keep being good at that. It's part of what makes grace, grace. But that's a feature. That's a benefit of the new covenant. That we don't focus on the rules. We focus on loving one another well. And we focus on loving our God well. And we trust the rest of it to fall into place. These last two are my favorite features of this new covenant in which we live. The old covenant was breakable. This new be broken by their behavior. I will bless you if you follow my rules. I will bless you if you behave the way you're supposed to behave. He made it conditional on their behavior. This new covenant is remarkable in that it is not conditional on our behavior. And if you can't appreciate that about this new covenant, then you're in the wrong spot. Paul articulates this in Romans chapter 8. At the end of the chapter, I think Romans chapter eight is the greatest chapter in theestined. Those who are predestined are justified. Those who are justified are sanctified. Those who are sanctified are glorified. It's already been done. Once you place your faith in Christ, your part of the covenant is over. All that God asks of you is that you believe in Jesus and who he says he is, that we believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, is going to do what he says he's going to do. That's your part of the covenant. Believe in Christ. And once you believe in Christ, God does the rest. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Do you understand that your salvation and God holding you in his hand and God ushering you into eternity is not contingent upon your behavior? You cannot behave your way into heaven. Listen to this. You cannot behave your way into a deeper love from God. Your heavenly father will never ever love you more than he does in this moment right now. No matter what you did yesterday, no matter what you carry into this room, he will never love you more than he does now because he's not capable of a greater love than he offers you. And all he asks is that you trust in that love and that you believe in him. We exist in an unbreakable covenant that is protected by the very blood of our Savior. Because of that, this last part is true. The old covenant is dependent on our performance. The new covenant is dependent on his performance. We see this in verses 35 through 37. This is what the Lord says. Let me break that down for you. Declares the Lord, the day hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. The day there is another God who understands the universe, who is better than me and more capable than me and understands what I can understand, that day when pigs fly is when I will break my promise to you. N.T. Wright is one of the world's foremost theologians. He's absolutely the foremost theologian on Paul. And N.T. Wright defines God's righteousness as his commitment to keeping his promises to us. When we think about the righteousness, the holiness, the unblemished nature of God, N.T. Wright says that very nature is crafted by his commitment to keeping his promises to us. And here in Jeremiah 31, verses 35 through 37, God says, when hell freezes over will be the day that I break my promise to you. But I've got you and I will keep you. This new covenant is not based on your performance. It is not based on your behavior. It is simply based on your belief and God does everything else. It's not based on our performance and what we do and how we behave. It's based on his performance here. Do you understand? That's why this is here. To remind us that this is the performance on which we base our faith. This is the performance by which we claim eternity. This is where we place our hope. This is where we get our faith. Not in ourselves. So some of us need to quit trying so hard to behave and start working harder to love and exist in this new covenant where Jesus says, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I think that we have this habit of reverting back to the old covenant. See, the things that I've told you this morning, for many of you, for most of you, are not news. You may not have walked in here able to divide the Old Testament into five separate covenants. You may not have, if you thought about the difference between the Old Covenant that God had with his people and the New Covenant that we exist in, you may not have articulated the five things I did, but you know them. I don't think I taught, I hope you learned something, but I don't think this information was brand new to everyone. So the question becomes, if this is true, if we exist in this new covenant that's based on his performance, not mine, that's unbreakable, that I just need to focus on love and go out and reach people, why don't we live in this new covenant? Why don't we live in this reality? Why do we struggle so much? I think our problem is an unconscious, habitual regression towards the old. I would even say it's very American of us to prefer the old covenant. We can perform our way into it. It's on us. I'll do it my way. I'll earn it. It's the reason why if you're someone worthy of respecting, it's hard to buy you dinner. Because you want to buy your own dinner. Because you want to pay for it. Because you want to do it. Because you want to earn it. It's the American way. I'm independent. I can handle it. And so in our subconscious, we default to this Old Testament, Old Covenant performance where it's based on my performance, not someone else's. And we revert and we regress. This is why Christmas is such a blessing for us in so many ways. Christmas is our annual reminder of our existence in the new covenant. Christmas, those dumb sweaters you're wearing, especially that one. And all the festivities and all the lights. Yesterday I was in Home Depot and I was looking for command hooks because I was hanging wreaths and I heard a lady tell her son that she was also looking for command hooks. And when the employee told me where the command hooks were, I hollered down the aisle to the lady and I said, ma'am, I hear you're looking for command hooks. I am too. They're in the next aisle over at the end. And so we met at the command hooks, her and her two sons. And she said, thank you so much. And I said, I said, thank you. It's National Wreath Hanging Day. And she laughed and she goes, it is, isn't it? That's what we're all doing. And some of you hung your wreaths yesterday because it's the first Saturday in December. That's what we're doing as we do those things. And we celebrate Christmas and we look forward to family and we buy the gifts and we sing the carols and we play the music in our car and we do all the things. Here's why this sermon is the first one of the month, is the first one of the series, because I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that you exist in this new covenant. I want Christmas to be a reminder to you that your spirituality is not based on your behavior. It's not based on your devotion. It's not based on your personal holiness. Your spirituality was one for you on the cross. You've already entered into the new covenant. It's not based on your performance anymore. Exist in this place where you are loved as much as you ever will be. Quit trying to earn your father's love and exist in the fact that he loves you, that he adores you, and that from his fullness we receive grace upon grace. Let Christmas be a reminder to you of all the ways in which the new covenant in which you live is superior to the old. Walk with freedom and grace and goodness and mercy as you go throughout the season, and love your God and love others well as we celebrate this Christmas. And let Christmas be a reminder to you about the covenant in which you exist. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the promise of Jeremiah 31. We thank you for this new covenant in which we exist. We don't deserve it, God. We can't comprehend it. This deal that you've made with us is unfathomable. God, help the reality of your promise and your commitment to keeping your word. Help that wash over us anew. Help us more deeply appreciate this promise you've made to us. Help us more deeply appreciate your commitment to it in spite of us sometimes. God, as we go through Christmas and we do all the Christmas things, let us not lose sight of who you are and what it represents. Let us not lose sight of what it means for the coming Messiah to have arrived and ushered in these new promises. Father, I pray for our Decembers. I pray that they would be sweet times with friends and family, that we would reflect on the riches that you've offered us. And God, for those of us for whom this season is sad or hard, give us the strength, Father, to turn the sadness into gratitude because at least someone or something existed in our life that we love so much that we miss it. Be with us as we go throughout this December as we celebrate the coming of your Son. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning, Grace. I'm Nancy LaCivita, and I'm a partner here and one of your elders. This morning, I'll be reading from Psalm 134, a song of ascent. Praise the Lord, all you servants of the Lord, who minister by night in the house of the Lord. Lift up your hands in the sanctuary and praise the Lord. May the Lord, maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion. Awesome. Thank you, Nancy. All right. Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here at Grace, which essentially means I am the pastor for students sixth grade through 12th grade. Our middle and high school students, I get to hang out with them every week. We meet on Sunday nights. We have the best time. We get rid of a lot of these chairs and we do really fun stuff that honestly we don't do enough of on Sunday mornings. I'm trying to bring in more of the game aspect to the Sunday morning experience, but truly it is such a blessing to be able to be the student pastor here at Grace. I've been here for a little over six years. I love our kids. I love our families, young families. If you are looking for advice on parenting, talk to our student parents because they're unbelievable. They're almost as incredible as our students. I love these kids and I love student ministry. Before I came here, I was a student pastor in Georgia. That's actually how Nate and I were connected. He led me as I was a student pastor at a church that he was also at in Georgia. I've basically been doing student ministry full-time since I graduated college in 2015. Go Dawgs. And I don't know how many of you know this. I'm actually from kind of a family of student pastors. I am one. Also, my brother's one. My younger brother is a student pastor in Athens, Georgia. Go Dawgs. Yeah, again. And my dad is currently a student and a college pastor in Dahlonega, but he has been doing student ministry full-time as his job for, I think, over 20 years at this point. Now, I will also say that my mom has been volunteering and teaching in student ministry way before us guys started doing any of it. So we followed in the blueprint, and we took it full-time, and we took it professional. But, Mom, I see you. I know you're probably watching or listening. And so I wanted to give her the shout out. But my dad actually went into student ministry and he went into ministry in general a little bit later in life than a lot of people do. And he actually started out in student ministry when I started out in student ministry. As I was going into middle school, he had accepted the call and accepted a job at his first church, meeting and loving and serving the students. Now, sometimes that doesn't go well. I have ministered to some really incredible kids and some really incredible families that love each other a lot, where the parents would be unbelievable leaders and youth group, and their kids are like, no way, I would never want you to be there. It's a pretty common thing when you're a middle schooler and high schooler. I know that it's going to shock some of you that sometimes they want their freedom as they start to get older. And that is the case a lot of times, but I didn't really have that choice. I will instead, all I have known of student ministry from the time that I was young, from the time I was in sixth grade was simply being ministered to by my dad. And while I know that being a pastor's kid sometimes doesn't always have the best connotation, sometimes people who grow up as pastor's kids kind of fall away from the church, but I'm just so thrilled that my brother and I fell in love with the church instead. And specifically, we fell in love with student ministry as a part of my dad's youth group. I'm sorry, I thought I might cry, and it is not yet, so we've got to lock in. And when I think back on that, I spent some time as I was going through this and thinking through just my journey and my life in this ministry and spending time in my dad's ministry and just wondering what made that ministry so special to me and what made it so special to everyone. And I'll tell you straight up, I think my dad is the best at it. I don't think that there is anyone who exists who does student ministry better than he does. I know that kind of sounds like I'm the five-year-old who's like, my dad can beat your dad up. I can give you a lot of names and I can give you a lot of numbers to reach out to of people who would agree. Over the course of his 20-something years, he has been so impactful on the lives of just unbelievable amounts of students. He has completely taken over and revamped and completely just turned on its head these ministries and turned them into these, from these small insignificant ministries to these thriving ministries that bled into and impacted the community at large. And I thought about what was he doing that made him that good? What was he doing that was bringing so many people in? What was he doing that was so impactful to the people around? I'm thinking it back and I'm like, all right, what what, what did we do at youth group that was that awesome that people were that drawn to or whatever. First, we did do Wednesday nights as our main nights. And I don't know who is from a smaller area than Raleigh and has gotten to experience having Wednesday night dinners at the church. Um, some, I got a few nods. Uh, Wednesday night dinners is basically when you're at a small local church, there are grandmas all over the place that come into the kitchen at whatever time on Wednesdays. They make everyone in the church dinner that shows up. So if you showed up for student ministry, then you got to have a dinner cooked for you by a lady by the name of Mama Jane. And if that name's not enough, you don't miss opportunities to eat food from Mama Jane. So maybe that was it. But dad did work really hard. He spoke well. He raised up leaders well. He planned great trips. We went on awesome camps. But as I continued to come up with all of those different lists of things, I'm like, none of these are more or less significant than really any student ministry that I've ever seen or been a part of. The only thing I can think of is this, that I don't think that there is a person that exists on this earth who loves students more deeply, more purely, and more Christ-like than my dad does. And whatever reason you walked in the door that first time, whatever drew you, Mama Jane, I heard you're making whatever. I heard my buddy is singing tonight, so I'm coming to support. Whatever drew you in that first time, it's the same thing that ended up drawing you in that hundredth time. That to be in the presence of my dad was to know what it meant to be loved. And when you experience that, you want more of it. And I wonder, if you have people like that in your life, dads that are student pastors, no. Are there people in your life that have those same qualities? You're connected for whatever reason you're connected. Maybe it's a family member. So you were born, and when you're born, it's like, hey, you have no other choice. You have to hang out with this person. It's your mom. Maybe it's a friend. You have the same hobby. You like pickleball. You like birding. You like playing golf. This person wants to play. He hits you up. She hits you up. Let's go do it. Maybe your kids are friends and you're like, well, we should hang out too. Whatever your reason for your connection for these people, I bet that you have at least one person that comes to mind where you go, man, you know what? What I love most about them and what draws me the most to them is simply who they are. To be in their presence and to be with them is to be loved. To enter into their presence is to enter into joy, is to enter into peace, to feel safe, to feel whole, to be made full. Do you have those people? If you do, I'd love to hear about them, first of all. But you know that there's no blessing greater. There's not a greater blessing on this earth than having people that make you feel whole and right and make you feel holy and completely loved and brings you joy and brings you peace by simply getting to be with them. It doesn't matter what you do with them. It doesn't matter how much time you have with them. It doesn't matter how often you're able to see them because every time you do, you just get to rest in their presence and it's good. The Psalm that Nancy read for us a few minutes ago, Psalm 134, that Psalm is a celebration of this type of love. That Psalm is a celebration of the fact that we have access to this. Celebration of the fact that God offers us the blessing of a perfect version of this love in his presence. Psalm 134 is the last psalm of ascent. For the last couple months, we've been going through this journey, if you will. We've been going through this ascension also, if you will. This series called Ascent. We've been going through these different psalms. And as Mikey said, these pilgrims, these Israelites who are traveling upwards, they're traveling up the mountain to Jerusalem to be in the temple of God and to be able to bless and spend time with God. All of the journey, all of the hardships, all of the everything that is involved in a journey up a mountain for one single solitary purpose. And Psalm 134 is the resolution of what that purpose is. Can we read it together? Praise the Lord, all you servants of the Lord, who minister by night in the top of this mountain. What's their goal? What's their purpose? It's to simply be able to rest and enjoy and rejoice in the presence of God. You can see on your notes, if you're looking at them or if you have them, that the title of this is called Blessing. And it's called Blessing because of something that I learned through research in this psalm. Because in this psalm, there is the word bless. We saw it. It's right there. May the Lord bless you from Zion. But I wouldn't say it's the most significant part of this until I did a little bit more research. This series that we've been going through, we've been reading through this book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, and it is kind of, we've used it as a guide for our series. And I learned through that, Eugene Peterson writes that when the word bless is used here. In Hebrew, it's the word blessing. It's the word bless that it talks about that when God is blessing us, he is blessing us in the way that he is coming down, that he is making himself known to us. He is making himself ours. And he, let's see, you know what? I'm just gonna read this quote. It's so good. The passage describes what God does to us and among us. He enters into covenant with us. He shares the goodness of his spirit and his creation and the joys of his redemption. He empties himself among us and we get what he is and that is blessing. To understand that is to realize and to understand that the blessing that each and every one of those Israelites, what they were pursuing, the goal and the prize for their long and their harrowing journey to Jerusalem was nothing more and was nothing less than God himself. And to connect with him deeply and to connect with him intimately and to rejoice, put your hands up and rejoice in his presence. And that same exact deep and intimate connection is offered to us as well. As Christians, our motivation for living out our faith should be to enter into God's presence. As we've gone through this ascension, as we've talked about this literal physical journey of the Israelites, of these people, these pilgrims that are journeying upwards, we've used it as kind of a connection and as a backboard to also describe that, hey, we, each one of us in this room, is also taking a journey upwards as well. That we are taking a spiritual journey somewhere. Whether we're ascending upwards towards heaven, we are all ascending or going or moving in some way, even if it's just through time. But as Christians, we are called to make this discipleship journey. We're called to step and to move ever closer and ever nearer, just like these people were as they were heading up and moving up to Jerusalem. I love the way that Psalm 1611 puts it. Can we read that together? You make known to me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of God, and at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. All right, there we go. We've got the path. This is perfect. This is such a perfect, because we're talking about a journey. We're talking about making steps. All right, so God gives us a path. He makes the path of life known to us. Okay, so in our life, we have this path. And on this path, if we will move towards him, if we will take steps ever closer towards him, what we are doing is walking into what he calls fullness of joy. I think sometimes we forget that. Sometimes we forget that this thing that we're doing when we worship, when we come to church, when we're listening to the sermon, when we do all this stuff, it's for joy. It is to be able to experience and witness the presence of God, and in the presence of God is fullness of joy. There's this pastor named John Piper, and he calls it Christian hedonism. For those of you who know the word hedonism, you're like, oh, this feels weird. Hedonism, I'm giving you guys a lot of terms today. Hedonism is basically this term that describes doing everything to serve yourself. I am going to seek and pursue pleasures for myself as much as I'm able to do. Not great. But what John Piper says is Christian hedonism is this, that this verse says that the best and most joy-filled version of your life possible can only be found in the presence of God. And so the most self-serving thing you can do, the thing that will bring you the most joy, the thing that will bless you the most is simply by moving and taking steps towards God. And guess what? When you're taking steps towards God, when you're serving yourself by unlocking this joy that you never knew existed, you're bringing everyone along with you. Because when you know joy, so do the people around you. And that's my reminder. I know that, you know, this is a lot of like, all right, sweet. That's a lot of quotes from a lot of pastors. Way to go, Kyle. We should live for God more. It'll give us the most joy. But think about this practically. All right, let's do an exercise together. I want you to think about the people in your life who are the most connected and the most committed to their faith. The people who you would put as a pillar of like, this is the person that I would strive to be in my faith. They love the Lord well, whatever. How would you describe those people? The people in my life that I know, they're the most joy-filled. They're able to offer the most love because they're the people who've experienced the most love. In a world where everyone needs more and needs the next thing and needs to grow, they are the people who are the most content. They're the people that are most at peace in a world of anxiety and fear. Man, think about my dad. You think he just fell into loving like that? No. My dad wasn't a Christian until college. He met my mom. He pursued my mom, and my mom was like, can I offer you Jesus instead? Because I'm not interested otherwise. And he was like, well, you're pretty, so I'll come to church. So I guess my mom used her spiritual gift of being pretty. I don't know. But in my dad's pursuit of my mom, he fell head over heels in love with Jesus. Living a life away from Jesus, a longer life away from Jesus than a lot of us have who've grown up in the church, is to be able to just fully recognize and understand and be rocked by the grace and the goodness and the forgiveness of God. And because of that, I watch him. And if he was standing right here and you watched him worship, he would look just as joy-filled as the first day that he experienced the goodness and the grace of God, because every day since he continues to pursue and is the most joy-filled and love-filled person that I know in my life. The people who pursue God are the people who are characterized in the ways that we wish we could be characterized in. And yet, we still don't do it sometimes, man. I wonder, like, I'm like, okay, I know that there are joys beyond compare that come simply from making steps towards God, making God my priority, discipleship, taking my next step of obedience, whatever language we want to use. So what's the deal, man? Why don't we do it? Why don't I do it? And as I thought through that, I was like, you know what? I can think of a couple of reasons that I don't. And if we walk through those reasons, then maybe you can find yourself in them. Maybe you have also felt or had a hard time experiencing God because of these things that hold you back in the same way they hold me back. And maybe we can talk through those. And as we talk through them, maybe together, we can be people who strive towards Jesus and the presence and the goodness of God. I think that the first thing that, oh, if you want to fill in the blank, I realize that oftentimes our life of faith isn't marked by the joy of God's presence. Ultimately, we know that there are times where as much as we know that we should pursue God, we still don't because life gets in the way. First reason I think this could be is maybe you haven't experienced the joy of salvation through repentance. I know there's probably, there may be people in this room who have not become Christians yet, who have not accepted this love of Christ, this forgiveness of Christ, that Christ came, lived a perfect life, died on your behalf, and was raised on your behalf, and have not come to the saving knowledge that, hey, I want to be a part of this. I want to be part of this God who made a way for me to be able to experience him. If that's you, I want you to hear this verse. And I just want you to ruminate on this one thing. Romans 2.4 says, God's kindness is intended to lead you to repentance. When we think about our sins and our shortcomings and the ways that we fall short in our life, it's sometimes hard to separate those from our shame. We know this, you know this. Think about the things that you do wrong to your kids or to your friends or to your husband, your wife. Wrongdoing oftentimes leads to shame, but it is, as Romans says, God's kindness that is intended to lead us to repentance. As you see and recognize your sin, allow you to not ruminate on the shame that comes. Don't let it be the fear of God that brings you to him, but instead seek out his kindness. Seek out his love. Seek out the grace that God offers every single one of us if only we would believe. Now look, we're going to stay on the first one. I know most of, a lot of the people in this room are Christians. But I've got a question for you. We just did a repentance sermon. They just did a repentance sermon. I think sometimes we say yes to Jesus. We repent. We say yes. Praise God. I'm a Christian now. And I to ask, was that the last time you repented? If so, it's time to do it again. How about this? Is yesterday the last time you repented? If so, it's time to do it again. Repentance isn't a one-time thing. It's not a sometimes thing. It's an all-the-time thing. Matthew says to bear fruit in keeping with repentance. Every time we repent, what we are doing is we are putting God in his place and saying, God, you are good and I am not. Thank you for your grace. Allow me to get rid of this sin that is holding me down and allow me to experience your joy to the fullest with nothing, nothing that is holding me back from you. Every time we repent, we have to turn to praise. Every time we repent, we have to turn to thankfulness. And so if you're in this step and you are a Christian there, I still think we can up our repentance game, if you will. If God has new mercies every morning, then guess what? We have access to new mercies every morning. How many of us are taking hold and taking action on making those a part of our daily existence and our daily life? The second thing is unbelievably wordy, and I'm very sorry. Are you currently settling for the supplemental blessings of God and deferring enjoyment of the presence of God until heaven? All right, sweet. Everyone got that? I'm sorry for how wordy that is. Essentially, here's what I'm saying. I think sometimes it's easy for us to go like, sweet, boom, I'm a Christian. That's awesome. I'm a Christian now, and guess what, God? I am going to bless you for all of the things that you've done for me. I'm thankful for my family. I'm thankful for my house. I'm going to say the blessing, and when I say the blessing, I'm going to say thank you for all the things. I can't wait to enjoy all the things that you've given me, and then I also can't wait because when I get to heaven and eternity, God, I'm going to enjoy you forever. There is no blessing greater than enjoying God. And sometimes we forget that the Jesus that died for our eternity died for our right now just as much. The second that we give our hearts and the second that we give our lives to Jesus, we have access to him. We have the Holy Spirit. We have the ability to witness and ruminate and spend time in the joy of his presence every single day. Another quote from the book says that God gets down on his knees among us, gets on our level and shares himself with us. He does not reside far off. He kneels among us. God shares himself with us generously and graciously. The perfect creator of the universe says, I want you to be with me right now. Why would we settle for anything less? If that's you, this series has been about discipleship. If that's you, we just did a series where Nate did a specific Kermans, Kerman, Kerman the frog. Nate did a specific sermon called Step Takers. If you're in the habit of just sitting and chilling and saying, you know what? I'm good, y'all. I'm going to enjoy just the blessings that I've got in my life and I'm going to focus on you later, God, thanks. If that's you, I would encourage you to look around, to spend some time in prayer. Maybe go check out that step-taker sermon and just spend some time looking and seeing, hey, what if I did take a step forward? What if this journey of faith wasn't just me sitting and watching time pass away, but it's me stepping forwards and stepping deeper into the love of Christ? The third way, I think a lot of us get stuck here. I think this is a really difficult one, and I think all of us probably have experienced this at one point or another. Maybe you have been living for God, but your obedience feels devoid of the joy of his presence. Have you ever done what you feel like you're supposed to be doing? And it's like, God, I don't really see where you're at. I'm doing it. Nate said to take my next step of obedience. I'm four steps down and I haven't felt you once. I haven't experienced you once. What's the deal, God? Come on. If you find yourself here, my encouragement for you would be to check your motivation, would be to take an internal pressure and an internal temperature of, why am I doing what I'm doing? Am I doing what I'm doing because God is good and I want to be and experience his presence? Or am I doing it because I want to set a good example for my kids? Am I doing it because I want other people to be like, that guy's got a good head on his shoulders? Am I doing it because, you know what, it's Sunday, so we should probably go? Am I doing it because, you know what, I ought to do it? The shame and the guilt's going to get me if I don't, so I might as well do it. It's very easy and a very real thing to do things, quote unquote, without God involved. I'm gonna be honest with you guys about something. I tried to write this sermon without the help of prayer. I am doing the literal like, hey, like the pinnacle of what I could do today to take my step of obedience, to live out my faith, is to be able to make a sermon for you guys and share with you guys the joy of God if we'll simply allow him in. And I forgot to allow him in. And so a few days ago, I'm going to be really honest with you. I mean, Ashlyn knows this. None of you do. I had a rough day because I couldn't figure out. I couldn't crack it. I couldn't understand. I felt overwhelmed. I felt frustrated. I was like, God, why am I even here? I'm trying to do this thing for you and you're like, and you're not coming through at all. I don't have an ending to this. I don't know what to do. And I was like, you know what? Guess how many times I prayed about it? Zero. It is very easy to do what we believe is the will of God without God actually being at the center of it or even involved at all. Man, once I realized that, it changed how I approached it. I put the sermon down. I'm like, God, I need you. And wouldn't you know that writing the rest of the sermon, man, there was just a lot more joy and a lot more peace that came from it. Turns out the presence of God is pretty sweet. Turns out the presence of God is the only thing that can sustain us if we're trying to take our next step of obedience. If that's you, I would refer you back to the top. Recognize where your motivation maybe falls short. Repent of that. And make your next step of obedience one where you're stepping towards Christ. If God offers fullness of joy, if God offers new mercies every single morning, I promise you he wants you to have them. He wants you to experience them. So all you gotta do is ask, man. Wake up. God, what would you have for me today? Not only that, but God, whatever you have for me today, will you just show me where you're in it? And will you be at the center? Because I don't wanna settle for anything less than your presence. I'm thankful for everything else around me. I'm thankful for everything in my life, but God, more than anything, I simply want you. And maybe we establish a different motivation. And maybe your motivation is this, that every step of obedience is a step deeper into God's loving presence to which nothing compares. When we step towards God, when we take a step of obedience, the goal, the prize, the win of every single step is that we get to be closer and deeper into the loving presence of God. And I promise you, there is no sweeter thing. Let's pray. God, we love you and we're thankful for you. God, thank you for the fact that you are enough. Would you work in our hearts, in our minds, and in our actions to where we could fully and brightly see and understand that. Lord, we are so thankful for you. Thank you for being a God who not only sent his son to die for us, but did so so that we could know you right now all the way to eternity. We love you and we're thankful for you. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Jim Adams. I'm one of your elders, well actually an elder in training. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll be one of your elders. I want to read for you today Psalms 127. It's another one of the songs of ascent and it's generally a credit to Solomon, wise King Solomon. I think you'll understand why when I read. Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain. In vain you rise early and you stay up late, toiling for food to eat, for he grants sleep to those he loves. Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate. Thank you, Jim. I believe you got what it takes. You'll be a full elder in no time. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday. I'll just tell you right up front, off the top, this is a different Sunday than we normally have. This is really a family talk masquerading as a sermon that I'm about to do. So I would tell you this, if this is your first Sunday with us, they're not normally like this. I'm also not talking to you today. Okay, so whatever I say, I'm not asking you for anything. I'm not implying that you should do anything. I hope that you'll come see us again on a normal Sunday. But every now and again, it falls on us as a church to have a Sunday like this, because I want to take our collective focus and place it on what we believe. And when I say we, I mean the elders, what we believe God wants us to do next as a church. So this morning is going to feel a little different. I want us to focus this morning on our campaign. You've probably noticed when you come in the wall opposite the sound booth in the lobby, there's a blueprint of a church, a nice looking blueprint with floor plans and everything. And then there's a facade that you've seen, and it's our goal to build that on four acres of land around the corner on Litchford. And this morning, I want us to talk about it because, A, I haven't talked about it in over a year from here. I've written a letter about it once or twice. I may have emailed about it, but I haven't spoken about it corporately in over a year. And it's time that we do that. More than that, we started this in February of 2020. And so many of you in the room have not been here and were not here when we were talking about this as a church and why we were deciding to do it and move ahead with the pursuit of a permanent home in North Raleigh. And so a lot of us simply need to be caught up and informed on what we're doing and why we are doing it. To do that, I wanted us to see a video really quick. This video is on our webpage. The first part of the video is the video that we used to launch the campaign back in 2020. And then the second part of the video is an update that we gave after we acquired the land that came out of that campaign. So I think it'll help if we watch this together and then I'm going to kind of fill in the blank with some more of the story. So let's watch this video. to strengthen families, build faiths, and knit together a wonderful community of His people. But because there has always been a more urgent struggle or need, the dream of having our own home has not yet been realized. Now, however, we see that we are entering into a time of health. We believe that it is time for us as a church to look outward once again and dream big dreams about how God might use us to build His kingdom here. We continue to believe that having our own permanent home is a part of God's plan for us and is critical to our ministry and our community. We believe that after 20 years of hoping, right before COVID changed the world forever. And even in the midst of the uncertainty, even though we had months at a time where we weren't meeting as a body in a building, the money continued to come in and God continued to provide. And from that campaign, we were able to purchase the land that I'm standing on right now at 7600 Litchford Road. I am standing in the future home of Grace Raleigh. In a few years time, there will be a building right here where I am. And I am so excited for this opportunity. Thank you. And from the very beginning, it's not been about building a building. To us, it's about taking the next step of obedience that we believe God wants us to take. We believe that it's God's will that there would be a building right here where I'm standing, that there would be children filling the hallways, and there would be people coming each week into this space to learn more about Jesus, to get loved closer to Him. We believe that God wants to put grace here in this community to share His love and spread His love and build His kingdom right here in this community. We hope this becomes a place where people hang out and gather, that it's used every day, and that people are connected to Jesus and connected to one another more and more here. It's our ardent prayer that generations of people who call grace home would be connected to Jesus here, would be connected to one another, and that from this place, we can love on this community for decades in the future. You know, what's fun is watching yourself age in real time in front of 200 of your closest friends. It's a year later and a year grayer and a year thinner, but that's how it goes. So that's roughly the background. To give you a little bit more details, because I want you to see how God's been with us every step of the way, this actually started. The dream of having a permanent home has been here since the beginning. It's always been the desire of the people of Grace that we would do this. Back in 2000 when we were founded as Grace Community Church. But we didn't have a time or a place where we could realize that dream. And then in the fall of 2018, we went on an elder retreat. And when we went on the elder retreat, two of our elders, Burt Banks and Bill Reith, who were here this morning, and were over there next door praying before the service like they do every week. They came to the elders and they said, hey, we've come up with a 10-year plan that we'd like to discuss. And the rest of the elders were like, okay, seems presumptuous, but what you got? And they laid out their hopes and dreams for grace. And part of that was, hey, it's high time we start to pursue a permanent home. And so out of that, we formed a campaign committee in 2019, chaired by Tom Proctor, and populated by some other people in the church to figure out how to go about this campaign. We determined that we needed to raise $1.5 million. This was pre-COVID, and so at the time, we genuinely believed that would get done everything that we thought we needed to get done to have a space. And we opened up our search. We were willing to buy another building or another church, move into a church that had moved out, anything like that. Everything was on the table, but we were tasked, the committee was, how do we raise the money? How should we go about the campaign? And we read a book by an expert who's done hundreds of campaigns all over the country and did the research that we felt like we needed to do. We talked to some other committees who had also done it. And the recommendation to the elders from our committee was that we needed to do a silent campaign first. And in a silent campaign, somebody, usually the senior pastor, sits down with the 10 to 15 most impactful givers in the church, the people with the highest capacity to give the most. And I would sit down with them and I would say, hey, listen, here's what we're going to do. I'd love for you to pray about being a part of that. And then make an ask. The book says that you're supposed to ask for three times what they give annually, which seems absurd to me. But that was the guidance. And so we go to the elders and we say, this is what we think we need to do. And the elders served us really well in that moment because they said essentially, absolutely not. That's not who we are as a church. That's not what we want to do. Let's just make an ask, one ask, and let everybody respond how they want to respond and trust the Holy Spirit to get this done. And I responded to that person by saying, that sounds great. Tomorrow, are you going to go walk through the forest and sing with the animals? Because that doesn't seem too practical. We have something we have to do here. And they kept pushing back on me and pushed back on the committee and they said this is how we think we need to do it one of the reasons I've come around to understanding that that was the exact right way to handle things is I've been very careful during this campaign to not value gifts based on amount but but we value gifts based on sacrifice. I would hate to have had a meeting with a high capacity giver and not have met with some of our young families who don't have the capacity to give like that just yet, but are sacrificing in order to do it. Who am I to say which party is making the greater sacrifice? So we don't want to differentiate the gifts based on amount. We just want everybody to participate. And so I'm so glad that we didn't go about it that way. So then in February of 2020, we had four weeks. It was a Grace is Going Home campaign. Four weeks capped off with a Pledge Sunday. And I talked about evangelism and discipleship. I didn't talk about the future. I talked about who we are as a church and what we want to be. Not in a building, but as a people. And then on March the 1st, we had Pledge Sunday. And we had sent everybody out cards and asked you to bring in your pledge card. And at the end of the service, we're going to submit them together. And we collected them in the offering baskets. The goal is to raise 1.5. I, in my prayers, was very hesitant that this was going to get done, a little bit doubtful. And I was just praying that God would make it clear. And my thought was, if we get 800,000 pledged, that'll be a pretty good indication from God that we're moving in the right direction and this is what we need to do. If we have 300,000 pledged, we'll know, well, mud in our eye, we're going to look stupid for this, but I guess we're not going to do it right now. But I wanted it to be clear. We had brought in Tom Ledoux, our wonderful finance director. He lives out of state, but we brought him in so that he could be there on Pledge Sunday and tally up the pledges. So Tom did that. So Sunday afternoon, March the 1st, he called me, and he told me that we had $1.3 million pledged, which absolutely blew me away. By the middle of the week, the pledges were up to $1.5 million. Exactly what we wanted. I couldn't believe it. March the 8th, I stood here, and I announced to all of us, this is what's been pledged. This is amazing. And we celebrate it as a church of what God was doing for us. March the 15th, we didn't meet again for two years because of COVID. And there was a lot of financial uncertainty at the beginning of COVID. It's the last thing in the world we're going to do while the stock market is spiraling and everyone's going to Walmart at five in the morning to try to get bread is email you and be like, by the way, you pledged $10,000. How's that coming along? So we didn't, we just let it lie because we didn't want to be obtuse and ridiculous. And even though we did very little to keep our focus on it during those two years of COVID, $1.6 million came in, not 1.5. What those campaign experts will tell you is you do the silent campaign, you do the silent ask, you do it strategically, then you just need to know your operating budget is going to suffer and you're only going to bring in about 80% of what is pledged, not grace, by not paying attention to it at all God brought in 1.6 million dollars we finished in the black every year once we had the money we assembled our building committee with a commercial banker to commercial real estate agents and some. And me, because I'm highly qualified for that. And we started conducting a search. We looked and we looked and we looked. And finally, Wes Ward, one of our elders, said, hey, I found some land. It's three slots of land put together that's being sold as a chunk. But it's not showing up on any commercial real estate sites. So the land that we have on Litchford is three individual homes. So it's three different plots. But a realtor bought the largest home or the largest plot and then convinced the other two neighbors to sell with him. And then he listed it. But he didn't list it commercial. So all the people that would scoop in and outbid us didn't know it was there. It's like God just gifted us this perfect parcel of land, surrounded by a new neighborhood that's going in, across the street from Northridge, surrounded by another neighborhood on our left, literally surrounded with homes. We are in the middle of a neighborhood. It's perfect. On a road we all know well. And we were able to acquire it in a whirlwind process in the summer of, I think, 22. It was amazing. And then we began the process of meeting with an architect. We formed another committee, because we're churches. We like committees. We formed another committee. It was important to me that we would get voices from every corner of the church, trusted people who wanted to speak into this, and we began the design process. And the building that you saw is the result of that process. And obviously my picture in that building is a really stupid joke because if I ever tried to actually do that, they would fire me that day. Okay, so that's not, we're not, if this is your first time with us, we're not that kind of church. And all along the way, we believed that God was with us. We believed that he was encouraging us to take this step as a body of believers. That this is what he wanted to do. We talk a lot at Grace about being step-takers. It's one of our values. It's one of our traits. It's the way we talk about discipleship. Everybody has a step of obedience that God wants them to take. It's our job to identify it and have the faith and courage to take it. We believe that this is the next step for grace to take as a body, as a church. This is our collective next step. We believed it then in 2018. We believed it in 2020 when we shared it with everybody, when we shared our dream. We believed that God was with us and it was what we were supposed to do as the money came in, even though we didn't ask for it. And we've believed it since we had to come back to you and go, hey, listen, the plan didn't go like we thought it was going to go. We need to raise an additional $2 million to be able to get this done, but we think we can do it. And so last fall, we launched another campaign and said, let's try to give this a two-year horizon and get over the hump. You've got your bulletins. On the back of it is just a little bit of financial information that basically tells you for all intents and purposes, we're about halfway home on that. But I'm talking to you about it this morning because just like we believed then that this is what God wants us to do, we continue to believe that now. We continue to believe that establishing a permanent home is the right thing for grace to do and that this is the right time to do it. If you were to ask me why, I think the most succinct, honest, compelling reason to me is the inadequacies of our current facility. You've never brought a single person to this church that said, you know, I don't know about the service and the people weren't very nice, but you got a beautiful facility. How many weddings do you do here a year? I've done two weddings here. Both of them happened whenever that hurricane came through about four or five years ago. It was, how long ago was it? It was your wedding. 2018. They got hurricaned out of their venue and so they came here that weekend. Those are the two weddings we've done in this space. This space and this location, God forgive me, we're grateful for it, stinks. It does. We all know it. Our location's terrible. We are not positioned geographically to reach the people that we're best equipped to reach. None of our neighbors come to church here. When we go to Litchford, a bunch of our neighbors are going to come to church here. This facade is awful. We're across from a big lot that I think is going out of business. Lord knows what's going to be over there now. We now have new neighbors. We had a fish store for years and we always laughed about walking past the aquarium store to get your children. And, and that was a big joke. Well now jokes on us. Cause you know, who's there now? Trim carpenters. You know what they do every day from 7.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m.? They fabricate. They run a planer and a saw, and Aaron complains about it. Because you can't concentrate. And you can't even hear anything in the one meeting room. The large room that we have, that's our conference room slash children's space. You can't hear anything in there when they're fabricating. And when we are here, we're beholden to our landlord. Raise the rates, charge what they want, kick us out, sell to someone else who doesn't want a church as an occupant. We are not in control of our own future here. And when I think about the inadequacy of the space, I think about it for two groups of people. I think about it for us, for the grownups, and then I think about it for the kids. For us, I don't know if you know this, but every night of the week, Sunday through Thursday, people are meeting here. We are now full of small groups. We've had to ask favors of some small group leaders. We've had to rearrange some things. We've had to ask groups to change nights or to change times so that we can accommodate everybody who wants to use our space. And I was told that there's a large group that meets in here in the evenings and the lights are so dim that a lot of people have a hard time reading their notes and writing things down. And frankly, I don't want to dump several thousand dollars of money into an auditorium that we're leaving. So we're just going to let it be dim now. Use your phone like old people at a restaurant if you have to. I don't know if you know this, but I can't see Jason Ashburn anymore because I just moved behind the pole. How about a church without one of those? Does that sound nice? Every week we hear our kids. If you're on a committee, you know we have no place to meet. White tables, fold-out chairs, that's fine. We're not highfalutin around here. And that's not going to stop us from making disciples. But it does highlight the inadequacy of our space. I just mentioned about eight different committees. None of them had a good place to meet. I get really concerned for our kids. We are bursting at the seams with children now. One of the things that's so striking to me about Grace is going into COVID, February of 2020, about 12 to 13% of our Sunday morning attendance consisted of children 10 and younger. Do you know what it is now? 33. Last year, it was 25%. Now it's 33%. We'll have 130 people in this room, and we'll have 44 kids spread out throughout the rest of the church. We are out of space with our kids' ministry. If you have a toddler that you dropped off this morning, you dropped them off in what was a storage closet a month ago. See all this stuff? See all this junk over here? Look, have you ever noticed it? All this crud under sheets so you don't see it. We have no storage. We have tables tucked in things. We are crammed in every nook and cranny of this place. And we still have to throw things out left and right. Our fourth and fifth graders meet in this back room across from a dirty kitchen with chairs in the hallway and tables jamming things up. There's like this much space that you can just get in and then go to the door. If you have a child in second or third grade, they don't even have a space. They meet in the copy room. It wasn't until Facelift Sunday in September that we were able to move some things out of there to make more space for them and actually put a stinking decoration on the wall so it felt like they were in their own space on a Sunday morning. You know what's next? I'm not kidding around with this because we keep getting more kids. You know where they're going to start meeting after the next time we grow? When we can get some more volunteers. All we're waiting on is volunteers and then we're going to split a class and put them there. My office. My desk is against the wall. I have a whiteboard. I have a lot of space. We're going to start using the senior pastor's office for children's space. That's fine. I do not care. But here's what I know, is we don't want that experience for our kids. We want our children growing up in spaces that feel like they belong to them. We want enough space for our kids to be able to run around. Did you see in the video the playground on the outside? Do you think that they would like that more than this? Because right now, the auditorium doubles as a playground after church is done. They can't wait to come around and run in circles and smile and knock each other over. And it's awesome. It's one of my favorite things about Sunday morning is watching the chaos in here. But man, I'd love for them to have a playground. I would love to be able to do a Grace's Big Night Out at Grace. Did you see that outdoor space where there's going to be, there's a kitchen. And there's going to be a slide-up window for the kitchen so we can prepare things, bring it outside. There's going to be TVs. Small groups can gather there. People can hang out there. We can have parties there. We want people coming from the community to come play on our playground and sit there and talk to one another, even if they don't go to grace. We want those spaces. But the space that we have here is inadequate for who we want to be. It's inadequate for where we want to go as a church. And here's why I chose this psalm. Because I think it's a good thing for us to reflect on as we consider establishing a permanent home together. Here's a big reason why. Verses 3-5 of Psalm 127. Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from Him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court. Grace, our quiver is very full. We have a whole generation of kids that we're bringing up, teaching to be kingdom builders, to connect to Jesus and to connect to one another. I believe we have a responsibility to them. I believe it's solemn and sacred. And I know that many of us, we've already raised our kids. But this is an opportunity for those who have adult children now to leave a legacy here too. I want my children's children playing on that playground. I want people who never knew us and never met us to come together and worship God there. I want it to be a footprint, a stamp in North Raleigh where God's kingdom goes out from and comes to. We have an opportunity to do something really special. And I hope that we'll do it. Here's another reason why. When I say our facilities are inadequate for what we want to accomplish, I also mean that they actively turn people away. We have friends, Jen and I do. Not a lot, but we have some. We have friends that we invited here. Come to our church. And they came. And they loved it. They loved our people. They got involved in a small group for a short time. But eventually, they stopped coming. And we didn't know why, and I never press. When people come and then they don't, I have the hardest time reaching out to them. I don't want to make anybody feel bad or awkward or weird. But we were able to talk to them. Jen was able to talk to the mom. And the mom just said, yeah, I love it. I wish we would go, but my husband just says it doesn't feel like a church. He just doesn't want to be at a place that feels like that. And listen, I think that's stupid, okay? I don't accept that as an adequate reason. It's immature. However, we can never mature him in Christ if our building prohibits that. This space is a hurdle for people that have to, they have to overcome it to want to be a part of grace. And I know that you have friends too that you've invited that have said to you because you've told me, yeah, great people, incredible pastor, okay worship, but it doesn't feel like church. Let me know when y'all get a building. Those kids, listen, my friends' kids should be in church every week. They should be making friends with other people who love Jesus, whose parents love Jesus. They should be getting discipled. They should be taught by our wonderful volunteers. That couple should be getting Jesus poured into their life every week. They should be coming and worshiping with us. The Holy Spirit should be working on them, making them more like Christ in character and sanctifying them. That family needs a church. Every family needs a church. I don't think every family needs grace. I'm not trying to make that point, but I think every family needs a church. And that family doesn't have a church right now because the one that they feel closest to and most connected with isn't working for them because our facilities are prohibitive for them. This space is causing us to not do all that we could, to not be all that we can be. It's keeping us from walking the path that we believe God wants for us. So I think it's time for us to get this done. And here's the thing. I've been very passive about this campaign. I was passive about it in COVID. Didn't put it in front of us. We don't have a thermometer in the lobby. I'm not sending out emails. We're not saying, hey, you've pledged this much and given this much, just letting you know. We're not putting it in front of people. I don't talk a lot about the campaign, even in Discover Grace, where we still continue to grow. I know we have a lot of young families, but if you come to Discover Grace, what you'll see is we continue to maintain this generational diversity that is wonderful and characteristic of grace. But you don't hear me talking about the campaign a lot. I have people who care deeply about it that get mad at me and tell me that I need to talk about it more. Why aren't we talking about this? Why aren't you asking people, what are we doing? I have to get it. I have to get the business about three times a year from some folks. The passive approach to the campaign has been intentional. It's not because I'm scared to talk about it. It's not because I forget. It's not because I don't think it's important. There's two big reasons why I've been passive. Well, there are three. The first is when we did the campaign, when we launched it originally, we chose a passive tact. The Holy Spirit did it. It worked. And so I learned from that. And thought, that's what we should continue to do. But two bigger reasons are one, me. I've never wanted it to be about my ego. I've never wanted it to be about what I got done. I don't know if you know this, but a big notch in the belt of a pastor is to take a church from a non-permanent facility to a permanent facility. A big notch in the belt, a big career milestone for guys like me and women is to take a church into a building into its very first one. That's a big accomplishment. And I abhor the idea of making this about me, of asking you to give your money to the kingdom of Nate. And so I have stayed intentionally as far away from it as I can because I don't want my ego involved. I don't want it to be about me. I don't want it to feel like something I am doing. I want it to be something that we are doing. I want it to be something that the Holy Spirit has stirred in us to do. I want it to be something that we come together collectively and don't make it about our egos either. Make it about what we believe God wants us to do. The biggest reason I've been passive is because I didn't want us to take our eye off the ball. I felt like as a church, we had bigger fish to fry than building a building and getting a permanent home. We needed to make disciples. We needed to grow in our youth ministry and our children's ministry. We need a strong small groups ministry where people grow and spiritual health flourishes. And I didn't want for a second for us to start to think that building a building is the most important thing that we can do as a church, not with all this other hard work to do. And so I didn't want us to take our eye off the ball and make it something that it's not. But here's what I think now, and here's why we're talking about this. In light of our health, we have a healthy staff team. Our staff team's great. I love every one of them. I think they love me. They tell me they do, just like my mom. We have a very healthy staff culture. We have the right people in the right places, and to my knowledge, no one's going anywhere for a long while. We have a healthy elder board. We disagree well. I won't say what it was about, but a few months back, we had the most contentious elder meeting I've ever been in. We were voting on an issue that was important to us. There was disagreement there. It was the most fractured vote that there's ever been. And let me tell you something. You should like this. My team lost. The senior pastor did not steamroll the elders. They are unsteamrollable. They're healthy. And they push back. And then we left that contentious meeting where we did not agree. And we agreed. And we were fine. And there was no calls to be made afterwards because someone got upset or their feelings hurt. We're healthy on the elder board. Our student ministry is flourishing. Finally. Kyle, God bless him, he's at home visiting his nana or baba right now. One of the two. I don't know. And so he's not here this morning. But y'all, he worked so hard over COVID. And we have a youth group now that's growing and flourishing and thriving. I've already told you we're bursting at the seams with our kids ministry. Aaron's done a phenomenal job with that and with our volunteers. We have healthy small groups. Our discipleship pathway is in place. We know that we're supposed to be disciples of Christ. We know that we're designed to be kingdom builders. We've installed our five traits. We've reminded you of those. We are ready to go. And so in light of all that health, I think now is the time to take our collective focus and put it on getting this thing done and getting into this building. It's time for that last half of the two million to come in. So here's what I'm going to ask of you. If you have been faithfully giving towards the campaign from the very start, you filled out your pledge card in 2020, or you made your donation in 2020, and you've been doing end of year stuff, and you've been hitting your pledge. Just keep doing that. Just keep it up. We're so grateful. We're so grateful. I'm not asking you for another thing, okay? I would ask us all, as we think about end-of-year giving this year, I know that many of us are in the habit of giving money at the end of the year for different reasons. I would love for you to consider the building campaign as a target for your end-of-year giving, whatever that might be for you. I also want to talk to another group of people in the church and do this as delicately as I can. I've had some of you, and I've heard from other people that have taken this posture. We're going to give to the campaign. We believe in this. We're going to do this. I am going to do this, whatever your case is. But I'm going to wait until we get a little bit closer to the finish line because that money is parked in a place where it's making eight or 10% right now. And it's best for everyone to just leave it there to accrue as long as possible. Fine. Fine. I understand that. I do not have a financial mind. I'm not going to advise for or against that. I have no idea. But if that's you, I want to ask you a favor. The first time we did the campaign, somebody from the church wanted to meet with me. They met with me and they said, hey, listen, we have decided that we're going to give X amount of dollars to the campaign. We're're gonna give it at this increment every year for the next three or five years But if at some point you get close to the finish line and you want to call on it to get us there you can and so once we got within that range of money I Text texted him a GIF of someone from 30 Rock, or from Parks and Rec, saying, money please. And they wired it over. If that's you, if you have an amount that you know you want to give, you guys have talked about it, you've prayed about it, but you're just holding back until we're a little bit closer because of where it's sitting. I understand all of that. But if that's you, would you have that conversation that my friend had with me? Would you have that with Tom Ledoux? Would you email him? He's our finance director, finance at gracerolly.org. If you need to know how to get in touch with him, I can help you out with that. But if that's you, would you just tell him that so that we know once we get close, we have X amount that's going to get us there? The other group of people I want to talk to are the folks that have come since 2020, since we started the campaign. You weren't here for the beginning. You've never pledged, nor should you have. But you've started coming here now and now Grace is home. I would love for you to consider getting involved with this campaign. I would love for you to consider partnering us and letting us walk together to do this because I believe that the whole church needs to galvanize around this. Even if we had somebody who said, you know what, I want to give it all. I would say, I don't know that that's a good idea because I think that we need to come around this as a church and as a body together. So if you're newer to grace and you've never given, I would love for you to consider doing that. And if you've never given to grace, and I know all the different reasons why we might hesitate to do that, and it takes a long time to believe in a place enough to start giving that part of our resources to it, that's fine. But if you've never given and you feel compelled to begin, what I would love for you to do is begin to give to the building campaign. Get in the habit of giving. And then once we get there and we're going and we're building, keep giving that but give it to operational. So that's the ask that I'm making of you. Pray, please, about what you might do at the end of this year if you're inclined to give in that way. If you have an amount you want to give, can you kind of flag that for us and let us know? And then if you've never given to grace, maybe this is a good time to start. But now is the time to get this thing done. And I want to end it this way. I love the beginning of this psalm. 127. Because it says this, What Solomon says here is if the Lord's not in it, what's the point? If we build a church and God's not in it, what's the point? It's why I took the time to walk you through the process that's gotten here because I want you, like me, to be able to see God's hand in all of these things and to have confidence and faith that he continues to remain with us. So what we're going to do is we're going to pray, but we're going to pray differently than we have since I've gotten here. I've never done anything like this, so I'm just going to ask you to trust me and go with me. But I want us to pray together. I want us to make a statement of unanimity as we believe this is our focus. So I'm going to come down here and I'm going to invite up a couple of groups of people. The first group I'd like to join me up here are current elders. So if you're a current elder, if you'd please come stand with me, I would appreciate that greatly. The next group that I'd love to come stand with us is former elders. If you've ever served the church as an elder, if you've ever been asked by your peers to lead us, would you come join us? And now I'd like to see the people who were here in 2000 at the beginning of this dream. If you were here in 2000, would you come up, just stand around the perimeter. We'll expand out. Stay right here. And now the rest of us who call grace home, who believe in this step, I'm going to invite you to stand, find somebody, touch people on the wall. But I want us to hold hands together. Can we do that? Stand up, find someone's hand to hold. And let's have a moment where we pray together. Wonderful. Please pray with me. Father, we thank you for this church. We thank you for what it means to us. We thank you for the people that you've brought here, for the love that fills this room and the lobby and these hallways every weekend. We thank you for a rich community that you've brought us. And we thank you that we get to be the light that shows Jesus to other people in our community. God, we pray for grace. We pray for your blessing on us. We ask God earnestly that you would galvanize us around this goal of getting into this building. Bring in the last million dollars, Father. Bring it in quick. Let us go. We're itching. God, may each one of us consider in our hearts and in our families what you would have us do as we seek to accomplish this together. And we know, God, that if you are not in it, it doesn't matter. So show us your presence in this process. God, help us to do our part as you promised to do yours. We pray all these things together in your son's name. Amen. All right, guys, thank you so much for coming. Have a great week. We will see you next week for a normal service with a sermon and everything.