Sermons tagged with Faithfulness

Good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this cold February morning on Super Bowl Sunday. I hope everybody's got fun plans, or if you don't care about the Super Bowl at all, I hope you have a nice dinner planned for yourself. This is the third part in our series going through the book of Colossians. And this week, as we approach it, I wanted to approach the text with this kind of idea in mind. We're going to be in Colossians chapter 2 and then on through chapter 3 in some different portions of it. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn there. And then if you're at home, please turn there. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. I would also call your attention to the bulletin. The bulletin looks a little bit different this week. There's no place for you to take notes. So note takers, you're going to have to get creative. Instead, I've put a prayer on the bulletin that we're going to pray at the end of the service together. You'll pray silently as I pray it aloud. And by the time we get there, hopefully the prayer makes a lot more sense and is meaningful and is something that you will carry home with you. But we'll talk more about that at the end of the service. If you're watching online, this bulletin is attached to the grace find that you should have received this week. So you can download that if you want to, or you can just email someone on staff and we'll be happy to send it over to you if you find it helpful and want to pray it throughout your week. But as we approach the text this week, I wanted to start here. I'm not sure if any of you have ever tried to eat healthy, okay? By the looks of most of us, this has been an effort at least at some portion of our life, but there have been a lot of times in my life when I have decided that I'm going to begin to eat with some wisdom. I'm going to start to eat well. I'm a person who's had a lot of day one workouts, and I've had a lot of day one diets. Okay, there's more in my future. Maybe tomorrow. Who knows? Not today. It's Super Bowl Sunday. This is not the day to start a diet, but tomorrow is fresh and hope springs eternal. But whenever I decide that I'm going to eat well, right? I'm going to eat responsibly, which is like a rabbit. Whenever I decide I'm going to do that, I feel like I am a person who is at war with myself. I feel like I am two separate people. I am one person who wants to eat well, and I am another person who just loves food so much that he's angered by me who wants to eat well. Because I love food. I don't know about your relationship with food. Mine is probably not healthy. If I know that I'm going to have a certain dinner that night or that we're going somewhere like a restaurant or something like that, I already know what I'm getting and I wake up thinking about it. Like I look forward to it throughout the day. That's how much I love food. For the Super Bowl tonight, we're going to have pigs in a blanket. I'm going to dip them in spicy mustard. I'm going to eat more than I should. I'm already excited about it, okay? That's just how I am about food. So when I decide that I want to eat well, it's really difficult for me. And I don't know about you, but I have certain stumbling blocks. It's pretty easy for me to eat well around the house. I kind of do a good job not snacking when I'm not supposed to. I don't drink the soda and stuff when I'm not supposed to. I drink black coffee and water, and that's pretty much it during the day. That's not very challenging. But what is challenging is when I'm trying to eat well, and my sweet wife on a Friday or Saturday will say, you want to go Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do, okay? I always want to go to Chick-fil-A and get a biscuit. That answer is never no, okay? You ask me, Nate, do you want a biscuit? Yeah, yeah, I do. Yeah, I do. But you just had three. I don't care. You're offering me one. I want another biscuit. I like biscuits in the morning. So that's tough, all right? The other time it's tough is when I go out to eat. Because I'll go out to eat. I'll go to places that I like, and they have food there that I like. And one of the places I think of is Piper's. I go to Piper's because I meet people there for lunch with a lot of regularity. That's kind of my default spot. And they have salads, like I see them on the menu, right? They got grilled chicken and some fruit or some whatever, some balsamic whatever, less delicious thing that they have there. And I know that I need to order it. And I have girded my loins. I'm ready for this choice. And I go in there and I don't even look at the meat. I look at just the salads. I don't look at the other things. But see, here's the thing. This Piper's has one of the best Reuben's in the city. They really do. It's delicious. And that's what I want, right? I want the Reuben. And I've been thinking all day about how I shouldn't have the Reuben. And I've made the decision, I'm going to get the salad. I'm going to eat the thing that I don't want. But then it's like Satan's working against me or God's just giving me a special grace and telling me it's okay. I'm not sure which sign. And the table next to me will receive a piping hot, crispy toasted Reuben. As I'm sitting there trying to muster up the discipline to order my salad. And I look at that Reuben and I look at those fries and I look at that ketchup and the waitress says, what do you have? That! I want that Reuben. I did not want a salad. And I cave, right? So for me to be on a diet is for me to live at war with myself. I bring that up because I think that you'll know that this is true. Those of you who have been a Christian for any amount of time, to be a Christian is to be at war with yourself. To be a Christian, to be a believer, is to know the good you ought to do and yet still struggle to do it. I even think, and this is a sad reality, it should not be the case, and hopefully God can deliver us from this, and hopefully this sermon moves the needle on this a little bit, but I even think that to be a believer is to be constantly disappointed with how spiritually mature you are and how spiritually mature you think you should be by now. Because we know the good things we're supposed to do. We know the kindness we're supposed to show. We know the greed we're not supposed to have and the pride that we're supposed to iron out. And we know all the different things and our hidden sins and the stuff that we look at and whatever it is, the stuff that we consume. We know what we're not supposed to do and we know what we are supposed to do. And we try like heck to be that person, but we are a person who feels at war with ourself because there is the person within us who wants to eat right and there is the person within us who really loves a good Reuben, whatever that might be for you. And they exist at war with each other. I am convinced that to be a believer means to live in a state of tension within yourself of who you know you should be, of who you know God created you to be, of who you know God designed you to be, and yet not being able to walk in that. There's a verse that's super challenging for me where Paul tells us that we should live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And I don't know about you, but I don't get to the end of too many days, much less weeks, where I look back on that week and I go, yeah, this week I was obedient to that verse. And if we're honest as Christians, it gets tiring to know that that's true. It gets exhausting to constantly fall short. Paul actually describes this tension in one of my favorite passages. It's one of the most human things to me that's written in the Bible, particularly by Paul in Romans chapter 7. In Romans chapter 7, Paul writes specifically about this tension in the Christian life when, in my inner being, but I see in my members another regenerated person as God has rescued my heart and claimed it and one day will whisk me up to heaven. He's given me eternal life and I'm living as a new creature that we're going to talk about more in a minute. I feel in this inner being a desire to live the righteous life that God has called me to live. And yet, also in my body, is a desire to revert back to my old self. It is a desire to revert to who I am without Jesus. It is a desire to indulge the flesh. It is a desire for the things that I used to consume that I know I don't need to consume anymore. That exists within us. And then he exclaims at the end of it, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Who will finally give me victory? How will I finally live the life that I'm supposed to live? And so that's where we arrive this morning. In Colossians, is this age-old question that all Christians face, that Francis Schaeffer, an author in the 20th century, framed up in a book entitled, How Should We Then Live? Meaning, in light of the gospel, in light of what we talked about in week one, the picture of Jesus that Paul paints for the Colossians, remember, they're facing pressure from within and without to go back to rules and aestheticism and to be legalistic and add on more rules than what is necessary so that they can live a righteous life, and then pressure from the more liberal part of their community to say none of the rules matter, how we live doesn't matter at all. You have total grace to do whatever it is you want to do. And so Paul, to that pressure, paints a picture of Christ as the apex of history and the apex of hope, as the connection point and nexus between the spiritual realm and the physical realm, how he is the creator God over everything, this majestic picture of Christ. And so the question becomes, how do we live in light of that picture? How do we live in light of the gospel? I am saved. I am a new creature. God has breathed new life into me. I am no longer a slave to sin, as Paul describes in Romans, but now I have this option to move forward with the power of Christ and the Holy Spirit in me and to live a life worthy of the calling that I have received. Now, how do I do it? How do I do it? That's the question that we come to in Colossians. And it should be a question that matters to each and every Christian. Father, how do I live a life worthy of the calling that I've received? How do I grow into spiritual maturity? What do I do practically? How do I live the Christian life? And it's an important question because it dictates how we pursue God. And to this question, I think we often answer it in the same way that we're trained to answer any other question in our life about how we get better at a particular thing. If you want to get better at exercising, what do you need? You need more discipline. You need to wake up. You need to do it. You need to be more disciplined in the way you pursue exercise. If you want to eat better, what do you need to do? You need to be more disciplined. You want to do better at time management. You need more discipline in time management. You want to be more focused. You want to be more productive. You want whatever it is, however it is, you want to grow and be better. What is the fundamental requirement of that pursuit of better? It's discipline. We need to do better. We need to come up with structures and systems that we follow, and I'm going to white knuckle my way to success here. And the most disciplined people within our field, they achieve the most success. The most disciplined people at the gym look the best in a t-shirt. The most disciplined people, when they go out to eat, they have the healthiest hearts. Like discipline is the root to how we accomplish success. And so, because that's true, and so very many areas of our life, even though we could philosophically talk about whether or not that's true, because we think that's true in so many areas of our life, we also just by default apply that to our spiritual life. If I want to be more godly, then I need to be more disciplined. I'm going to set up more rules, more regulations. I'm going to get up at this time. I'm going to do these things. I'm going to be the type of person that is defined by these things. We focus on our behavior and our self-discipline. And I think when we are faced with the question of how do I then live? How do I become the Christian that God has created and designed me to be? I think that in our culture, our default answer is to attempt to white-knuckle discipline our way to godliness. And here's what Paul says about that knee-jerk reaction that all perish as they are used, according to human precepts and teachings. Listen, these have indeed an appearance of wisdom and promoting self- we be the people that God asks us to be? And their response, it seems, at least initially, was white-knuckle discipline, aestheticism, following the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more God loves you. It's a very simple exchange. That's what legalism says. And so they're just going to be try-hards. They're just going to be do-betters. That's just what they're going to do. And to help them try really hard, they set up all these rules and parameters around their life. And they say, whoever can follow these rules the best is the greatest Christian. But Paul says, that's fine. Set up your rules. Have all your standards. Set the boundaries really far away from the actual boundary. He says, but all those rules and all that, the way that it looks, the way that you're living, just dotting all the T's and crossing all the I's and really, really, really having these policies in life that keep you on the straight and narrow. Paul says, yeah, those have the appearance of wisdom. And I would add in our vernacular, godliness, but they do nothing. They do nothing to stop the indulgence of the flesh that is the reason for the sinning that we need the rules for. For instance, let's say that what you struggle with is pride. Okay, I'm having to make some assumptions here because I don't have the struggle, but if you do, let's say that something that you struggle with is pride and you go, you know what, God, I gotta get rid of this. I gotta be better. I'm gonna be better at being more humble. I'm gonna try to push out my pride. And so we take intentional steps. Maybe we're people who will maybe kind of fish for compliments sometime, or maybe we'll ask people what they thought about something. And really all we want them to do is tell them that we did a good job or that we're good at this or that we're good at that. And there's ways, if you're a prideful person, there are ways to go through your life and get the people in your life to affirm you. And if you are this person, you're exhausting, okay? I've exhausted others. I say that as a friend. That's not a good road to walk. But let's say that you're a prideful person, and so you need other people to affirm you all the time and the things that you're good at, but you realize in light of the gospel and in light of God's word that pride is not good, and so we need to iron this out of our life. So we go, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm not going to ask other people for compliments. I'm not going to ask other people to affirm me. I'm not going to seek my value in other places. And then once you get really good at that and you haven't done that in a couple of weeks and you still feel good about yourself, then what do you do? Boy, I am proud of myself for not needing other people to tell me I'm good. Now we're taking pride in a new thing. What Paul says is there is this part of our flesh that is going to manifest negative things in our life, pride, greed, selfishness, lust, whatever it is. And we can put parameters around those things, but they're going to leak out somewhere. You can follow whatever rules you want to follow. You can white knuckle yourself into some good discipline. I've seen some people who can keep themselves on the straight and narrow for years, but those negative traits that exist within you, those things are going to leak out somewhere else. And I know this because I've met a lot of people who can follow the rules really well, and they're jerks. It's just their flesh leaking out in other ways. So what Paul says is we cannot white knuckle our way to godliness. Discipline, self-control, more rules, more standards. Those do not get us to spiritual maturity. Those do not put us in a place where we can live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. That's not the answer. In chapter 3, thankfully, I believe that he gives us the answer. And I think it's a refreshing one. Because when we try to get to godliness by white-knuckle discipline, just I'm going to be a try-hard, I'm going to be a do-better, what happens is not good. Because if you have ever in your life decided, yeah, I'm going to be a better Christian, and I'm going to do it by taking these steps. I'm going to do it by instilling these standards in my life. I'm going to do it by my own effort and me trying hard. And maybe we pray a prayer, God, I am never going to do this again. God, I am always going to do this moving forward. God, I swear that that will never be a part of my life again. And we make these big promises and we make these big claims. And listen, we mean them. But here's what I know about you. If you've ever promised God that you will never or that you will always, then you have failed. That's what I know about you. If we ever have promised God, I will never do blank. I will always do blank, we have failed in those promises because we can't keep those commitments, because we're broken. Because of Romans 7, the things that I do not want to do, I do, because it's part of our nature to fail in that way. And because that's true, after we make up our mind enough times that God, I'm never going to, or God, I'm always going to, and then we fail, we get to a place where either we just feel like this broken, wretched Christian, and we're thinking, God, I'll never be good enough for you. I don't think I'll ever be good enough for you. Just please let me be saved. Just please let me just hang on until I get to the end of my life. Please usher me into heaven. I know I'll never be who I'm supposed to be. I know that I can't pursue those things, but please just accept me as I am. And we kind of just live this broken down, hopeless Christian life where we feel like we're limping our way to heaven. Or worse than that, we try so hard and we fail so many times that we get so tired of trying that we can't find it within ourselves to do it anymore. And then we conclude, God, your word says that I'm a new creature. Your word says that you will help me. Your word says that you will empower me. And yet I fail over and over and over again. So I can only conclude that you don't keep your word. And then we just wander away from the faith and we give up on God because righteousness is too hard because we've only ever tried it by ourself and we've never invited God in in the way that he needs to be invited in, and our white-knuckle disciplining to try to be better and more godly to pursue the faith that we want so earnestly ends up costing us our faith. So that's not the way. We find the way in Colossians 3. And I would sum it up like this. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving. We grow to maturity by focusing on being rather than behaving, by focusing on who we are rather than how we behave. And here's what I mean. In this chapter, we're going to see this idea introduced here by Paul, but introduced in plenty of other places by Paul in the New Testament, of the old and the new. The old you and the new you. The old you is who you were without Jesus. The new you is who you are with Jesus. The old you, the Bible says, was a slave to sin. I had no choice but to do things that displeased God. I had no chance at all. But the new you infused with Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit does have the chance every day when you wake up to walk that day according to the life that God has called you to. We have a chance when we wake up to live today in honoring God and actually finish the day living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day. We've got a chance. There's a new us. And the new us desperately wants to please God. And so this is what Paul says about old self and new self in Colossians chapter three. This is what he says about being versus behaving. Look at Colossians chapter three, verses five through eight first. Put to death, Paul says, therefore, what is earthly in you? Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, and covetousness, which is idol rules. But here's what we need to do. We need to put to death these things, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires, covetousness, anger, slander, all these things. And at first, it sounds like that's a little bit in tension with what he just said. He said, if you want to be godly, if you want to be who God created you to be, it's not about following the rules. It has an appearance of wisdom, but that's not really helping any indulgence of the flesh. And then the very next chapter over, he's saying, put to death these things, which feels like rules and standards that he's giving us, except he's not giving us behaviors. He's telling us to put things to death. Remember how I said that if you follow rules, if you're trying to break yourself of pridefulness and you put rules around your pridefulness and then it just leaks out and into another area of your life. Jesus is, Paul is acknowledging that. See, it's not about trying to follow the rules because those unhealthy things just leak into other portions of your life. It's about actually putting the pride to death. It's about actually putting greed and lust to death in your heart so that in your heart there is no place for them to dwell. And if there is no place for them to dwell, then they will not produce the behaviors that you're trying so desperately to control. So the first thing is to acknowledge that we don't need to put parameters around our old self. We need to put our old self to death. And we do this by focusing on being. How do we put those things to death? This is what Paul says in Colossians 3. I'm going to read verses 12 through 17. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you. So you also must forgive. And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body, and be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, we live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? In the phrasing of Hebrews 12, verse 1, What the world do I live the life that you want me to live? I think what Jesus would say is, look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Jesus, what rules should I follow in this new life that you've called me to? How do I run the race that you've set before me? Jesus says, just look at me. Just keep your eyes on Christ. This is actually in complete harmony with Romans 12 that tells us that we should run the race and that we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles us by, in verse 2, focusing your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. So how do we live the life that God calls us to live? We daily make ourselves aware of Christ's love for us. We daily make ourselves aware of what God has done for us. If we will daily reflect on the fact that Jesus in heavenly form condescended and took on flesh and lived amongst us for 33 years and put up with everything that we have to offer and continues to walk with us and continues to love us and continues to sit at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you as an individual, leans into God's ears and says, she's good. She's with me. She loves you, Father. I died for her. If we will let that reality wash over us daily, how could we not put to death the pride that exists in us by walking in humility at the love of God that we receive? If we are struggling with anger towards other people and frustration and impatience, how is it possible to spend a portion of your day every day focusing on the reality of God's patience with you? Focusing on the reality that as many times as you've said, God, I will never, or God, I will always, and then you failed, that God has been right there to help you clean up the mess every time. How can we not grow in forgiveness of others when we constantly remind ourselves of how forgiven we are? How can we not grow in patience to others when we constantly are focused on the patience that God has to us? If we will focus on God's overwhelming grace, that he died for us while we were still sinners, that he pursues us while we run away from him, that even though we fail him over and over again, he continues to love us with a reckless love, that God loves us while we were unlovely, that God sees us fully and knows us completely and still loves us unconditionally. If we let those things wash over us every day, how could we not look at other people and be more loving and patient towards them in light of how loving and patient God is towards us? Do you understand that these things that we clothe ourself with in Colossians 12 through 17 necessarily put to death our old self that Paul tells us to rid ourself of. So if we want to get rid of malice, what do we do? We focus on Christ. If we want to get rid of pride, do we put parameters around our pride? No, we focus on Jesus and who he is and realize that we have no right to our pride. If we want to be more gracious people, what do we do? We focus on Jesus' grace to us. Say, Jesus, how in the world do I live the life that you call me to live? Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And Jesus says, focus on me. Focus on me. So I would tell you, if you are a Christian who lives at war with yourself, you do not have a discipline issue, you have a focus issue. If you are someone who struggles with greed, you don't have a greed issue. You have a focus issue. If we try to be more godly and more pleasing to him by focusing on the behaviors that we need to do better, we will fail over and over and over again. But if we can put our focus on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith and let his grace and goodness and mercy and love wash over us daily, then those things will necessarily put to death the very root of the behaviors that we do not like. So again, if we are struggling in our walk with God, we do not have a discipline issue. We do not have a sin issue. We have a focus issue. We need to focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We need to pursue him more with more urgency. We need to let the truths of how he loves us wash over us more. And those will necessarily put to death the elements of our character that we do not like, that produce the behaviors that we do not want to do. You can think of it this way. Our old self cannot survive where our new self thrives. Our problem is we have a new self and we have an old self and we feed them both the same amount of food. We give in to them both equally. And so they both just exist in this tension and if we ever want to put to death our old self, then our new self has to thrive. And our new self thrives by clothing ourselves in the characteristics of Christ and we clothe ourselves in those characteristics by focusing him and daily letting his goodness wash over us. So it's very simple. How should we then live? How do we get to the end of a single day? Living a life worthy of the calling that we have received that day? By focusing our eyes on Jesus on that day. By looking at him that day. And letting everything else fade away and take care of itself. Because it's that simple, and because that's what we need to do, I wrote a prayer for us as a church. In a few minutes, I'm going to read it and pray it over us as a church and invite you to read it along with me. If you find it helpful, I would love to invite you to put this prayer somewhere where you can see it, where this is a thing that you will pray daily. Put it on your desk, or in your car, or on your mirror. If this is helpful to you, I would encourage you to pray this every day until it's not helpful to you, until the principles of this prayer are so ingrained in you that it is part of your daily prayer. But if we want to live a life as Christians that we are called to live, then I am convinced that this needs to be a fundamental prayer that we focus on very regularly. Not necessarily the words that I've chosen here, but the ethos and the attitude and the posture that's presented in this prayer and the acknowledgments of the truths that are in this prayer that are from Colossians chapter three and other portions of scripture as we seek to live the life that God calls us to live. So I'm gonna pray this over us and invite you to pray it along with me. Father, I know I am your child and that in you I am a new creation. Though I know this, I struggle to believe it. Because I struggle to believe, I struggle to walk as you would have me walk. So Father, help me learn to walk in this new self. As I put on the new self, I ask that you would help me see others through your eyes and so clothe me in your compassion. Help me regard others as your beloved children as you clothe me in your kindness. Remind me of the way you love me when I am unlovely in order that I might humbly love others in the way I am loved. Remind me today, Father, of who I am in you. As you clothe me in these things, let them put to death in me the remnants of my old self. Let your humility drive out my impatience, my anger, and my pride. Let your compassion and kindness suffocate my jealous and selfish heart. Let the way you see me overshadow and obscure the way I see myself. Help's name, Father. Amen.

It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. This feels like a danged reunion after not seeing you guys for three full weeks. Three weeks ago, I showed up and I said, hey church, let's kind of get our button gear about church a little bit. And then God gave us two weeks off just to see if we would really mean it. So here you are. These are the ones. This is great. I have been so thrilled to get to preach to you guys again this week. I'll mention it later, but I got sick in the middle of the week and thought I had COVID. I do not. Three COVID tests later, I'm certain of it. But I had to call Kyle on Thursday and be like, I don't think God wants me to preach in 2022 like at all, because you might have to go this week. But I got lucky. It was just strep. So here I am. Before I dive into it, it's just strep. You take antibiotics, you're good the next day, nobody cares. And what do you want it about a sore throat for? So it's just strep. It's great. Before I dive into that, I wanted to remind you guys after the service today is Discover Grace. It's a class with me, which, who could turn that down, for about an extra hour where I just tell you more about who Grace is, who we are, what makes us tick, why we do the things that we do. If you want to join the church, become a partner, we have partners here, not members, because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. And we're looking for folks to contribute to what God is doing here as we band together and build God's kingdom through Grace Raleigh. So if you'd like to participate in that, just stay in this room. It'll be immediately following the service, which means if you're here and you're not going to be a part of Discover Grace, get the heck out of here, man. We've got things to do. No, congregate in the lobby or outside if you can stand it, but we're going to try to get started in here so that those folks who participate with kids can get their kids and get them home for lunch. The other thing is that I've been touting now for three weeks. I don't even know if it's worth the wait. It's a special announcement that I have for you guys. Just something I wanted to share with the church. Two years ago, February of 2020, when we were naive babies and didn't know what pandemics were, we did a campaign series called Grace is Going Home. And I kind of put in front of you as the church that at that time for 20 years, now for 22 years, Grace has never had its own permanent home. We were founded in 2000 and have always rented our space and kind of moved from space to space. And we've kind of been a church of wanderers and wonderers, wondering when we would find our home. And we believed in 2020, at the beginning of it, that God was moving us to find and step out in faith and pledge towards a permanent home. And you guys as a church pledged $1.5 million, which I was blown away by. And at no point did I expect that to actually come in, but it was a very nice gesture that we made there at the beginning of the pandemic. And then the pandemic hit and remember the bottom fell out and everything's the worst and nobody knows if we're going to have any money or we're just going to be trading Bitcoin for the rest of our lives. And it was a little perilous there. And so we just made a decision as a notary board, we're not going to mention it. We're not going to ask people for it. We're not going to send out letters and say, hey, here's what you owe. Here's what you pledged. If you could kind of honor that, like we didn't do any of that stuff. We just kind of mentioned it a little bit. And then at the end of years, we would say, hey, if you want to give more, because sometimes people do that at the end of years, you can give towards the campaign. And so the announcement is that as of the end of 2021, the end of December 2021, we have $1.5 million available to us right now to go get whatever land or building we need to get. I never, never thought that was possible. I can remember being in elder meetings and we said, how much should the campaign be? And I said, I think our goal should be 1.25. That felt high. I was expecting about a million to come in because that's what experts say will happen. But I'm the one that has to drive the train on this thing or so I thought like a dummy.'s the Holy Spirit doing all the work, and he didn't really have to do anything except get out of the way. And the elders were like, let's do 1.5. And I'm like, you're stupid. You're dumb. It's easy for you to say that because you don't have to stand up here and ask people for it. Why don't we just do 2 million? Let's see what happens. We should have. We should have done that. But we did 1.5. I never thought it would come in. Then we hit the pandemic. Never thought it would come in. Our campaign is not even supposed to be done until the end of February. We have two more months. Well, one more month on this now. But I told the elders going into the end of 2021, listen, whatever we get at the end of 2021, let's just take that from God. That's what we need. He's going to provide for us what we need to build where and when he wants us to build. And so after 2021, we're done talking about it. We're done asking for it. There's still some pledges out there that are lingering that I'm sure will come in. I have heard, and I know that there are some of you who will give, but you're waiting until we identify the land or the property. That's okay. I understand that. So I expect more to come in to that end once we find where we're going to go. But guys, we're done. We did it. Campaign's over. We got what we need. Now we just wait for God's direction on land and where to go. And that could be a minute, just being honest with you. That probably won't be this year. Okay. We've had a team of good, sharp people, the best people in the church at this particular thing, looking for commercial real estate for us. They have not stopped looking for the duration of the pandemic and all the stuff, all the office buildings and churches and stuff that we thought was going to come available because of the pandemic, that ain't happening. Ain't nothing out there. So we're looking and we'll see, but we're happy to wait until God makes it clear that we're supposed to move. But the thing I'm most proud of about this is this. We did this the right way. We raised this money as a church with, listen to me, no discernible strategy at all. We didn't have a dumb thermometer in the lobby. We didn't send out trinkets in the mail. We didn't keep you guys updated on, hey, we're at third base now. Let's make that final stretch. No, we didn't do any of that dumb crap. We just prayed. And we just believed that God, if this matters to you, you'll make it happen. And guess what? It mattered to him. This place matters to him. I like to say that God likes grace. I don't know why he does. He just does. He likes this place. And he's going to take care of us. And I'm very proud of the course that we charted through it as a church and the way that you guys responded to it. And I will say this too, the course that we charted is not at all a testament to my leadership. It's a testament to the leadership of your elders. Because when we started this journey, I was all about doing it the way the consultants say you need to do it. I was 100% behind sectioning off the givers in the church, me going and meeting with the people who had the highest capacity to give, doing a silent campaign before the campaign, and doing it the professional way that you're supposed to do it. I was all about that. And I took that to the elders, and the elders gave me really strong pushback. That's not right. That's not a good fit for grace. That wouldn't go over well here. I wouldn't do that. And I like, listen, I'll just tell you guys in the elder meeting, sometimes we get a little pointed. We will, um, we will say direct things to one another. And there was some direct things said in those meetings. And I pushed pretty hard. I believe I may have told one of the elders to go frolic in the forest with the animals if that's how they thought we were going to do it. It's possible that I said that. But through the elders' pushback, the Holy Spirit worked in my heart too, and I became convicted that the way we needed to do it is to just let him do his work. And so I am so grateful to our elders for charting the course for grace. That was the right course and the God honoring course. I am proud of our partners for honoring God with your pledges. And I am just overwhelmed with God's goodness to us and how he brought us to accomplish that goal with no strategy in a pandemic when at times there was zero people or 40 people a week even using the building that we're pledging to build. It's pretty cool. So let's pray and thank God for that and then we'll dive into this series. Father, you are so good to us. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for caring about us. Thank you for pursuing us. Thank you for reminding us, God, in myriad ways that you love us, that you care about this place, that what happens at Grace matters to you. God, I just pray that when the right spot becomes available, that you, through your spirit, make it abundantly clear to every person involved that that's exactly where you want us to be. And Lord, I just pray that we would be patient for you to move there just like you moved in this campaign. We trust you with all of our hopes and our dreams and our future, and we pray that what we hope and want for grace is exactly what you hope and want for grace. May your will be done here. In Jesus' name, amen. All right. Our new series is called Colossians. It's creatively titled after the book that we're going to study. If you have a Bible, you can go ahead and open there. It's towards the middle of the New Testament. It's just a short four chapter book. So maybe a little tricky to find, but hopefully you'll find it and read along with it on the reading plan and those things. I'm going to confess something to you about this series because I think it's actually kind of funny and informative for how I kind of arrived at some conclusions this week. But when you plan a, when you plan series, when we plan series as a staff, we kind of, we'll approach a season, the January to Easter or Mother's Day or whatever. And we'll kind of look at that season and we'll think, okay, what are the series that we want to do in here? And there's always one or two that I know I definitely want to do. And so you take the series that you really want to do and you put those where they need to be. And then you kind of see what your time blocks are and what you have space to do otherwise. And so I knew I wanted to start out the beginning of the year with this series called Consumed. And I knew that I wanted to share with you guys what was on my heart about our need for being consumed by church. And then the others were going to be consumed by community and consumed by making disciples. I didn't get a chance to get to that, but we'll get to those topics in the spring. And then we were able to do a response to what does it look like to be consumed by the church. That was on video that we did, I think, last week. So if you haven't seen that, I'd love for you to watch that one. So we knew we wanted to take January. We wanted to do consumed. And then I'm not going to get into too many details about it, but we've got a Lent series coming up that I think is going to be eight total weeks, maybe seven. I'm not quite sure. I forget. But I'm very excited about that and all the things that we're going to be doing. And we've known since Lent of last year that we wanted to really hammer home Lent and focus on that as a church this year. So you can go, everyone's going to be challenged to fast from something. You can go ahead and begin to prayerfully consider what that might be for you if that's something you want to participate in. So I'm very excited about that Lent series. And so we knew where we needed to place that. And that left us with four weeks here in February to do another series. So I'm looking at the staff. I'm like, okay, we got four weeks. We need a series. What do you want to do? So I've been listening in the fall. I was listening to the book of Colossians with John every morning. I'd get him up. I'd feed him his bottle, and I'd turn Colossians on on my Bible app and then just read Colossians to both of us. It's four chapters. We've got four weeks. How's that sound? Everybody's like, yep, sounds great. Colossians is a good book. Cool, let's go. And then we started jokingly referring to this as the filler series, the series in between the two ones that we actually care about. And we would never tell you that because every series is important, but that's how we were joking about this particular series. Even the graphic, Carly sent it to me and I think the graphic looks really good. Carly didn't love it. She was like, here it is. I know this isn't a big deal series. So what do you think? I'm like, that looks great. That's fine with me. I think it looks really, really good. So even to that, we're focused on Lent, right? So this week I dive into research on our filler series. I'm like, okay, God, what do you got for us in Colossians? And I just couldn't help but chuckle, even just 30 minutes into research and reading and praying, at just how very relevant and necessary this book is for us, at how very rich and good I think it's going to be for us. I'm so excited about what I get to preach to you this morning that I'm a little bit emotional about it. I'm afraid I'm going to cry at times that don't make any sense, so I'm going to try to keep it together. But I'm really excited to share with you this message of Colossians. I think Colossians is tucked away in the New Testament and is typically relegated to Bible studies sometimes. And that we don't really study it very often. And we might not even be super familiar with what it is and what its message is. And the more I have gotten into it, the more I thought, gosh, this is going to be so good for grace right now. So God in his goodness, and maybe in those mornings when I randomly landed on Colossians, the Holy Spirit was preparing my heart for the series that he knew he wanted us to do in February that is anything but a filler series. But one of the things that first tipped me off that this would be a good series for Grace right now is the background on the church in Colossae. Paul didn't start this church. Somebody else was running this church. Paul was actually in prison and he got a letter from the person who was running this church. And the letter basically said, hey, Paul, we're doing great. Our folks love God. Our folks are all in. Our folks are full of faith. They're standing up to persecution. Like we've got a really good spirit here. And I thought that feels like grace to me. We're doing a good job. The reaction to, hey, let's be all in was so good and was so encouraging. And it made me so proud in our campaign. It made me so proud. I feel like we're doing pretty good. I feel like we've got a good spirit here. I feel like we've got a good thing going. But the leader of the church told Paul, but they're facing tremendous pressure that I'd like you to speak to. And the pressure was essentially to fold into old ways of legalism or to transition into new ways of liberalism. So there was forces being exerted on them from outside the walls of the church and sometimes from within the walls of the church to recede back into legalistic Judaism, where your spirituality is measured by your ability to follow the rules. The better you follow the rules, the more spotless your life is, the more spiritual you are, the more God loves you. That's how we gain favor with God and respect for man. There's legalism following the rules well. Or this slide to liberalism. Actually, none of those rules really matter. They're not important. Those were never actually meant to be rules. Do whatever you want, no matter what, and God loves and accepts you all the time. Which is probably a bad synopsis of liberalism, since I do ardently believe that God loves and accepts you all the time, which is probably a bad synopsis of liberalism since I do ardently believe that God loves and accepts us all the time, but it's doing away with any sort of standards that we need to hold in our life and just embracing every ideology that comes along. And I thought, well, that's pretty similar to grace too. Frankly, that's really similar to any church, particularly in the Southern United States. Every church in the Southern United States right now faces that tension from within and without. There are some people that want to drag us back to legalism, right? My parents grew up in Southern Baptist churches where all the skirts had to be below the knees, where you weren't allowed to be seen at the theater, where you weren't allowed to go dancing or play cards or gamble or any of that stuff. And I don't go dancing, and I don't play cards because those are boring, but I gamble sometimes because that's fun. We don't do that stuff anymore. But every now and again, there's a part of us that wants to go back to that familiar legalism, that we've got to follow the rules better. We have to decide. We have to draw lines in the sand. This is a sin and you can't do that and you can do this. And we want to put up barriers around our behavior and define people's spirituality by how well they follow the rules. That's a comfortable, natural place for the human instinct to go. And if we don't watch it, some of us will always slide towards legalism. In the same way, we're in a culture now that's trying to tell us that none of those rules really matter. All the trains get off at the same station. Everything's really the same. It's you have your faith and we have our faith and yada, yada, yada. We don't really need all those standards. There's a push on the church to let go of some of our tenants so that we can be more acceptable to our culture. And so like the Colossians, we are a church that's doing good, that loves God, that has a heart of faith, but exists under some pressure to go liberal or to go legal. And so Paul writes to encourage the church in Colossians. And in his encouragement to the church in Colossae, I think we can find a lot of encouragement to this church here in Raleigh. And so the question becomes, well, if Paul is writing them to then encourage them in their faith, how does he do it? What does he write to them? What's the first thing he points to, to encourage them in their faith? And I thought about, well, if it were me, if I wanted to encourage our church or any church, or if I'm Paul and I was trying to encourage that church, how would I do it? How would you do it? Would you like me do it strategically? I would probably want to talk to the leader of that church. What's going on? What kind of things are they facing? The legalistic crowd. What kind of rules are they really caring about? The liberal crowd. Where are they coming from? What's their ideology? What are they trying to do? And I would have wanted to directly address those arguments. Like an attorney, let's just break this thing down. Let's address all their arguments. Let's build out a nice rebuttal here so to give them a good foundation to stand on. Let's do this thing strategically, right? Well, Paul didn't do it strategically. Paul did it very simply. And it's so simple and it's so pure and it's so powerful that it convicts me that maybe as a pastor, I don't do this enough for you guys. But Paul didn't choose to encourage them strategically. He didn't choose to figure out where they were and kind of read the tea leaves and try to hit them right where their heart was. He just did it very simply. Paul encourages the Colossians by pointing to Jesus, plain and simple. He encourages the Colossians by pointing to Jesus. And when I say this, what I mean is he begins in chapter one, verses one through 14 are really kind of this preamble. He says, hey, you know, I think my God, every time I remember you, I think of you in my prayers. This is what I pray for you. The prayer in Colossians looks very similar to other prayers and the other letters that he's written to the church that are basically, hey, I just want you to know God more than anything else. I want you to know God, grateful for your faith, grateful for your testimony from your church. And then he gets into how he wants to encourage them. And this is what he writes. And this is verses 15 through 23. I'm going to stop a couple of times and talk about some things, but keep your Bibles open. I think this passage is worth reading. It's such a sweeping and stunning portrayal of Jesus. And you know, it's funny that I've come back to this because a few years ago in the spring, we did a series in Hebrews. And I said that Hebrews had the most incredible description of Christ in the Bible. And I preached it to you guys. And I got an email from Brandon Reese right over here, who was in the men's group. And he said, that's a great picture. There's an equal one to it in my mind in Colossians. And so now here we are two years later, and now we're talking about that depiction of Jesus in Colossians. And I want you to read it with me, and we'll kind of digest it together. This is what Paul writes, beginning in verse 15. I'm going to take a break there. I want you to understand what's going on here. What Paul is saying is Jesus was present at creation. He's agreeing with the gospel of John that says, through him all things were made and without him nothing was made. He was present at creation. All of creation hinges upon him. All of his existence now rests upon him. He is saying that all things belong to him, that he is the reconciliation. And if you read this, what you really find is that this is what Paul is saying, that all, everyone who's ever lived has held Christ, whether you realize it or not, as the epicenter of your history and the epicenter of your hope. Which means for every person who has ever lived, all of your understanding of your past hinges on Christ and all of your hope for your future hinges on Christ. That's what that means. Even if you go all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the first thing they learn is that God created them. How did he create them? Well, according to Genesis 1 and John 1 and Colossians 1, he created them through his word, Jesus. He created them through his son. So Adam and Eve, with a brief two-day history they had, looked back to the creation of the earth with the hope that it was Jesus who actually did it. Their history hinged upon Jesus. And then when they sinned and they fell and suddenly they need reconciliation and forgiveness, their future hope for that reconciliation and forgiveness without them knowing it hinged upon Jesus. And then over the course of the Old Testament, God begins to shed some light on exactly what that future hope is going to be on the Messiah. And we see whispers in Jeremiah and Isaiah and in the prophets as they kind of shed more light on who this Messiah is going to be and what this hinge of history is going to come to do. And then Jesus shows up in the gospels and he personifies God's goodness and loveliness. And we'll talk about that in a second. And he lives a perfect life and he dies on the cross for our sins. And so all of history to that point culminates in the death of Christ as he fulfills his divine nature to do that for us. And then we move forward into the church era. And now as people who exist in 2022, we look back on the death and the burial and the resurrection of Christ as a hinge of history. All of our history is contingent upon him. And then we look forward to, as we preached in the fall, revelations, when Jesus comes down in Revelation 18 and 19 to come back and rescue his church and to take us back up to heaven with us. He is the hope of our future. So for every person who has ever lived, Jesus is the epicenter of your history and he is the epicenter of your hope. Jesus is the confluence of heaven coming down onto earth and earth experiencing heaven. He is the nexus of the spiritual world meeting the physical world. Jesus sits in the middle of everything. Everything. There is nothing without him. Whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we admit it or not, whether we comprehend it or not, Jesus sits at the hinge of all history, of all creation, of all love, of all majesty. And that's the picture that Paul is painting to the church in Colossae and to us is this grandeur of Jesus. And he doesn't stop there. I love this next sentence. I think it's verse 19. For in him, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. We'll pause there again. Much of what I'm about to say comes from this book that Kyle recommended to the staff called Gentle and Lowly. And I can't recommend it to you highly enough if you're a reader. If you're not a reader, become one. It's good. And read Gentle and Lowly. But I love that phrase in verse 19, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. What does that mean? This is a clumsy explanation, but it's the best that I can do. I can only try to size it up like this. Do a little mental exercise with me. And just picture in your mind, I don't know how you're gonna do it, just figure it out. Picture in your mind how much you think God loves you. Just how much you think he loves you. And try to wrap your head around that for a second. How much grace do you think God has for you? Wrap your head around that for a second. Grace for your humanity and for who you are and loving you despite of your faults. How much mercy does God have for you? Willingness to look over times you've slighted him or things that you've done. How much compassion does God have for you in your sin and in your hardships? Wrap your head around those things. And then let me tell you this. It's more than that. It's more than that. And now wrap your head around that new reality. But it's more than you can fathom. It's more than that. Wrap your head around that new reality, and guess what? It's more than that. Wrap your head around that reality, and it's more than that, and it keeps going. We cannot comprehend the love and the grace and the mercy and the compassion and the goodness that God holds in his heart for us. It is beyond human comprehension, and I am convinced that the whole Christian life is an exercise in expounding our understanding of how much God loves us and has mercy for us us and then realizing that's not nearly enough to capture how he loves us. And that overwhelming love, that overwhelming goodness, that overwhelming grace and compassion that we cannot fathom is personified, listen to me, is personified in the person of Jesus. That's what it means when it says the fullness of God, all of his grace, all of his mercy, all of his compassion, all of his love was pleased to rest on the person of Christ. And if you want to know how much does God love me, look at Christ crucified and answer the question for yourself. If you want to know how much mercy and compassion does God have on me, look at Jesus weeping with Mary and know that that's the compassion that he has for you. If you want to know how much grace and mercy does he have for me, look at Jesus with the adulterous woman as he defends her from the death penalty and know that that's the compassion that Jesus has for you. If you want to know how much Jesus forgives you, look at him telling Peter to forgive 70 times 7, which is as many times as is necessary, and know that that's God's forgiveness for you. If we want to know how God feels about us and how much he loves us, look at the person of Christ on whom his fullness is pleased to dwell and know that that's how much God loves us, that that's the compassion that he has for us. That that's the grace and the mercy that he offers us. That's what it means when it says that the fullness of God was pleased to dwell on him and then he finishes up this description of Christ in this way. In verse 21, He says, Why did God send the culmination of all history, the fullness of his love and compassion? Why did he send that down here? To get you. To come and get you. To reconcile you back to him so that he can experience eternity with you. Listen to me. Why does Paul choose, when he needs to encourage the Colossians to hang in there, when he needs to encourage them to stay pure in their faith, what does he do? He points them to Jesus in the stunning depiction of Christ. And why does he do that? This is why. Because Jesus is the embodiment of God's earnest yearning for you. Jesus is the embodiment of God's earnest yearning for you. I don't know if you think about God's love for you in this way, but God loves you. God desires you. God chases after you. God sent his son to win you. And then he left the Holy Spirit to nip at your heels whenever you run from him so that you would turn and accept his embrace. He is coming for you. He desires you. He is yearning for you. He does not sit back and wait for you. He pursues you. So he sent Jesus to come and get you. And he left his spirit to keep the chase going until you finally give in and give up and say, God, I'm yours. Because that's what he longs for. I told you this week I had strep. On Tuesday, I began to feel a little sick, and so I realized with all the COVID junk going on, I should probably mask up in the house and try to stay away from the kids. Wednesday felt like garbage. Thursday was the worst. Literally, I never get sick ever. I've never been as sick as I was on Thursday in my adult life. But by Thursday afternoon, I got some antibiotics, so Friday I was right as rain, baby. It was great. But on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I'm in the house, and I'm with my kids, but I can't touch them. I'm an affectionate guy. I pick up and scoop up Lily all the time. I pick up and scoop up John all the time. I love holding my babies. And there was one night, I think it was Thursday, Jen was laying with Lily singing her songs and I was standing in Lily's doorway with my mask on just waving at Lily in the bed and she waved back at me and she said, I miss you, Daddy. And I had to go cry in my bedroom. I yearned for them. All I wanted to do is scoop them up. All I wanted to do is pick up John and eat those fat baby cheeks. Is grab Lily when she got home from school and make her tell me about her day. She doesn't do it, so I say, tell me three good things that happened. That's all I wanted to do. All I wanted to do is scoop up my kids, man. And it was like this weird quasi-torture sitting in the house looking at them and not being able to scoop them up. If that's torture for me for three days, knowing good and dang well I'm going to get over this and I'll pick them up again, what must it do to our Father in heaven to watch us and so desperately want to pick us up and to hold us and to cherish us and for us to hold him at arm's length. Because Lily waved back at me and said, I miss you. And I knew that she wanted to hug me as soon as I was able to do it again. How much more would that crush your parent heart if you waved at your kid and they said, I miss you. And they said, if God yearns for me the way that I yearn for my children, if God yearns for you and the people you love the way that you yearn for your children, the way that I yearn for mine, how much must it hurt his fatherly heart in heaven to watch his children run from him, begging them, please just stop running. Please just turn around for a dang second and let me hold on to you. I sent my son to catch you. I left the spirit to keep up the chase. How much must it hurt his father's heart to not be able to hold his babies, to not be able to embrace his children, for us to run from him and to wander off from him. When all he wants is for us to be with him. When all he wants is to hold us. When all he wants is his son or his daughter to talk to him. And tell him about our days. Y'all, God, he yearns for us. It's all over the Bible. Jesus says it like this. He says he leaves the 99 sheep that are safe to go get the one who's lost and wandering. And I think that we make such a mistake about how we view the gospel and the love of God in our life. I think that sometimes we have this attitude that God's like, you know, take it or leave it. I sent my son, he died for you. It's there if you want it. It's yours if you don't want it. You don't have to spend eternity for me. Take it or leave it. I sent my son. He died for you. It's there. If you want it, it's yours. If you don't want it, you don't have to spend eternity for me. Take it or leave it. Guys, take it or leave it isn't yearning. Take it or leave it is not what we see in the Bible. Take it or leave it is not what we see pouring out of scriptures and shouting at us through the book of Colossians. What we see in the Bible is a father in heaven who earnestly in his guts yearns for you, who wants you, who loves you. And now for some of us, you've never known that love. You've run from it your whole life. You've never accepted Christianity. There's things about it you can't get your head around. And so you're still running. And I'm begging you that you would let God catch you today. I'm begging you that you would let today be the day that you would embrace your heavenly Father. But there's others of us who have been caught, but after we've been caught, there's been the wandering. And in our wandering, sometimes we feel so badly for what we've done that we think God must be disappointed with us. He can't be yearning for me anymore. And so we keep ourselves at arm's length from God out of a sense of guilt or shame. And to you, I would simply ask, if God came after you when your soul was fundamentally opposed to him, why would he not continue to pursue you when your soul feels actual guilt of your sin? If God chased you down and yearned for you and pursued you before you were his child, then how much more does he still love you now that you're his child? Why would he ever stop loving you? Listen, when God forgave us, when you accepted Christ, he forgave you for all of your sins, past, present, and future. He already knew you were going to go through the season of wandering when he chose to save you. He doesn't love you any less. As a matter of fact, God's, I believe, primary emotion as he looks at you in your sin is not anger, but pity and compassion because of what you're giving up to be away from him when he just wants you close to him. Listen, if you've never known Jesus in your life, God yearns for you and is chasing you down. If you have doubts and you're not sure about your faith, God yearns for you and will chase you down through those doubts. He's still after you. If you are wandering away, God yearns for you and is chasing you down. If you're holding on to pet sins that you're not sure you want to give up yet, God is going to chase you through those sins and he will chase you down and the Holy Spirit will nip at your heels until we give in and allow him to embrace us. If you are experiencing incredible victory in your spiritual walk right now, good. God loves you and yearns for you on a deeper level than you can still ever imagine. God loves you and yearns for you deeply. And that's all that the church in Colossae needed to know to be encouraged in their faith. And so my prayer for you this morning is that you will walk out those doors knowing in your guts that God loves you more than you thought he did when you came in here. And as I thought about the best way to finish up the service this week, I was reminded of this song called Reckless Love. Because in that song, there's lines of, there's no walls he won't kick down or lies he won't tear down coming after me. There's all these things that God will do to come after us. But the part about the song I like is that it's called Reckless Love. And when it first came out, there was some kind of dumb arguments about whether or not it was really appropriate to use the word reckless because we didn't want to accuse God of being careless or thoughtless or somehow errant in his love for us. But that word reckless doesn't mean mistaken. The word reckless implies this. When you offer your love to someone, when you expose yourself, you make yourself vulnerable to them and they reject you. That hurts. You take that personally. I don't care who you are. And there's only so many times you can offer your love freely and wholeheartedly to someone and have them reject you before you start to guard yourself against it. And the love you offer isn't as much or it isn't as pure or it isn't as grand. Or even maybe you wall yourself off to it entirely because you just can't stand the pain anymore. We learn self-protection. God's recklessness is that he has no self-protection. God's recklessness is you can reject him as many times as you want to and he will never stop coming after you. It doesn't matter how many times we hurt him, he's gonna continue to come after us to get us, to claim us. And so we should sing and marvel at this reckless love. So I'm gonna pray and then we're gonna sing together, but I would invite you to experience the song however you wanna experience it. If you wanna stand and sing, stand and sing. If you wanna sit and you want the lyrics to wash over you, let them do that. If you wanna kneel at your seat and pray, pray. If you wanna come up here to the front and pray and have me kneel over you and pray with you, I'll do that too. However you wanna experience this song, you experience it that way, but I'm gonna pray, the band's gonna come up, and then we'll finish with that song together. Father, boy, you are good to us. We thank you for your love for us. We thank you that you pursue us. We thank you that you sent your son as the personification and embodiment of your earnest yearning for us. I simply pray, God, that we would be more certain of your love for us as we leave than we were when we showed up. God, we are your children. We are your sons and your daughters. I pray that we would let you love us like that. May we please quit trying to perform. May we please quit insisting that we get our life in some semblance of order before we come to you. May we please tear down all the roadblocks that exist between you and us and just allow ourselves to feel your overwhelming and reckless love for us. It's in your son's name on whom all of history and hope hinges that we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. If you're watching this, it's because we correctly guessed that we would not be able to have church on Sunday. So this is actually Thursday afternoon right now as I record this. That's why I'm preaching in my hat. Also, last time I preached, I preached in Crocs, so I figured to just round it out, this time I would preach in my hat. If that's okay with you guys, I didn't feel like I had time to go home and shower and do my hair. So if you can put up with a pastor and a hat, I'll do my best to share this morning's message with you on what is for me a Thursday afternoon. Before I dive into that, a couple things, by the way, of announcements that we wanted you to know about. You know, we left off asking the question, how can we be all in at Grace? Well, two ways to do that are, first of all, to join a small group. We say at Grace that if you're not in a small group, then you're simply not experiencing all that God has for you. So I hope that you'll do that. There's a link online. There's a link in the Gracevine. If you're not receiving the Gracevine, let us know. That comes out every week with all the details, all the information about what's going on with the church that you need to know. And you can go to our small groups page online, find the catalog there, and contact a leader. Or if you have questions, reach out to me, and I would love to try to guide you to whatever group might be the best fit for you. Another way to be all in is to attend the Discover Grace class that we are having next week following the service, if, Lord willing, we're able to have services. I'm going to stop assuming that we're just going to be able to meet every Sunday, but hopefully we'll meet next Sunday. I believe it's going to be January the 30th, and we'll have Discover Grace immediately following the service. That's a way for you to become a partner of grace, for you to find out more about who we are, how we tick, what makes us go as a church. There's lunch provided and childcare if you need it. So register ahead of time for that if you can, especially if you're going to need childcare, and we will take good care of you. But if you've never attended a Discover Grace, whether you're new to grace, you've been coming for years, you've never done one, we would love to see you at that one. Now, when we left off, the last sermon that I did was not an easy or a fun sermon because I had to come to you and say, hey, church, I see us sliding into a direction that's not good. And I really kind of called out the whole church, but you guys are so awesome. You're so great. You're so encouraging. I'm sure there are people who didn't appreciate what I had to say the last time I was able to preach. I'm sure that's out there, but the feedback that I've gotten has been universally positive. It's been a lot of folks going, you know what? Darn it. Yeah. I was consuming the church. I reduced it to a product and I need to be all in at grace. And I think all of us to some degree or another, we're a little bit convicted when I just kind of brought up the point that I see us sliding to become consumers of the church. That in our practices and patterns, we've effectively reduced church to a product to be consumed by us when and where and how we want it. And I talked about how that's a shame and that's unhealthy because that's not Jesus's attitude towards the church. Jesus's attitude towards the church is that it is his bride. He died for us. It is his plan to reach a lost and broken world, and there's no plan B. And we talked about if we just became consumers in our marriage, how quickly would those crumble? So why do we think that as the bride of Christ that we can just consume the church and that that identity really should be wholly consuming, not flippantly consumed. And so then I ended the sermon with a challenge of, if you're at grace, if you call this place home, if you consider yourself a partner, then be all in. Be two feet in at grace, two feet in to God's kingdom and what He is doing here. And we left it off with, okay, well, what does that mean? And so that's what this week is. I feel like this is an important part two to that sermon. As a matter of fact, if you haven't seen that sermon, I would pause this right now and go back and watch that sermon and then come back to this one later today or later in the week. Because this sermon really only makes sense if you've heard the last one. And as I thought about how to answer this question for us, what does it mean? What does it look like to be all in? I was reminded of an idea that I presented to you guys, I think it was about three years ago when we were going through the book of John together in the spring. So if this first part of this sermon, if the first half of the sermon sounds familiar to you, that's why. I've preached this idea before. But to help us understand what it means to be all in, I want us to understand this idea or this concept. It's the concept that we are all kingdom builders. We are all kingdom builders. We are all actively building a kingdom. I don't know if you've ever thought of it this way, but every single one of us has time, talents, and treasures. We have gifts and abilities, and we use and leverage those with all that we have to build a kingdom. Now, it may be a small kingdom. It may be a humble kingdom. You may feel like I'm not really doing that. I don't have big aspirations. I'm not trying to build a big, huge company. I'm not trying to climb the corporate ladder or any of those things, but we all have kingdoms, little fiefdoms that we build, whether they're of our career, of our finances, of relationships, of friendships, and they're not necessarily bad, but what I want us to see and acknowledge is that we are all building a kingdom. We are all, all of us, kingdom builders. We leverage everything that we have to build something. There's none of you who are listening, none of us who will listen in the future, none of the children that you're raising that are not kingdom builders. So the question really becomes, whose kingdom am I building? Am I building my kingdom or am I building God's kingdom? And it's through that lens that I want us to view the story of John the Baptist. If you have a Bible there at home with you, you can pull it out and turn to the book of John. We're going to look at chapter 1 and then chapter 3. John the Baptist, to give you some background on him, was a really successful minister, prophet in the ancient world. He was the cousin of Jesus. He was prophesied about as a voice crying out in the wilderness, and it was his job to make it known when the Messiah arrived. It was his job to make it known, hey, Jesus is here. That was his job that was assigned to him by God to build his kingdom. This is how you're going to do it, John. You're going to be the one who introduces my son. And so to gain the credibility to do that so that the people of Israel would actually listen when John said it, he built up a ministry. People followed him. They waited in line for hours for him to baptize him at the Jordan River. They listened to what he said. John had his own disciples. John was essentially an ancient Israel, in our terms, a very well-known and successful megachurch pastor. John would have had speaking gigs and book deals. John had built himself quite a kingdom of ministry. But we get two glimpses, actually get more than two, but two that we're going to look at this morning of how John viewed all of these things. But I wanted us to approach these verses with the knowledge that we all build kingdoms and that John had built quite the kingdom. He was very successful and good at what he did and what he was building. But let's look at how John viewed his kingdom. First, we'll pick it up in John chapter 1. And just as a reminder, John the Baptist is a different John than the Apostle John that wrote the Gospel of John. It's a lot of Johns. But let's look at John chapter 1, and followed Jesus was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. So John is there with his disciples, and Jesus walks by, and John goes, hey, that's the guy. That's Jesus. That's the Lamb of God. And the disciples immediately leave John and go and follow Jesus. And I kept reading to the end because we learned that one of those people was the brother of Peter. And we know that he stayed with Jesus. So when I say they left John and went with Jesus, I don't mean they left John and went with Jesus for a little while and then came back to John. I mean, they left John and they went with Jesus. So what's happening here, what we see in this verse is Jesus, in this passage, Jesus shows up and he starts skimming off the top of John's ministry. He starts taking a little bit of John's kingdom. These are not just simply followers. These are disciples. These are young men that he is pouring into and training and teaching. This is his staff. And now Jesus has just taken a couple of them. So Jesus starts to take some of John's kingdom, but we get a glimpse of John's attitude about this later on in chapter 3. Look with me, chapter 3, verses 29 and 30. John says this, So he's telling his disciples, look, the bride is the church. The bridegroom is Christ. The groom is Christ. He's here. And the marriage is complete. I've done my part. I've introduced him. Now it's time for me to step aside. Now it's time for me to fade away. And he says one of the greatest lines in the Bible, he must increase and I must decrease. It's like if you were able to go up to John in the moment and say, John, Jesus has taken your kingdom, man. He's taken your stuff. He's shaving off the top of your kingdom. How do you feel about that? I believe that John's response was essentially, man, I was never building my kingdom. I was always building his kingdom. Those disciples were never mine. They were always his. This following, this ministry, this has never been my ministry. This has never been my following. This has never been my kingdom. It was always his. It was always his ministry. It was always his following. It's my job to simply point the way back to him. And now that he is here, now that I've announced his coming, now that I've handed over the keys of my little fiefdom, my little kingdom to his eternal kingdom, I'm done. I'm out. And what we see from John, and I don't think John understood it at the time, but God mercifully calls him up to heaven a lot sooner than he would have had to go. He gets arrested and beheaded by the king. And it's seen by John as a sad thing when he's arrested, he wants to be freed. But I think God was just bringing him up to heaven a little earlier because his job was done. And I think John got a very hearty, well done, good and faithful servant when he arrived. Because John understood, this isn't my kingdom. This isn't my stuff. God didn't give me the gifts and talents and abilities that he gave me so that I could amass people to look at me. He gave me any gift that he gave me so that I might be used to grow his eternal kingdom, not my temporal one. And so if you ask me, what does it look like to be all in? I would answer it this way. We are all in when we acknowledge and embody the mindset of John the Baptist. When I say, what does it look like to be all in at grace? Because I challenge this, if you're at grace, be all in, man, let's go. What does that look like? Well, it looks like acknowledging and embodying the attitude of John the Baptist, which is to say, I was never building my kingdom. This was never about me. This was always about Jesus. It was always his kingdom. And everything that I've been given by God, it was not to be used to build my own kingdom. It was to be used to build his kingdom. I remember when this light went off for me. I was in my late 20s, and I had just taken over as a youth pastor at my last church at Greystone Church. And I had only been there in a full-time capacity for a couple of weeks, and it was time to take all the kids to summer camp. And so I'm going to summer camp with these kids. I think there's about 150 kids there, and I didn't know them, and they didn't know me. And yet here we are spending a week together, and I've got to prove myself to them. I've got to win them over. I've got to be able to do ministry to them. And listen, I'm beyond this now because I'm not in student ministry anymore, but anybody in their 20s who's a student pastor who tries to tell you that there aren't times when high schoolers can be the most intimidating people on the planet, they're liars. Sometimes they can be. And we got a bunch of kids. We got a bunch of older kids. They don't know who I am. They don't know me from Adam. And they're kind of arms folded skeptical. This is our new youth pastor, huh? Let's see if he's any good. And I know I've got to win them over. And so one day, the first day of camp, it was wreck time, free time. And a bunch of the guys go and they play basketball, the hard top, the black top. And I thought, I can play basketball. I'm serviceable there. Let me just go play with them. So I go down to all the upperclassmen and just start playing ball with them. And for about two hours, we're playing basketball. I was able, I know you're not gonna believe me. Maybe they were all terrible athletes. Actually, some of them were really good athletes. One of them is playing for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays right now. But I was able to hold my own. They wanted me on their team. My team usually won the games, and so we had a good time, and suddenly I'm feeling a camaraderie with them that I didn't expect to feel so quickly. And that's when it dawned on me. It's like God whispered into my ear, because I've always considered myself to be a little bit athletic. I know now that the better word for it is probably coordinated. In my youth, I was coordinated in such a way that I was able to not embarrass myself when I engaged in athletics. I played in college. I played against actual athletes and realized I am not one of those. But I've always known that God made me just a little bit coordinated, and I've always kind of been able to make people laugh. That's just been a thing that I could rely on. And up until that moment on the basketball court with those kids from Greystone, I always just assumed that God made me athletic and funny to get people to like me. I was just thankful that he gave me those wonderful gifts. But in that moment, it was as if God whispered into my ear like, yeah, dummy, this is why I gave you the gift of coordination. This is why I've made you funny. Not to win people over to yourself, but to win them over to me. I gave them to you so that it might open doors so that you can do my work in the lives of people. Now go minister to these kids. Use those gifts, that's fine. But use them to build my kingdom, not your own kingdom. And that's the collective eye opening that I want us to have. That God has given each of us gifts and abilities. He's given each of us time, talent, and treasure. And it is our job to first open our eyes to the fact that he didn't give you your gifts to make you good at your thing so that you can build your own kingdom. He gave you those gifts. He made you funny. He made you caring. He made you smart. He designed you to be good with numbers. He gave you musical talent. He gave you the ability to make friends. He gave you the ability to write and to think and to be magnanimous. He gave you the things that he gave you so that you might get to experience the incredible privilege of being invited in to being a part of building his eternal kingdom and so that you wouldn't experience the devastation of realizing you've spent your entire life piddling around building your own kingdom that no matter how great will end. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. No matter how great of a temporal kingdom we build here on earth, one day Amazon's not going to matter. As we sit here today, the Roman Empire doesn't matter anymore. The Babylonian Empire doesn't matter anymore. These great kingdoms of their day where people were actually successful in building kingdoms that we still read about today, they don't matter. Who cares? So God in his goodness invites us into the incredible privilege of building an eternal kingdom that will echo throughout eternity and matter for the rest of time. Do you understand? That's why he's given you your gifts and abilities, to leverage everything that you have, not to build your own kingdom and draw people and things into you, not to amass your own wealth, not to amass your own followers, not to build your own brand or business, but so that you would turn people to him. He gave you your gifts and abilities so that he might use you to build his kingdom. And so we come back to our question. Whose kingdom are you building? The gifts and abilities, the time and the talent and the treasure that you have, what have you been using it for? Are you using it to build your kingdom or God's kingdom? Are you using it to make your name great or his name great? And what it looks like to be all in at grace is to say, hey, you know what? I have these gifts and abilities. I have this time, talent, and treasure, whatever it is. And I want to apply that to grace in whatever way I can to see God's kingdom move forward through this church. And some of us have special giftings of time, talents, and treasures. And I want that to be acknowledged. Some of us have the special gifting of time. I think of Ron Torrance. Ron is one of our favorite people at Grace. Everybody loves Ron. If you've come to Grace here in person, he has greeted you at the door and he has learned your name and the name of your children. He is a wonderful man. And I'm told that Ron's turning 80 soon. So happy early birthday to you, Ron. I've been told that 80 is the new 70. So, I mean, live it up, pal. It's going to be great. Ron is retired. He has the gift of time. One of the things he does with that special gifting is he comes in on Fridays and he cleans the church. He vacuums the office. He takes out our trash. Do you know, and this is so humbling to me, Ron washes my mugs. If he decides that the mugs on my desk are too dirty, he'll wash them. He'll fold up a nice, neat paper towel and he'll lay them on top of the paper towel. Nice and clean for me when I come back on Monday, and every time I see it, I'm so humbled by that service. But Ron has a gifting of time, so what does he do? He gives it to the church and to other places. There's some stay-at-home moms who have volunteered their time during the week to come in and help Aaron get everything set and ready to go for children's ministry on Sunday. So if you have a special gifting of time, and I do think about stay-at-home parents who have kids who are in school, and so during the day you have this special gifting, this special season of time that has been given to you, I would encourage you and ask and implore you to ask God, God, what would you have me do with this time? You've given me this special gifting of time. Father, what would you have me do with it? This is your time. How can I use it to bring glory to your name? How can I use it to build your kingdom? How can I use it to get involved and do whatever it is you're doing, wherever it is you're doing it? See, if you have a special gifting of time in this season of your life, it's right and good to ask God, what do you want me to do with this? Why did you give me this gift? Some of us have a special gifting of talents. I think about Dylan who plays the drums. You know, God didn't give him rhythm much to his chagrin to get him chicks, right? God gave him that gift of rhythm that he might use it to usher God's children communally into praise together. And what a beautiful thing it must be for God to sit in heaven and watch Dylan use his gifts to draw other people closer to his throne. What a thrill it must be for God, our Father in heaven who created us and loves us, to have given some of us good voices so that they're beautiful to listen to. I wonder how much it pleases him in heaven to hear his children, whom he's gifted in that way, sing out to him as they lead other people into praise to him as well. It's got to be just this special joy that God experiences. If you have been given a special talent, if you've been given a musical ability, if you're exceptionally good with numbers, if you're exceptionally good at gathering people, if you are exceptionally good at something, man, God didn't give you that gift to build your kingdom. He gave you that gift because he's inviting you into being used in his kingdom. And it's worthwhile to ask God, how would you have me use this gift? You might have a special gifting of treasure. I think about some people that I know in my life, and I've talked to other guys and women like this, who are basically saying they're towards the end of their career, and they basically said, you know what, I could retire. We've hit whatever the number is that I set with my financial planner. We've hit it. I'm there. I'm good. I could retire. But, you know, I'm making more money than I've ever made, and I'm trying as little as I've ever tried, so I don't really want to shut off the faucet. You know what I mean? Listen, that's great. That's wonderful. I'm legitimately happy for you that that's your situation, but you now in that situation, you have a special gifting of treasures and resources. And I think it's worth asking yourself between you and God, God, have you given me this special gifting of resources to build my 401k and make me wealthier? Or have you given me this special gifting so that I might get to experience what it is to be a conduit of your generosity to others? Have you given me this special gifting in this season of my life, if you're married, in this season of our lives, so that you might use the treasures that you've entrusted to us to make your kingdom grow in other places. It's worth considering and asking, God, you've put me in this place where I have more than what I need. What would you have me do with this special gifting of treasures? I saw the switch go off in a friend of mine in the last couple of years, and it's been really, really cool to see. A few years ago, we had the opportunity to go over to Ethiopia and visit Addis Jamari, which is a ministry that Suzanne Ward, one of the women who goes to the church, she started it with another lady who goes to another church down the road. Her church is not as good. But they went together and they started this ministry called Addis Jamari, which ministers to orphans and families in Ethiopia. And I've been over there to see it and it's incredible what they're doing. We had the opportunity to take a trip over there a few years ago, and my buddy came with us. And he got over there and saw the ministry and saw the people, and God just touched his heart, and he was so moved by it. And he's in a great situation financially. He's in a position where he was really good at his job, and so he was able to retire early. And then he takes consulting gigs on the side whenever he feels like he wants them, and he does those, and that's a couple extra bucks, and that's great. Well, after coming back from Ethiopia and experiencing God touching his heart in that way, he had the John the Baptist epiphany, and he said, wait, I can get these consulting gigs that I don't need. I don't need that money, but Addis Jamari does. And so now the dude takes consulting gigs, makes the money, and then turns around and he gives it to Addis Jamari so that they can build God's kingdom in Ethiopia. And to me, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing when God's children open up their eyes and see that everything that God has given me is to be used for his glory and his name and his kingdom, not my own. And I know plenty of people who would be listening to this sermon thinking, you know what? I don't have any special giftings of any of those. I am as average as average gets. I would say to you, if that's how you feel, that's fine. But someone else who used to say that to me was my mama, my grandmother on my mom's side. She always felt like she was in the background. She always felt like other people were more gifted than her. She always felt like she didn't matter very much and that her voice shouldn't really be considered very much. She spent her life quietly serving in the background and would have sat in the sermon and felt like, I don't have any gifts or abilities to offer to anybody. But when I preached her funeral, there were 500 people there. Do you know why? Because she loved them well. Because her gift, her ability, was to be an encourager, was to love and to support and to be consistent. Things that might feel so plain and mundane to us and things that felt very unspecial to her. But God used her in so many lives and in so many ways that when she passed away, 500 people showed up to honor her. So even if you think that you don't have much to offer, if you offer it to God, he will double and triple and quadruple whatever impact you think you might be able to make. So as we finish, I would simply finish with this question. What's my next step? What's the next thing for you to do? Do you want to email me and say, Nate, dude, I'm all in. What can I do? Do you want to email one of the staff members and say, I'm all in. I want to help you. Kyle, I want to see the youth group grow. I'm in, what can I do? How can I help? How can we build God's kingdom there? Do you have some musical ability? You need to stick your hand up and go, you know what? I can actually sing. You know what? I can actually play and I've been scared or hesitant, but I think that God's given me this ability so I can use it for him. So I want to do that. Do you have a gifting of time that you can offer? But I think everybody's got a next step. Everybody's got a thing they can do to say, you know what? I'm all in. I'm all in at grace. And listen, it's not about grace. It's about God's kingdom. That's why I shared the Addis Jamari story because he's building God's kingdom outside the walls of grace, and that's wonderful. I'm not trying to get you to invest yourself in grace. I'm trying to get you to invest yourself in God's kingdom wherever he is building it. And also saying that if you believe that God is building his kingdom here, then yes, ply your hand here. Leverage everything that you have here. Leverage your time, your talents, and your treasures here at Grace that we might see God's kingdom advance. But as we think about that, I wanted to put it in very simple terms. And maybe you can talk about this with whoever you're watching this sermon with if that's what's happening. If there's people around you. But I would ask you to prayerfully consider if I'm going to be all in at grace, what's my next step? What's the next thing that God wants me to do to be obedient to what I've just heard? Let's pray. Father, you're good. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for gifting us. I pray that each of us would see that you have gifted and purposed us to be used by you. That we might experience the thrill of building your eternal kingdom. That we might avoid the devastation of spending a life building a kingdom that will ultimately fade away. God, I pray that you would give us courage to take the next step that you're placing on our heart. God, I pray that your Holy Spirit would make that very clear. If there's anybody listening to this prayer and they're thinking, God, I really don't know what to do. I just give them ears to hear your spirit as he whispers into their ears what it is they want, they need to do. Because I know that you will guide us and direct us and show us where to apply our hand. God, be with us as we enter 2022. I pray that you would do amazing things here at Grace. We ask that you would build your kingdom here, God. And we are grateful that we get to be a part of it. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here as just a little point of order. If you received a bulletin when you came in and you're someone who fills out the notes, I would direct you to the back of the bulletin. In the middle of the notes is a point that starts out. I think the local church is the blank thing to which we are all called. You can cross that out. Okay, I'm not going to get to that. The word there was bigger, so if you really just want to fill it in, there you go. But we're not going to include that. So I don't want to get to that point of the notes and you guys think, oh, no, he forgot it. No, I didn't. I'm leaving it out on purpose. Also, some of you have asked, Nate, why are you wearing your Crocs? Do you have a gout flare-up? No, jerks. I know that you would love that, but I did not. I did not. I also, before I'm telling you why I'm wearing them, have promised my sweet wife that I would communicate to you that she loathes them. They are the least favorite thing of hers that I own, and it is to her great dismay that I continue to wear them every day. I'm wearing these because these are my friend's shoes. These are the shoes that you only see when I am your friend. If you come to my house, and I knew you were coming, if you come to my house and I didn't know you were coming, come on, man, what are you doing? But if I do know you're coming and I'm still by choice wearing these, it's because I'm totally comfortable with you and we're friends. If you invite me over and I'm wearing sweats and Crocs, it's because we're pals, all right? Only my close friends see these because they are shameful. And when I come to church early, I get here early on Sunday mornings, and usually I just throw these on just to be comfortable until I need to put on my church shoes, my preaching shoes. And as I was pacing, thinking through what I was saying this morning, I just realized that what I'm going to say to you this morning is hard. It's hard for me to say. It's going to be hard for some of y'all to hear. And as I say it, I want these to remind me and you that I'm coming to you as a friend. I'm saying these things to you because I love you. Because I feel like Grace is collectively my pal. And so I want you to know up front that I have been praying this week and this morning for courage and gentleness. And so these Crocs are a little bit more gentle than my preaching boots. So I'm wearing these today. Years ago, there was a show called 24. I don't know if you guys have ever seen it. If you have, your life is better for it. But 24 was released, I don't know if you remember this, right on the cusp of like DVD series and then live series. For those of you, I don't know how young you have to be to appreciate series that are on DVDs, but we used to buy whole volumes of series that now you get on Netflix. But 24 is right on the cusp of that. And so when I heard about it, my friends were watching it and they were like a couple seasons in, I think they were on season four. And they had this tradition of every Monday night, they would go over to my one friend's house and they would all watch it with rapt attention and then talk about it during the commercials. And then when it started again, total silence and they were very committed to it. And then they would kind of talk about the episode afterwards. And I really wanted to go to this. I was having serious FOMO, which for old people, that's fear of missing out. I was having some serious FOMO of my friends are having this fun and I can't have this fun because I'm not caught up on the series. So I tracked down the DVDs and got caught up on the series. And I don't know if any of you have had this experience. Raise your hand if you watch 24 on DVD. Okay, you are my friends and you know what I'm talking about. The end of the episode always, without fail, ends on a cliffhanger. And then there's that countdown, the beep, boop, beep, boop. And you're like, no, I got to know what happens to Jack. So then if you're watching the DVD series, it's like play next episode. Yes, of course. And you play the next episode and you just binge that thing. This is when binging started. And it was so satisfying to be able to watch. And this was, let's see, I was probably 19 or 20. So I could watch an ungodly amount of uninterrupted TV at a time. And I mean the word ungodly because it was not spiritual to do what I was doing, but I could watch a ton at one time. And so you power through these seasons, man. And I got through them and I got to go watch with my friend. Now this is the big night. I get to go to my friend's house. There's like 15, 20 of us there. This is great. I'm going to consume this content this way. And as I was doing it, I was like, this stinks because it ended. First of all, I had to watch commercials. That's a bummer. I don't want to watch commercials. I'm into the story. I don't want to hear about Claritin again. And then it ends. There's the beeps. And it's like, let's watch the next episode, guys. And you can't. You've got to wait a whole week. And by the time the next week rolled around, I really wasn't very much into it. And I realized within a couple of weeks, you know what? I don't really like consuming this this way. I like it better on the DVDs. So I waited and just watched it all at once on the DVDs. And I bring that up because this is when content really began to make it very clear that it was a product and we are the consumers. We can watch whatever we want to watch. We have all kinds of streaming services. We have everything available at the tip of our fingers. We can choose the content that we want to watch whenever we want to watch it. This is 24 to me illustrates when it became very clear in our culture that there's all kinds of content out there that we can consume when we want it, where we want it, and when we actually have a desire for it. When we think it's what's going to be best for us, when we feel like it's what we want in the moment, it's right there and we can consume it. I'm bringing that up because I feel like I've seen church become that for many of us too. I feel like in Christian culture, in church people, and then most pointedly at grace, I have watched a slide over the years that the pandemic has accelerated where we are now in ways consumers of church. Church, to some of us, in our mindset and in our families, has become a product that we consume. Sunday morning is something that if I have time, I'll go. If we don't have other plans, I'll attend. If there's not just one more inconsequential thing, and when I say inconsequential, I mean something that we allow to take Sunday morning away from us that isn't gonna matter one little bit in 20 years, then we'll just do that thing and I'll catch up with church during the week. I'll watch it on Tuesday. I'll binge it. I'll listen to the whole series. And it's not easy or fun to say this because normally when I come to you as the church and I say convicting things, I'm right there with you. I always put myself first and say, this is my conviction, join me in it if it applies. Well, this one's different because I get paid to do this. I don't have the perspective that church partners have. But I do have the perspective of a pastor. And I can tell you what I see from my perspective. And what I see from my perspective, as someone who leads a church, as someone who I think is pretty tapped into Christian culture, as someone who talks to other pastors regularly, I see a slide in our culture towards consumerism as it relates to churches. That for many of us, church has become a commodity or a product that I will include in my life when and where I want to, when and how I want to. And I know that none of us would cop to that out loud. None of us would say, yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm a consumer, church is the product, that's how it is. But in our practices and in our patterns, that's what we make it. I'll get to it when I can. I'll include it when I want to. I'll catch up with it on my jog. Revelation really is not very interesting of a series for me. I'll catch it at Christmas. Or, Revelation is super interesting to me. I'm going to totally pay attention to this one. Last one, I wasn't really there for it. I've seen us become consumers in the way that we volunteer, which is less and less, which is a good indicator that in my mind, church exists for me to make my life better. It's a product that's there for me to grab and to consume when I want it. And this is something that I have seen and noticed for several months. And something that I've wanted to put in front of you for several months. But I didn't know the best way to do it. I didn't know how. And I wanted to be really sure when I did it. Because I know that I'm stepping on toes right now. And here's how I've been complicit in it. Is I've allowed that mindset to reduce my role to a producer of content. There are many a week in the last two years when I viewed my role as literally nothing more than just giving you something worth consuming on a Sunday morning and forgetting about the pastoring and the leading that has to happen during the week. I have been complicit in reducing my own role as the pastor of a church to simply producing content that's good for you that you'll choose to consume again. And I'm just, I'm telling you guys, we're wrong about that. It is a dangerous thing when church gets reduced to a commodity to consume. And I'm convinced that that's true and that it's right and good for me to take a Sunday morning and talk about it and that it's worth stepping on some toes because Jesus's attitude towards the church is so vastly different than the attitude of someone who consumes the church. Jesus didn't for one second think that the church was a commodity to be consumed. Jesus for one second was not interested in putting out a product that people would want to come back to. He wasn't interested at all in commodifying and making us comfortable in the way we choose to consume his body. The New Testament does not talk about the church as something to be consumed. It does not talk about the church as if it's something that's optional for us, that we can include in our life when we feel like it, that we can include in our life when we feel like we have time or effort or energy or space. And so for me as a pastor to watch this slide in my church and say nothing about it is a dereliction of duty. It is irresponsible. So we've got to talk about it. Again, we've got to talk about it because as I thought about communicating this idea this week and what passage to use, I was thinking through the New Testament and how the church is talked about and it dawned on me, there's not like a single passage to use because the whole New Testament is about the local church. The whole New Testament assumes that you are a part of the local church. The New Testament teaches us that the moment you get saved, that when you accept Christ as your Savior, that you are now a member of the big C universal church. And it is incumbent upon you to express that membership within the body of the local church. The one book, the biggest portion of the New Testament that's written to an individual is written to a guy named Theophilus by Luke, probably on behalf of Peter. And he writes to Theophilus so that he can understand who Jesus was and what he came to do, which is to begin the local church. The one big major book that's written to an individual to explain things in the New Testament is written so that that individual could understand the local church and how it came about. Then Paul writes letters to churches. And every directive in the Bible that's given is given to us communally. There is nothing, nothing about individual spirituality in here. It all, the whole thing, cover to cover, assumes that you know and understand that you are functioning within a body. That you are functioning within the local church. And so it's difficult to pinpoint one place where this is clarified because it's assumed all throughout the New Testament. And I don't know if you've ever thought of this, but do you realize, and I believe this with all my heart, that the local church, this expression of grace that we sit in this morning, is the reason that Jesus stayed some extra years to do ministry? I don't know if you've ever wondered this, but Jesus was 33 when he was crucified. If all he came to do, if all of his marching orders were to become flesh, live a perfect life, die for the sins of the world, why didn't he just get crucified at 30? Or 25? Or 17? What was he doing? Hanging around, putting up with us? He was building the church. He was training the leaders. He was preparing the world for his kingdom. Jesus stayed those extra years and put up with us so that he could call the disciples to him and train them and show them. He taught them how to teach. He taught them how to perform miracles. He taught them how to cast out demons. He taught them how to lead. He taught them how to love. He showed them how to do ministry to one another. And then he died. And then he came back and he left. And when he left, he said, now go do all the things that I've been showing you to the ends of the earth. Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. He said, go and do what I told you to do. And how did they respond to that? They huddled up in Jerusalem. And they said, what do we do? And then they got the gift of the Holy Spirit and they started a church, man. And its numbers grew day by day. Acts 2, 42 through 47, you can find it there. And then the rest of the book of Acts is about the disciples' effort to go and to plant more local churches. All of Paul's life was dedicated to planting local churches. When Jesus left and said, you, I've given you the keys to the kingdom. I've spent these years and I've trained you and now I'm going to leave and you've got the Holy Spirit. Go do my ministry. What did lost and broken world, and there is no plan B. That's not my idea. I stole that from another pastor. I don't remember who. But the local church, this expression, this Grace Raleigh is God's plan to reach this community. And there's no plan B. We have got to do our part. We are a part of God's divine strategy, of God's divine plan. This is not something to be flippantly participated in. That's not the point. There's something bigger going on here. The New Testament teaches us that we are the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians chapter 12. We're the body of Christ. We are his different members. We're going to talk more about this next week. But the New Testament also preaches this. And this was one of the more convicting things to think about this week as I think about our attitude with how we approach church. It is admittedly an odd passage to land on for the sermon this morning, but it's Ephesians chapter 5, verses 25 through 32. This is a marriage roles passage. This is usually talked about in weddings. And when we read it, that's where our mind goes. And one day, hopefully sooner than later, I would love to walk through this passage with you as a church body and walk you through kind of how my understanding of this passage has changed over the years. But this is not what I want us to highlight this morning. As I read it to you and you read along with me, I want you guys to pay attention to the relationship between Jesus and the local church. I want you to notice the dynamic that's going on there, and then we're going to talk about it just a little bit. Ephesians chapter 5, beginning in verse 25. He says this in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. and cherishes it just as Jesus does the church because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. The church, Christians, we are the bride of Christ. That is our divine identity. We are the body that he came and died for. We are the body that he's going to come back and rescue. We are the body that he intentionally started. We are the body that was prophesied about in the Old Testament. We are the love of Jesus's life. We are the bride of Christ. And what I'm saying to you this morning is being Christ's bride should be wholly consuming, not flippantly consumed. Being the very bride of Christ should be an identity that is wholly consuming to us, not flippantly consumed. Nothing about that passage and nothing about that role says to us that there's any space whatsoever to simply be consumers of the product that church puts out. No, we are called to be a part of what the church is doing. This is where the whole idea of this series came from when I was thinking about it last fall, is this idea of doing what I can to transition us from sliding towards consumerism and push us back towards being consumed. The church was not created for us to consume it. It was created so that it could consume you. It was created for your whole devotion. It was created for you to be all in. It was created to give you a new life completely separate from your old life and give you something bigger to be a part of that we all long for. Being the bride of Christ deserves our full attention. It deserves our fanaticism. It deserves to consume us. To drive this home just a little bit, I want you to think about something with me. What would your marriage look like if you decide that you were simply going to be a consumer of it? What would my marriage with Jen look like if I decided, you know what, I know she wants to talk about her day-to-day, but I'm not really feeling it. I don't really want to do that. I want to watch football. And also, I've never done this. What would it look like if all the time my interactions with her, I only thought about, well, how does this benefit me? Is this something that I really want to do right now? Why don't I just schedule something over what's happening? What would it look like if in our marriages we simply became consumers and when we were asked to volunteer our time to make the house better, we said, what's in it for me? What are you gonna do if I clean clean the garage? You make meatloaf? All right, I'll clean it. How dead would our marriages be if we became consumers within them? And we saw our marriage as something that just produced a product that was there for me to consume if I wanted it or not. If that analogy holds true, and Ephesians tells me that it does, is it any wonder why some of us just don't feel like our spiritual life is clicking like it should be? Is it any wonder why we just don't feel like we're in sync with God? Is it possible that maybe we don't feel a spiritual vibrancy in our life because we've reduced the things of God to things to be consumed to improve our life when we feel like we need them? You know, it's funny, and it's worth mentioning. Over my years as a pastor, and Grayson at previous church, I've sat down with parents of teenagers, and they've said, we just can't get our kid to come to youth group, and we don't know what to do. And I can't say it, but I think it. Well, if you want to do anything right now, you need to get in the time machine and go back 10 years and quit treating the church like it's something to be consumed for you. You have modeled this method of consumption to your children for 10 years and now is it any wonder that when they get to make their own choices, they're consumers too? Is it any wonder that maybe we don't feel as close to God as we could when we don't treat the things of God as they deserve to be treated. I thought of this as well. Paul is at the end of his ministry and he's writing a letter to Timothy. It's one of the few things written to an individual in the New Testament. And guess what? It's about how to lead the local church. Anyways. In already being poured out as a drink offering. And the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. What a remarkable statement to make. Now I'm about to ask you a question. It's an unfair question. It's a gotcha question. And I'm admitting that up front. So this isn't to make anyone feel bad. This is just to help you think along with me, okay? Did any of us on December 31st, a few days ago, kneel and pray and say, God, thank you for 2021. I was poured out for you like a drink offering. Now, listen, you may have gotten to the end of 2021 and felt like you were poured out like a drink offering. We may have gotten to the end of that year and said, I got nothing left. But were you poured out for the right things? Were you poured out for the things of God? Were you poured out because you were consumed with your identity as the bride of Christ? So, either you're just mad at me and you want the sermon to be over. I get that. Or you're with me and you're okay. I want to be all in. I want to be consumed by the church. What do I do? Well, the very simple answer is this. You give of your time, talents, and treasures. A very simple answer to think about how can I be consumed by the local church is to give of your time, talents, and treasures. And as I was prepping this sermon, I lamented that when I got to this point in the sermon, I've been preaching for too long to really adequately do justice to what that means to give of our time, talents, and treasures. And then it occurred to me, dude, you're in charge of the series. You can do whatever you want. So next week, we're going to talk about that in detail. We're going to come back. Those of you who remain with us are going to come back and we'll go, here's how we can be all in together. Here's what it means and looks like to give of our time, talents, and treasures. But for this morning and for 2022, this is the message and the challenge that I wanted to issue to us as a church. If you're at Grace, be all in. If you're here, mean it with everything you got. You'll notice through this whole sermon, I've not talked about grace as far as what God calls us to. I've talked about the local church. And so I say this with all humility and candor. If you can't be all in at grace because you're not all about what's happening here, that's fine. There are a lot of churches. And with only kindness and love in my heart, I'm admonishing you that if grace isn't it for you, find a church you can be fanatical about. Find a church that you love what's going on there. Find a church that you can be all in, and that you can be consumed by, and you want to pour yourself out for. I hope that's grace, and I hope that what we're doing here is something that matters deeply to you. But if it's not, as just your friend, as a pastor, as a Christian, I'm telling you, we need to be consumed by the local church. So find one to consume you. And this is why I think it's so important to preach this message. And why I wanted to do it at the beginning of this year. Because I know that the cloud of the pandemic still looms over our culture. But I've got to believe that the sun's going to break sometime soon. And I don't want to tread water in 2022. I don't want to just cling on and try to exist this year as a church. I am praying and hoping that Jesus will eagerly and earnestly move in this place. I want to see Jesus show up this year. I want to see children fill that baptistry. I want to just dunk them and I want their friends to be in here celebrating it with them. I want to baptize you guys. I want to see your friends and your family and your coworkers begin to come to church with you and for you to experience the joy of watching them move into a faith because God used you in their life. I want to see you guys take steps of obedience that are far beyond what you thought you would be capable of sacrificing before. I want to see a church with their hair lit on fire for Jesus and begging him every week that his kingdom would come here and that he would move here and that he would do great things here. And that starts with our individual decision to be consumed by the body of Christ and by the identity of being his bride, and then it culminates in a corporate culture of pursuing him and of prizing him and of doing the things of Jesus because we love him and because it's our identity and because we're consumed by him. I don't want to tread water anymore. I want to move. I want to do ministry. I want to see salvations. I want to see people come to know Jesus. I want to see marriages rescued. I want to see children discipled. I want to see hurt people cared for. I want to see people prayed for. I want to see small groups blossom and multiply. I want to see discipleship happen intentionally. I want to see the great friendships that God has planted in this church do more than just make us feel good about ourselves, but point us back towards our Father and enhance our spiritual walks. And how can any, and here, you're all looking at me and I know that you want that too. And how can it happen if we're consumers? If we continue to just slide towards thinking of church as a commodity to be consumed? It can only happen if we say, here I am, Lord, and allow ourselves to be consumed for His purposes. So if you're at grace, be all in. And listen, I say that knowing and being humbled by the fact that we have a bunch of people who are all in. I know that we do. I'm humbled by your service every week. And we have people who have watched online faithfully for two years who simply have health issues that will not allow them to come and be a part of us. And I know you're all in. I know it. And so my prayer has been that the Holy Spirit would be whispering in each of your ears. And if you are someone who is all in, and if you are someone who has been consumed by the local church, that the Holy Spirit would be whispering into your ear right now, and he would be telling you, hey, this is not for you. This is to bring you some help. You don't need to feel convicted by this. Similarly, my prayer for the rest of us is that the Holy Spirit would whisper to us too. And he would be telling you right now how you need to listen. You need to hear this. For the sake of your marriage and your kids, you need to hear this. For the sake of your anxiety and your peace and your joy and your angst, you need to hear this. For the sake of being swept up and knowing how much I love you and experiencing my goodness as being part of a kingdom, part of my kingdom on earth before eternity, you need to hear this. So next week, we're going to come back and we're going to talk about what it looks like to be all in. I hope that if the Holy Spirit is telling you right now, hey, this is not you, that you will pray with me this week. For those to whom it may apply a little more. If the Holy Spirit is talking to you right now and telling you that you need to listen, I pray that you will. And if any of you are mad at me, my door is open. I'd love to chat. But next week, we're moving forward with who we got and we're gonna do some cool things this year. I believe it with all my heart. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the church. Thank you that we are invited to participate in it. Thank you for the way that it wraps its arms around us. Thank you for the way that it is your presence in our life. Thank you for how it trains our children. Thank you for how it strengthens our marriage. Thank you for how it points us towards you. God, we pray that grace would be the church that you want it to be. We pray that we would be consumed by building your kingdom here. We pray that we would understand in our bones what it means more and more to be your bride and to be your body. God, if I've said clumsy things, I just pray that you would grant grace and forgiveness where it's needed. God, we offer you ourselves. We offer you this place. We thank you for creating it. And we just ask that you would give us the faith and courage to serve you and to be consumed by you as we move through this year. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I am the student pastor here at Grace, and I'm so excited to once again be able to be up in front of you getting to preach. I hope you had an awesome Christmas. I hope you had an awesome New Year. Shout out to everyone who's in the building right now. It's January 2nd. We are on the back of the other side of two pretty big holidays. So the fact that you're here, even though it's quite icky outside, shout out to you. But also, good morning or good whatever time of day it is that you may be watching online, whether it's live or whether you're watching it sometime in the future, or everyone in here who loves it so much that you're going to go back and watch it later on. Shout out to you as well. But it's also particularly exciting this morning because we're kicking off a new series that we are calling Consumed, and the ultimate goal is to take a look at where in our lives we might be able to transition from being consumers to being consumed. And so this morning, I have been tasked with diving into what might it look like for our lives and our hearts to be consumed by Christ. Now that sounds like a very easy topic to preach on because it's like, hey, that's kind of the point, Kyle. But I felt myself a bit overwhelmed by this because as I take a look back and as I was thinking through this, what I knew was this, that the last series that we just did was a Christmas series. The entire goal of our Christmas series all through December was to take a look at Jesus and to make much of what Jesus came on earth to do. We celebrated for four weeks or however many weeks or however many Sundays we had, literally going through and talking about, look at this Jesus who came down from heaven to earth. And we celebrate the fact that he came to earth for us. That ultimately his goal and his mission was to live a perfect life as a human and eventually take and bear a cross, dying to put our sin to death. Later being raised to life, signifying that as our sin has been put to death, that death will not be the end of us, just like it was not the end for him. And as he's raised to life, signifying that one day we will be raised into eternity, into heaven. That as we come to the end of our days on earth, that that is not the end, but instead, just as Jesus was, we will be lifted up into eternity. And so that's a lot of really good news to be talking about. That's a really great way to talk about Jesus if I want to talk about being consumed with Jesus. But we just did it for an entire month. Not only that, but if you look even further, it's like, okay, let's look at a different picture of Jesus. Well, here's another picture of Jesus as we went through Revelation. And in Revelation, the ultimate goal of Revelation is as much as it is to learn and to gain knowledge about what does all of this mean, ultimately the purpose is to look and to see how unbelievable, how incredible our God is and how incredible Jesus is. It was to make much of and to bring as much glory as possible to Jesus. That not only in the past was Jesus this human who made himself like us in order to save us, but in the end, ultimately, he becomes this great and mighty and glorious warrior who is coming down to, as Nate likes to say, to wreck shop, to make the sad things untrue, to make the wrong things right, all of those things, that is another picture of Jesus that might be able to go, hey, we should be consumed by this Jesus. This Jesus is awesome. This Jesus of eternity that one day he's going to come down and he's going to get his people. And even if we don't get to experience that from heaven, ultimately at the end of our days, we look forward to eternity where we get to meet that Jesus and be in the presence of that Jesus. And so basically for the past like two or three months, we have been going through the premise of uniting with Christ, of making much of Christ, of giving pretty good descriptions as to why we should be consumed with Jesus. And so here I am sitting and I'm like, what in the world am I supposed to be talking about this morning that is at least anything different than what we've been doing for the last 10 weeks? Well, as I was sitting and working on my sermon and tasked to do so, I was also working on a devotional. I was writing a little devotion and it was actually for something for grace. So get excited. I'm not going to tell you about it right now, but to come, there's going to be some awesome devotions and mine won't be one of them, but some other people wrote some great ones that you get to read in the near future. But as I was writing this devotion, the premise behind it was a role of Jesus that I feel like often gets overlooked. Or maybe not even overlooked, because I think overlooked may be on the side of people who are teachers or preachers that maybe we don't talk enough about it to where maybe some people don't even know about this role of Jesus. Because if I were to sit down with you guys and I said, hey, what is the role of Jesus? Or what are, what were, what will be the roles of Jesus? I imagine that most of our answers would look similar to all the stuff I just got done talking about. He came to earth. He left heaven being fully God. He came to earth to be fully man, to sacrifice himself for us, ultimately buying our salvation and buying our entrance into the promise of salvation that we get to have eternal, we get to be in an eternal relationship with God the Father. Maybe you'll quote me John 3.16 because that's a great way to do it. For God so loved the world that he gave us one and only son, whosoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. God sent his son Jesus to die for us. That was his role, was to bring about our salvation. And then his role is eternity, right? He gets to be in eternity. And one day we get to spend eternity with him. One day we get to see and rest in his glory. Or one day he gets to come down in his glory and bring us up to him and win our salvation once and for all. That's what I was trying to say. Once and for all of our faith. Our faith is in the fact that we are nothing, we deserve nothing. Our sin makes us in this place where we deserve nothing but eternal separation from God. But because Jesus came to earth, made himself man, and was killed on a cross, that his perfect sacrifice gives us eternal salvation. And I have to be honest with you, when I used to read this verse, the other thing I would have said is, hey, you know what Jesus gets to finally do? He had to endure the cross. He had to do all this stuff, but what does he finally get to do? He finally gets to sit at the right hand of God, the Father, who sits on the throne. He gets to rest, and he gets to wait to just get to meet his people. And I love how it says, for the joy that was set before him, that it's his joy to take on the cross. And therefore, it's his joy to be able to be in heaven, seated at the right hand of God, simply waiting to welcome his people into eternity. Waiting to welcome these people who he died for by name and by sin. But as I've done a little bit more research and as I've dived a little harder into Hebrews, what I realize is that is a very inaccurate reading of what it means that one of the joys set before him is to be seated at the right hand of the throne of God. As he is seated at the right hand, he's not being inactive. He's not sitting lazily by. He's not waiting expectantly to meet his people. Is that ultimately true? Yes. He can't wait to welcome you in. But while he is there, he right hand of God, is not twiddling his thumbs. It says that he is our high priest. Now, I know some of you guys are like, oh yeah, high priest, that's great. Other of you guys may have no idea what a high priest is. So the short version of what a high priest is, is he did a couple of things. He was this person who was appointed to be able to go into the presence of God and offer sacrifices for his people. Before Jesus, before the ultimate and perfect sacrifice, he would go and he would provide these sacrifices to God saying, Lord, let these sacrifices be enough so that my people can remain in your glory and in your presence. Well, we know and we just talked about that we don't do that anymore. And we don't do that anymore because we don't need to do that anymore. Because Jesus came down and was the perfect lamb that was sacrificed. That because of this perfect sacrifice, we don't need these small, insignificant sacrifices anymore because Jesus bought our salvation through his sacrifice for eternity. Well, the other thing, and what's basically completely linked to the first thing that a high priest does is he intercedes for his people. Basically, he is a go-between between his people and God. He was appointed to this place so that he could go into the presence of God, and while he's giving his sacrifices, he's also bringing about the pleas of his people. He's bringing to the Lord our sins, the things that we have told him, the ways that we have fallen short in the sight and in the eyes of God. And our high priest, and a high priest is to go in between us and God, praying to God and saying, Lord, as I sacrifice this, will you please forgive my people? Well, once again, what we know now, post-Jesus, is that since we have the Holy Spirit inside of us, when we say yes to Jesus, the Holy Spirit enters inside of us. What that means is we no longer have to have a go-between. We no longer have to go to this person on earth and say, hey, here are these things. Will you please take these things up to God? Because I could not be caught dead trying to talk to God because he's too holy. No, because we have the Holy Spirit within us, that means that we have the right and that we have the ability to go before the Father. But what gives us that right is Jesus. What gives us that right is not simply what happened in the past, not simply the fact that Jesus was sacrificed for us, but because Jesus is now sitting at the right hand of God. And what is he doing? He's our high priest. He's not currently living idly by. He's actively living as our high priest, actively pleading for us, is interceding for us, that he is always living to take our pleas to the Father, that his entire goal and his entire existence in heaven right now is to do everything he can to bring joy, to bring peace, to shower upon you hope and grace and mercies every single second of every single day. As we go to him, as we ask, Lord, please forgive me for this, or Lord, I just want to give this over to you. Jesus's joy is being able to accept that and to look to the father and say, Lord, that one's ours. And so he is forgiven. Lord, I died for that person right there, and therefore they are holy and they are blameless in your sight. Every single time we go to the Father, Jesus is interceding on our behalf saying, hey, you remember when I died? I died for that one. And as Hebrews 12, two says, it is his joy to do so. His joy is not simply his sacrifice in the past, but it is the current ability to be able to shower these mercies upon his people. Any person who is drawn near to his father. I love the way that Thomas Goodwin puts it when he says, Christ's own us, as he is able to comfort us, as he is able to relieve us, as he is able to comfort us, as he is able to shower grace and mercy upon us at every single turn, every second, every minute, every hour, every day. It is his joy, it is his comfort, it is his happiness, and his glory is ultimately greater and higher if his people would come to him for those things. And guess what? If you've drawn to him, if you have drawn near to God, if you have said yes to this faith, yes to this salvation that was authored by Jesus, then not only are you unlocking this eternal redemption, this eternal redemption that is brought to you by Jesus, but you are unlocking this ever-present redemption while you're here on earth. And that's good news. And the goal of this morning isn't simply for you to add to your checklist, oh, here's another role of Jesus. The goal is that it might impact us because I think that oftentimes when we look at Jesus, if I were to ask you to look at Jesus, then we would look at him as somebody of the past, somebody who was a human and died for us and died for our sins. And then, therefore, we look for him for the future. Because since he died for my sins in the past, that means my future is secure in eternity. And when we do that, and when we skip the middle part, when we skip the fact that Jesus is currently living and active as our high priest, consistently doing everything he can to draw us closer and closer to the Father, when we forget that step, I think that our faith starts to look about the same. When we begin to look at our faith, I think we look at it as an event of the past, that over here, we said yes to Jesus. We were bought and we were redeemed by his blood, and we've said yes to Jesus. And that is an incredible thing that we did in the past. And therefore, we get to go all the way over here to the end of our days and in eternity, we get to be with Jesus forevermore. We have this eternal, indescribable joy that we get to experience for the rest of our days. But when we forget the middle part of who Jesus is and what Jesus is doing, then we go from here and saying, you know what, for the rest of this time, I'm just gonna struggle through the rest of my life by myself. And then I'm gonna experience this incredible joy that I'm super excited about. And the problem is we fail to recognize that Jesus's current and active role is to make it to where that eternal joy is being realized in new and different ways every second of every day in our hearts while we are living on earth. That we don't have to wait for this joy. Jesus is just sitting at the right hand of God saying, why don't you just turn to me? I'll give you this joy right now. A quote that Nate has used a few times in his sermons that I'm gonna use again is by C.S. Lewis when he says, we are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us. Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased. To put it a different way, imagine that you're living in poverty and you win the lottery one day. And this winning of the lottery is the amount of money that's not going to run dry. It's going to be there as long as you're using it. And so you have this huge celebration, this huge party. I did it. I won the lottery. I am victorious. And then you live the rest of your life out in the same poverty, never using any of your winnings to bring you the joy that it could bring you. And then the end of your day, as you start using it, and you're like, this is unbelievable. I love this. I love this so much. This is awesome. That's not a one-to-one comparison, but I mean, in the same way, when we simply see Jesus and celebrate Jesus as someone who saved us in the past, and we look forward to say, hey, at some point he's going to bring us joy in eternity, and that's what we're doing. When we forget that his current existence is literally consumed, he is wholly consumed with bringing us this indescribable joy more and more every single day. And we're just chilling with mud pies. And like, you know what, this is fine for now. I'll get the real joy later. Jesus just wants to grab you by the shoulders and shake you and say, what are you doing? I have this joy for you now. I would have called you later if I wanted you to experience the joy later. And when we shift our understanding of Jesus' role from one of the past and the future to one that is current and one that is active, then I believe that our faith begins to shift as well from a faith that is simply looking upon the past and looking upon the future into a faith that is current and active. And when we recognize and we understand that Jesus is wholly consumed right now with bringing about the greatest possible joy that you can experience on earth, not simply of the past, but of something right now, always. Bringing about new mercies and new joys and a new peace every single morning. That is his role. That is what he is consumed with right now. Why would we not want to consume ourselves with those joys? When we read Hebrews 4, 14, I want throne of God through Jesus. And we have a complete freedom to come exactly as we are because Jesus knows exactly what we went through because he experienced it on his time on earth as well. And the sins, the ugly stuff, the bad stuff that we don't want God to know about, the ugly stuff that is within our lives is the exact reason why we are welcome to come to Jesus. Those are the exact qualifications that allow us to get to come to Jesus, because Jesus only came to heal hurting people. He only came to redeem a fallen people. And it's his joy to redeem. It's his joy to be able to redeem you, to make you new, to make you whole, to shower upon you joy and grace and mercy and peace and forgiveness every single day. And so I want to return to Hebrews 12. We read Hebrews 12 too, and this time we're looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that is set before us. Today, may we not be a people who settle for mud pies. May we not be a people who have won the lottery but choose not to cash in on the joys that it produces. Let us run our races. Let us be consumed and let us step out into our faith, drawing closer and closer to Jesus as he is drawing us closer and deeper into the ever abounding peace, joy, and love of the Father. As we close out our service, we're gonna sing a song. And the song was placed here for a reason because the words are absolutely beautiful and do far more than I could ever do on this topic. But I just wanted to read a couple verses for you of the song, and if you will read with me before we sing it. The second verse actually goes, when Satan tempts me to despair and tells me of the guilt within, upward I look and see him there who made an end to all my sin. Because the sinless Savior died, my sinful soul is counted free. For God the just is satisfied to look on him and pardon me. The first verse says this, before the throne of God above, I have a strong and perfect plea. A great high priest whose name is love, who ever lives and pleads for me. My name is graven on his hands. My name is written on his heart. I know that while in heaven he stands, no tongue can bid me thence depart. Amen.