Sermons tagged with Life

I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life, all over my life. I see promises in fulfillment. All over my life. All over my life. Help me remember when I'm weak. Fear may come, but fear will lead. You lead my heart to victory. You are my strength, and you always will be. I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. All over my life. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life, all over my life. See the cross, the empty grave, the evidence of your goodness. Jesus. I see your promises in fulfillment all over my life, all over my life, yeah. I see your promises and fulfillment all over my life. Yeah, you're all around us. So why should I fear? The evidence is here. Why should I fear? Oh, the evidence is here. I searched the world, but it couldn't fill me. Melted deep rays, treasures of fame were never enough. Then you came along and put me back together. And every desire is now satisfied here in your love. Oh, there's nothing better than you. There's nothing better than you. Oh, there's nothing, nothing is better than you. Come on, tell them. To show you my weakness My failures and flaws Lord, you've seen them all And you still call me friend Cause the God of the mountains Is the God of the valleys There's not a place Your mercy and grace won't find me again. Oh Come on. Tell them now. Come on, choir. Oh, there's nothing better than you. Nothing. You turn bones into armies. You turn seas into highways. You're the only one who can. Somebody give a praise in this house. I don't think we're finished yet. Come on. Come on, one more can. You're the only one who can. You're the only one who can. Jesus, you're the only one. Come on, give Him one more shout of praise. When all I see is the battle, you see my victory. When all I see is the mountain, you see a mountain moon. And as I walk through the shadow, your love surrounds me. There's nothing to fear now, for I am safe with you. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees, with my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs for you. Thank you, God. God, you see the end to tell. So when I fight, I'll fight on my knees. With my head lifted high. Oh God, the battle belongs to you. And every fear I lay at your feet. I'll sing through the night. Oh God, the power of our God. You shine in the shadow. You win every battle. Nothing can stand against the power of our God. In all mighty fortunes, you go before us. Nothing can stand against the power of our God We wanted to let you know that our mission here at Grace is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people. One of the best ways to communicate with us here at Grace is through our connection cards. If you would like to speak to a pastor at Grace, if you have any prayer requests for our prayer team and our elders, or if you're not receiving our Grace Vine weekly emails, this would be a great way to fill it out and let us know. If you're watching with us online, you can click the link below and submit the connection card there. Or if you're here with us at Grace, the connection card is in the seat back pocket in front of you. Just be sure to drop it on your way out in the box next to the doors. Thanks so much for joining us this morning and we hope that this service is a blessing to you. Well, good morning, everyone. It's great to have you here at Grace Raleigh. I'd like to ask you to stand. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace, and it's great having people here in the room. It's great having people at home joining in with us. I thought that this morning we could start off with the scripture of John 3.16, that God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Come all you sinners Come find his mercy Come to the table He will satisfy Taste of his goodness Find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us. Whoever believes in Him will live forever. bring all your failures bring your addictions come lay them down at the foot of the cross Jesus is waiting there with hope in our hearts For God so loved the world praise god praise god from whom all blessings Praise Him, praise Him For the wonders of His love For God so loved the world that He gave us His one and only Son to save The power of hell forever defeated Now it is well, I'm walking in freedom Oh God so loved, God so loved the world Bring all your failures, bring your addictions. Come lay them down at the foot of the cross. Jesus is waiting. God so loved the world. Amen. God sent his son. They called him Jesus. He came to love, heal, and forgive. He lived and died. To buy my pardon. An empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow. he lives all fear is gone because i know he holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives And then one day I'll cross that river I'll fight my spine No war with me And then as death Gives way to victory I'll see the lights of glory and I'll know He lives. Because He lives, I can face tomorrow Because He lives All fear is gone Because I know He holds the future And life is worth the living Just because He lives. And life is worth the living just because He lives. Amen. Amen. All right, y'all can have a seat for a moment. Good morning, Grace Raleigh. It is fabulous to see your smiling faces in here. And welcome to those of you that have joined us online. It is a beautiful and sunny Sunday morning, Welcome to the world for this beautiful sunny weather because in two weeks, the mission committee will be here to gather all of the goodies that you choose to bring. So if you go to Grace Raleigh's events page, you will find a list of things that the mission committee is looking for for the Interfaith Food Shuttle. You will buy those. And then on either that Friday or either that, I'm sorry, that Saturday or that Sunday, you can drive through. The hours are listed on the screen. You can drive through. They will come out to your car. They will pick it up. They will bring it inside, and they will take care of it. So all you have to do is go to the grocery. And I guess these days you could even have it delivered to your house. So that is fabulous. And speaking of driving by and dropping off, if you are the parent of a 6th grader through 12th grader, today is the day you get to drive by and push them out of the car. Woo-hoo! We are so excited to announce that Grace Students is back up and running live and in person. Kyle will be here tonight in all of his fun. And we have the cool thing happening too that he's live streaming the service. So if for some reason your 6th through 12th grader can't be in the building tonight, no problem. Email Kyle, kyle at graceralee.org. And he has all the information and the links that you need to be able to be attached to the live stream and join in that way. They're now going to start into a routine of being in person one week, meeting online together the next week in person, and you get the idea. But email Kyle for any information that you guys might need. So thank you again for coming, for being a part of Grace Raleigh thisbbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody here. This is as full as the church has been since last February. That's crazy. Man, you guys, apparently, we've been going through Ecclesiastes. Y'all love depression and hopelessness. So thanks for showing up to that. You're like, I got to get out of the house now. Maybe that's what I needed to do the whole time, which is make you really, really sad. So you had to come see people. This is great. If you're still joining us at home, we're so grateful for that. This is the third part in our series called Vapor, where we're moving through the book of Ecclesiastes. We've said the whole time that we've saved the dreariest book of the Bible for the dreariest month of the year. And what's really fun is that this is the joyful sermon. This is the one, this is the good news. This is the one where we celebrate. We only did two songs up front because we want to end praising God together, and he gave us sunshine to do this. So it seems that the weather is matching the rhythm of the series, and I think that that's fantastic. In the first week, we started out and we talked about this idea of a hevel or vapor or smoke, and we concluded that Solomon would argue that a vast majority of Americans are wasting their life, right? Which means a vast majority of us are probably investing our life pursuing things that ultimately we can't grab onto or vapor or smoke. They're here one day and they're gone the next. And so that really left us with this question at the end of that week, is there a worthwhile investment of our lives? And if you have notes, you see that at the top of your notes. I think that's been a question that's been lingering in the series. Is there really a worthwhile investment of my life or is it all just a waste of time? Is everyone here just, we're all just chasing vapor? And I think that there's a good answer to that question, but last week we answered it a little bit, but we stumbled into another harsh reality. The harsh reality that even if we pursue wisdom with our life, even if we're obedient, the godliest of the godly, that does not insulate us from pain. Our godliness doesn't protect us from grief, right? And so what we learned by looking at that beautiful passage in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy. There's a time for grieving and there's a time for healing and there's a time to be hurt. There's a time to live and there's a time to die. Like we saw that passage. And what we learned is that pain is not punitive. God's not tightening the screws on us to punish us. Pain is the result of a fallen world, right? And that the harsh reality that Solomon gives us in Ecclesiastes is that no matter what we do, we're going to hurt. No matter how godly we are, there will be seasons of mourning in our life. And so that leaves us, I think, with another really difficult question. Can I ever hope for true happiness? Can I ever, on this side of eternity, grasp onto something that isn't Hevel or vapor or smoke? Can I grasp onto a joy that is immutable and unchangeable, that is resistant to circumstances in life, that even as the storms come, I can still find myself in seasons of joyfulness and contentment? Is it even possible to do those things? And I think those are the two big questions that we bring into this week. Is it possible to pursue anything that really matters? And is it possible to grab onto anything that looks like actual true contentment and joy? And the answer to those questions, I think, is yes. And Solomon answers those questions multiple times in Ecclesiastes. I think in four separate passages, he addresses those with the exact same answer. Four different times, he gives this answer, and I love this answer. I think there's so much bound up in his choice to answer the questions in this way. But like I said, he says it in four separate times. I'm going to read you two of them so that you can get a sense. They're in your notes. If you have them, they'll be on the screen if you're following along at home. But here's what he writes in Ecclesiastes, Solomon repeats this idea. That at the end of the day, what's left for us to do is enjoy our toil, enjoy our food and drink, and honor our God. The end of the book, he ends. The end of the matter is this, all has been heard, fear God and keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. We talked about that last week. And it's important that as we look through what I think is kind of this formula for contentment, that we understand that when he's talking about eating and drinking, when we see eating and drinking in the Bible, that is almost always a reference to a communal activity. Eating and drinking is inherently communal. The Bible rarely talks about eating for sustenance, right? It rarely talks about food as this way to be healthy. It always talks about food and bread and gathering around a table as a form of community. And so when he says that there's nothing for man to do except to find joy in what he does and to eat and to drink. What he means is when we look around the table, when we have our meals, if we love the people who are around us, that's good. That's a gift from God. We go out to eat, we're eating with our friends, and we look around and we have genuine affection, we enjoy these people. That's a gift from God. When you look around your table and you have family there and you love that family. Now listen, we're all parts of families. We know that love isn't just sing song and fairy tales all the time. Sometimes it's hard, but at the end of the day, if you know that I love you and you love me, then that's a gift from God. And so when he's talking about food and drink, he's really referencing community. And then when he talks about toil, enjoying your toil, I have a men's group that meets on Tuesday mornings at 6.30. Anybody can join us if you want to. Just email me. Well, the more the merrier there. And we were talking about this word toil. And to a room full of men, it means career, right? It means work. It means what's your job? But Solomon uses that word a lot more broadly than that in Ecclesiastes. And the word toil really doesn't refer to your job or your career as much as it refers to the activities that you have set aside for that day, the productivity of that day, whatever it is you're going to do. Because we have some men in the group who are retired. If it's only about work, career, then they have no shot at happiness, right? They better get back to it. But really, it's broader than that. It really means, Toyo, what do you have set for yourself today? What productivity are you going to engage in today? And then in this verse, he says that we should do good. And he defines doing good as honoring God with our life, fearing God and keeping his commandments. And it's with these understandings that I kind of arrive at this conclusion of kind of Solomon's equation for contented joy and apex happiness. And I really do think it's this. People you love plus tasks you enjoy plus honoring God equals apex happiness. Listen to me. If when you eat, if as you move through your day, you look around and the people in your life bring you joy, and when you wake up, you're looking forward to the things that you're going to do in that day. Maybe not everything, but the point of the day brings you joy. And you're honoring God with your life. If those things are true of you, then I want you to know this morning, you are apex happy. It doesn't get better than that. Sometimes our problem is just that we can't see it. But I'm telling you, man, if you wake up every day and you get to have breakfast with your family or you go out to lunch with some people at work that you enjoy or you look forward to seeing some friends at small group or something like that, if you look around at your community and you're surrounded by people you love and you look at your days and God has given you something to put your hand to that you enjoy, that gives you a sense of purpose, that helps you become who he's created you to be and use your gifts and abilities to point people to Jesus as you move throughout your days, if that's what you get to do and you're honoring God as you do those things, then listen to me, you are experiencing apex happiness in your life. And I think that we get it so messed up sometimes. We do all the things that Solomon talked about in the first two chapters, and we chase all the things. We run out there and we chase all the success and all the relationships and all the money and all the fulfillment and all the pleasure and all the stuff that's out there. When really what's true is God has already given us everything we need for joy. God has already provided in our lives everything we need for joy. And listen, if you don't have those things, if you look around, you're like, I don't like any of the people in my life right now. If you don't have a fulfillment in your job, if you're not honoring God with your life, then guess what? Those things are attainable. Those things aren't out there and forever away. Those things are attainable. They're right around you. God gives us everything we need for joy within our reach. That's why I brought this chair today. This chair here is my chair from my house. This is my chair in my living room. This chair sits in the corner of our living room, and opposite me is we have a little sectional couch. There's other people who sit in this chair sometimes, but for the most part, it's me. When I sit in this chair, I get to watch dance recitals. I get to watch Lily come in with her friends, and they sing Elsa to me. And I pretend to care about Elsa. I get to watch dumb little magic tricks. We went to some restaurant and they gave her some pot with a magnet on the bottom and there's a plant that comes out of the wand and she comes in and she does the abracadabra, the whatever, and then she pulls it out and for the 37th time, I'm amazed by this magic trick, right? I sit in this chair and Jen sits on the couch and we talk about our days. We talk about what's hard and we talk about what's fun. From this chair, when someone rings the doorbell, if I angle my head just right, I can see down the hallway to the front door and I can see the little face that's there to come play with Lily. If they're all over, I can look this way out the window and I can look at them all, all the neighborhood kids jumping on the trampoline that we got to get for her. In the mornings when I'm doing life right and I'm downstairs reading like I'm supposed to, at about 6.45, 7 o'clock, I can look up the stairs and see Lily up there and motion her down to come sit in my lap and tell me what she's going to do that day. When we have friends over, which I love to do, eventually we end up in our living room and we sit around and we talk and we giggle and we laugh. In the pandemic, I worked from this chair. I set up a little table right here and I do my Zoom calls and I argue with the elders and that's pure joy except for Chris Lata. I love working from that table. I can see all the things that bring me the most joy from this chair. And if I go out there chasing joy, if I go out there trying to track everything down, what am I going to do? Buy a new house for this chair These are from old David. If this church grows to 2,000 people and I get to feel what that feels like, do my conversations with my family and friends get any better from sitting in this chair? No, man. This is it. And sometimes it's not the chair, right? Sometimes it's the kitchen. Sometimes it's when I get to cook dinner and Jen sits on the stool and we talk about our days. Sometimes it's the mornings when Ruby and Lily are on the bed and I'm in the chair in the corner of that room and we're all talking, just enjoying our times. But here's what I know. I can go out there chasing whatever I want to chase. But my times of most profound joy come when I'm right there. They come when I'm around the people that I love the most. They come when I'm soaking in the blessings that God has given me. And this is what we need to pay attention to. Solomon tells us these are God's gifts to us. If people in your life that you love, who love you, they're God's gift to you. Drink them in. Hug them more. Tell them more that you care about them. Tell them more that you're grateful for them. Tell them more that they are a gift from God in your life. You have a thing to do every day that you like to put your hand to, whether it's raising kids or volunteering somewhere or spending time in your neighborhood or going to work or looking forward to seeing your friends or whatever it is. You have things that God has given you that make you productive, that let you feel like you are living out His intended will for you? That's His gift for you. That work, that toil, that's His gift. It's designed for you. And then if we honor God, His invitation to honor Him is His gift to us because He knows that when we live a life honoring Him, we live a life of fewer regrets. We live a life of deeper gratitude. We live a life with a deeper desire for Jesus if we'll just revel in his gifts. This helps me make sense of the Honduran children I saw at one time. For years of my life, I would go down to Honduras with some regularity to take teams down to visit a pastor named Israel Gonzalez. Israel is one of my heroes. The things that he's done for the kingdom are unbelievable. And he is based in a city in central Honduras called, called, uh, Swatopeke. He and his wife have set up a free clinic there. He has a church there. And then from that church, what they do is they organize these goodwill parties and they bring teams down and you get together hot dogs and little tchotchke gifts and you go up into the hillsides. There's mountains surrounding Ciguatapeque and you go up into the mountainside and you go to these villages and he throws these goodwill parties and he hopes that by doing this, these villages that are deeply Catholic, but Catholic in such a way that shuts them off to faith rather than turns them on to faith. And so they're lost communities. And he goes and he throws these parties, and by throwing these goodwill parties, they invite him into the community to plant a church. He's planted 14 churches that way, last I checked. And I would go on these parties. And you go up into these mountains surrounding Suwatopec into a village. And that's not derogatory. It's literally a village. Homes are built of mud and wood, makeshift roofs, one or two rooms, literally dirt poor. I've had the opportunity in my life to be in a fair amount of other countries and to see poverty on multiple continents. Honduras is just about the worst. But yet when we would go there, we would get out and there would always be these children there. And these children would have the biggest, goofiest grins on their face ever. They were so joyful, and they would laugh, and they would play, and they were happy to see you, and it never got wiped off of their face. And I always wondered, kid, how can you be so happy? Don't you know you don't have a Barbie house? Don't you know you don't have a PlayStation? Don't you know your soccer ball stinks? Those kids had it figured out, man. They had people around them who loved them. They had things to do each day that they looked forward to. And they hadn't lived enough life to carry the weight of what it is to not honor God with our choices. They were walking in apex happiness. And I carry all my American wealth down there and privilege, and I look at them and I'm jealous. Because they figured out something that we haven't. And I just think that there is this profound truth that everything that we need is right there within our grasp. We don't have to run around out there chasing vapor and Hevel. God has given us these gifts already. And in that truth, in that truth that everything we need for joy is within our grasp? We answer those two questions we started with. Is there a pursuit that's actually worth investing my life in? Yes. The people you love, the tasks that give you purpose, and honoring God. You want to live a life that matters? You want to get to the end of it and wonder if it's all vapor? Or not have to wonder that? Then invest your life in the people that you love and the tasks that God has ordained for you. Ephesians 2 says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus, that we should do good works, that we should walk in them. Walk in those good works that God intended you for and honor God with the choices that you make. Those are worthwhile pursuits. You will get to the end of your life if you pursue those things and know that it was a life well lived. And he actually doubles down on this idea of pursuing relationships with other people. I don't have a lot of time to spend here on it, but again, this is a passage that I can't just skip over as we go through the book of Ecclesiastes. He doubles down on this idea of having more folks in our life when he writes this has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Solomon doesn't take a lot of time to tell you to invest in a lot of things in Ecclesiastes. If you've been reading along with us, he doesn't tell you to do a lot of stuff there. He just kind of tells you, hey, this stuff's a waste of time. You should honor God. And then he tells you how we got to that conclusion. But here he stops and makes sure you understand the value of having people in your life who love you, who you love in return. And he sets up life as this struggle, this fight, because it is a struggle and a fight to choose to honor God with our lives. It is a struggle and a fight to keep our marriages healthy. It is a struggle and a fight to direct our kids in the right way, to love our families well, to share our faith, to be evangelists in our community, and to make disciples of the people who are around us. That's hard. And Solomon says, if you try to do this alone, woe to you when you fall and you have no one to pick you up. Woe to you when addiction creeps in and there's no one you can tell. Woe to you when doubts creep into your faith and there's no one you can talk to. How hard it must be for you when your marriage gets rocky and there's no one to fight for it. If there's two, he says, you've got a fighting chance. If there's three, that's not quickly broken. We need people in our lives to fight for us. We need to fight for the people in our lives. It seems to be a big value to us. That will help us ensure that we always have people to eat and drink with that we love and enjoy. So I thought it was worth pointing out Solomon's emphasis on this. The other question that remained from the previous weeks is, can I ever hope for true happiness? Yes. Yes, because here's the thing. If the bad things in Ecclesiastes 3 are true, then so are the good ones. Last week, I read the passage and I said, listen, pain is coming for all of us. It's going to hurt. We're going to mourn. We're going to grieve. No one gets to dodge that based on our godliness. It's going to happen to all of us. We will walk through hard times, but here's the reality. If that's true, then the flip side is true. If the bad things are true, then God says we will walk through seasons where we experience the good things. Look at the good things. There is a time to be born, to plant, to heal, to build up, to laugh, to dance, to gather things together, to embrace, to keep, to sow, to speak. A time for love and a time for peace. If we're going to have to walk through hard times, there's going to be good ones too. And I just think that the blessing from Ecclesiastes is this. It hits us with some hard realities. It's stark. It's unflinching. Hey, most of us are wasting our lives. And no matter what you do to invest it well, you're going to hurt. Those are hard truths. But I've said the whole time that if we can accept them on the other side is this joy that is waiting for us. And this is the joy. The joy is, yes, there's big things going on that we can't control. But in the midst of all that stuff that we can't control, God gives us these gifts, these moments of joy, these pockets to lean into where we celebrate him, where we're grateful for him, and we acknowledge those things as gifts. And I just think that if we accept the difficult realities from this book, then we can start to look for these little pockets of joy in our life, and they will bring us such more fulfillment than if we just move through them waiting to get to the next thing. At our house, we do a thing called Breakfast Sammy Saturday, all right? I like a good breakfast sandwich. I know it's hard to tell by looking at me, but I like a good, I put butter down, I toast the bread, I do the eggs, I do some bacon, do some cheese on there, and then I put it all together on the blackstone, cut it in half, and the good egg bleeds out onto it. It's all the goodness, and then you dip your sandwich in there. It's the best. I love breakfast Sammy Saturdays. You guys are not enthusiastic enough about this. You need breakfast Sammy Saturdays in your life. Well, I'll just let you guys sign up. Come over to the house. I'll make them for you. We love it. But it's just kind of a thing that I do. I like it. I make one for Jen and Lily, and they kind of eat half of theirs. I'm more excited about it than anybody else. But then one day, Lily brought this home from preschool, and it made me cry right on the spot. That's breakfast Sammy Saturday. She drew my griddle. She put food on it. Apparently, I make pizza there. And she brought it home to me. Now, the thing about this is, it was an assignment at preschool. She was told, just make whatever you want. It's an art project. And she made breakfast Sammy Saturday. And she brought it home to me. And she said, look, Daddy. And she told me what it was. I started crying right there on the spot. I got these big old alligator tears in my eyes looking at Jen. What a cool thing. And sure, life's going to be hard. She's going to be a teenager. She's five now, so she's kind of maxed out on cuteness, and now it's just hyper sometimes. But even though I know that there's hard times ahead, even though I know she won't always appreciate things like Breakfast Sammy Saturday, I know she does now. And I know that that's a gift from my God. And I know that what Ecclesiastes says is the best thing I can possibly do is to drink deeply of that. The best thing we can possibly do is find joy in these moments that God allows. We don't know how long we'll have them. I was talking with a friend last night who's got a new infant. And he said every time he gets up with the infant in the middle of the night and holds her, that it's a privilege. Because he doesn't know when that last time's going to be. And that's the truth of it. I think that we have so many pockets of joy in our life every day. If we have people that we love, if we have something to do that we appreciate, if we're choosing to honor God with our life. And I think that because we're so busy chasing vapor, sometimes we miss these sweet little moments that can all be had right here if we're just paying enough attention. That's why I think on the other side of these realities awaits for us this profound joy. And I think that when we realize that, that when we realize that God has designed these things to bring us happiness in our life, that what's really important is if we don't believe in a God, if we're atheistic in our worldview, then that's it. The joy terminates in those moments. That's all we have. But if we are a spiritual people who believe that God designed these things and these blessings in our life to make himself evident in our life, then our joy doesn't terminate in the moment. It turns into exuberant praise. It reminds us that we have a God that designed this for us. And the other part is, and this is incredible, that the joy that we're experiencing in that moment is only a glimpse of the eternity that he's designed for us and won for us with Jesus, which is what we're going to come back and talk about next week, is how these things are glimpses to the eternity that Jesus has already won for us. So in a few minutes, the band is going to come, and we've saved two fun, exuberant songs to praise God together. And while we do that, I want to encourage you to keep those two thoughts in your head. What are the things that I can see from my chair? What are the joys that God has given me that are within my reach from places that I already have in my life? What are the things that maybe I'm missing because I'm chasing stuff that I don't need? And then let's reflect on the reality that there is coming an eternity where that's all we experience. It's no more just pockets. It's reality. And that is something for us all to celebrate. Let me pray for us. Father, you are so very good to us. You've given us so much. Lord, I pray that we would be grateful for those blessings. I pray that you would steep us in profound gratitude for the things that we have, that you would show us what we need and what we don't. God, if there is somebody here or who can hear my voice, who doesn't have people in their life that they love, God, would you bring that to them? Would you provide that community for them even here at Grace? Would you give them the courage to slip up their hand in some way, to fill out some sheet, or to send some email, or make some phone call, or some text, and help them engage with relationships that matter to them. God, if there are people who don't have something they enjoy in their days, would you give them the courage to find that? Show them how you designed them and what you created them for. God, if we are not honoring you with our lives, I pray that you would give us the courage to do that. Let us praise you exuberantly, God, for the joys that you have given us in our lives. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen. Amen, amen. Thank you, Nate. Let's all stand up. guitar solo Our God, firm foundation Our rock, the only solid ground Let's lift his name. you are the only king forever you are victorious Unmatched in all your wisdom In love and justice you will reign and every knee will bow we bring our expectations our hope is anchored in your name the name of jesus Jesus you are the only king forever forevermore you are victorious We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. We lift our banner high. We lift the name of Jesus. From age to age you reign. Your kingdom has no end. You are the only king forever. Mighty God, we lift you higher. You are the only king forever. Forevermore, you are the only king forever Forevermore, you are victorious. He is doing great things See what our Savior has done See how His love overcomes he has done great things. We dance in your freedom, awake and alive. Oh Jesus, our Savior, your name lifted high be faithful forever more you have done great things and I know you will do it again for your promise is yes and amen you will do great things God you do great things Oh Oh you have done great things you've done great things every captive and break every chain oh god You have done great things. You have done great things. Oh God, you guys here today. God bless. Have a great week. Thank you. Come all you weary, come all you thirsty, come to the well that never runs dry. Drink of the water, come and thirst no more. Well, come all you sinners, come find His mercy. Come to the table, He will satisfy. Taste of His goodness, find what you're looking for. For God so loved the world that He gave us, His one and only Son to save us. If you never believed in Him, you'll live forever. Here we go. We'll live forever. God so loved the world. Praise God. Praise God. From whom all blessings flow. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. Praise God. Praise God. Praise God. Praise Him. Praise Him. For the wonders of His love. His amazing love. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save. For God so loved the world that He gave us. His one and only Son to save us Whoever believes in Him Will live forever Oh, the power of hell Forever defeated Now it is well I'm walking in freedom For God so loved the world. Amen. You are here, moving in our midst. I worship you. I worship you. You are here, working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are here. Working in this place. I worship you. I worship you. You are way maker. Miracle worker. Promise keeper. Light in the darkness. darkness my god that is who you are Jesus. Jesus I worship you. I worship you. You're mending every heart. You are here and you are mending every heart. I worship you. I worship you. You are here and you are way maker, miracle worker, promise keeper, light're the way maker. Yeah, sing it again. Oh, that is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. That is who you are. My Jesus. Yes, even when. Come on. You never stop. You're the way maker. Oh, that is who you are. Oh, it's who you are, my Jesus. Miracle worker. That is who you are. is above depression. His name is above loneliness. Oh, His name is above disease. His name is above cancer. His name is above every other name. That is who you are. Jesus. oh i know that is who you are When darkness tries to roll over my bones When sorrow comes to pain is all I know, oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. I am not captive to the light. I'm not afraid to leave my past behind. Oh, I won't be shaken. No, I won't be shaken. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. My fear doesn't stand a chance when I stand in your love. Oh, I'm standing. There's power in your name. Power in your name. There's power that can break off every chain. There's power that can empty out a grave. There's resurrection power that can save. is Thank you. I'm standing in your love. I count on one thing. The same God that never fails will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. The same God who's never late is working you're working Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy. My heart is heavy God that never fails. Will not fail me now. You won't fail me now in the waiting. This ain't God who's never late. He's working all things out. You're working all things out. Oh, yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will. For all my days. Oh, yes, I will. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all names that nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise, to glorify, glorify the name of all Thank you. The name of all names. That nothing can stand against. And I choose to praise. To glorify, glorify the name of our names. That nothing can stand against. Oh yes, I will lift you high in the lowest valley. Yes, I will bless your name. Oh, yes, I will sing for joy when my heart is heavy. All my days. Oh, yes, I will. Thank you. Come let us bow at his feet. He has done great things..

Good morning, Grace. It's so good to be here with you in this way again. This week, we're jumping into a new series called The Time of Kings. You should know by now, if you've been a part of Grace for any period of time, that I love the Old Testament. I love the stories. I love the characters. I love the nuance. I love the way that diving into the Old Testament not only makes the Bible come alive, but sheds new and helpful light on the Old Testament. And whenever we do a series in the Old Testament and tell some of these stories from that period of time and that portion of the Bible, one of my hopes is that if nothing else, the Bible will come alive for you and you'll enjoy diving into it on your own. I hope that this whets your appetite or inspires you to dive into Scripture and read these stories on your own. We're going to be looking at the books of 1 and 2 Kings. We have a reading plan to go along with this series. That's on our website. So if you'll go there, graceralee.org slash live, you can find our reading plan. Many of you are on it right now and follow through the books of 1 and 2 Kings with us. It won't be exhaustive, but if you want to get ahead of it, then you can try to read in the margins and read through those books as we do this series for seven weeks. I'm excited about this series because the first and second Kings kind of covers a large narrative arc in the Old Testament. The Old Testament from Genesis all the way up through Ezra kind of tells the story of the nation of Israel. And then the books that come after that, the wisdom books and the prophecy books, the major prophets and the minor prophets kind of give us details of different portions of that story. And a large swath of the story is covered in the books of 1 and 2 Kings. And there's all kinds of good things tucked away in these books. And we're going to highlight some of those over the next seven weeks. But by way of background, so that we know where we are in history and in the life of the nation of Israel, I wanted to kind of give you a very quick overview of how we get to the book of Kings and what's going on around the story that we're going to focus on today. So if you go back all the way to Genesis, there's a guy named Abram who lives in Ur, a Sumerian city. God comes to Abram and he says, I want you to go to this place that I'm going to show you that we know is the modern day nation of Israel. Then it was the land of Canaan. But he says, I want you to go to this place where I'm going to show you. And he makes Abram three promises for land, people, and blessing. He says, I'm going to give you this particular plot of land, which we know is modern day Israel. I'm going to make your descendants like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. And the Messiah is going to come from you. And then he changes his name to Abraham. And Abraham goes and he takes his family and he goes over to the land of Canaan. And Abraham finally has a son named Isaac. Isaac has sons named Esau and Jacob. Jacob is the one through some finagling that inherits the promises of Abraham and the blessing. Jacob has 12 sons, one of whom is Joseph. Joseph is kind of pushed out of his family. They sell him into slavery. He ends up in Egypt. Fast forward 30 years, there's a famine and Jacob's 11 sons, the rest of his family moves down to Egypt where they're reunited with Joseph and they exist in prosperity in Egypt for a long time. That's pretty much the book of Genesis. Then the book of Exodus starts, the second book of the Bible. We fast forward 400 years. Moses is there. He's a descendant from Abraham and a claimant to the promises that God made to Abraham. And he's adopted into Pharaoh's family. He spends some time in the desert. God appears to him in the desert and says, I want you to go free my people. And Moses does just that. He frees slaves from the most powerful nation in the world by the hand of God. And while they're wandering around in the desert, the people of God, the Israelites, the Hebrew people, are clamoring for rules. They're like, it's not enough to just follow you, to just kind of loosely obey you. We need some policies here. And so God gives them the Ten Commandments. And then on to the Ten Commandments adds more laws through the book of Leviticus. Until in the desert, we have developed this now formalized religion that we know is Judaism. That would later become Christianity. Then while they're wandering around in the desert, Moses passes away. Joshua raises up to take over leadership in the nation of Israel. They cross the Jordan River into the promised land of Canaan that God promised Abraham. They fulfill that promise. They slowly conquer it and take it over. Once they conquer it and take it over, Joshua divides the land amongst the 12 tribes of Israel and they set up shop. In this time, immediately after taking over the land of Canaan and dividing up the land into 12 territories, they don't have a king. They're ruled periodically by judges. What would happen is God's people, Abraham's children, would periodically rebel, forget about God, do whatever it was they wanted to do, ignore God's laws, and God, to get their attention, would allow them to be oppressed, sometimes enslaved, sometimes heavily taxed, sometimes kidnapped, sometimes at war. And when they were oppressed, they would cry out to God, please save us, we know we did wrong. And God would raise up what we call a judge, and the judge would free Israel of oppression and restore them back to sovereignty, and everything was good until the Israelites forgot again and they began to sin again, forgot about God, lived how they wanted to. God would allow oppressors to come in and then God would raise up a judge when they would cry out. And this is the cycle that we're in. One of the last judges was a guy named Samuel. There's two books in the Bible named after Samuel, 1 and 2 Samuel. Samuel was born to a woman named Hannah who was barren, who prayed and committed to God, if you'll give me a son, I'll commit him to you. So as soon as Samuel was able to eat solid food, probably at about four or five years old, his mom Hannah takes him to the temple, gives him to the high priest Eli, and says this is God's son, that he belongs to God. And Samuel grows up in the temple and eventually becomes the high priest, the prophet, and the judge of Israel. And this is where we pick up the story. If you have a Bible there at home, you can actually go ahead and turn to 1 Samuel chapter 8. 1 Samuel chapter 8. Now, I know that this series is over the kings and first and second kings, and it's weird that I'm diving into Samuel on the first day. But first of all, we're going to get into kings a little bit. Second of all, this story has more to do with the meta-narrative of the story of kings. This story is how Israel got their very first king. And I think that there is a cautionary tale that comes out of this story in 1 Samuel 8 that sheds a light on the rest of the time of the kings that's important enough for us to stop and focus on this morning. So in 1 Samuel 8, Samuel's getting old. He's appointed his sons as the next judges of Israel, and they're not good at it. They're taking advantage of their position. They're corrupt, and the people of Israel are upset about this. So they come to Samuel, and they say, hey, we want a king. And listen, it's important. if you have a Bible at home, please go ahead and open to 1 Samuel 8, because I'm going to summarize a lot of this chapter, and I really want you interacting with the text and following it along and making sure that I'm not making stuff up. But the children of Israel, the people of Israel come to Samuel, and they say, hey, we want a king. And Samuel says, why do you want a king? And Israel stomps their foot and holds their breath until their face turns blue and responds like a petulant middle school child. And they basically say, because everybody else has a king and we want one too. Jordan gets to have a king. Lebanon, they get to have a king. Egypt, they get to have a king. The Babylonians have a king. We want a king too. It's not fair. Everybody else gets a king and we don't get a king. And that stinks, Samuel. Please go to God and get him to give us a king. It's really an incredibly immature attitude from a whole nation of people, which is basically, why do you want a king? Well, everybody else has a king, so we feel like we should have one too. It's the same reason your fifth grader is demanding a cell phone right now. So Samuel is troubled, and he's angered, and he goes to God. And he says, God, they're clamoring for a king. What do I do? And he's clearly taking it personally. They've rejected me and rejected my leadership. They're asking for a king. Help me squelch this. Help me quell this. God, what do I say to them? And God responds this way in verse 7 of chapter 8. Listen to this. So Samuel goes to God and he says, God, the people have rejected me. They don't want me to be their ruler. They want a king. They're not happy with the judge. They don't like the current system. They've rejected me. What do I do? And God says, Samuel, Samuel, give them what they want and understand that they're not rejecting you. They're rejecting me from being their king. God says, Samuel, listen, man, I set it up this way on purpose. I directed Joshua to set up the nation exactly as I wanted it to be established. The way that things are currently orchestrated, that you're a judge and that you represent me and that my nation, my people, Israel, is different than the rest of the world in that they don't have a king. That's on purpose, Samuel. And if you think about it, it's not like God didn't know what a monarchy was when he set up his nation. It's not like the idea of kings hadn't occurred to him. It's not like he thought it was a great idea and just thought, nah, I want my people to just be confused for a long time. No, his people didn't need a king because God was the king and the judge was his representative. I mean, the Israelites had the best setup in the history of history. The most altruistic, selfless, powerful, loving, gracious, forgiving being to ever exist was their king. The king of kings was their king. There could be no better ruler than God. And they had him. But they wanted a physical king. They wanted to be able to see and touch him. And so they weren't happy with what they had because they wanted it so badly they couldn't see what God did for them. Israel's desire made them blind to God's provision. Israel's desire, their earnest want for a king made them blind to God's provision for them. Because they had an expectation that led them down this path, that made them expect this thing, they didn't see what was provided for them over here in such a deep and wonderful and profound way. Their own desire made them blind to God's provision. And so God says to Samuel, listen, give them what they want. Give them what they want because they're going to keep clamoring and they haven't rejected you, Samuel. They've rejected me. I've tried to provide for them as their king and they don't see it. So don't take this personally, Samuel. This is an offense to me. And Samuel warns them. Samuel warns them. He goes back to the people. He says, okay, God says that you can have a king. God says that you can have a king, but listen. Listen to what happens if you're going to have a king. I'm reading in verse 10. He says, so Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking from a king, and God's going to let you have one, but you need to understand. You need to understand, listen, this is not going to be a good thing. He's going to take your sons from you and he's going to put them on the front lines and they're going to die for him. He's going to take your daughters out of your home and he's going to take them to his palace and they're going to serve him there. He's going to take a tenth of what you own. He's going to tax you. He's going to enslave you. He's going to impoverish you. And eventually you're going to regret this choice and you're going to cry out to God and he's not going to hear you. Just so you know. It's such a stark warning to these Israelites who are crying out for a king because they want one so badly. You know, it reminds me of something that I've thought for a long time. It's not all the way true, but it's mostly true. You win every argument you get into with God. There's a couple examples where that's not the case. Jonah lost the argument. But for the most part, if you want to argue with God, you win. He tells the people of Israel, you don't need a king, you have me. And they go, but we really want one. And he goes, it's going to be terrible for you. You're going to hate it. And they go, we don't care. We really want one. And God says, okay, if that's what you want. You might remember the story of Jacob who wrestled with God. God comes to him in a vision at night. He wrestles with God all night long. And do you know who won that wrestling match? Jacob did. Is that because God's not powerful enough to defeat Jacob in a wrestling match? No. It's because when we argue with God, we win. God says, hey, I really want you to do this thing. And we go, oh God, no, I don't want to do that thing. But I really, I think it'd be best for you if you did the thing. No, God, please don't make me do the thing. I don't want to do the thing. I'll do anything but the thing. Please don't make me do the thing. And God says, okay, it'd be best for you. It'd be best for your family. You're going to find joy and contentment there, but I'm not going to make you. Or God says, hey, you know, your life would really be better if you didn't do the thing. Your family would be stronger if you'd stop doing the thing. And we go, but God, I really like doing the thing. One day in the future, I'll stop doing the thing. but right now I'm gonna keep doing the thing because I'm finding joy there. And God says, you know what? You can keep doing the thing, but you're only gonna find wreckage there. You're already walking in hurt and damage and leaving a terrible wake, and you're only gonna leave a greater one, and you're only gonna end in more damage and more death, but you keep doing the thing if you want to do the thing. Go ahead. When we argue with God, we get our way. He's going to let us win. But I think what we see out of the story of how Israel got their first king is that sometimes getting your way isn't the best way. Sometimes getting your way isn't the best way. Sometimes getting that thing that we desperately want, that we petition God for, we need it, we're praying for it, we're begging for it, we're asking for it, and we don't, God hasn't given it to us yet, but finally he gives it to us. And that's not the best thing. Sometimes God won't give it to us. So we force it and we find our own way to make things happen. And that's not the best way. Sometimes we argue with God and we say, I don't want to do that thing that you want me to do. And he says, okay, you don't have to do it, but just know you got your way, but that's not the best way. A big warning that I think that echoes through the centuries of how Israel got their first king is that sometimes getting your way isn't the best way. And it turns out to be true. If you'll read through the book of 1 and 2 Kings, what you'll find is that the first king they had was a disaster. He was a selfish jerk and that David, the second king, had to do a military takeover of Jerusalem just to establish his own kingdom. And then it went well for a while, but at the end of his reign, his son Absalom raised up against him and staged a coup d'etat and overthrew him. And David had to siege Jerusalem again, during which he lost his son Absalom. After that, he was able to peacefully hand it over to his son Solomon. Solomon hands it over to Rehoboam, who's such a terrible leader that the northern tribes revolt and follow someone named Jeroboam. And within four kings, within four kings, after they clamored in 1 Samuel 8, we need a king. it's gonna make us good, it's gonna make us better, it's gonna give us security, it's gonna get us respect among the nations. Within four kings, they descend into civil war and the nation splits forever. It exists for the rest of the Old Testament as the northern tribes of Israel and the southern tribes of Judah. And within 300 years, each of those separate kingdoms is ushered off into slavery and exile in Babylon and in Assyria. And at the end of the Old Testament, they come limping back a people of slaves in a post, so I'll highlight for you the story of King Hezekiah. You can find this in 2 Kings 20. King Hezekiah was a righteous man. The southern tribes, the northern kingdoms of Israel had no good kings, had no godly kings for any of the 300 years that they existed. The southern kings, the southern kingdom of Judah only had three good kings. One of them was a guy named Hezekiah. Hezekiah was lauded for his faithfulness and his righteousness. When they were surrounded by the Babylonian army, led by a guy named Sennacherib. Sennacherib sends a letter to Hezekiah and he says, listen, get everybody out of the city because I'm going to burn it to the ground. I'm going to take this place over. And if you're stubborn, they're going to die because of you. And Hezekiah takes the letter to the temple. He lays it down before the Lord. He kneels and he lifts it up to God and he says, God, what are we going to do about this? And God says, your faithfulness has saved your people. I will save your people and you will not have to fire an arrow. And sure enough, that's what happens because of Hezekiah's righteousness. After that, Hezekiah gets deathly ill, and he's going to die. And he prays and petitions the Lord for healing. Please, please, God, save me. Please, please, don't let me die. And God in His goodness grants him 15 more years. And towards the end of those 15 years, there's an envoy of Babylonians that come back to Jerusalem. And Hezekiah and his pride can't resist but showing them everything in his kingdom. He shows them all the storehouses, all the wealth, all the things that he's done. It's not enough for Hezekiah to have the applause and the adulation of the nation of Israel for them to think he's great. He wants the Babylonians to think he's great too. In the south, we call that getting too big for your britches. And so after the Babylonians leave, Isaiah the prophet comes to Hezekiah and he says, hey, what did you show them? He says, I showed them everything because of his pride. And Isaiah says, because you did that, you know they're coming back and they're going to take everything that you showed them and they're going to enslave your people. And Hezekiah responds. Look at 2 Kings chapter 20. He responds, as long as there's security in my time, what do I care? Within those extra 15 years that God granted him, Hezekiah lost his way. He lost his character. He went from being humble and righteous and holy to prideful and arrogant and self-centered. And instead of remembering Hezekiah for this wonderful beacon of righteousness and hope that it can be done right, we have to balance his memory with his faltering in the last 15 years. And the story of Hezekiah shows us again that maybe getting our way isn't the best way. It would have been better for him to have gone into eternity when God allowed him to get sick. He regretted asking for those 15 years. And the same is true in our life. We all have things in our life that we petition God for, that we feel like we want so very badly. I can remember when I graduated from college with my freshly minted pastoral ministries degree. I had worked in Young Life. I had been around youth groups. I had had experience. I had done summer camp. And I wanted more than anything to be the youth pastor of a big, fun youth group at a big, fun church where I could do whatever I wanted. I wanted that, and I prayed for it earnestly. And instead, God sent me to Rocky Mount, Virginia, the moonshine capital of the world. Everybody's got to be proud of something. And we met, to say it was an old country church is probably a disservice to old country churches. We met in a colonial farmhouse on a hillside, literally in the middle of nowhere. It was about 35 people a week. There's three middle school boys in my youth group, and none of them cared what I thought about the G gospels. That's what God gave me. A far cry from what I petitioned him for. That was at 25, 24. But at 30, he gave me the thing I had asked him for. I had a big fun youth group at a big fun church. And what I became certain of is, if he'd have given me the petitions of my heart at 24, they would have ruined me and I would have ruined it. And so because God knows better than I do, he said no or not yet to my request when I was 24. We all have things that we petition God for. We all have things that we earnestly want. Maybe we earnestly want a new job, a new opportunity, a new challenge. Maybe we're working through an anxiety and a depression and we just, we've cried out to God, please take this from me. Maybe there's some turmoil in a relationship that matters to us and we've prayed that God would fix it and it just seems to be getting worse and we're not sure what's happening. Maybe we need money. Maybe we just want more money than we have. Maybe we want a bigger house than we have. Maybe we're praying for a move that's not working. Maybe we're praying for an opportunity that we're not getting. Maybe we're being passed up for a promotion that we feel like we deserve. Maybe we're praying for a child that's not coming yet. We're all petitioning God for something. Maybe we're even praying for health or healing for ourselves or for a loved one. We, like the children of Israel, have this thing that we really, really want. This morning, in light of the cautionary tale that comes out of how Israel got their first king. I want us to think about that thing or those things that we really want, that we earnestly need. Some of them might be silly. Some of them are deathly important. But this morning, can we just pause for a second and consider the possibility that God's answer has been no or not yet because yes isn't best for you. Can we just stop and slow down and that thing that you feel like you want so badly that might even seem like a good and righteous prayer. Maybe God hasn't given that thing to you yet. Maybe his answer is no or not yet because yes isn't best for you. Maybe God knows, no, I'm not gonna just drop in and magically heal your relationship because if you don't go through these hard times and do the hard work to find a way to help, then you're not gonna have a foundation for it to not get unhealthy in the future. You need this struggle. No, I'm not going to give you the job yet because you're not ready for it. And if I do, it's going to destroy you. No, I'm not going to give you the money yet because if I do, you're going to be an arrogant jerk and that's going to destroy you too. And you're going to lose your friends. And I don't want that for you. Your greatest happiness is here. I'm providing for you in a way right now that you're not acknowledging that if you would just stop looking at what you're focused on and focus your eyes on God, you would see that he's already met that need for you in your life. Just like the Israelites who were clamoring for a king, yet they had the best one ever. And I know that it's hard to hear. And this one hits close to home for me. But it's possible that even though we earnestly pray for healing, that healing simply isn't what's best. The healing wasn't best for Hezekiah. We so often forget that God sees things from the scope of eternity. And we see this much of it. And even though in this much of it, sometimes it feels like we want something so badly and we can't understand why God wouldn't let us have it, He sees this. And He understands perfectly. And in eternity, you will too. Consider this morning the possibility, just the possibility, that the reason you don't have the thing that you want so very much, that seems like God should want that thing for you, is because having it wouldn't be what's best for you right now. Consider the possibility that God is already providing that in ways that you don't notice. And listen, hear me. I'm not saying that we shouldn't petition God. I'm not saying that we shouldn't go to Him in prayer. I'm not saying that we shouldn't lay out before Him the things that we earnestly want. Jen and I prayed for years that we would have a child. Lily is the answer to that prayer. I don't regret having Lily. It's one of the greatest blessings in my life, if not the single greatest blessing in my life. We should absolutely petition God. The story from Kings is not that we shouldn't go to him with what we want, but maybe it points to a prayer by Jesus himself in the New Testament and encourages us to pray like that. I don't want you to hear this morning that you shouldn't petition God, but I do want you to hear that we should pray like Jesus did, according to the Father's will. When the disciples go to Jesus and they say, how do we pray? He says, when you pray, pray like this. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The disciples said, Jesus, how do we pray? And he says, you pray like this. First, you praise God. You acknowledge who he is. Then you say, not my will, your will. What you want, God. Let your will be done here on earth as it is in heaven. And to put his money where his mouth was in praying like this, we see Jesus literally pray like this at the end of the Gospels when he's in Gethsemane, the night that he's getting arrested to be crucified. He's laying prostrate on the ground. He is sweating blood. He is maximum stressed out that a human can possibly endure. And he is crying out, God, Father, please take this cup from me. Please don't make me do this. I don't want to do the thing. I don't want to get crucified. I don't want to die like this. Please don't make me do this. But not my will, but your will be done, Father. See the difference? Israel says, God, we want this thing no matter what. God says, it's not going to be good for you. That's not my will. They go, we don't care. This is what we want. We know better than you. Jesus says, God, this is what I want. I want it desperately, badly. But God, I acknowledge that my will might be different than your will, so your will be done, not mine. I think the message coming out of 1 Samuel 8 and the overarching narrative of the results of this desire that's expressed in chapter 8 that we see in 1 and 2 Kings. There's this stark reminder that when we argue with God, He's going to let us have our way, but our way is not the best way. And we should remember that if there is something that we earnestly want, if we've gone to God like the Israelites had and said, hey, we really want this, and God hasn't given it to us yet, it's probably because it's not best for us. And let us remember that when we pray, when we petition God, we should do it like Jesus did. And lay out the things before the Father that you earnestly want, but let's blanket that with, Father, not my will, but your will be done. Let's pray. Lord, you are good, and you are gracious, and you are loving. You are boundlessly patient with us. You were gracious with our frailty and our humanity. I pray that we would see that more and more. God, in light of the sermon, I pray for grace. I don't know how much longer COVID is gonna be a thing. God, I hate that we can't all be together. I know that you hate it more. I know that you're seeing us through this season. And God, even though we earnestly pray that we can all come back together with a feeling of safety and security without anxiety about catching a disease that some of us cannot handle. God, not our will, but your will be done. Let us all return in your perfect timing. God, with the different issues that we're facing with our employment, with the anxiety that we're facing with whether or not our job's going to exist in a couple of months, for those of us who are on the incredibly competitive job market, Father, not our will, but your will be done. Father, may your will be done in the marriages of grace. May your will be done in the raising of the children of grace. May your will be done in the day-to-day lives of the people who call this place home. May your will be done in my life. God, help us pray like that. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Doug Bergeson, and I am a partner here at Grace. Typically, when I say good morning, it's supposed to elicit a response, but I don't want to put too much pressure on you. Thank you. Hold on to your hats, because we are going to kick this morning off with a bang. We're going to play one round of Final Jeopardy for all the marbles, okay? And just to refresh, I will give you the answer, and you, our studio audience, is to find the question that best fits that answer. You got it? Okay, here we go. A, sitting at a dead stop on I-95. B, anesthesia-free root canal. C, listening to a celebrity athlete refer to himself exclusively in the third person. D, being waterboarded. E, death by meteor. And F, all of the above. Okay, now your job is to answer in the form of a question. Just shout it out. Someone asked, Nate asked if that was my wife. No, no. She was thinking it, but she's not that type to do that. No, no, that's very kind of you. I wish that you had made it a little less personal, a little less hurtful. What kind of sermon? I'm looking for what kind of sermon? Stewardship sermon, I guess. That's right, a sermon on giving. You know, it's a little sad and depressing for me that you found that so easy to answer. What really stings is that there are some of you out there who answered that question without any sense of irony, without any sense that it was meant to be a joke. I was watching a few of you, and you were actually sitting there trying to answer it seriously. Yeah, I think I'd rather die by a meteor than have to listen to Doug. But okay, well, too bad. I'm here. I'm going to go for it, and you just have to put up with it, okay? But first, let me open us in prayer. Dear Lord, thank you for this morning. Thank you for all these people. Help me say what it is you want me to say and help it to be profitable for us. And it's your name we pray, amen. Okay, as we are kicking off our capital campaign, Grace is Going Home, I've been asked to speak on biblical stewardship, how we invest our resources, our energy, our passions, our time, and our finances. But what I have to say this morning really doesn't have anything to do with our campaign. It encompasses it. It's included in that. Rather, though, I want to share my understanding of what the Bible teaches about biblical stewardship, about giving, about the importance and practice of it. I also want to push back against some of the ways biblical teaching has been misrepresented and misunderstood. My hope is to adjust the lens through which we see giving in a way that reveals it to be the blessing and the privilege that God intended. Now, I've heard a bunch of stewardship sermons over the years, some better than others, and good or bad, compelling or not, they all kind of typically hit the same notes. You know, one being that, boy, the Bible talks a lot about giving, so it must be really important, and you better pay attention, that God is the owner and source of everything. So why do we even fuss? You know, and why do we even think that it's any of ours in the first place? How we should use our resources for God's glory. How giving expresses our thanks to God and is an outward expression of a confession, really, of the gospel. And how our giving can help people in important ways. And typically, your stewardship sermon ends, sort of seals the deal with an emotional and heart-rending story of how a certain gift made an enormous difference in someone's life. You're not going to hear any of that from me this morning. No bringing you to the emotional brink. No pulling at your heartstrings. No litany of all the great things grace can accomplish helped by your generosity. Another thing you're not going to hear from me is something that every stewardship sermon and stewardship campaign has either said outright or strongly implied, that God and His church need our money. They need our tithes and offerings to carry on their business. Now, I'm exaggerating just a little bit, but it sounded sometimes as if God is up in heaven, fingers crossed, anxiously waiting to see if Debbie and I come through with an appropriate tithe so that the work of the church can move forward. And that's only a part of it. If you're all familiar with the Bible standards for giving, you know that the bar is set pretty high. It is hard to do right. There are a lot of boxes to check. Not only are we supposed to give, but we're supposed to be generous about it. And being generous might not even be good enough because the Bible standard is sacrificial giving. And not only are we asked to give generously, perhaps even sacrificially, but we're supposed to give in a spirit that considers others' needs more important than our own. Not only are we asked to give generously and with the proper care and concern for others, but we're supposed to give freely, not out of obligation or compulsion. Finally, it's not enough to give generously, even sacrificially, thinking only of others, not at all about ourselves, freely, not out of obligation or compulsion. There's one added kicker. We're supposed to do it joyfully. We're supposed to be happy about it. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my, how do we do all that? Not surprisingly, my track record is pretty mixed in meeting all those expectations. I'm not at all convinced I'm doing it right, doing it well, or doing it enough, and I know I am not alone in thinking that. If you could see me when I open my checkbook, I'm not sure you would remark to yourself, well, would you look at that? Look how cheerful Doug is. More often, you would see someone who's trying to be a good soldier, who's giving out of his abundance, who's giving out of a sense of need, who's giving out of a sense of obligation, recognizing that the need's here and elsewhere. You know, of course, there have been times when a specific appeal, maybe a church or a cause or perhaps a mission trip, has really gotten a hold of me and touched me, where I became emotionally invested, you know, and I've really got fired up, kind of like a sugar high. But before too long, I always seem to settle back into the less emotional, more mundane and murky exercise of balancing what I need and want with what I think God needs and wants from me. What's the right amount? I don't want to be stingy, but do I really want to go overboard? What's enough? If I give everything away, is that better? Is that inherently more spiritual? How does that square with my responsibility to my family? There's a tension. It's as if I'm in a Turkish bazaar bargaining with God. My goal, more often than not, is to try to arrive at a number that allows me to feel good about myself and sufficiently faithful because I gave God his part without impinging too much on the things that I want, the things I'm used to doing and having, the things others in my life want and expect. Something's lost in this process. That simply can't be what the biblical writers are talking about. For some of us, that sense of obligation leads to a desire to seek God's approval, to do enough to please him, to check that box. For others, it can lead to a pervading sense that giving is a zero-sum game, that when we give, inevitably we forfeit something of equal or greater value. It can also leave open the door for spiritual pride, the thinking that, you know, we're really coming through for the church and for God, that we are one of his 18, you know, a sense of self-righteousness and self-satisfaction. Or the pendulum can easily swing in the other direction, where that sense of obligation leads to guilt or a sense that somehow we're disappointing God. For others, we might simply tune it all out and convince ourselves that we're at a stage of life where this really doesn't apply to us. If we have young kids, we're just starting out, my pace sucks at work, blah, blah, blah. We'll worry about that later. So I became increasingly dissatisfied with what I was hearing about giving. It left a bad taste in my mouth. Nothing I had heard had equipped me to give as the Bible wanted me to, generously, joyfully, with a genuinely compassionate heart and caring heart, not out of obligation or compulsion. It's not that all those reasons for giving that I had heard were wrong. They're not. But something was missing, something big and vital to the understanding and practice of biblical giving. And because they didn't tell the whole story, those reasons simply weren't enough for me to experience giving as God intended. So what was missing? It's a $64 question. I'll tell you what was missing. I needed to be more selfish about my giving. That's what was missing. I needed to think about my giving in a much more self-interested light. I needed to understand better what was in it for me. Why? Because giving isn't for God. It's for you and me to benefit and help us. Now, the Bible does talk a ton about the importance of giving. No argument there. An enormous emphasis is placed on giving generosity in Scripture. But all those sermons and stewardship campaigns that I heard had it backwards. Giving's not important to God because he needs it. God wants us to give because we need it, because of the magnificent things the act of giving can do for our stubborn human hearts, how it can shape them, transform them, and move them to a better place. There's no question that our giving can help others, but what's too often missed is how profoundly our giving can help us. The idea that God and his church need our money creates a sense of obligation and duty that misleads and ties us in all kinds of knots. And it does the experience of giving a huge disservice. Now, this may come as a shocker, but God is perfectly capable of doing what he intends to do without your or my help. Scripture's pretty emphatic at that point. Listen to this passage from Psalm 50, written at a time when God's people, the nation of Israel, were seeming to be very faithful and obedient. They were giving lots of tithes and offerings. But they too had it backwards by thinking that their sacrifices and offerings were what were important to God, as if he needed them. This is God talking. I have no need of a bull from your stall or goats from your pens. For every animal of the forest is mine and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains and the creatures of the field are mine. If I was hungry, I would not tell you. I love that. I love that. You know, that seems pretty clear to me clear to me. God values our giving and graciously accepts and uses our gifts, but he does so for us, for our good, for what giving can do to our weak and frail and wandering human hearts. When I said I needed to view my giving more selfishly, when I needed to think about giving in a more selfish light, it's to embrace and lean into this truth that giving can be life-changing for the giver. And the sooner one grasps that truth, the sooner biblical stewardship seems less like an obligation and more like a gift, less like a duty and more like a privilege, less like eating your Brussels sprouts. And I'm referring to Brussels sprouts before you. All the new recipes the last 20 years where they throw in brown sugar. The kind of Brussels sprouts my mom made for us. She boiled them and maybe if she was in a really good charitable mood, she'd sprinkle a little salt, a little pinch of salt. They were horrible. So remember that when you're thinking that. Don't say, oh yeah, I like Brussels sprouts. So it'll be less like eating your Brussels sprouts and a lot more like a cream-filled donut. Not to overstate things, but how we think about giving is a game changer. When one thinks of it primarily as an obligation, the act of giving is robbed of much of its joy and its power to transform our lives. And it's very hard not to think of it as an obligation unless one sees that it is the giver who benefits from giving as much or more than anyone or anything else. Giving is a gift for the giver first and foremost because of its power to move and shape our hearts. My go-to passage in scripture is one many of you are probably familiar with. It's from Matthew chapter 6. I adore this verse. This is Jesus talking. It's one of the most straightforward passages in all of Scripture. And for God's purposes, for what he's trying to accomplish, one of the most useful. Wherever I place my time, my energies, my passions, my affections, my confidence, my joy, my hope, and yes, even my financial resources, that's where you'll find my heart. Now, you might have noticed when I came up here that I brought a rug with me, a very special rug. Way back in the late 1980s, Deb and I finally had a little bit of discretionary income. And I forget how now, but I developed an interest in Oriental rugs. I found them just exquisitely beautiful works of art, each one painstakingly hand-woven over very many months. And, you know, I was enthralled with them, and I went as far as to start buying a few and spending what, for Debbie and I, was a lot of money. Now, you have to bear with me, because I actually have to bend. This is Persian from the holy city of Gom in central Iran. It's woven out of silk with hundreds of knots per square inch. The signature of its master weaver, or Rami, is woven in Farsi here at the top. Needless to say, my rugs immediately became part of my treasure. One way you could tell they were my treasure is that when anyone was coming over to the house, I would scurry and roll it up and put it away for fear that it would be spilled on. Now some might say that defeats the purpose of having a rug if you put it away whenever it might be seen or walked on, but I didn't care. Another way you could tell that these rugs were part of my treasure is that for about, oh, roughly the first thousand times she ever vacuumed them, I couldn't help myself. I felt compelled to gently remind Debbie that she needed to be careful, very careful, and never, I mean never, suck up the fringe for fear that that's not as tightly woven and it unravels and falls apart. I have since stopped that practice, fearing that I might suffer an unusual and tragically fatal accident while sleeping in bed one night. Now, I'm not saying that it's wrong to appreciate and enjoy beautiful things. It's simply to illustrate how easily they capture our affections, how easily they become part of our treasure. Far more than supporting a church or funding a ministry, giving away our resources can be a most powerful antidote for all those things in our lives that compete to be our treasure, a very practical and effective way to help us loosen our grip on our earthly treasure. When we give and invest in the things God cares most about, in things that can have an eternal impact, whether we know it or not, whether we can feel it or not, we are moving our heart's center of gravity. And we are adjusting the lens through which we view our lives, our world, and our futures. Cultivating a perspective that increasingly mirrors God's. God does not need or want our money. What God covets is our hearts. That's what he's fighting for. And the act of giving is one of his most effective tools to align our hearts with his. Now, I might have raised a few eyebrows earlier when I said that in order to experience giving as God intended, joyfully, generously, compassionately, and freely, I needed to understand giving in a much more self-interested light. Surely, someone must have been out there thinking to themselves, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Isn't Christianity all about being completely and utterly unselfish? Never thinking of yourself, but always considering others more important? Yes and no. It's certainly true that we are called to be unselfish in the sense of considering others' well-being before our own. But that's not the same as saying that it's not in our selfish best interest to do that. In Luke 9, Jesus explains it this way. Again, this is Jesus talking. So here's Jesus calling us to serve and to sacrifice and follow his example, but that we do this ultimately to benefit. And it may surprise some, but any notion that self-interest is somehow anti-Christian is not supported in Scripture. How we act in our own self-interest is where we've gone off the rails. That's been the problem since the Garden of Eden, not the self-interest itself. In fact, the Bible consistently encourages us to pursue a life of faith precisely because it's in our best interest to do that. Taking it one step further, placing your faith and trust in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is the single most self-interested thing one can ever possibly do. Okay, so what now? What am I suggesting each of us do? First is to simply acknowledge that where we lay up our treasure is where you'll find our hearts. It's as night follows day. It's really pretty straightforward. So if you care at all about the condition of your heart, you can't really avoid some introspection, some question about where you're laying up your treasure. Second, I want to encourage each of us to lean into the transformational power of giving by taking a step or two forward, whatever that step might be for you. Far more than an obligation, the ability to share our resources is an opportunity and a privilege that we should not let go to waste. Few things are as effective in helping us move our treasure to where moth and rust won't destroy. Few things have such potential to align the beat of our heart to the rhythm of God's own. However, please keep in mind that moving our treasure doesn't happen overnight. It's a process. I'm reminded of a time about 20 years ago when I started a Navy SEAL workout plan at home. I get it. Feel free to snicker. I'm not Navy SEAL material. Nevertheless, I kicked off what was supposed to be a 12-week program of two and a half strenuous hours each day, six days a week. Turns out, this is also a shocker, it was too much. It was too soon, and it was way too unpleasant. After six weeks, I had completely given up and was back upstairs in my office eating milk duds all afternoon, doing exactly zero hours of strenuous exercise each day. And that's how these things often work. And moving our treasure is no different. Far better to advance the ball, to take a step or two forward, wherever you are in your journey. Forward progress and movement are the keys. I've been at the stewardship thing a long time, and I've already shared some of my struggles, but my growing appreciation for how giving blesses me has made a difference. In all my years, I don't think I've ever given sacrificially in the sense of really giving up something I really, really wanted and needed. But over the last few weeks, as I've been thinking about my experience with giving, I've come to see that's not exactly how God works. I've always viewed sacrificial giving as coming through what I call the front door perspective, in which a battle of the will takes place right out in the open of my consciousness. A forceful bending of my will, giving up something I really need or want simply out of obedience and faith. I collapse. Exhausted and spent, but faithful and obedient, confident in God's smiling approval. You rock, Doug. Well done, good and faithful servant. Now the key is getting up. I didn't really practice that very good. But I no longer believe that's how giving sacrificially or otherwise actually works. Rather, much more quietly and far less dramatically, God enters through our back door and starts working on us, using our giving to slowly change what we think we need and what we think we want, what's important to us, and a priority. In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that the people who actually do give sacrificially don't even necessarily know they're doing it, because at this point, what they view as valuable, what they treasure, has moved and evolved so much. Personally, I have a long way to go, But I can honestly say that over the years, God has used his gift of giving to slowly but surely move my treasure, and thus my heart, to a far better place. The things that I think I need and want have changed, and I've come to view the opportunity afforded by giving as much more of a privilege and much more of a joy than ever before, and I find that enormously encouraging and hopeful. In closing, it's more than okay to think about how giving benefits us. In fact, I think it's critical to understand if we truly seek the life that God has designed for us, life that is truly life. Listen to this lavish promise from 1 Timothy. Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant, nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way, they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life. Back in the 1950s, a young missionary traveled deep into the jungle of Ecuador to spread the good news of Jesus Christ to people who hadn't heard it. He and his four colleagues were found murdered along a remote riverbank, murdered by the very tribespeople they had gone to find. A famous saying is attributed to that young missionary, and it's stuck with me over the years, and it really captures what I've tried to share this morning. He had written it in his personal journal six years before he died, and this is what he wrote. He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. He this morning. Thank you for your magnificent plan of redemption that graciously includes us. And you do that because in your wisdom, that's how we change. That's how we grow. That's how we prepare for eternity. Thank you for giving, for not only what it does and the witness it provides, but also what it does to our human hearts. And we thank you for loving us, for pursuing us, and for the hope that you give us. And it's your name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Happy New Year, and thank you for choosing to spend your first Sunday of the year in church here at Grace. I'm excited for this year, for all that it holds for our church and all the things that hopefully God has for us this year. I think 2020 is going to be a huge year in the life of Grace. As we launched the year, I wanted to start with a series that would be helpful for everybody. So if you're here this morning, wherever you are on the spiritual spectrum, if you're one who would say, you know what, I'm not even really sure that I'm a believer or that I want to be, but I want to try the church thing. I want to try to understand faith a little bit more. If you're here as a representative of a New Year's resolution to attend more regularly or whatever, or if you're somebody who has really highly prioritized your relationship with God for a long time, my goal for this series is that it would be practically useful for all of us, that you'd be able to take things home every week and really kind of assess, how do I implement these things in my life? I'm hopeful that this can be a very helpful series. That's why it's called I Want a Better Life. I don't think anybody, if we said like, how's your life right now? Is there anything that you want to be better? Very few of us would say like, I'm killing it. I mean, there's nothing else that I could find. Like, Kyle Tolbert's the only person I know who'd be like, nope, totally happy with everything in my life right now. This is fantastic. Kyle's our super energetic student pastor, for those who don't know. So we all want a better life, and so next week, we're going to look at, I want better kids. We're going to look at parenting. Then the week after that, I want a better marriage, which I know that there's only a couple of marriages in here that really want to be better. The rest of you are doing great. For those few, we're going to talk about wanting a better marriage. Then the last Sunday of the month, I'm really excited about, we're going to talk about, I want a better me. Mental health has come to the fore of our culture, and I think as a culture we have an increasing awareness of that. And so I want to take a week and look at mental health and what it means for a believer to be mentally healthy and how the church can accept and embrace and rally around the mental health of us individually and of the people in our lives. So I'm excited for that week. This morning, I wanted to start 2020 by talking about our schedules. So this morning is I want a better schedule. I wanted to talk about our schedules because I feel like as a culture, we are busier now than we've ever been. I feel like there are so many pulls and so many pressures and so many different things and obligations and senses of ought that pull us into things that we just give our days and our mornings and our evenings away to, that as a group of people, as a culture, a society, I think we are very likely busier than ever. I remember when I was a kid, which was in the 80s, which for me feels like a long time ago, I saw somebody tweet the other day, or I guess it was on January 1st, that we are now as far away from 2050 as we are from 1990, which is super depressing. But in the 80s, when I was growing up, man, Sundays, I just saw somebody over there doing the math like, they're very slow. I saw, in the 80s, you didn't schedule anything on Sundays. Sundays was a blackout day. There's no nothing on Sundays because Sundays was church day. I even remember growing up, you didn't have practice on Wednesday night. Nothing was scheduled on Wednesdays. That was a sacred day too. And now, man, like all gloves are off. Everything can be scheduled at any time. And people will obligate you to things so quickly. We took Lily to preschool to start that. And on orientation night, there's a large sign-up sheet that everybody just stares at you as you stare at it. And they're watching you. Where are you going to write your name? Surely you're not going to walk out of here without writing your name on something. And I thought, bad news for you guys. I'm not volunteering for anything. And I didn't. But my wife is sweet. Jen is so nice. So she signs up to be library mom, not knowing that it means like once a week she has to pick up books from the classroom and then take them to the library and then check out all the other books that the preschool now wants, which is funny because the amount of money we give the preschool every month seems like they can afford books, but what do I know? So that's what Jen does like every other day, but she loves it and she's continued to do it, but there are opportunities and things that get our time so frequently. I actually hold, I don't think that there is a busier season of life than that of parents of elementary and middle school kids. From a pastor's perspective, I get to see kind of all seasons of life and which groups of people can engage in which activities in the church. And the hardest ones to grab a hold to are parents who have kids in elementary and middle school. And it's not because they don't care about spiritual things. It's because they legit don't have time for anything. I had some of the moms in the church who have kids in that demographic. I emailed them and I said, hey, can I have your schedules? I just want to get a sense for how busy your lives are. Y'all, it was crazy. It was crazy. As I read through their schedules, literally stem to stern every day. The thing that stuck out to me most was one of the moms who has three kids put, I'm just reading her schedule every week. These are the consistent things every week. And it was all the time. And then she said, there's an asterisk, and the asterisk says, these are the activities that we can predict. There are unpredictable activities such as all these things, right? Swim meets and committee meetings and mom things and dance recitals and all the other stuff that fill up all the time. And she had a note on Friday afternoon. The schedule on Friday afternoon was from four to six o'clock, free time, nothing to do, smiley face emoji. For two hours on a Friday. That's it. That's the free time that the whole family has together. And I thought, my goodness, that's so busy. And some of us can relate to that. So listen, I'm not here this morning to demonize busyness. It's not inherently wrong to be busy. As a matter of fact, in defense of the moms that sent me their schedules, they made each of those decisions as a family. And sometimes you're just in a busy season or a season of hustle, and that's all right. So I don't want to demonize busy, but I do want us at the beginning of this year to think critically about how we assemble our schedules. How is it that we allow things to be put on our schedule? I also want to say up front that in our culture a little bit, we wear our busyness on our sleeve like a badge of honor, like being exhausted is a thing to be respected. That's stupid, right? That's all I have to say about that. That's a dumb thing. We shouldn't be proud of how busy we are. We should accept it if we choose to be busy, but it's not a thing to be admired that someone else is so busy that they can't wake up and look in the mirror and think, I feel rested. That's too busy maybe. But I think a bigger reason why we end up so busy with our time so obligated is that we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's builds a menu. Okay, we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's, the restaurant, builds a menu. Now, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know how much fast food is a part of your world. Fast food is a large part of my world. It always has been. It is near and dear to me. I'm in a weight loss bet with my dad and my sister right now, and so it is not a part of my world, but I think I'm going to lose the weight by about March, which means come April, back to Hardee's, baby. But if fast food is not a part of your world, then you don't know that in the early 2000s, Hardee's, as a restaurant, just completely forgot who they were. They did breakfast. They did biscuits. We know about biscuits. The rise and shine biscuits or whatever they are. Those are delicious. But then they said, let's get into burgers and let's do roast beef sandwiches and let's have curly fries and let's do chicken tenders and let's serve fried chicken. And how about soups? I'm pretty sure at one point there was an experimental deli counter at a Hardee's somewhere. I would have loved to have been in the boardroom just listening to these meetings where some intern says, you know, I think Arby's is making some real hay with that roast beef sandwich and curly fries. We need to get into that market share. And the rest of the really smart executives around the successful restaurant board went, yeah, sounds good. Let's do a roast beef sandwich. Let's figure it out. And they just started adding things to the menu. If you were paying attention, it was just this total hodgepodge. They did everything. I can't imagine what their inventory looked like. And then when that failed, they just went to, let's just do really ridiculous attention-grabbing commercials, and nothing worked. And the thing is with the Hardee's menu is none of the things were bad, right? Roast beef sandwich, that's good, but let's just let Arby's do it. Fried chicken, that's great. Let's leave that to Popeye's. They didn't do that. They just kept adding all the things. Anytime anybody suggested a good thing, boom, got put on the menu. And it led to disorganization, and it's not a very good restaurant. So I think that what we need to do is we need to build our schedules a little bit more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's. We need to build our schedules more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's because I think that we do what Hardee's does sometimes. Somebody suggests something that seems like a good idea, and we're like, yeah, I mean, I guess I should. We go to preschool, and there's a sign-up sheet, and everyone's staring at you, and my sense of awe is going to make me sign up for something. I can't leave here disappointing these strangers that I don't know again. Or we do the same thing with PTA, or it's time to coach ball, or it's time to be on the committee, or Nate called me and asked me to do this thing, and I really don't want to do it, but it's the pastor. I feel like I have to. So we just, when we get good ideas, we put that on the calendar, we figure it out, and we build it like Hardee's builds their menu, and maybe we need to build our schedule more like Chick-fil-A. Now, we know about Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A does one thing, chicken. That's it, chicken sandwich. And then they grilled it. And then with an act of Congress, they made it spicy. That's it. That's all they do. And you know that there's been some pretty good ideas in the boardroom at Chick-fil-A over the history of the restaurant. You know people have suggested some really good stuff. Why don't we do rotisserie chicken? No. We do chicken sandwiches. This is all we do. And the other thing I love about Chick-fil-A, if they put something on the menu and it's not working, get it out of here, man. They're ruthless about it. They really streamline what they allow there. They don't have a chicken salad sandwich anymore because they got away from the old one that was mashed down and in the warm bag and was delicious and they tried to go fancy and that didn't sell. And so now they don't have one because if it's not doing what it's supposed to do, get it out of here. They really streamline their menu. And I think that we need to build our schedules like that. So the question becomes, how do we build our schedules like Chick-fil-A builds a menu? How do we streamline it according to what's important to us, so that we don't live our life by default, so that we don't look back on the last year and go, how in the world did I invest my time? How do we do that? Well, I think that there's a biblical principle to help us, and we can find it in Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible and you want to turn there, go ahead. The words will be up on the screen in a minute. Matthew chapter 6 is the Sermon on the Mount. It's in the middle of it. It's Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. It's Jesus' first recorded public address. I love it so much that we did a whole series on the Sermon on the Mount one time. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is just dispensing wisdom and instruction for life. And in chapter 6, he says this. Verse 19, the words on the screen are going to start in verse 20 don't matter, that are temporary. And the purpose of this morning, don't invest your lives, don't invest your time, don't invest your effort and your energy and your talent and your resources in things that don't matter, but rather treasure up for yourselves, make priorities of the things that will matter for eternity, of the things that will matter after you're gone. Orchestrate your life around those things, treasure those things. And so, to me, the very obvious question in light of, in thinking about our schedules and in light of this passage and this principle is what are my treasures? What are my treasures? And normally when I do a note like this, I say, what are your treasures? It's me talking to you, but I really want you to internalize it this morning and think through what are my treasures? What are the things that are most important to me? What are my biggest priorities? And I was always told growing up, if you want to know what someone treasures, look at their bank account and look at their calendar. Look at how they invest their resources. How do we spend our time and how do we spend our money? And so if we think about time, if I were to go home with you or grab your phone and look through your calendar from 2019, what would your calendar say about what your treasures are? Because you can't fake that, right? We can say, oh, God's most important to me, my family's most important to me, or my friends, or whatever it is, my job's most important to me. We can say whatever we want is most important to us, but all we have to do is look through our appointments and the way that we spent our time, and we'll know what we really value. If we could follow each other around on the weekends, what would we learn about each other that we value? If we could see each other in the evenings during our discretionary time, that one family in the hours of 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday, what would we learn about what they value? If we were to look at our schedules and our calendars from 2019, what is it that we treasure? And so what I want us to do this morning is a little bit of homework. In your bulletin there, there's the question, what are my treasures? And there's five blanks, okay? I don't want you to fill those out here. What I'd love to invite you to do is take the bulletin home with you and prayerfully think through, God, what are the things in my life that you want to be most important to me? A better way to ask the question is, God, what are my God-ordained treasures? What would you have be important to me in 2020? How would you have me prioritize my life? I think it's a worthwhile exercise at the beginning of the year to take that home and sit down and prayerfully say, God, what do you want to be important to me? What have you placed on my heart that I need to value? And it's actually a helpful exercise. I did it this week. I just sat down and I thought, if I'm going to ask everybody to do this, I need to do this for myself. I haven't written down my priorities anywhere. I just kind of go. And a lot like Hardee's, my schedule by default just kind of happens. And so if I were to be intentional about building my schedule and listing my priorities, how would I list them? And so I'm going to share them with you this morning, not because they need to be yours and not because you need to copy my list, but just as an exercise of trying to figure out what should be important to us. And then how do we organize our life around those things? So these are my top five priorities in my life as I thought through them this week. You see, the very first thing up there is spiritual health, my relationship with God. The Bible has a lot to say about pursuing God. David writes in Psalms that as the deer pants for the water, so his soul longs after God, that that's how much we should long for God. I almost preached out of a passage where Jesus is interacting with Martha and Mary in Luke, I believe chapter 10. And in that story, Jesus is going to Martha and Mary's house. And Martha is doing what most of us would do and is scrambling around getting everything right, making sure the table's set correctly and that the napkins are folded and that the room that Jesus is never going to go in in a million years is vacuumed and that the curtains are just right. She's doing all the things that you're supposed to do. This is the Messiah, after all, and he's coming to my house. I'd like for it to look nice. And she gets upset because Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus. Mary's just sitting there soaking in Jesus's presence. And Martha thinks she's lazy and she gets on to her. Hey, you should help me. And Jesus actually defends Mary and says, Martha, Martha, you are concerned about all of these things, but only one thing matters, and Mary's figured it out. So I believe that if you're a believer, this is the one where I would say you should really write this down too as your top priority. But don't do it unless you mean it. Our spiritual health has got to be our most important thing to us. Because here's what I know about myself. I don't know what you've learned about yourself as you've pursued spiritual health over the years or as you've considered it, but for me, I'm a better everything when I'm walking with the Lord. I am more gracious with my time. I'm more magnanimous with other people. I'm more patient with inconveniences. I'm more considerate of Jen, my wife. I'm more present with Lily, my daughter. I behave better in elder meetings. I'm nicer to the staff and don't want to get out of meetings as quickly. I leave my door open a little bit more often so I can chit-chat, which is not really a thing that Nate loves to do. But when I'm walking with the Lord and he's filling me up, I become a more gracious and more kind version of myself. And I become a better husband and I become a better father and I become a better pastor and I'm walking in a sense of joy and contentment and completeness that I cannot experience away from the Father. So I would be a very strong advocate to putting as your number one priority your spiritual health. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, you're thinking things through, I would still submit to you that probably the most important thing in your life is being spiritually healthy. I think if you go down that path, it will lead you to serve the same God that I do. But I think for all of us, this is a pretty compelling top spot. Next for me is Jen. It's my wife. In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about marriage, and he says that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who gave himself up for her. So if we look at Jesus, his first priority was to God and being obedient to him, and then his next priority was the church. And husbands, that's how we are to love our wives. We're going to talk about this in a couple weeks, so I'm not going to step on that too much. But my Bible tells me that I am to sacrifice my life for my wife. I'm going to lay myself down for her, and I will, listen, I'm up here preaching this to you. She's sitting right there. She knows I don't do this all the time, all right? So let's not act like you should be like me in your marriages. No, we should work on this together, right? No, we don't want any liars up here. We're doing our best. But I know that this is how I should prioritize that. And what does it look like to prioritize these things? If we're to say that spiritual health is my number one priority, then what does it look like as far as building our schedule to do that? Well, first we have to identify the things that make us healthy. I think it's time in God's Word and time in prayer. And so for a lot of us, that might mean adjusting our schedule and going to bed a little earlier so we can get up a little earlier. Cutting out that last episode of whatever it is. Being willing to not see the end of the game, which by the way, go Titans last night. So that we can get up earlier the next day and invest in spiritual health. Maybe it means next week signing up for a small group and prioritizing that in our schedule. Maybe it means not committing to the things that are going to require our time on Sunday morning or some other time where it can be spiritually helpful to us. Maybe it means paring down some of the things in our schedule so that we can have more time for God. And if we think about prioritizing our marriages, I think anybody who's in here who's married, their spouse would be in the top at least three, okay? If that's not it, come see me. But how do we practically schedule for that? I know for us, it's going to mean me being more intentional about finding babysitters and getting out to spend time together. It's intentional about getting home for meals, not stopping by in the middle of the day if it's a full day. We can't just say that these are our priorities. We have to think practically about, okay, if those are my priorities, then how does my schedule mirror that? After Jen is my daughter Lily. I think she has to be after Jen. And if parents, if we're not careful, we'll let the kids sneak up over our spouse, won't we? But I think one of the best things I can possibly do for Lily is to love her mom in such a way that she wants what we have when she grows up. What a thing to say about your parents that they might want that. I think one of the best things for Lily is to grow up in a house where her parents love each other. And listen, we don't have a perfect life or a perfect marriage. I'm just saying that this is what Lily is supposed to see. And it's what I want to give to her. I want to love Lily so well that when guys try to date her, she knows. You're not going to love me anywhere like my dad does. Forget it. I want to love her so well that she doesn't put up with dummies when she's in high school and college. I really do. And I have her listed above the church. And I'm just going to tell you guys this right now because I want her to know as she grows up and we lead this church together that she means more to me than you guys do. I want her to know that. I want her to never think, man, my dad loved those church people, and sometimes it felt like he didn't love me as much. I don't want her to feel that. I don't want her to feel like she's taking a back seat to my job. I do want her to feel like she takes a back seat to my wife because I want her to marry a guy that does that too. And we're going to talk about this next week, but Lily's got to be on there because God's called me to disciple her and to train her in spiritual health as well. After that, for me, are my family and friends. My immediate family and my friends, I lump those together because for me, friendships are super valuable. I believe what Solomon says in Proverbs when he says, the companion of the fools will suffer harm, but the companion of the wise will become wise. I believe in the adage, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. We believe passionately that you need people in your life who love you and love Jesus and have permission to tell you the truth. And so for me, I prioritize friendships. And I prioritize them sometimes over my job because I believe that we all need safe spaces where we can be completely ourselves and completely vulnerable and still completely loved and accepted. That's a picture of godly biblical love. It keeps us sane. For me personally, I want to be your pastor for 30 years, not three years. And part of that and the help for me is having good friendships both inside and outside of the church that give me life where I can just be myself. So for me, I prioritize those. And then my job. You guys. I put it there because I think the tendency is, for any of us who have careers that we care about, is to allow that to leapfrog everything else in our life. Is to allow that to steal time from other things. And I hear often from people who are retired that one of their biggest regrets is working too much. And I don't want to say that. So on the front end, I try to constantly remind myself because it will eat me up. You guys know how it is with work. There's always more to do. There's always more to think about. There's always something else to be done. There's always the next hill to climb. There's always something urgent. There's always the phone call and always the email and always the thing to respond to. It's not going to go away just because you choose to respond to this one. The next wave is coming. So at one point or another, you have to draw a line and you have to say, these are my God-ordained treasures, and I'm not going to let this one overtake ones that it shouldn't. So we have to measure how highly we prioritize our jobs or whatever else may go there that tends to eat away at your time. So my hope is that you'll go home and you'll say, God, what are my treasures? What are my God-ordained treasures in my life? That you'll physically write them out and then ask this question, what would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? What would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? If I say these are the most important things to me in 2020, then what's it going to take to organize my life around those things? What am I going to have to give up? What am I going to have to reprioritize? Who am I going to have to willingly disappoint and say, I can't do this thing anymore because I'm going to prioritize these things? And if we ask that question, what's it going to look like if we radically reprioritize our life around these God-ordained treasures, I actually have an example of what that could look like. As I was thinking through this this week, there's a family in our church, Wynn and Elisa Dunn, and they've got two kids, one in elementary school, one in middle school. I think the daughter might be in middle school now too. I got to figure that out before they come in the second service and I offend her. But I noticed on their Facebook feed is a lot of pictures like this. I think, Lynn, we have a picture of their family. Yeah, that's them doing something involving harnesses. It seems very fun. They do stuff like this all the time, all the time. They are forever going on little family outings and vacations and retreats. As a matter of fact, listen, I don't check up on you when you don't come on Facebook, but often if I don't see them on Sunday, on Sunday afternoon or Monday, I'll see a picture of their family together somewhere. Family time is big for the Dunns. And so I called Wynn. I said, hey man, this might sound weird, but I'm doing a sermon on this. I kind of explained it to him. And I said, you guys seem to be hanging out as a family all the time. Your kids are in middle school, and they seem to still like you and want to be seen in public with you, which is a big win for Wynn. And so I asked him, like, what's your philosophy around family? Like, what led you to value it this way? And he goes, well, do you know my full story? I said, I guess I don't. And he told me that years ago, he had a really lucrative job. It was a very high-paying job, but it was a high-stress job. And it consumed him. This was in the days of Blackberries, and he was forever on it. It was ever-present. Dinners, weekends, vacations, it was always, when can you do this one more thing? When can you just take this call real quick? Can you just close this out? Can you just put out this fire? It was always a part of him. And he says it was causing a lot of stress in his marriage, particularly as they invited kids into this marriage. And now his wife is home caring for the baby and he's never present. And it was causing tension and it made things difficult. And the kids began to notice how committed he was to his phone and his job too. So much so that he told me that, I think it was about 10 years ago, they went to Busch Gardens as a family. And as he was getting out of the car, he said, you know what I'm going to do? And he took his BlackBerry out and he put it in the car and he shut the doors and he locked it. And he said, when he did that, everybody in his family started crying because we've got our dad. He's going to be present with us today. I'd love to be the ticket taker at Busch Gardens that day. What's the matter with you guys? Like no one made you come. You can go back home. But his family cried because now we get dad. And it didn't take too much longer after that until he looked at his life and he said, man, I'm prioritizing things that I just don't want to prioritize right now. And so he changed careers. He called an audible, left the very high paying job, changed careers and chose a career, chose an industry that would allow him to have more time with his family. Made an intentional choice to radically reprioritize his life around what he believed to be God-ordained treasures. He said that was nine years ago. I said, as you look back on that, do you have any regrets? Or was it just best decision you ever made? And he said, you know, I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I think about the money and what would be possible if I had it. But no, there are no regrets. I love my kids. My kids love me. I have a good family, and it's so much more valuable to me than any resources that I could have. And so I'm praying that for some of us, this is just the nudge that you needed because there have been things going on in your life and you're too busy and you're too caught up and you see things slipping away from you that are important to you. And maybe the Holy Spirit's just working in your heart right now to say, hey, why don't you let some things go? Maybe this needs to be the year that you get okay with disappointing people. Where you realize, you know what? If the stranger's disappointed in me for not doing the thing that they want me to do, I'm going to be okay. Maybe we need to step away from things. I'll even say this. I want to be your pastor before I run the business of the church. If you need to step away from church things, sorry Aaron, for your own health, do it. Claim your schedule around your priorities. And in 2020, let's make some changes and reprioritize our lives around these God-ordained treasures so that when we get to the end of this year and look back on our schedule and we look back at how we invested our time, we go, yeah, I invested these things in treasures that matter for eternity so that we had a better year this year than we did last year. So I hope you'll do that. I hope you'll take the list home. I hope you'll pray through your priorities, and I hope that you'll have the courage to reprioritize your schedule around the things that you and God agree are super important to you in 2020. All right, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, I'm going to pray over the year, too, as we kick it off together, and then I'm going to dismiss and we'll go out into the world. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you so much for you, for your presence, for your goodness, for how big and marvelous and miraculous you are, for how much you care about us, for how much you care about how we fill our time. Lord, I pray that we would be courageous in naming our priorities. I pray that we would be courageous in building our schedule around those. God, if we have to say no to some things, then give us the audacity to do that. If we need to say yes to some things, give us the discipline to do that. God, we know that decisions that we make and things that we resolve to do often falter and flutter. God, I pray that you would be with us and give us your strength to see these things through so that our lives might change in profound ways, God, if that's what you would have. Lord, I pray over this year, may all the events of this year conspire to draw every one of us closer to you. Will you overcome doubts? Will you overcome fears? Will you overcome hesitation? Will you overcome hurt? Will you speak to us in the triumphs so that we don't take credit for those? Will you speak to us in the tragedy, God, so that we don't get overly angry at those? Will you please conspire everything in our life to draw us more closely to you so that we might know what it is to walk with you? For many of us, God, make this the year where we finally break the chains of the old habits and walk in new habits. God, please bless this year and bless us as we walk in it. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

I hope that you guys are getting excited about the holidays as they are coming up. I know that we are decorated at my house and we've got big plans here at Grace. I'm really excited about the Christmas series that we have coming up and all the things that we have planned for you in December. So I hope that you and your family will be a part of that. I'm very excited for our December series. This week we are in the fifth chapter of Ephesians. Technically the fifth chapter, but the fourth and fifth chapter, you'll see why in a minute as we move through this letter from Paul to the churches surrounding the city of Ephesus. As we jump into this week, I wanted to start at a book that was written a few years ago. There's a guy named Charles Duhigg that wrote a book called The Power of Habit. If you're a reader, you've probably heard of it, and you may have even read it, and you know that it's a good, interesting book where he says a lot of things about the habits that are in our life, how we can harness them for good. I really enjoyed the book. I didn't implement any of the things that he told me to, but I acknowledged them as very good ideas that seem wise. One of the things that he noted that he presents was the idea of what he calls a keystone habit. He says a keystone habit is a habit that you can adopt that if you will just focus on this one small change in your life, that it's going to manifest itself in other areas of your life. That kind of one habit can be get disciplined in other areas. It'll have almost a trickle-down effect if you pursue it as a foundational habit. And he says the best example of this, of a keystone habit, is exercise. In his research, he found that people who exercised regularly were people who tended to be more disciplined in what they ate. They were better at managing their time throughout the day and focusing on home and focusing on work, maintaining a better work-life balance. They were overall more disciplined people because the discipline of exercising on a regular basis kind of spilled into other areas of their life. And I really identified with this because like a lot of you, I've had seasons in my life where I have been regularly exercising. Clearly, I'm not in the middle of one of those seasons now, but I've had them before. And I've noticed that when I'm in those seasons, I am more disciplined in general, that that habit kind of spills over into others. And so as I encountered this idea, of course, because of the way that I'm wired, I thought, I wonder if this has spiritual applications. I wonder if this can help me in my walk. The way that we're phrasing the question this morning, you have it there on your notes, says, I wonder if there is a habit that can change the way that we obey. I wonder if there's one single habit, if there's a keystone habit, if there's one small thing that we could do, that if we'll just focus on this, that what happens as a result of that habit will manifest itself in other places in our spiritual life, and it will change the way that we obey. This morning, I want to propose to you that I think that there is one. I think that there is a keystone habit given to us in the text in the middle of Ephesians chapter 5 that we can kind of latch onto and seek to implement in our life. But to properly appreciate what it says in the middle of chapter 5, we have to really appreciate what's going on in the book of Ephesians. And what's happening in the book of Ephesians is you can really kind of divide it right in half. The first three chapters of Ephesians are establishing the idea that we are saved, that we have the gospel. Chapter 3 is the mystery of the gospel. Paul prays that we would know Christ more deeply. We spent time a couple weeks ago on that beautiful prayer beginning in verse 14, going through 19 of chapter 3. In chapter 2, we're given the most succinct yet complete explanation of salvation that I think there is in the Bible in Ephesians 2, 8, and 9. Then we're told in verse 10 of that same chapter that we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we might walk in them. We have purpose for our life. So he spends the first three chapters invested in this idea that like, hey, we are believers now and the gospel is for everyone. So now that you have the gospel, now that you have faith, the back half of the book is committed to answering a question that we all have. It's a question that we've all asked, whether you're a believer or a non-believer, it's a question that you've asked about the Christian faith. And that question simply is, it's a common question that we've all asked, how should I live? How should I live? You might ask it like this, in light of the fact that I'm saved, in light of the fact that I know Jesus, that I call God my Father and Jesus my Savior, what does God expect of me? Because we approach the text with this question, but there's a lot of stuff in here. It's confusing, at times intimidating, at times it seems impossible, and sometimes it feels contradictory. I'm supposed to do this in this situation and this in this situation, and I don't know how to tell the difference between the two. And so we always come back to this question, how should I live? I think if you're not a believer this morning, but you're here at church, you're kicking the tires, you're trying to figure out faith and how you feel about spiritual things, I think one of the questions you would be asking is, if I do become a believer, how do I live? What's expected of me? What am I supposed to do? To be a believer is to wonder, am I doing this right? How should I live? I think we would all like to get a little bit better or maybe a lot a bit better at obeying God. How should I live? I think that's the common question that we ask after we realize that we are believers. And so Paul dedicates the back half of Ephesians to answering this question. Ephesians 4, 5, and 6 are Paul's answer to this question. I truly believe that if Paul were here this morning and you could ask him, hey man, I'm a believer, how should I live? Like, what should I do? If we could ask this common question to Paul, I honestly believe he would say, well, it's funny that you asked. I actually addressed that in chapters four and five of the book of Ephesians. So let's look. And as I was studying, you might be wondering, why are we in chapter four if we're supposed to be in chapter five this week? As I was studying last week, I realized I was going through chapter four and I'm just, I always open up the Bible when we're going through a book like this and I kind of go, okay, God, what do you want us to know? There's so many things that we could highlight. What's the thing that you want us to know? And so as I was praying through chapter four, studying chapter four, I realized that four and five really go together. That from 417 to 521 is really one big long thought that I'm thinking of as the conclusion discourse. He's been building to this question, how should we live? And he even opens that question in chapter 4. Chapter 4 starts out with a verse that tells us that you should live a life worthy of the calling that you have received. So the question becomes, how do I do that? And beginning in chapter 4, verse 17, he answers that question. So I want you to do this. I want everybody in the room, if you'll do me the favor, of going ahead and opening your Bible. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Grab it and let's go through it. Open to Ephesians chapter 4. If you don't know where Ephesians is, just wait until the person next to you opens their Bible to it and then then take it, all right? They're going to love you and be gracious, and they'll get another Bible, and they'll open it there. So that will be fun. But open to Ephesians chapter 4, beginning in verse 17. 417 through 521 is one long continual thought, one long discourse, and we're going to be interacting with the text today to see how does Paul answer this question of how should I live? How does he back up what he says at the beginning of 4, that we should live a life worthy of the calling that we have received? What's his answer to this question of how we should live? And I want to propose to you this morning that there's two answers, one in chapter 4 and one in chapter 5. The first answer that he gives us in chapter 4 is by walking in our new identity. That's the first answer that we see in chapter 4 of Ephesians. How should we live? We should live by walking in our new identity, and here's how I know that's true. We're going to put up on the screen verse 22, but I'm actually going to start reading in verse 17 so we can understand what's happening in verses 22 through 24. Paul writes this, now this I say and testify in the Lord. Oh, I will also say just by way of, I don't know, being nice that if you have a blue Bible, that's NIV. I'm reading out of the ESV. It's not going to word for word match up, but you'll be able to follow along. Verse 17, now this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. All right, it's worth some clarification here. When he's saying that you must no longer walk, the you there is the church, anyone who calls himself a believer. And when he says Gentiles, that's his way of saying outsiders, people who don't yet have faith. So it's basically, you shouldn't walk like people who don't know Jesus because you do know Jesus. That's what he's saying. So when we see the word Gentiles, just think people who don't know Jesus yet. Verse 18, they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and they have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But this is not the way you learned in Christ. All right, let's pause right there. He says, you must not think and act like the Gentiles do. You must not think and act like someone who doesn't know Jesus. And then he gives us the characteristics, some of the defining characteristics of people who don't know Jesus. And it's a pretty rough list. He says some harsh things about people who don't know Jesus. And so I want to be very clear that people who don't know Jesus are not worse people than people who do know Jesus, okay? The people in your life that you know that are not yet believers, we're not calling them bad people. Paul's not calling them bad people. And I don't want anybody in this room thinking that you're somehow better than the people outside of this room who are still in their sweatpants because we're not. We're all broken and we're all bad at this, okay? So we're not calling ourselves better than them. The difference is people who don't know Jesus are blind to their sin. They're sinning, they're acting outside the will of God, and they don't know that they are. And when they're acting outside of God's will and they don't see their sin, they perpetuate that sin, their consciences get seared to that sin, and eventually they end up encouraging that sin. That's the pattern. And it's not because they're bad or a different kind of person than you. It's simply because they are living in the dark and they do not yet see their sin. And what he is saying is, that's not how you live. That's not you. If you know Jesus, you've seen your sin, you acknowledge Jesus for who he is, you realize your need for him and how he cleanses you of your sin, and so you were taught a different way. Assuming that you have heard, I'm in 21, about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self. This is where we're getting our answer to walk in our new identity. To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. So he presents this idea, don't walk like you used to when you didn't know Jesus, walk like you do know Jesus. He actually talks about this in a lot of his letters, the idea of an old self and a new self. In Romans chapter 6 and 7, he talks about it at length, and he actually, Paul paints for us the picture of baptism, the video that we watched of Jim being baptized. In that baptism, what Paul says in Romans 6 and 7 is that when we are baptized, we are buried with Christ in death. Our former self, our old self who didn't know Jesus, who was blind to sin, is buried with Jesus in the burial and then raised to walk, come out of death into life, raised to walk into newness of life. The very act of baptism is an acknowledgement that the former self is gone and the new self is here. And so if we are going to live life as Christians, then we should walk in our new identity. Romans 8 tells us that our identity is adopted sons and daughters of the king. We're told that we are loved as much as we can ever be loved, that we no longer have to perform or clamor or stretch or claw to get anyone to affirm us, to get anyone to love us, to make ourselves good for anyone, because God fills us with affirmation, tells us that we are good, tells us that we are loved, and then invites us to operate out of that love as we serve as a conduit of his love to the people in the world. We walk in this new identity. In our new identity, Romans tells us that we are no longer a slave to sin. Before we know Jesus, we have no choice but to do evil things because we're blind to them and we don't see them as evil. But as believers, we now have a choice. We're separated from that. And then to help us walk in this new identity, he gives us some behaviors that we should embrace and some behaviors that we should avoid to kind of say, this is what a new life is going to look like. And so he says this on down through the chapter, picking up in verse 25. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each of you speak the truth with his neighbor. 26, be angry and do not sin, which is really hard. I don't know about you, but that's not really how my anger works. Like when I get angry about something, that's not generally the time when I'm making the most rational choices. But what he's saying is there's a way to get angry. And the other thing about anger is you usually don't deserve it. You usually don't have a right to that anger. You think you have a right to that anger because you're being, in my case, a selfish jerk. You usually don't even have a right to that anger. But it is possible to get angry about the right things. And when we're walking in our new identity, we're angry and we do not sin. No more stealing. You guys, in your new life, you can't do that anymore. And then he goes, let no corrupting of stuff. As I read this stuff this week and I realized, okay, I'm supposed to walk in my new identity. What does it mean to walk in my new identity? What are the things that are going to characterize me beginning in verse 25? And I read through that list. I kind of got done reading it and thought like, well, gosh, I don't know if I should be a pastor. I'm not very good at those things. Those are really hard. Those are really challenging things. I mean, to read through that list, man, I do a lot of stuff I'm not supposed to do, and I don't do a lot of stuff I am supposed to do. That's challenging. But Paul doesn't stop there. He gives us the next way that we're supposed to live, because there's two answers. There's one in four, and there's one in five. The first answer is that we should walk in our new identity. And then he gives us a list of behaviors that we should embrace or avoid because of our new identity. And then at the beginning of chapter five, he gives us the second answer. How should you live? You should be imitators of Christ, is what he says at the beginning of chapter five. Be imitators of Christ. Just however Jesus would act, you act like that too. Look at what he says. Therefore, chapter 5, be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Then, just to add some detail, this is what somebody who is imitating Christ looks like, but all sexual immorality and just all impurity in general or covetousness must not be named among you as is proper among the saints. So he says, okay, how should we live? Walk in your new identity. Once you're walking in your new identity, be an imitator of Christ. And so I was thinking this week, what does it mean to be an imitator of Christ? What did Jesus do? How did Jesus love us? Well, Jesus offers us a sacrificial love. Constantly putting others first and himself second, he offers us a sacrificial love. He condescended, he gave up his heavenly form, came down to earth, lived a perfect life on our behalf, we need to love others sacrificially, and we need to forgive others faultlessly, and forever, by the way. And if you want more details on what it means to live as an imitator of Jesus, just keep reading chapter 5, and you'll see more behaviors there that you should embrace and others that you should avoid. And listen, it's entirely possible to get bogged down in these different behaviors and a very worthwhile study. If you know your Bible well, you know that Ephesians five is chock full of things that are tough for a pastor to preach through. I even got texts and emails this week like, hey bro, you doing Ephesians 5? What are you gonna do? Somebody said, somebody emailed me and they said, Ephesians 5 this week, I'm really looking forward to what you have to say about it. And I thought, please don't email me that. I don't need that kind of pressure in my life. And while it's absolutely worthwhile to drill down into these different behaviors and into these different stances, I didn't want us to miss the forest for the trees. The trees and the minutia are worth examining, but if we only have one week to look at Ephesians 5, I don't want us to miss the overall point that Paul is trying to make, which is to answer the question, how do we live? And we answer that question by saying, walk in your new identity and then be imitators of Jesus. Offer other people sacrificial love and faultless forgiveness forever. And here's a list of behaviors that can help you live that way. So at this point, I think we should arrive at our common response. We ask the question, how should I live? Paul answers that question by saying, walk in your new identity, not your former self, walk in your new self, and then imitate Jesus as you live. And I think that we all have a common response. If you're thinking along with me at all, this has to be what you've concluded too. How in the world do I do that? How do I do that? That's a tough list, man. That's hard. Like, I'm not, listen, I'm telling you as a pastor, as your pastor, for most of you, I'm not good at this list. I violate something on this list. I want to say weekly and be nice to myself, but that's probably daily. That's a hard list, man. That feels impossible. And we can treat it lightly and say, surely God doesn't expect me to do that. I mean, He knows that I can't be perfect. In another place in Scripture, Paul tells us, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. And I think we're tempted to read this and go, there's no way I can do that. But I don't think the Bible lets us off that hook. I don't think it makes that space for us to just kind of partly try. I think this is the standard, to walk in our new identity and to be imitators of Jesus. And the great part is this, getting better at these things, to more regularly walk in our new identity, to more regularly be imitators of Jesus, that is a process. It's a lifelong process. I hope that in 2019, you're a better imitator of Jesus than you were in 2018. And I hope in 2025 that you're a better imitator of Jesus then than you are than you're going to be in 2020. I think it's a progressive thing. This progressive growth towards becoming more like Christ is actually called sanctification. It's a biblical word that Paul uses, and it means the process of becoming more like God in character, which is to be better at imitating Jesus. So this is a process that we move through in our, through our whole life. And I think our goal should be that every week we're a little bit better at it than we were last week and be sensitive to the spirit and what we need to do to be better imitators of Christ and to walk more confidently in our new identity. But as we try to answer that question, how do I do this? That's a tall order, man. That's a big task. How am I gonna do that? I think that this is where the keystone habit comes back into play. I think this is where having a keystone habit, if I'm trying to get my life healthy, what's this one thing that I could focus on that might have some spillover into all the other areas of my life that I want to kind of fix or allow God to move in and repair? What's one keystone habit? What's one thing that I could focus on that might help me start nailing some of this other stuff down? I think our keystone habit is our first step. Our first step in this process is to lean into what I'm going to propose to you is our keystone habit that we find at the end of the passage in verse 21. So Paul writes this passage. He writes what I'm kind of calling the conclusive discourse on answering the question, how should we live? He says, walk in your new identity, be an imitator of Jesus. Here's some behaviors to help you know what it is to live that way that you should either embrace or avoid. And then as he caps it off, he says, finally, do these things. And he lands the plane at a really peculiar place, I think. He lands the plane in this verse, in verse 21, because after 21, there's a transition. After 21, he transitions and he starts to give us specifics of how to live. He says, this is how you should organize your home life and your marriage and your work life. And then this is how you should arm yourself for the spiritual life that is a battle. There's a transition after 21. So at 21, he's concluding a thought and this is how he concludes it. Pick it up in verse 15. He says, And then here we have it. Submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. He lands the plane on submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. And I want to propose to you that our keystone habit as we seek to be imitators of Jesus and we seek to walk in our new identity is simply chosen submission. I think the common conclusion of our question, how should I live? How do I do that? I think the common conclusion that we have this morning is chosen submission. And that word submission simply means to submit to somebody is to say that when our wills clash, I'll choose yours. When you have a different will than I do for a certain situation, I will submit to you by choosing your will. I at this church am submitted to the board of elders. The elders might not feel that way sometimes, but I promise you that's technically the case. I'm submitted to the board of elders, which means if I go to the elders and I say, hey, I think we should do this thing, and they go, we do not think you should do that thing, then their will is different than my will, so I choose theirs and I submit to it. That's what submission is. And I want to propose to you that this is a keystone habit that unlocks how we can obey in all of those other areas. I think this is the one habit that can change the way that we obey. And we don't just see it here. At another place, we're told to outdo one another in honor, to honor other people more than ourselves, to outdo one another in honor. At another place, we're told to consider others better than ourselves. So this is not just a one-time principle in the Bible. It's something that's woven throughout the New Testament. Jesus says that the greatest among us must be the least, that the greatest comes to serve. So there's this constant idea in Scripture of considering others before we consider ourselves. And the reason I think that this is a keystone habit to unlock obedience in the rest of our life is this. Go back through four and five. Look at the behaviors that are listed there. Look at the behaviors that are listed in chapter 5, the ones that we should avoid. Sexual immorality and covetousness and all impurity. And ask, would it be easier to avoid those behaviors if I lived every day submitted to the people around me? Would it be easier to avoid sexual immorality if I considered other people's needs more important than mine? Would it be easier to avoid coveting things, wanting things for myself, if I considered other people's needs more important than mine, if I were mutually and had chosen to submit to the people around me? Blaise Pascal had great insight on this passage. He was a French philosopher, and I wondered why sexual immorality and covetousness are paired up together in chapter 5. And he says it's because they fall under the umbrella of lust. Lust is to want things for ourself. And he says that lust tethers us to ourselves. It makes us relentless me monsters. And so the antithesis of sexual immorality, the antithesis of covetousness is selflessness. The antithesis of this is mutual submission. We said earlier that we should be angry, but we should not sin. And I kind of presented to you the idea that there's some things that are okay to be angry about, good, righteous anger, and that's a good thing. And then there's other anger that just results in our selfishness or just reveals our selfishness. Is it going to be easier to become angry about the right things if we live our life mutually submitted to other people? At the end of chapter four, we're told to be kind one to another, be tenderhearted, gentle with one another. If you get up every day living your life for the people around you, is it going to be easier to be kind to them, to be tenderhearted towards them? Pick any of the behaviors in four or five, any of the things that we're supposed to embrace and any of the things that we're supposed to avoid. And for the ones that we're supposed to avoid, ask, would it be more natural? Would it be easier to avoid these behaviors if I were living a life of chosen submission to the people around me? And then look at the behaviors that we're supposed to embrace and ask yourself, would it be easier to embrace these behaviors, to incorporate those behaviors in my life if I were living a life of submission to the people around me? I think it's a keystone habit. I think if you're here this morning and you feel like you're in a spiritual rut, you feel like 2019 has been a little tough. I'm not growing like I should. I wish that I were closer to God. I wish that I could get some traction in my spiritual life. My quiet times have been a little bit difficult or maybe even non-existent. I wish I were closer to the Father. Can I just suggest to you implementing this keystone habit in your life? Can I just suggest to you waking up tomorrow and saying, I'm going to do my best to consider the needs of others as more important than mine. I'm going to do my best to have chosen submission to the people around me and that when our wills clash as best as I can, I'm going to choose theirs. Can I gently suggest to you that if you feel spiritually stagnant, that maybe, maybe, maybe it's because you've been living tethered to yourself and we should live for others. And if we'll do that, the rest of these behaviors will naturally flow out of a heart that now belongs to God and is in tune with Him. Can you imagine the beauty of a church that's mutually submitted to one another? It would be an oasis in the community that it would be the only place on earth that didn't have a caste system. Do you understand that? If we came in mutually submitted to one another, it wouldn't matter how much money you make. It wouldn't matter how old or young you are. It wouldn't matter where you got your education. It wouldn't matter what degrees you had. It wouldn't matter what you've accomplished. It wouldn't matter how charismatic you are or are not. It wouldn't matter how attractive you are or are not. It wouldn't matter how capable you were or you are or are not. All that would matter was that we showed up and we loved one another because we were told to in Ephesians to consider others better than ourselves and to live a life of chosen submission out of reverence for Christ. This is impossible if we don't know Jesus. We cannot just decide to do this and fuel the submission ourselves. We have to have the love of Christ flowing through us so that we can be conduits of that love to others. But if we'll acknowledge that Jesus died for us, that Jesus offers us sacrificial love and faultless forgiveness forever. And he submitted to me when he didn't have to. And out of reverence for him and who he is and how much he loves me and how I love him in return, I'm going to choose to submit to the people around me. We say that our mission is to connect people to Jesus and to connect people to people. How in the world could we be more effective at that than if we simply chose to submit to the people around us and considered what they needed more important than what we needed? How contagious would that be when people would come and be with us on a Sunday morning? How wonderful a testimony would that community be to people who see all the wrong things going on with Christianity and in the media world to come in here into an oasis of submission where they see a fresh version of how Christ's people love one another. How beautiful would that be? How contagious would your faith be if you carried the submission back into your workplace and back into your circle of friends and simply considered other people as more important than you and simply chose this submission as a keystone habit that would unlock our ability to obey God throughout the rest of our life. I pray that we'll do that this morning. I pray that grace would be a church that's defined by obedience to this verse. And I pray that you would choose to be obedient to that. That you would submit to the people around you in your life even this week and experience the power of this chosen submission and watch as it unlocks your ability and God's ability to work in your life as we seek to walk in our new identity and be better imitators of him. Let's pray. God, we love you. You love us for reasons that we genuinely don't understand. God, I'm so grateful that church can be a place where we can just admit that we don't have it together, where we can admit that we're not good at things, where we can admit that we constantly fall short of who you ask us to be, and where we can be met with your grace and your love and your affirmation that that's okay. And you pick us back up and you send us back out. Lord, if there are people here who are far from you, I pray that you would draw them in. If there are people here who are caught up in sin, I pray that you would just bring your gentle, healing conviction. If there are people here in situations that feel impossible, God, would you show them a light? Would you remind them that you make new paths, that you make streams in the desert? God, would we not shy away from the enormous task that it is to be a Christian? Would we not excuse away what you call us to? Simply have the faith and the courage to try to be a little bit better today than we were yesterday. Help us experience the power of choosing to submit to one another, Lord, out of reverence for you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.