Sermons tagged with Marriage

We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? It turns out the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. Well, good morning again. Thank you again for being here. This is my first Sunday back after having a kid, so I'm really grateful to be back in the saddle. I mean, I didn't do anything. Jen was primarily responsible for birthing the child. But yeah, so it's been a heck of a two weeks. For those who haven't seen, this is a picture of John. This is our boy. Yes, yes, I know. But before we go overboard with how cute he is, I am of the conviction that no child is actually cute until they've been alive for about three months. At the three-month mark, they become cute. At the newborn stage, they look like angry aliens, so we don't have to pretend like he's exceptionally cute, all right? But he's got blonde hair. He's a good-looking kid. We are excited about him. And I also wanted to thank Kyle for jumping in and preaching for us for two weeks. We had a plan leading into this series where we kind of acknowledged, you know, Nate, you're probably going to have to miss a couple of weeks somewhere in this faithful series because your baby is due. And I said, yeah. I said, so listen, when she goes into labor, I'm going to text you and you're teaching for the next two weeks. And he was like, all right, got it. So we had this plan in place, but neither of us expected to implement that plan almost three weeks prior to the due date. So he got the text on Friday morning and had to preach Sunday and I think did a remarkably good job. So thank you, Kyle, for doing that. And I'm glad to be back with you preaching about faithful women of the Bible. The woman that we're going to look at this morning is someone that I would be willing to bet that even though most of us probably know who she is, we might not know her name. It's a woman named Jochebed. And I had to actually look up what her name was, shamefully, because I know her story, but I didn't know her name. Her name is Jochebed, and Jochebed is probably the greatest mom of all time. If she's not the greatest, she's in the goat conversation. She's on the Mount Rushmore of moms, I think. And this isn't all the time the case, because sometimes excellent parents have children that just in their adulthood, they struggle. So it's not a one-to-one thing, but a lot of times you can tell the quality of a parent by the kids that they produce, right? And Jochebed produced some really good ones. From what we know, she had at least three children. She may have had more, but we know of three of them. One of them, her son, was a guy named Aaron. He was the first high priest of the nation of Israel. His staff was in the Ark of the Covenant. He is the one who performed a lot of the miracles that got the Israelites free of Egyptian enslavement. He instituted a lot of the religion that we still follow today. He had a profound impact on Israel in the Old Testament and continues to impact how we understand God to this day. I mentioned him in a sermon a couple of weeks ago when we were in Hebrews talking about Jesus as the great high priest. Aaron's a big deal. She had a daughter named Miriam. And most of us probably don't know about Miriam, but she was the first priestess in Israel. In a time when we didn't really know a lot about priestesses or that they even existed, but she was the first priestess in Israel. She actually wrote a praise song that's included in scripture, making her the first included female author in the Bible. And the praise song was just for the women of Israel. Men were not supposed to sing it, and it was about the conquest at God's faithfulness at the Red Sea, how God parted the sea and then defeated the armies of Egypt for them. She wrote that song, and it's included in the Bible. Those two kids are Jochebed's kids, and they did some really good stuff. Even if the third kid was a screw-up, she's still doing pretty good, right? The third kid was Moses. You may have heard of him. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, you're not really a church person, or you're listening or watching online, you wouldn't call yourself a church person. When I say Moses, you at least know who that is. You at least know, oh, that's a big deal Bible guy. Yeah. He freed the Hebrews from slavery. He led them through the desert. He established the religion. He came down with the Ten Commandments. It was the law of Moses. He wrote the first five books of the Bible. All three of these people, Aaron, Miriam, and Moses came from Jochebed's house. And so I want to know, what was she doing? What kind of Kool-Aid was she serving that produced these three incredible people that we still remember 6,000 years later? What was happening in her house that produced these types of adults. And I think if we can get some insight into that question, if we can get an answer there, then we can certainly apply that in our homes to our children, but I think that we'll pull out of it something that we can apply to all of life. So if we want to learn what it was like to grow up in Jacob's house, we don't have a ton of text. We don't get a lot of insight into her as a mother or as a person, really. We just get really one snippet at the beginning of Exodus in Exodus chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Or if you're at home, there's one on your phone. If you're in person, don't look at your phone. That will distract me. I'll think that you're totally bored and now you're on Twitter or something. So look at Exodus chapter 2. We're going to pick it up right at the beginning. Now what's happening here before I read the verses? The Hebrew people are slaves to the Egyptians. And someone, one of Pharaoh's advisors, got in his ear and was like, hey man, these Hebrews, there's a lot of them. We think that when they were wandering through the desert, archaeologists and theologians believed that it was somewhere around 500,000 people that made up the Hebrew nation. So this Egyptian advisor said, hey, there's a lot of them. We're a little bit worried if they continue to grow at the current rate that they could be so strong that if they decided to rebel against us, there could be an insurrection that we wouldn't be able to stop. So we need to do something about this burgeoning Hebrew civilization within our borders. We need to do something about this population. And so what they decided to do is to kill all the boys two years and younger, and the midwives, the ones delivering the babies, were instructed, if you deliver a baby boy, you have to kill it right away. This is just evil stuff, but this is what they did. And so there's a woman named Jochebed, and she's about to have a son. And this is a snippet that we get of her story in that context. In Exodus chapter 2, I'm going to pick it up in verse 1. It says, Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. That's just a tribe within the nation of Israel. This is the action that she took. And then if you continue to read the story, what you learn is she goes down to the river with this new boy, this three-month-old baby boy in a basket, and she sets it in the reeds. She sets it in the river, presumably the Nile River. And she sends her daughter, maybe Miriam, up as a lookout to see what happens to this basket. And somehow or another, she knew, I would presume that she knew the general schedule of the princess, of Pharaoh's daughter, and knew that she came out to bathe in the Nile River. And so she timed it up just right so that when she released Moses, that this basket would be encountered by the daughter of Pharaoh. And she had her daughter looking out to make sure that this is what happened. And sure enough, Pharaoh's daughter saw the basket. She had her servants grab it. They opened it up. There's a baby inside. She's moved by this and is compelled to adopt the baby. When she adopts Moses, they didn't have formula back then, all right? So she couldn't just mix something up and feed it to him. So she needed a woman who was capable of feeding a child at the time. So she tells her servants, go to the Hebrew people, find a woman who's able to feed a child right now and ask her to wean this child for me until they're off of it and then return. So they go into the Hebrew encampment and who do they find? Jochebed. Oh, what do you know? I can feed a kid. So she gets her son Moses back and gets those moments with him, those special months and probably years with him until it's time for him to be adopted officially into the palace by the princess of Egypt. The rest of the story from there, he grows up in this royal society. He learns how to lead. He gets the best education possible. He's exiled into the wilderness for 40 years. God speaks to him out of a burning bush. He comes back. He leads the people into freedom. That's the story of Moses. But as we look at the story of Jochebed here, can you imagine? Can you just imagine? Those of you who are parents, can you imagine having a baby? The moment John was born and they placed him on Jen's chest, I knew good and well, and it's not hyperbole, and you dads know what I'm talking about. I knew good and well I would die for that kid. Can you imagine taking the thing that is most precious to you in the world, putting it in a basket, and floating it down the river? Just releasing it and hoping that it works out. Having no control over what happened, having done all that you could do, and then setting this child in a basket and letting it go down the river. Can you imagine watching that basket like Jochebed did? But as I think about this story and the lessons that we can learn from this story, what I realized was the wisdom of Jacobad was that she did all that she could, and then she acknowledged it wasn't enough. She did all that she could, everything possible, and then she acknowledged, and that's still not enough. I think it's noteworthy that she got a basket, she wove it, she got the best bulrushes, and she put it together. She made it just for her kid. She made sure it was perfect. Then she coated it with bitumen and pitch. She made it waterproof. She took extra special care. She observed the schedule of the princess. She sent her daughter as a lookout. She did everything that she could. She controlled every detail that she could. She didn't just find any old basket. She didn't just set it in the river at any old time. She did everything that she could, but then at some point or another, she acknowledged something that I think we struggle so mightily to acknowledge. I've done everything that I can, and now I have to acknowledge that that's not enough. There's some mystical intersection between our effort and God's actions, between our effort and God's responsibility. And I think the lesson from Jochebed as I think about it more and more this week is yes, she did all that she could. Yes, she had faith, but she was able to accept this reality that there is a gap between our efforts and God's actions. And that in that gap, you have to admit, my efforts, my abilities are going to fall short. If she would have just sat there holding on to the basket and never released it, she would have waited too long and would have missed the opportunity. If she would have waited in the river with that basket up to the princess, she would have ruined it by being present when she found him. And if she would have given him to her daughter and said, walk the baby to the princess and ask, she would have ruined the opportunity. I can also imagine her waiting too deep into the river, holding on to the basket, refusing to let go of control, and I'm also going to acknowledge that at some point that's not going to be enough. It reminds me of this proverb that I've always loved. Proverbs chapter 21, verse 31. It says, the horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord. We can do everything we can to get the horse ready for battle. We can sharpen the sword. We can make sure the saddle's just right. We can know where the enemy is. We can approach the way we're supposed to approach. We can do everything we're going to do. But the battle belongs to the Lord. I can do the prep work. I can do everything I can do. But at some point or another, I have to hand the results over to God. And one of the reasons I love this story of Jochebed and the picture of her releasing that basket down the river is because as I was thinking about it one day, it occurred to me, isn't this just what parenthood is? Isn't parenthood just that moment over and over and over again where we've done everything we can and then at some point or another we have to release? A lot of you guys know this part of mine and Jen's story. We wanted a long time to be pregnant. We waited eight years to be pregnant and it was a hard eight years. And then when we finally did get pregnant, we found out about eight or 10 weeks in that we had miscarried. And that was hard. Maybe the hardest thing we've ever walked through as a couple. So when we got pregnant with Lily, I prayed so hard, God, please protect this child. Please don't let us walk through that again. Please, God, you've got to take care of us. And I would have done anything. I would have gotten three jobs. I would have never slept. Jen would have done anything. We would have put her on any diet, literally any injection. Whatever we can do to try to protect this baby that's growing inside of her, we will do it. But the reality is there was nothing we could do. We could do a couple things. We would be careful about a couple diets. But the reality was we had to pray. God, this child is yours. We believe you care about them and that you care about us. So we trust you with this pregnancy. And it occurred to me that this is what parenthood is. God, there's nothing left that I can do. I'm impotent here. But you care about us and you care about them, so we trust you. There was another reminder as we were having John during the process of labor and of waiting until it was really time to have the child. You know, there's contractions and things start to pick up in that process. And somewhere in that process, in the middle of the night, Jen's blood pressure began to drop and John's heart rate plummeted. And the nurses tried to pretend like it wasn't a big deal, but four of them rushed in there and started going really fast and dropping things and cussing. And one was trying to make light and like, like uneasy jokes. And me and Jen are scared. We're looking at each other. Our eyes are big. We don't know what to do. I can't even get near her to hold her hand because she's surrounded by nurses that are moving her around and they're giving her shots to try to do this and that and the other thing. And there's about 20 or 30 minutes where we were just scared. And all I could do is pray. And I was reminded of the story of Jochebed. We've done all that we can do. Now we pray. Now it's in the Lord's hands. And this is a picture of parenthood. One day, you do everything you can. You get them ready. You try to protect them. You try to choose the right school. But one day, you're going to let go of their hand, and they're going to walk into kindergarten, and you're not going to be with them for eight hours, and you don't know what's going to happen. One day, you entrust them to other dumb middle schoolers and the things that they're going to say and the stuff that's on their phones. There's coming a day, parents, many of us have experienced it already, where you watch them drive off. They drive away from home for the first time. They're 16 years old. They got their license. You can't control what happens in that car. You drop them off at college and hope they make wise choices. You walk them down the aisle and see them walk into a life that you won't live. You watch them have kids and wish them the best of luck. But parenthood is nothing if not a continual releasing of a basket down a river. Saying, God, I've done all that I can do. Now I trust you. And it's important to me to point something out here. And if I don't point this out, this could come across as like clumsy, ham-handed advice. Just trust God with your kids. Just trust God with the things in your life. Don't worry about it. Trust God. No, listen, she did everything that she could. She chose the perfect basket. She covered it with bitumen and pitch. She timed it out. She sent the lookout. She controlled everything that she could control. And so for your kids, because some of us are walking through some really serious things, and it would feel really clumsy to go, well, just trust God. We had a child this summer. It broke my heart to think about it. I think that they were four while they were walking through this. He choked on something really bad at dinner one night, really, really badly. Scared everybody in the family. Moms and nurse scared them to death. It traumatized him so badly that after that moment, he could no longer eat. He couldn't be convinced to put anything in his mouth and eat and swallow because he was scared of it. And they got treatment for it, and they did all the best things that they could. And eventually, eventually, he's able to start drinking smoothies, and then eventually, he was able to start eating things. And then, I was talking to his dad a couple of weeks ago. Then finally, they would give him something for dinner. And he was like, I can't eat that. I'm going to choke. And he's like, I saw you eat six chicken nuggets like an hour ago. So you're squared away, pal. Like then it became a thing where he was trying to get out of certain meals. But for a while, it was incredibly scary. And it would be super clumsy of me as a pastor to pick up the phone and call this couple and be like, I know that your child's having a hard time swallowing anything and is losing weight at a dangerous rate and is close to starving themselves, but just trust God with it. That's clumsy advice. Do everything that you can do. Get the best baskets. Get the best treatment. Call in the best experts. Go to the best practices. Get the best people associated with your children. Put in all the effort. Put in all the prayer. Rally all of your resources to do the best thing that you can do by your child. But be like Jacob and acknowledge that there's coming a moment where my efforts stop and God's actions begin. Do not hang on to that basket for too long. And do not trick yourself into believing that you can control the things that you can't control. So it's not just clumsy, trust God and everything will be okay. We don't just grab any old basket and throw the kid in the water anytime we want. Do everything that you can do, but acknowledge that there's coming a moment when you can't do anymore. And in that moment, choose to be like Jacob and trust God. And you know, I'm preaching about this, and sometimes I don't love to do parenting sermons because it doesn't hit everybody in the room. It hits a portion of the room. But I think that this one actually works for everyone because releasing things to God isn't just a practice for parenting. It's a necessary practice for all of life. This idea of preparing the horses for battle, but the victory is the Lord's. That's not just for raising children. That's for everything in life. Maybe you're in a marriage right now that has seen better years. Maybe it's getting really hard. And you want more than anything for this marriage to be fixed. You're not sure if your spouse is in it with you, but you want more than anything for this marriage to be fixed. This principle applies to that situation. Do everything that you can do. Get the best counseling that you can have. Have the hardest conversations that you need to have. Do the most introspection that you can do. Own the most in the relationship that you can own, but at the end of the day, you're going to have to admit that there comes an intersection with my efforts and God's actions, and you're going to have to trust that relationship to him. You're going to have to float that down the river and quit trying to control everything and trust that whatever needs to change in their heart, that God is going to change it if he's going to change it at all. With our careers, with what we want in life, with our goals, that interview that we really want to nail, the job that we really want to get, the account that we really want to close, the company that we really want to work for, the career that we really want to have, whatever it is that we're yearning and striving for, do all the work. Make the best possible basket, but at some point or another, trust that God cares about your career too and float it down the river and let him do with it what he's going to do. Those of us with aging parents, this is a hard reality. How do we take care of them? How do we do the right things? How do we know what to do? How do we know what to say? How do we know when to be forceful and when to back off and be respectful? How do we know when to take over? Do everything that you can do. Do everything that you know to do. But at some point or another, let go of the basket and let God take control of it. This applies, I think, to every area of life, to our finances, to our relationships, to everything that we do. Do everything that you can do. But just acknowledge, just know that at some point there's coming a time when your efforts will fall short and we will need God's actions to come in and trust those things to God. And if you're somebody who struggles with this, if you're anxious, just know that holding onto the basket too long could be the worst possible thing for it. If we go back to parenthood, think of the people that you know that have tried to control their child for too long and then release them into college and what happens? Because you couldn't release them sooner. Think about the people who probably should have put a little bit more bitumen on the basket. Maybe you should have picked a better basket. Maybe you should have been a little bit more thoughtful before you just slung that thing down the river. There's a downside to not doing everything that we can do. There's a downside to hanging on too long and to tricking ourselves into believing that we can continue to control things as we drown in the river ourselves and pull our basket of whatever's dear to us down with us. But I remember a couple years ago, I guess it was about 2018, we bought a house in April or in February of 2020. Praise God, because we couldn't buy a house right now. We started looking in 2018 for a house, and Jen was looking every day. I am convinced that between 2018 and 2020, there is no one who knew the North Raleigh real estate market better than Jen Rector. Not a soul on earth. I'm telling you, we'd be sitting there after dinner, and I'd be on my phone looking at Zillowow and I'd be like, oh, this house looks good. And she'd go, where is it? I'm like, it's over on like Diamond Hitch Trail. And she goes, oh, is that the green one or the brick one? I'm like, geez, the green one? She goes, yeah, it's got a great outdoor space, but I don't know about that kitchen. Okay, well, I guess we'll check that one off the list. Like she had this thing memorized, man. And we began to get concerned that we weren't going to be able to buy a house in North Raleigh because we really love this area. We really love North Raleigh. I didn't want to move to the outskirts. We really love it here. It was important to us to stay here. But it was really hard to find a house that we could afford and that we actually wanted. And we had a lot of conversations about, gosh, I'm not sure that this is gonna work out. Jen would be anxious that we're never gonna be able to buy a house or whatever. And one day it occurred to me and I just told her, I said, listen, I believe that God brought us to Raleigh. I believe that he actually cares about where we live. I believe that where we live matters to him and the community that he places us in matters to him. And because of that, we can trust him with this. Because we know that God cares about where we live, we can trust him with finding us a house. So we still did everything that we could do, but then one day he brought us a house that for us was perfect, is perfect. And I'm glad he did because no kidding around, if we would have waited another year to try to keep looking for this perfect house, I don't think that we could get into a house right now. And that's the encouragement that I would give you this morning. The thing that you're anxious about, the thing that you're trying to control, whether it's your kids or your career or your relationship or your finances or the things that you won't let go, that you're just latched onto this basket and you can't seem to release it to God or acknowledge that there's a place where your efforts need to stop and God's actions need to begin. If you're in that place, I would ask myself this question. Does God care about this? Does God care about this thing? If he does, then I can trust him with it. Does God care about this thing? If he does, I can trust him with it. Does God care about my kids? Absolutely he does, so I can trust him with them. Does God care about my marriage? Yes, deeply. It matters tremendously to him, so you can trust him with it. Does he care where you live? Yes. Does he care about your career? Yes. Does he care about your relationships? Yes. Does he care about your finances and your aging parents? Yes. He cares about all those things. So if God actually cares about this thing that matters so much to you, then I want you to know that you can trust him with that. His wisdom is greater than yours. His providence is better than yours. His strength is mightier than yours. His vision is further than yours. I think we have a lot to learn from the example of Jochebed. I don't know that this is the reason that she raised three incredible children, but I would be willing to bet that it's a big part of it. We all of us, especially those of us who are anxious, those of us who worry, those of us who stay up, worrying about all the different things that could possibly happen as we try to keep adding the perfect amount of bitumen and pitch and finding the perfect basket before we are willing to release it down the river to God. Let's acknowledge that this releasing, this principle of Jacobad, it really brings with it great peace. There is an incredible peace to watching something float away from you, knowing good and well, I've done all that I can. Have you done everything that you could? Yeah, I've done everything that I could. Now I'm giving it over to God. And what he does with it, I'm good with. There's an incredible peace to that. If we struggle with anxiety this morning, maybe what we need to do is finally release it and let the peace of God wash over us, knowing that if he cares about it, then he will take care of it. And in that way, I think we can all learn from the example of Jacob. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you this morning. We thank you for who you are and for what you do for us. Lord, I pray for the parents in the room. We struggle so mightily with relinquishing control of the children that you've given us. Would we acknowledge that we just simply can't control every detail? We're going to have to trust you in the conversations and in the spend the night parties and out on the road and at college and at school. We're going to have to trust that you care about those children too and that you will direct their paths. For those of us with other concerns, be it our finances or our careers or our relationships or our marriage, God, would we just be comforted by the fact that you care about those things too? Would we have the faith and the humility of Jochebed to do everything that we know to do, but at some point or another understand that our efforts are going to fall short and we need to entrust these things to your actions. Give us the strength and the peace to do that even today, Father. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning and happy Easter. It's so good to see everybody. Thank you for joining us online. It's good to see a good crowd and Easter colors. I love Easter. It's my favorite day of the year. I love everything that it celebrates. It's such a victorious day. It celebrates not only the greatest victory ever won, but the greatest one to come. It gives us hope for a future. My favorite quote about Easter is actually from Pope John Paul II. He said, we do not give over, give ourselves over to despair. We are the Easter people and Alleluia is our song. And what a day to come together and celebrate our risen Savior and all that he won for us. As we do that, we are in the middle of our series called Greater, going through the book of Hebrews together, and we're going to continue right on with that here on Easter. So hopefully you've been able to follow along and you have kind of a loose awareness of what we've been talking about, but for the uninitiated, for those that got drugged here by friends or are watching in somebody's living room, just so that we all are caught up together. The book of Hebrews is a letter. We don't know who wrote it, but we do know that it was written to Jewish people who lived outside of Israel in a Greek context who had at some point in their life converted to Christianity. So they grew up as practicing Jews, practicing the faith of Judaism, and then at some point received the news about Jesus and his resurrection and placed their faith in Jesus and converted to Christianity. Because of that conversion, they faced persecution from within and without, from the Roman government and from their own community, both of whom were trying to encourage them in various ways to walk away from their newfound faith and to embrace their old way of life. And so the author of Hebrews writes this letter to those people, those converted Jews into Christians, to compel them to stay the course in their faith. And he chooses to try to compel them by painting this lofty, soaring picture of Jesus and who he is. And he paints this picture by way of comparison. He compares Jesus to different facets of the Hebrew faith, which is why we're calling the series Greater, because he was greater than the angels and the other messengers. He was greater than Moses and the law. We see that he's the great high priest we talked about a couple weeks ago. And this week, we see that he's the greatest sacrifice. Now, to appreciate the fact that Jesus is the greatest sacrifice, we need to understand a little bit about how the sacrificial system in the Old Testament worked. And I know that you might think to yourself, boy, this is a weird place to go on Easter, but hang with me, okay? We're going to get to where we're going, but we've got to move through here first. In the Old Testament, the way that you would be right with God, the way that you would have a good standing before God, in our New Testament vernacular, most of us probably think of it as being saved. So in the Old Testament, the way that you were saved, or really the way that you had right standing before God, is through the sacrificial system. In Leviticus, we're given 630 some odd laws, and you had to live your life trying to follow those as best you could. If you could follow them perfectly, then good news, God is happy with you. But just in case you fall short, which everyone but Jesus did, then there were sacrifices that you could make. So once a week, once a month, whatever your rhythm allowed, whatever your wealth allowed, the head of the household, the dad or the grandfather, would take a bull or a lamb or a goat or whatever the sins of that household required based on different parameters of sacrifices that we're not going to get into. But he would take an appropriate sacrifice to the local temple, and the priest would sacrifice this animal on your family's behalf. And as the animal was sacrificed, the father would lay his hands on the head of the bull or the lamb or the goat or whatever it was, and the sins of the family are symbolically transferred onto this animal that is now paying the penalty for your sins. And once you go through this ritual of sacrifice, now you're good. You and God are squared away. You're fine. All your past sins are forgiven. The problem with the animal sacrifice is it only covered your past sins. So if you planned on screwing up in the future, well, then you better plan on making some more sacrifices. And you would. So every week or month you had to go back and you had to make a new sacrifice for the fresh sins. And then once a year on the greatest day in the Hebrew calendar, on the day of atonement, the high priest would go into the tabernacle or into the temple, into the Holy of Holies in the very presence of God, offer a sacrifice for himself and for his sins, and then a sacrifice for the nation of Israel. And it was this system of sacrifices of sinning and repenting and offering sacrifice to give yourself right standing before God. It was this system of sacrifices, of sinning and repenting and offering sacrifice to make yourself, give yourself right standing before God. It was this system of sacrifices that kept you right before God, that kept you saved, right? And so in the Old Testament, they really focused a lot on doing the rituals the right way, on offering the sacrifice in the right way, of putting our hands in the right place. If you were here a few falls ago, we did a series called Feast, where we went through the Jewish festivals, and the biggest one is the Day of Atonement. We spent a whole Sunday morning on the pomp and the circumstance in the Day of Atonement, and when things are supposed to happen, and the ceremonial bath, and the robe that you're supposed to wear, and when this sacrifice happens, and who's allowed in this room, in this space, and it was all very choreographed and nuanced and detailed. And you see, that led them to this assumption in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, they thought the rituals were the point. They thought the rituals were the point. If we can do everything just right, if I offer the sacrifice in the right way, if my priest is a good priest and he's doing it right, if the day of atonement goes well and that high priest performs his sacerdotal duties in the right way, then we're good. In the Old Testament, they thought that the rituals that they were following were the point. The problem is there's a little bit of Mr. Miyagi going on in these rituals. Now, I wanted to show you guys a clip from the 80s smash hit Karate Kid, but we can't. We're fancy now and we stream on YouTube and they would shut down our channel if we showed it, so we decided not to chance it. And now you'll be subjected to me describing to you a movie scene. So let's do this together. For those that don't know, Karate Kid is the predecessor to the really cruddy Cobra Kai that's on Netflix now and is a shadow of the former realities. But in Karate Kid, there's this great scene. There's a guy named, there's a little kid, or he's a teenager named Daniel, and he's getting bullied, okay? The kids are picking on him and he can't fend for himself and whatever, whatever. And so he finds this karate master named Mr. Miyagi. And he goes to Mr. Miyagi, and he says, will you train me? Teach me to do karate like you do karate. And Mr. Miyagi says, okay. But if you do karate, you got to do it all the way. You can't waver. If you do it, we'll squish you, he says. And Daniel's like, I'm in. And he goes, okay, great. And he puts a sponge in his hand and a rag in his hand, and he says, here's my cars. Wax on, wax off. Clean my cars. And he's like, what? And he goes, ah, no questions. You clean my cars. Daniel's like, all right, fine. So he starts cleaning the cars, right? And then the next scene over, he's like washing the car like this, and Miyagi sees him, and he's like, no, what are you doing? Wax on, and he takes his hand, and then wax off. And he moves it really intentionally. And he's like, what's the big deal with the waxing on and the waxing off? I'm cleaning the cars, right? And then he does this series of chores. He paints the fence, and he sands the floor, and he does all these repetitive motions. And it feels, for the first several weeks of of his training that Mr. Miyagi is really just using him for free labor, right? That he's just taking advantage of this kid's desire to learn karate and he's not actually learning anything. And then there's this great scene when Daniel gets ticked and he kind of confronts him. He's like, what's the deal? I want to learn karate and you're just making me do chores. And Mr. Miyagi's like, all right, wax on. And he's like, and he goes, no. And he takes his hand and he does it really intentionally. He goes, wax on. And then you hear Mr. Miyagi scream, hi, and he goes to punch him, right? And Daniel blocks the punch. And then he tries to punch him again and Daniel blocks the punch. And he's like, sand the floor and he blocks the kick. You know, paint the fence and he blocks the punch. And he's like, sand the floor, and he blocks the kick. You know, paint the fence, and he blocks the punch. And you realize in this moment, oh man, Mr. Miyagi really knows what he's doing. This is amazing. I'm all in on the karate master. This is like the smartest thing that happened in the 80s. And you can't believe it. And you're like, oh my gosh, all the things that he was doing, he was teaching him muscle memory. He was teaching him karate. Those were a form of what was to come. The waxing the floor wasn't the point. Waxing on wasn't the point. Sanding the fence wasn't the point. All the chores weren't the point. He was getting them to the point that he didn't understand yet. This is what's happening with the Old Testament rituals. They thought that the rituals were the point, that the cleaning of the actual floor, that the sanding the floor, the painting the fence, that that was the point. But they were really, through those rituals, getting in a much deeper reality. And the author of Hebrews actually writes about this reality and lays it out for them almost. I'm not willing to call it sarcastic and joking, but man what he's saying. He's saying, you guys went through these rituals all this time ago. And then he even comes out and he overtly says it. Those were shadows of the reality that was to come. Those rituals that you were doing that day of atonement was a shadow of the reality that was to come. It's not here yet. And then I love the way that he ends it. This is almost the sarcastic part for me. Maybe I just read my own personality into it. But it's like he leans in and he's like, did you really think the blood of bulls and goats is doing anything? Do you think there's anything magical going on in their blood? It's a symbol, guys. It doesn't make a difference. The ritual's not the point. And then he says this about Jesus. He says, those things weren't the point. They were a shadow of the realities to come. It's the reality of the ritual. And then he goes on and he says, and this is really the fulfillment of those rituals. This is why we did that. And he talks about Jesus in verses 11 through 14, when he writes, He says, that the high priest was pointing to our great high priest in Christ. You watched the sacrifices happen. You didn't realize that the sacrifice was a shadow of the reality that was going to come in Christ as he offered the ultimate sacrifices. And we've already acknowledged that the limited ability of the sacrifice of the animals was that they only covered the things that had happened in the past. But with the eternal sacrifice of Christ, you're not only forgiven for all the things you did up until the moment that you accept that sacrifice, but all the things that God knows you're going to do in the future, which is the remarkable thing about salvation. So he's saying that Jesus is the fulfillment of all of the rituals. And what we need to see is what he was trying to get them to see is that the real point of the rituals was to point to the point. Do you get the point? The real point of the rituals was to point to the point. Think about it. The point is Jesus. The law that they give him in the Old Testament, follow these rules and you can be okay with God. The point of those rules was never to make them okay with God. It was to show them their inability to ever earn their way into God's favor and so surrender to their need for God. The law was given so that we would acknowledge our need for Jesus. The sacrifices that he gives in the Old Testament, those point to the sacrifice of Christ one day. The role of the high priest, the imperfect high priest going into the Holy of Holies is a picture of Jesus as your high priest dying on the cross and then going to heaven and sitting at the right hand of God where we talked about a couple of weeks ago. He prays for you. He intercesses for you. He goes to the creator of the universe and he says, I have him. I have her. They're good. They can approach. He goes, he not only wins our salvation, but then he goes and he sits at the right hand of the throne of God and he ushers in our presence into the throne room so that anytime we want to, anywhere we are, we bow our heads and we say, dear God, and we are rushed right into the very throne room of God, into his presence, which is not a place that we would dare tread if we were not going in the name of Christ. That's what our high priest does for us. And what he wants them to see is that everything in the Old Testament, everything in your old way of life, the point of it is to point to the point. It's all pointing to Jesus. The prophets pointed to Jesus. The kingship of David points to Jesus. The priesthood of Melchizedek points to Jesus. All streams are running to Jesus. The point of everything is to point to Christ. And it would make sense to me if now you were thinking, okay, Nate, that's neat, but we don't live in the Old Testament. We don't do those rituals. So I'm glad I understand that, but what does that mean for me? I'm glad you asked. Don't you understand that we're still just waxing on and waxing off? Don't you understand that we're still just being Miyagi'd? That everything we do as a church is designed to point ourselves and others to the point? Don't you understand that everything we do as a church, as a church, everything we do is designed to point ourselves and others to the point. We come here and we gather together and we worship corporately. We sing praises to our God. Do you understand that that's a picture of heaven? That that's just this glimpse, just this sliver of our ability, the grace that God gives us to gather together with other people who are united in faith and come together as a body of faith and praise God to his throne. That that's a picture of what we're going to be doing in heaven. So that when we come and we praise God together, the point isn't to worship and be moved in your soul right now. The point is to understand that one day we will do this for all of eternity, that one day I won't just be singing next to the people I go to church with, but I will be singing with all saints for all of history. I will be praising next to Moses and David and my grandparents and Esther and Ruth and Naomi and all the heroes of our faith. We will come together and we will praise before the throne together. And what we do on Sunday morning is a shadow, a glimpse of the reality that is to come in heaven. We're pointing to the point. Don't you understand that when we take communion, it's not about the ritual? It's not about how we do it. It's not about if we dip it right or if we use the right bread. It's pointing to the point. As a matter of fact, I just heard before the service started, and I said, oh, that's great. I'm going to use it in the sermon. We did communion two weeks ago, and a single guy was watching online, and he wanted to participate in communion, and the best he could muster up was a tortilla chip and a glass of wine. Great. He participated in communion with his family. I would lean into that like the author of Hebrews did and say, do you really think there's anything magical going on in the bread? I think it matters whether you use Welch's or like whatever, Summer Home. It doesn't matter. I don't even know if that's a wine. I'm a bourbon guy. Somebody in between services, somebody tell me a good wine to use there, and I'll see if I can remember it in the second service. There's nothing special going on in those elements. It's a sign of the things to come. It's pointing to the point that one day we will be gathered around the table of God, of the King of the universe, and we are adopted sons and daughters of the King, and we are invited into that fellowship with Jesus. It is a reminder of what Jesus did 2,000 years ago, and it's a reminder of what he will do, what he has promised to do in the future. Do you understand that even the behaviors that Scripture admonishes in you are designed to point to the point? That faithfulness and goodness and kindness and gentleness and meekness, that God doesn't implore you to be gentle for gentleness' sake. He implores you to be gentle because when you are different from the world that we live in, when you are so gentle that it's noticeable, it orients your heart towards Christ and other people who watch you walk in your gentleness are oriented towards Christ as well. That he asks you to be forgiving, not for the sake of being forgiving, not for forgiveness's sake, but for the sake that with radical forgiveness, we mirror Christ and orients our heart to him and other people are pointed to Jesus as a result of our forgiveness. Go down the list. Goodness, love, mercy, charity. All those behaviors that are prescribed in the New Testament, we're not prescribed them for the sake of the behavior, but so that our hearts would be oriented towards Jesus and other people would see that in us and want to know our Savior as well. Even our marriages, these things that we go through for our lives, we choose a life partner, we stay married, we love them, and even the most holy of marriages, it's a ritual to point to the point. The marriage is used over and over and over again in scripture as a picture of the way that Christ loves the church, that we are the bride of Christ. Pure, unadulterated, marital love between the most holy of people who love Christ only serves to show the world around them how Christ loves the church. Marriage itself is designed to point us to the point. We're still just waxing on and waxing off. Even, I would say to you, fighting your own sin nature within yourself, striving and failing and striving and failing and feeling never good enough is intentional to point you to the point so that you'll come to the end of yourself and admit, I need Christ. Even our striving against ourselves in sin is serving to point us to the point. Not to mention baptism, what we just did. People get concerned about the ritual. Did we do it right? We were in the bathroom changing afterwards and Kyle said, did my head go all the way under? And I said, you're good, man. It took. That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. That's not the point. Whether or not we did the baptism right is not the point. The point is that it points to Christ. In Romans 6 it says in baptism we are buried with Christ in death and we are raised to walk in newness of life. That's why the early church did it on Easter because it's a symbol of Jesus being put in the grave and when Kyle Kyle goes under the water, he's being put in the grave too. And his former self is passing away. And when he rises up out of the water, he is washed clean. He is sprinkled pure by the blood of Christ. He raises to walk in newness of life in eternity with Jesus. It's a picture of Easter. It doesn't matter if we do it right. The point is not the ritual. The point is to point us to Christ. And speaking of Easter, Easter, more than any other day, points us to the point. Easter, more than any other day, points us to Christ. It is amazing to me, the victory that was won on Easter. It is amazing to me that when Mary went and she found the tomb and she heard the greatest line in the Bible from the angel, why do you search for the living among the dead? He is not living. Or he is not here, he is living just as he said. In that victory, Jesus conquered hell and Satan. Jesus conquered death for us. Jesus conquered disease for us. When we gather on Easter, we remember those of us who have lost loved ones in the last year or even further away than that. We are reminded that the last time we said goodbye to them was not goodbye forever. It was goodbye for now. Easter reminds us of that reality. Easter reminds us of the hope that we have. Because Scripture says, death, where are your shackles? Sin, where is your sting? Like it's been defeated. Jesus won that for us because Jesus died on the cross and left the tomb empty and went to heaven as our high priest and now prays for us because he won us that salvation. We get together on Easter and we remember that reality. And because he did that, my friend Kyle, his father watched him from heaven get baptized with his little granddaughter and with his wife sitting on the row and his daughter-in-law that he loved so much. He watched that and participated in that. And when Kyle goes to heaven one day, he's going to hug him. That was one on Easter. Do you understand? We don't have to fear what everybody else fears. We have a tremendous hope. That's why Pope John Paul II said, we do not give way to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. We praise God no matter what. It's an amazing thing that was won on Easter. And here's the bigger deal. Not only on Easter do we remember the victory that Jesus won and be grateful for what it did to us and ushering us into heaven and uniting us with him for all of eternity? But his victory over death is the greatest victory that's ever been won, but it's not the greatest one that will be won because Revelation tells us that Jesus is coming back on a white horse and he's coming back to wreck shop and he's gonna set up his new kingdom and his new earth where there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. Jesus is going to come back and win that victory. One day when we don't have to ask why do shootings happen and why do bad things happen to good people and why do bad people seem to thrive? Jesus is going to come back and he's going to make all that make sense. As Christians, that is the promise that we cling to. That is our hope that will not put us to shame. That is what we usher others to. So even Easter, as we celebrate it, the point is not only the resurrection of Christ, but also the greatest victory that he will win. It's his seal on his promise. I kept that promise. I sent my son. He died for you. He conquered death. He resurrected. He ascended to the right hand of the Father. He prays for you. And one day he's coming back and he's going to make everything right. And so on Easter, we celebrate the promise that we remember that has been kept and we celebrate the promise that we look forward to him keeping. It's still pointing us to the point. As we celebrate Easter with our families, and we do all the things that we do, let us remember the victory that Christ won for us. Let us acknowledge that just like the Old Testament church, they were simply waxing on and waxing off, that the rituals and the things they did were simply designed to point them to Christ, that so it is with us as we exist as the New Testament church, that all the things he asks us to do and all the rituals he's installed and all the behaviors in our life and all the faith that he asks from us is really designed to point us to the point. And let us remember that on Easter, we don't just celebrate a victory won, but one that we know will be won in the future. Let's pray, and we'll continue to worship together. Father, we are so grateful to you. We're so grateful for your son. Thank you for sending him to pay the penalty for our sins. Lord, I pray that if there is somebody who doesn't know you, that this would be the morning when they decide that they want to. If there's someone who hasn't felt your forgiveness, let this be the day that they feel it. God, let us accept more and more that everything in our life is simply designed to point us back to Jesus. That everything we do at the church, everything that you encourage us to do together, all the ways that you encourage us to love, all the ways that you love us, all the things that you let us struggle with are designed, Father, to point us to our need for your Son. God, I pray that we would have the best Easter, not only reflecting on the victory that you've won, but on the one that you promised to win too. And it's in that returning Savior's name that we pray. Amen.

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..

This is good. I've been preaching to Steve for 22 weeks on Thursday mornings. This is great. This is the first morning. Jen and I moved into a new house in April, beginning of April. This is the first morning I've woken up in my new house Sunday morning and driven to church and now preach. So this is really, really great. So good morning to you, Grace. Good morning to you online. I wanted to say to those of you who are watching from home and just reiterate, you are every bit as much a participant in what's happening this morning and in this church as anybody who comes in person. And we are now in this new season of life as a church. This is the new season of grace. We are one church that meets in a bunch of different locations, both here and now, like Kyle said, all over the world online now. And this is what church is going to be for the foreseeable future. We're going to be like this for a long time. I don't know if you guys have thought that through, but this is a new season in the life of Grace as a church because we have to be one church in multiple locations. It's going to be a while before everybody feels all the way comfortable coming back. We're going to grow back into a need for children's ministry as that starts back up. And so this is the new season for Grace, which is kind of crazy to say, because I don't know if you know this, the last time we met in person, I was announcing to you the pledge total of our campaign. That's a thing that happened. And then COVID started, and here we are. So even though this plan, the way that 2020 has played out, and this new season of grace that we're facing is not our plan. God knew what was going to happen. His hand has been on us this entire time, and it will continue to be on us. He will continue to be with us. We have always said that God's hand is on grace. He's made it evident that he loves grace, and we are every bit as confident now that his hand remains on grace. And I need nothing more than this. I was talking with Joe as worship started this morning. Joe's the moderator of our board, and I went, this is great. I didn't expect this. All you brave souls to be here, this is wonderful to get to see everybody. So we are excited. And as we move into this new season in the life of grace, I did want to say just thank you a ton. There have been some people working behind the scenes, and whenever you want to call out any one individual person, it gets a little murky because so many people have been doing so very much. We've had people watching our practice online streams and giving feedback. We've had people showing up to work in the booth and help out behind the scenes. We've had Erin, her whole ministry, our children's pastor, has changed and she's just been killing it online. Kyle's switched everything to online. Everybody just up and changed their job in this quarantine and have done so much to push the church forward. But as we started this new season of grace, I would be remiss if I didn't point out to you the hard work of Steve Goldberg, our worship pastor. When we went in March, when we realized, hey, we have to go totally online. We have to find a way to record a sermon, release it online, and be totally online. And we'd like to have a virtual lobby where people can still talk to each other. And also, we need a new webpage. And we need somebody to record the sermon and edit it and upload it and be ready to go. Steve? And then when the elders, when we realized as elders that in June, we're going to have to go live. We're going to have to do a live stream. We really don't have a choice. We're going to have to be able to do this when we come back because when we begin to resume in-person gatherings, because not everyone's going to feel comfortable doing that. There's costs involved. There's technical attitudes involved. There's different things that you have to do. It's a big, huge stressor. And once again, as a church, we went, Steve? And he knocked it out of the park. So his job fundamentally changed in COVID. He has been a huge servant to the church and is the reason, the biggest human reason that we exist as a body right now because of the work that he's done behind the scenes. So we are grateful to Steve. Thank you, Steve, for that. As we jump back into the series, we are in the series called A Time of Kings. We're walking through the Book of Kings. We know it to be the Book of Kings. Our Bible divides it into two, 1 and 2 Kings, but it was originally all one big scroll that got divided in half because it was just too long of a scroll to carry around. This morning, we are in 2 Kings chapter 10. So if you have a Bible there at home, go ahead and turn there. If you have one here in the service, turn to the Bible. The Bible in front of you, in the seat back in front of you, has not been touched for over like six months. So it's good. It's clean. You can touch it. But we're going to be in 2 Kings chapter 10. In this chapter, there's a principle pointed out that reminded me of a book that was written back in 2001. It's almost 20 years old. If you're a business leader, if you're in the corporate world at all, you have probably gone through this book, Good to Great by Jim Collins. It's a great perennial book. It's one of these wonderful leadership books. Incidentally, in these leadership books, whenever you read these leadership books, how to be an effective leader, how to grow an effective company, whatever it is, the result of it is the author will always land on, after different studies by like Duke and Stanford and Yale and whatever else, that to be an effective leader, you need to be humble and lead without an ego. You need to be a servant leader and put others first. These are the most effective leaders we see in the world. And as a believer, you just kind of go like, oh, you mean to lead like Jesus? That's what your research tells you? That's just an aside. But in this book, Good to Great, he looks at companies and he's asking the question, how do companies go from good, effective companies to really great, knocking it out of the park companies? What's the difference between something that's good and then taking it to the next level and making it great? He's got a lot of good ideas in there that stand the test of time. But the one that he leads the book with that I think is incredibly effective is this statement that I was reminded of as I looked at the story of Jehu this week. It's a statement it's in chapter one of the book. Good is the enemy of great. Good is the enemy of great. And what he means is that when we settle for good enough, that's the enemy of actually pursuing greatness. That so many people, so many corporations don't reach greatness because they settle for good enough. They get to good enough and then they go, great, that's perfect. And they don't actually get to be great. So its premise is that good is the enemy of great. And this is true in the professional world. It absolutely is. You know this to be true in your own lives. It's also true in marriage. It's true in how we parent our kids. It's true in our physical health. Settling for good enough is always the enemy of great. And the story this week points out to us that not only is that true in the professional world, but it's true in the spiritual world as well. I think when we look at the story of Jehu, what we see is that spiritually, good is the enemy of great. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn, like I said, to 2 Kings 10. I'm going to give you a little bit of the background of what's going on here with this story of Jehu. By the way, I don't think there's ever been a more redneck pronunciation of this particular king's name, J-E-H-U, Jehu, right guys? But as I looked at him this week, it became apparent to me that this is one of the more tragic figures in the book of Kings. And I would have thought that two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, if you asked me, who are the characters in this book that make you sad? I wouldn't have named Jehu. But the more I dove into his story, the more my heart broke for him and the potential that he had that he messed up. If you've been following along, you'll remember that two weeks ago, we looked at the showdown of Elijah against the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. And you might remember that the king at the time was a guy named King Ahab, married to a woman named Jezebel. And Ahab, when he took over as king, for whatever reason over Israel, he installed Baal as the God. This is the God that we're going to worship. So he had 450 prophets of Baal. He had temples erected to Baal all over the country. And that was the predominant religion in Israel, which broke the heart of God because these are his people. These are his children, the descendants of Abrahamal on Mount Carmel. If you haven't seen that sermon, there's a spoiler alert. Elijah wins. God wins. And he kills the 450 prophets of Baal. He turns the hearts of the people towards the Lord, but apparently not all the way. Because when Ahab dies, Jehu is his successor. Jehu takes over as king. And he immediately, you'll see in the preceding chapters, stamps out the lines of Ahab and Jezebel, which is an uncomfortable truth, but that's just what they did in the time of kings. That was part of the deal. And the very next step he takes after making sure that Ahab and Jezebel are no longer a threat is he puts to death all the prophets of Baal and he burns down the temples of Baal. He says, no more with this religion, not in my reign, it's done. And it's because Jehu had a heart for the Lord. He said, this is wrong. We're not going to do this in the Israel that I run. He burned them all down. He ran out the prophets. He killed the ones that remained. And he said, in this country, we honor God. This is what we do. And it's a great thing. This is why I think Jehu is a tragic figure, because if you've been paying attention, you know that after Solomon, David and Solomon ruled over Israel, all of Israel. But after Solomon, his son Rehoboam was a dummy and he was so prideful that he split the nation. Now there's the northern tribes of Israel and the southern tribe of Judah. After the Civil War, there is a split. As you follow the history of Judah through the book of Kings, they have, depending on who you ask, either three or seven good kings. Israel had no good kings, not a single good king as it existed as a sovereign nation, if you understand good to be a king who turned the hearts of the people back to the Lord, a king that was faithful to God. Israel didn't have a single good king. And here Jehu is, at the beginning of his reign, taking this huge step, doing this really great thing, this thing that was very bold, this thing that probably would have upset a good portion of the people who followed Baal, this thing that was loud and prominent and good. And he wiped away the prophets of Baal and he wiped away the temples of Baal. And he could have been a good king that changed the course of the nation of Israel, that changed the course of history for Israel for all of eternity. But he didn't do this one thing. And that's where we pick up the story in verse 28. Chapter 10,'s good. God says you've done a good thing. You came in and with faith, because you love me, you got rid of the prophets of Baal, you got rid of the idols of Baal, you got rid of the temples of Baal, and you have followed me. And because of that, this throne is going to be in your family for four generations. This is a good thing. He is on the precipice of potential now, Jehu is, the precipice of greatness. All he has to do is finish the drill. All he has to do is take the next step. He's done the hard thing. And God says, good, I'm going to honor this. But God's not done talking to Jehu. We pick it back up in verse 31. But Jehu was not careful to walk in the law of the Lord, the God nation split, everybody was still practicing Jews. And for every festival and holiday, they had to go to Jerusalem. And in Jerusalem, they would pay the temple tax. They would pay for their sacrifices. They would pay for a hotel stay. They'd go to the restaurants. They'd do the whole deal. It was a trip. It was a pilgrimage. And Jerusalem was getting all the tourist dollars. And Jeroboam went, this stinks because Jerusalem is in Judah. So he made up his own religion with golden calves and he put them in Bethel and in Dan and he told the Israelites, hey, good job. You don't have to go to Jerusalem anymore. You can stay right here and leave your tax and tourism dollars to the nation of Israel. It was an economic choice. And in doing so, he sinned against the Lord. And those golden calves stayed there through many kings, virtually ignored. But to the heart of God, they were offensive. And when Jeroboam took the great step of getting rid of all of the idols in Israel, he didn't get rid of these two idols, the original ones, the ones that were there from the beginning. And I don't know why he didn't do that. I don't know why. Your guess is as good as mine. He could have thought these are part of the heritage of the country. I don't want to mess with this. I don't want to offend people. People go there. They're tourist attractions now. I don't want to fool with it. I've ruffled enough feathers with the bail thing. I don't want to do this thing. He could have thought that. He could have just thought, they don't matter. Nobody cares. Nobody's going to worship these golden calves. Nobody does that anymore. It's an antiquated religion. It's part of our history. It doesn't matter now. They're no threat to God, so whatever. But for whatever reason, he left them behind. And because he left them behind, he didn't turn his heart completely to God. Because he left them behind, he didn't do his part in turning the hearts of the people completely to God. And over time, the worship of those golden calves began to creep back into the culture. And over time, the hearts of God's people were turned away from him again. And over time, it says at the end of this that God began, in verse 32, that the Lord began to cut off parts of Israel. Bit by bit, portions of the kingdom were taken away from Jehu and his descendants until in four generations they were carried away as slaves because of this fundamental mistake that he made. And to me, the lesson from Jehu and his reign that echoes down through the centuries is that partial obedience leads to total failure. Partial obedience, a half measure, not quite full measure, leads to total failure. Partial obedience under Jehu led to total failure. The steps he took with Baal were big, and they were bold, and they were brave, and they were courageous. And he gets credit for that obedience. But because he didn't take the full step, because he didn't go the whole way and take the full measure, eventually it led to his total failure. And you know, the Bible is replete with these examples where half measures don't get the job done, half measures lead to total failure. The most prominent example to me is the transition between the book of Joshua and the book of Judges. The book of Joshua is the sixth book in the Bible that tells the story of the conquest of the land of Canaan. God brings his people, led by Joshua the general, into the promised land that's now occupied by other tribes and nations and city-states. And the whole book of Joshua is a book of conquest sweeping through the nation, and God has given them the divine instruction to get rid of everybody who's not one of my children. This is your land. It's nobody else's. I don't want them here. They're going to contaminate the holiness of my people. Get rid of them. And the whole book is about how God goes before Joshua and his armies and makes that possible. But then the next book, the book of Judges starts. And the book of Judges starts off by telling us, Joshua did right and swept through the land and cleared it out. But he left a couple of pockets of some tribes and some villages that he must have thought were inconsequential. I don't know if he was battle weary and just didn't feel like it. I don't know if he didn't see them as a threat. And so he left them. They could never oppose anything to Israel that would be bad for us. They could never hurt us, but he left them behind. He offered partial obedience. And because it was partial and not full, the author of the book of Judges tells us that because Joshua left them behind, that they were a thorn in the side of the nation of Israel. And in the book of Judges, we see those little inconsequential people groups rise up and oppress God's people in Judges. And they stay there and they remain so much so that generations later when David is in the valley fighting Goliath, he is fighting a giant that is a descendant of the tribes that Joshua left behind because he wouldn't be completely obedient. We see over and over again in Scripture that partial obedience leads to total failure. And what I want us to see this morning is that these stories, the story of Jehu and overthrowing Baal but not the golden calves, the story of Joshua not cleansing the nation like he should have. These stories are not stories about cleansing a nation. They're not stories about getting rid of idols. That's not really what they're about. These stories are about our ongoing battle with sin. They're about our ongoing pursuit of holiness. These stories matter to us deeply because what we should learn from this story of Jehu and his partial obedience is that partial obedience leads to total failure in sin and sin, in lowercase sin and in uppercase sin. For us, here's what I mean. I think the easiest application of this lesson is for us to think about that one sin in our life that just eats our lunch. That one sin in our life that over the years, decades maybe, we just have to battle with over and over again and we experience different seasons of victory and different seasons of struggle with this sin, this one big sin. Many of you, when I said sin, this one big sin, half the room and half of you guys there at home went, yeah, I know what that is for me. You don't have to do a lot of soul searching. You, in fact, think I'm preaching right to you right now that the Holy Spirit gave me a special message, and I know what your sin is. Let me tell you something, I don't. I'm so glad we're not Catholic, and you don't have to confess to me because I don't want to know. But we have those. These big sins that we struggle with over and over and over again. And if you have one of those, come on. You know what that struggle is. You've taken the big measures, haven't you? You've knocked down all the prophets of Baal. You've burned down all the temples for this sin. But you left behind some golden calves because you didn't want to admit that was tempting too. Because maybe you were a little battle weary. You were tired of fighting that when you thought, those can't possibly trouble me. And you left a little remnant. You left a little thing. You left a little window. You left a little foothold behind. And over the years, that sin evolved back into something that was more debilitating than before. You been through that cycle? Yeah, I have too. This story from Jehu is a reminder that partial obedience leads to total failure. The easiest example of this sin, I'm sorry guys, I don't mean to make us, hey, welcome back. Let me make you super uncomfortable for a minute. The easiest example of this is lust, right? It's a sneaky, pernicious sin, man. You can sneak in anywhere. Now, if that's something we struggle with, we can give in to that struggle any time there's cell phone service. And we've taken the steps and we've done the things and we've tried to move past it and we've confessed and we've done the hard stuff and we've sat there in shame and we've been met with grace and we've said, I'm not going to mess it up again. But we leave these pockets, don't we? We leave these little golden idols where we say, certainly that couldn't be what does it. And over time, it builds and becomes just as debilitating as it ever was. And it's not just true of that sin. It's true of pride, or greed,, gluttony, or sloth. So let me just encourage you. If this is you, if you've got one of those sins in your life that's just kicking your tail, that as soon as I started talking about this, you knew what yours was. If that's you, can today be the day that you draw the line in the sand and you go, God, just show me everything I've got in my life that needs to come down so that I can move past this. Show me what full obedience looks like. I'm tired of partially obeying you and then totally failing. So show me what full obedience looks like in this sin. Can today be the day you do that? If you have one of those sins, and you would honestly, in your heart, listen, you don't have to lie to me. I have no idea what you're thinking. The people around you have no idea what you're thinking. If you have that in your life right now, and you think to yourself, you know what? I know that my life shouldn't have this sin in it, but I really like it. And honestly, I don't want it to go away. I'm happier when it's a part of my life. Can you just be brave enough to pray today that God would change your heart? Can you just admit that to the Father? Say, God, I have this sin in my life. I know it doesn't belong there, but I like it there. Will you please change my heart so that I'm not happy with this being a part of my life anymore? Will you just pray that and let the Lord work through that prayer? But this lesson, partial obedience leads to total failure, isn't just true of an individual, lowercase sin, but of all sin, of the sin nature that lives inside of us, of the sin nature that Jesus died so that we might be able to put to death. We can only battle that sin nature with Christ. We can only battle that sin nature with the Spirit. So even as we talk about battling all the sin that is in our hearts, we have to first acknowledge that Jesus expunged that from our hearts and we wander back into it because we're broken creatures. But I think in a church full of Christians, this is probably the more applicable way to look at this story. For many of us here in this room and at home, wherever you are, we don't have that one big sin. Sure, we sin. Nobody's perfect. But we don't have the one thing that if people found out about it, it would just tear us down. We don't have that, but we have sin. And I think for many of us, especially church people, this is where good is the enemy of great really comes into play. Because we feel like we're good enough, right? Maybe you got saved as an adult. Maybe you came to know Jesus as an adult and you look at your life now and you compare it to your life then and you think like, man, I'm totally different. Like I cuss way less, which in Christian circles has to mean you're godly. I cuss way less, right? I don't do the things I used to do. I used to drink this much, now I drink this much. I used to party with these people, now I don't do that. I used to have those friends, now I have these friends. I go to small group, I do all the things. I'm pretty good. So you compare yourself to who you used to be, you feel pretty good about life. Or maybe you've been in church for forever. Maybe you're like me, and as far back as your memory works, church and faith were a part of it. And so you think you're pretty good. You're pretty squared away. And yeah, sure, I mean, I could read my Bible more, but come on, just pastors read their Bible every day, right? Maybe most of the elders. People don't really do that. You know that you could pray more, but you're like, I mean, come on, who has time to pray like 30 minutes a day? Isn't that for little old ladies? Like, I got things to do. And we're pretty good. We look pretty okay. We compare ourselves to the right people. We're pretty spiritually healthy. But that partial obedience, those partial measures, allowing God to change portions of your heart, and then when he shows you this part of your heart, you go, God, I feel pretty good right now. Maybe you don't say that. Maybe you'd never have the audacity to say that to God in prayer, but we say it every day with the way that we act, right? Those partial measures, they lead to total failure just as much as anything else does. And when I say they lead to total failure, what I mean is if we're just cruising along, settling for good enough, not pursuing the Father, not engaging in a relationship with the Father, not daily pursuing Him through prayer and through reading His Word, and then something happens and our life gets shaken to its core and we need our God. We have not been investing in this relationship with Him and we don't have anywhere to go or to grasp and He feels so distant when we need Him so close. Or we're called to ministry or our kids have a question or we need to pour out and we realize that we're pouring from an empty vessel because we haven't been filling ourselves up because we've been settling for good enough. We've been settling for partial measures. It can lead to total failure. But you know, you know what scares me more than that total failure? You know what scares me more for myself and more for you in settling for good enough? It's the thought of what we're missing out on if we would pursue greatness. Think about Jehu. All Jehu had to do is take the next step and get rid of two cows, man. Get rid of those two golden calves, take the next step, take the full measure, and he would have been the lone good king in the nation of Israel. He would have forever changed the course of that nation. He would have been held up as a spiritual hero, and now he's lost history. Many of you never even heard of him before you walked in or before you tuned in this morning. He could have had such a better legacy. What richness and blessings of God did Jehu miss out on because he was partially obedient and he settled for good enough? And for you, what blessings of God are you foregoing by settling for good enough in your life? How much better of a spouse could your spouse have if you would refuse to settle for good enough in your life and you pursued holiness as God instructed you to pursue it. How much, think of your kids. How much better can we disciple our children if we would, as parents, refuse to settle for good enough and pursue greatness and pursue holiness and always go the full measure in our lives and in our hearts and always be willing to tear down the next thing that God shows us. What richness and blessing waits for us on the other side of complete surrender and obedience? We're told that at the right hand of God there are pleasures forevermore, that in his presence there are fullness of joy, that Jesus himself came that we might have life and have it to the full. And I am convinced that the only thing that is keeping us from not experiencing those pleasures and experiencing those joys and experiencing the full life that God has for us is our offerings of partial obedience rather than complete surrender. So look at the story of Jehu. Don't be scared of the consequences. Be aware of what he missed out on. And let's be people who determine, God, I don't want to miss those blessings that you have for me. I don't want to miss that richness that you have for me. I don't want to miss the relationship that you have waiting for me. I don't want my marriage to miss out on that. I don't want my kids to miss out on that. I don't want my next decades to miss out on that. And let's be people who learn from Jehu and apply it to sin and sin. And let today be the day that we say, I'm tearing down all the idols and getting rid of that big sin. And let today be the day that we say, I am going to stop offering partial obedience and start being willing to tear down everything that God shows me in my life so that I can experience all the blessing and all the joy and all the peace that he has for me. Let's do that together as a church. Let's pray. Father, you are good to us. God, I think about maybe some of the things that I've missed, some of the experiences that I haven't had or some of the joys that I would have loved that my half-hearted devotion to you has cost me. Father, may we not be a people of regret. May we not be a people of fear, but may we be a people with an anticipatory joy of what is waiting for us when we will simply surrender ourselves to you. And whatever situations we find ourselves in, whether it's facing a big sin that we're just so scared of, that's just so pernicious, or whether it's facing that sin monster in our life and the temptation to settle for good enough and not tear down the next thing. Wherever we are, God, would you give us the faith and the courage and the desire to take that next step? For those of us who are entrenched, admired in sin, would you simply change our hearts to not be happy with that anymore? Would you help us as a church walk in a pursuit of holiness towards you? Thank you for this morning, for this new phase of grace. We pray that your hand would continue to be on us as it has been in spite everything around us and sometimes in spite of us. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

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.