Sermons tagged with Savior

Advent. The coming. The waiting for light to shine in the darkness. We light candles each week to remind us of the coming of Christmas. As the candles burn down, our anticipation grows. We hear songs on the radio, think about sales we want to hit, see the smiles and the well wishes of peace on earth, the bright lights and decorations and everyone talking about joy, joy, joy. Really? People are more cranky and stressed, more frustrated and depressed than ever. Tragic news pops up in our headlines almost daily now and around the world we hear the same story. We live in a world starving for joy. In the New Testament, Luke tells us of angels coming to announce the birth of Jesus to some lowly and defeated, depressed, and joy-starved shepherds. That night, there were shepherds staying in the fields nearby, guarding their flocks of sheep. Suddenly, an angel of the Lord appeared among them, and the radiance of the Lord's glory surrounded them. They were terrified, but the angel reassured them, Don't be afraid, he said. I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people. Lighting up night, the angel proclaimed, And we marvel as well that God would step into our mess, a broken world marred by our sin. And the knowledge that God is accomplishing something new, that he cannot be stopped or deterred, brings us great comfort and great joy. Yes, we still feel sorrow and pain, but God is ever redeeming, ever remaking, bringing joy from sadness, and we look forward to his return when he will make all things new, and we will live in the great unceasing joy that he has promised us. No matter what you go through, we can know this. Jesus is with us. Think about it. He is with you in your greatest victories and your most humiliating defeats. He invited us to come with him and he will give us rest. He has won the victory for us to relieve our frustration and stress. Our striving is over. Let us be overjoyed. Jesus is with us at all times, in all things. That is the beauty of meeting together around these candles. We light a new Advent candle each week to help us prepare for the coming of Jesus that we celebrate at Christmas. And this week we light the pink candle to remind us of the real, deep-seated joy that Jesus brings that we can hold onto no matter what is going on. This great joy is the startling realization that God has taken up residence in this world. Joy to the world! The Lord is come. Will you receive this king? to be here this morning talking to you about joy. I am also very sorry that I just made that wordplay joke. That was terrible. I can't promise you it's going to be the last one of the sermon, but I can promise you you're going to not enjoy any of them. But the truth is the same. I am so thrilled to be here this morning getting to talk about joy. As you just heard, we are in our third Sunday of Advent. We are lighting the candle of joy, the pink candle of joy, and for me, it is maybe my favorite one. I think maybe the reason for that is because I believe one of the major reasons why people love Christmas so much, why it truly is the most wonderful time of the year, or at least this is how I feel, is because I feel like Christmas is just synonymous with joy. That the purpose of Christmas, the purpose of all of the decorations and the lights and the giving gifts and the songs and just the super fun, joyful songs. All of this is just meant to bring about this joy of this Christmas season. And it's so cool because when you go all the way back to scripture and when you look at the very first Christmas, I think we see the same exact thing. When we jump into Luke 2, and we're going to actually read through some verses in Luke 2, when we look at the first Christmas, as we look at what happened when Jesus was born, I think we're just overwhelmed with the amount of joy that's coming out of it. As it starts, Jesus has been born and there are shepherds that are in the field. They're to Jesus, this angel comes. And so we pick a sign for you. wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, glory to God in the highest and on earth, excuse me, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased. And so what happens? The angels go away and the shepherds immediately, I mean, it doesn't say this, but I imagine they sprinted to go find this baby because they're like, that was the most insane thing I've ever seen. I've got to figure out what they're talking about. And so they go and they see that what the angels had said was true, that this baby had been born. And I think they knew, they knew what that meant. And so after they see the baby, they see that it's legit. They run back and they want to tell everybody they know. They tell their families that it says they basically just recited what the angels had said to them. And then what did they do then? They hussled on back. They returned. They had to go see Jesus again. And we pick up back in verse 20, it says, I mean, there's just joy oozing out of every part of that passage. You start, you got the angels who come and they bring, quote, good tidings, good news of great joy. And then after delivering the message they have, they immediately start singing. It was essentially the world's first Buddy the Elf Christmas gram. And then after they get done singing, all of these shepherds in their joy and excitement run over. They see Jesus and then they're so excited that they take their joy elsewhere and tell other people about it. And then they bring them back and they're so overjoyed at just looking at God that they just have to turn to praising God because they're so overcome with this joy that they've experienced. And how incredible is it that now, today, this season, this December 25th, this Christmas time, we're celebrating that exact same joy. And I would argue that even the, excuse me, even the folks that celebrate Christmas that are more doing it just as a holiday, maybe because they aren't believers yet, that I don't think that they would even argue with you that Christmas is synonymous with joy. Because every part of Christmas is meant to push that agenda. But what we have the blessing of knowing is that the reason, the real reason why Christmas is synonymous with joy is because Christ is synonymous with joy and because Christ was born and Christ came and we have the gospel, we have the Savior who we know came and we know why that is a big deal and why that is important. And so we celebrate with everything we have. We have this childlike wonder and this childlike joy to just sing these goofy songs and to put up these goofy decorations and to do all of these things so that we can celebrate with the people around us this great and wonderful and awesome Christmas joy like none other. But as we all know too well, regardless of how soon, regardless of what date, even if it's like November 1st that we decide, all right, I'm going ahead, I'm getting my Christmas tree, I'm putting up my Christmas decorations as soon as possible, I'm immediately switching to only Christmas music for the next three months, as we all know, as quickly as Christmas comes, it goes. As quickly as we are just once again encapsulated by the joy of Christmas, we get on the other side of it. We get into the new year and we pack up all of our Christmas stuff and we kind of turn from that Christmas joy back into our far less joyful, far more mundane, boring, regular lives. Counting down the days until it's the next Christmas season so that you can experience that Christmas joy all over again. This is going to be weird to say, but just roll with me. I feel like our relationship with Christmas in this way is similar to my relationship that I had for a long time with the sport of disc golf. Yes, I said disc golf. It is not the same as actually as was said to me this morning, golf golf or real golf or regular golf or as us in the disc golf community like to call it, ball golf, but it is similar. Instead of there being a hole in the ground and instead of hitting a ball with a club, yeah, the form was good, I know. That was just a show off to you guys. But instead of that, it is played with a frisbee, or with different frisbees, so you throw it, and the goal is to get it down into a basket in a certain number of shots. You know, you've got your birdies, you've got your pars, bogeys, all of that stuff, and you play a round of disc golf. Now, for those of you who know me, this sport was basically tailor-made for me. One, because it's outside, and it's in these beautiful parks in nature, and you just get to be a part of that, and that's really cool. Another thing is, like, it's a sport in the sense of you're throwing frisbees, and throwing Frisbee is literally my favorite thing to do and has been my entire life. But it's not so intense to where you still just get to hang out with the people that you're with. Talk, mess around, and it was perfect during COVID because you could stay far away from people but still be around people. And you add an element of competition. And as much as I love disc golf, it was something that I very seldomly did. Basically, it was my times playing disc golf were reserved to the times where I was able to go visit home or we would go on maybe a once or twice a year, we would go on a family vacation when it worked out for the family's schedules. And so anytime we'd go on one of these vacations, my brother and my dad and I would look up and we would try to find these different local disc golf courses so that we could play. And it was awesome. It's so much fun. Like I said, it's right down my alley to play this sport. And so it became one of those things where like one of the things I most looked forward to about our trips and about getting to see my family was being able to look up these different courses and get to go and play these courses the couple times a year I was able to do so. Well, imagine my elation as I put together in my head that, wait, Kyle, you can play disc golf more than just a couple times a year. Because, Kyle, there's literally a disc golf course that's a quarter mile from your house that you drive by all the time. Now, as you hear that, I know you're putting it together in your head and you're giving me way too much benefit of the doubt as you think, oh, I bet what he did is say, I like disc golf. I wonder if there's any courses in Raleigh and realize that this one was close. No. Literally, this is a course that is very easily seen that I drove by, I'd point at people playing disc golf, and I'd be like, can't wait to play that in six months. I know, I was very obtuse to this understanding that this is something that was within my grasp this whole time, but thus, there I was, realizing for the first time this truth, that I could go and I could play this sport of disc golf, this thing that I absolutely loved doing, I could go and I could play it whenever I wanted to. Well, let me tell you that that is exactly what happened. I started playing all the time. I, I'd get done with work, and I'd go and play like two rounds every day. I'd hit up people, see if they'd want to come, or I'd go out there by myself, and I absolutely loved it. Because guess what happens when you really love something, and something brings you a lot of joy, and then you get to do it all the time. It brings you a lot of joy. And clearly I'm saying that to say the point of my message this morning is keep all of your Christmas decorations up all year. No, obviously not. And I mean, like you do you if that's down your alley, like more power to you. But obviously the point of that is not to say, hey, if Christmas brings you joy, then just celebrate Christmas all year. But what I am here to say is that the joy that is brought through Christmas is not brought because of the season. It's brought because of the truth of Christ. And there is a big and vast difference between the first time that these people celebrated Christmas and us celebrating today. And what that difference is, is that they were celebrating the birth of a baby that gave them hope. We celebrate not only the coming of Jesus, but the life of Jesus. And we celebrate the death of Jesus as he took on the weight of our sin, of your sin, of my sin, and said, I am putting this to death because I want the opportunity to have a relationship with you. And in that death, and in his resurrection, coming back to life, signifying that if we would put our sin behind us, if we would simply say, I realize that I am not perfect, I realize I deserve nothing but death, but I also realize what Jesus has done for me and has given me the opportunity to have eternal relationship with God, with our creator, with this perfect creator. And that is the joy that we celebrate on Christmas. That is the gospel. And put so beautifully, I think, by a musical group, Beautiful Eulogy, in their title song, they say, as long as the gospel is true, why do we treat Christmas as our quick fix, as our quick time where we are able to experience this great joy. Why do we use Christmas as the one time that we just celebrate Jesus and we're willing to be more childlike in our hearts? Being a little bit more goofy, decorating a little bit weirder, all because inside of us we're just joyful that it's Christmas time. Because the joy of Christmas and the joy of the gospel is forever. In Lamentations, Lamentations 3, 22 through 23. It's funny that I'm reading a verse out of Lamentations because lament is kind of the opposite of joy. But nonetheless, here we go. Lamentations 3, 22 through 23. It's funny that I'm reading a verse out of Lamentations because lament is kind of the opposite of joy,. Again, I say rejoice. I've got news for you. God invented joy. God sent his son to be born and created the joy that that brought to those people. He sent his son to die so that we could have joy eternally. He didn't create joy to say, man, when it comes to December, my people are going to be so excited. He sent joy so that literally every single day he could shower on us joy and he could shower new mercies on us every morning. God is giddy to bring you joy. He wants to celebrate with us. He invented singing. He invented dancing, both of which I'm eternally thankful to him for. Because they're great and I'm great at both of them. But not only that, but guess what happens? Guess what happened when I started playing disc golf a lot more? I got a lot better. As I played more, I started understanding more intricacies of the game. I grew this much greater love and appreciation for what was going on, from what I was seeing other people doing and trying to emulate that because I wanted to achieve those things, I started achieving goals that, like, I never even thought I could achieve, you know? I was getting my first birdies, shooting my first under par round, shooting my first 10 under par round. A few weeks ago, I think some of you guys saw on Facebook because I posted about it. I wasn't quite as joyful on my Facebook post because, you know, the putting was off. But I played in my first tournament, which is hilarious because I didn't even know that that's a thing that existed. Like when I used to just play a couple times a year, like I was like, oh, that's a thing people do. And hey, guess what? Yes, it's a thing that people do, including your boy Kyle. And I played in it, and it was so much fun, and it was so cool to just like unlock this whole new joy I didn't even know was a real thing. My putter was off, but hey, you know what that did? That just made me want to press in, because I didn't want to fall short on my putter again. The next round I play in a tournament, I want to do better. I want to see what it feels like to do even better than that. Hey, a few days after that, I went and played disc golf with my brother and with my sister-in-law, and that in itself brought me great joy. But hole 13, I got my first ace, my first hole in one. I mean, I like, you know, I put it, I got my stance. I ripped it up. Nice little Anheuser, little turnover shot up the hill, about 250 feet uphill. Smashed that thing. It's flying. It's going. Smashes into the chains. Lands in the basket. And I go nuts. I mean, like, you probably can imagine, like, you're watching me right now, and you're like, this guy's just talking, and he's going this crazy. Yeah, I'm kind of nuts. But I went insane. I was screaming, I was yelling, I was cheering. Like, literally, I wanted to make sure everyone on the course knew that I had just gotten an ace. I mean, like, I'm running around and yelling. Like, to the point that I turn around at one point, I see that my disc golf bag is here on my bench, and all my body can think to do is, I got to kick that. And so I just kick it, like, through the air. I mean, I was absolutely thrilled, and it was awesome, and I can't wait to get another one. But what was incredible to think about was the fact that that was a joy. Throwing a hole-in-one in disc golf is a joy I never even thought to be possible when I was just playing disc golf once or twice a year. Playing in a tournament, I didn't even know tournaments existed back when I was just doing it once or twice a year. Literally, as I kept playing, I've continued to unlock these greater and greater joys that I never even knew were possible or never even knew existed. And that's just a silly game. I love it. It's fun. Let's go play sometime. But it's just a silly game. Imagine how much more joy the Lord has in store for you if you will just say, I want to put that type of effort every day into seeking after him. I want my faith to be so important to me that instead of just waiting for December, I want every day to be a day that I'm seeking the same type of joy that I get to experience during Christmas time. Psalm 1611 says, you make known to me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy, true, complete, 100% fullness of joy, may not be completely available until heaven, where joy, as John Piper put it, joy has no other competitors. I believe that this verse is making us, making it known that this does not start until heaven. I mean, excuse me, that this starts way before heaven. We get to experience this fullness of joy now. And guess what? Fullness of joy changes definitions because God continues to unlock joys we never even knew were existent. He has pleasures for us forever. He wants to shower on us a love that knows no bounds that we can't even comprehend. He wants to bring peace to us and hope to us that sustains us in every part and in every portion and in every circumstance of our life. And he wants to overwhelm us with joy to the point that as an overflow, we can't help but sing and we can't help but dance and we can't help but just be childlike and giddy because we're so overwhelmed with the blessings of God. And at the end of the day, I say all of this, but I don't say this to say that the gospel changes. The gospel remains the same. Every Christmas we're celebrating the same thing. And so I don't say this to say that if you spend more time with God and if you spend more time in scripture and more time growing in your personal faith, that that will change the facts of the gospel. Because the gospel is the root of our joy. The gospel is the reason why we're able to rejoice. But what I am saying is when we choose to pursue this type of joy, when we choose to pursue the joy of the gospel and the joy of salvation and the joy that is a relationship with God, when we choose that daily, and when we decide that we want to start taking that next step of obedience, whatever that looks like in our life, I can promise you that those joys that you experience through a growing faith will be far deeper and they'll be far sweeter and they will be far more profound and they will come so much more frequently than anything that you could ever imagine. So, what if next Christmas, what if instead of next Christmas being just the next time where we get to celebrate the joy of Jesus, what if instead it is a time where we get to take stock of what the Lord has done in our lives and in our hearts the last year, where we look back at the Christmas prior and then we see the ways that because we sprinted after and we pursued the joys of the Lord all year, and we said, oh my gosh, look at the unbelievable things that the Lord has done in my life this year. Literally, if I would have thought last Christmas that the Lord would have done this in my life, I would have said there's absolutely no way. So what if next year? What if next Christmas? What if this Christmas? What if from now until this Christmas when we look back from, what, a week, two weeks? We say, gosh, look at all the joys that the Lord has brought me and my heart and my family just in these two weeks. And I think that's the point of Christmas. Not simply to celebrate a birth of Jesus, but to celebrate his life in eternity. Everything that he did. Everything that that means for us. And because the gospel is true, and because the gospel is final, we do not have to wait for Christmas time to rejoice. But instead, we always have reason to rejoice. God's blessings, his joys, his mercies are new every morning and all he wants to do is shower them on you because all he wants to do is celebrate with you his creation and somebody who he has a relationship with that he loves more so than we can even grasp. And so let our joy of this Christmas be the beginning. Let it be the root by which our joy grows throughout this year. And I can't wait until next Christmas to hear what has grown out of that root of joy that started last Christmas. Let's pray. God, thank you. Thank you for creating joy. Thank you for Christmas, God. Thank you for even the holiday of Christmas so that we can be reminded of your great joy, so we can be reminded of the gospel and of its truth. But God, let us not forget once Christmas time is over that the joy of the gospel is final and is forever. But instead, God, let this be the nudge in the right direction to say, I want this joy always. Every day, I'm going to pursue it. I'm going to pursue you. God, let us pursue you always. And let us, let you do what brings you so much joy, and that is simply raining down blessings, raining down mercies, and raining down joy upon your children. Lord, we love you so much. Amen.

Christmas is coming. The Advent candles mark this season of waiting. They help us pay attention to our longing for a Savior, for Jesus, the reason for our Christmas celebration. He gave us our first gift, our greatest gift, His love, which is perfect because we live in a world starving for love. We live lives starving for love. We're lonely, longing for a place to belong. We crave affirmation because we wonder if we really even matter. We long to be known and understood and accepted, don't we? Our whole selves, our real selves. In the midst of our shame and feelings of unworthiness, we desperately want, no, we need to be loved as we are. We long for Jesus because he loves like that. We read it over and over again in the Bible. We love because He first loved us. God is love, so you can't know Him if you don't love. And this is how God showed His love for us. God sent His only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they have done to our relationship with God. Friends, if God loved us like this, why can't we love each other? God's great miracle at Christmas was to love us up close, personally. Emmanuel, it means God is with us. So today we light this second candle of Advent as a reminder of God's love because the God who loves us knows we need his love. So he came to earth to be with us. Jesus coming means that we have that love. You are loved. Receive it. Welcome him into your home, into your brokenness, into your hurt and your shame and your sadness. Welcome him into your heart, into your places of joy and celebration and thanksgiving. Ask Jesus to fill you with the light of his love so that you can be light in a dark world. Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to get to be back with you up here preaching. Last week, Erin kicked off Advent for us. Erin is our wonderful children's pastor, and she did a phenomenal job kicking off Advent at Grace. If you didn't get to watch it, I would very much encourage you to go and do that. If it gets boring while I'm preaching, just jump over to our messages page and watch that one instead if you missed it. I wouldn't blame you. She did a great job of framing up Advent in that it's a season of expected waiting. It's a season where we as believers prepare ourselves for the coming of the Messiah and all that it means. And so every week we focus on a different thing that Jesus brought. Last week was hope. This week is joy, or this week is love. Next week is joy. The week after that is peace. And then on Christmas Eve, we get to focus on Jesus. So this week, as we settle into this idea of love, I wanted to take you back a couple of years ago. It's a Saturday night, Sunday morning, about 2 a.m., 2.30 a.m., something like that. And Jen and I are awoken by our dog, Ruby, barking. I have a golden retriever named Ruby. If you know me, you know I would like to not have a golden retriever named Ruby or any dog by any name, but Jen loves her, and so we keep her, and Ruby is about as good of a dog as you can have. I have a friend that has a dog named Rocco, and Ruby is way better than Rocco, but at about 2 o'clock, 2.30 in the morning, we were awoken by her barking, and she never barks inside. And so we were both a little bit startled, and I go scrambling down the stairs, but I fully expect I'm going to get down the stairs, Ruby's going to have her nose pressed up against the window, and there's going to be a rabbit or a deer or another dog or something in our yard. It won't be that big of a deal, but as I'm going down the stairs, Ruby's going to have her nose pressed up against the window and there's going to be a rabbit or a deer or another dog or something in our yard. It won't be that big of a deal. But as I'm going down the stairs at our old house, we moved back in April. At our old house, as you're going down the stairs, you can see the front door and then you can see like the window pane next to the front door and then the stairs going down our front porch to the sidewalk. And as I'm going down the stairs at 2.30 in the morning with no shirt on, I'm looking out that window and I see two men start to walk up my porch stairs. It's two dudes in their 20s. And I was instantly terrified. What are these guys doing here in the middle of the night? And what I should have done in the moment is stopped, turned around, gone back into my room, grabbed a gun and a phone and called 911. That's what I should have done. Instead, what I did was leap down the last eight stairs into my small foyer and press myself up against the glass panel right as they came to the stairs. And when I saw them, it was two guys and one of them was carrying a beer bottle, but he wasn't carrying it like he was drinking it. He was carrying it like he was about to swing it. And I thought, oh, it's about to go down. It's happening right now. So I thought maybe they are just trying to like sneak in and steal a couple things. So I press myself against the glass and I bang it as hard as I can. And I say, get off, get off my porch, get out of my house, get off my property. And they start to argue with me. At one point, I'm trying to get them to get off my porch. At one point, he holds a phone up against the glass and he says, is this your address? And I say, yeah, but that doesn't matter. Get off my property. By this point, Jen's at the top of the stairs. Lily's two years old at the time. She's crying in her room. I'm flipping out. I am waiting for my door handle to start jiggling. And when it does, my plan is to go to the kitchen and get a knife and come back and meet them. Like, I'm ready. But then I keep telling them to get off my property, and they go, they treat me like I was a crazy person. They walk back off the stairs. I go upstairs. I get my gun and a phone, and I told Jen, look out the window and tell me what you see. And she says, there's four men standing at the end of our driveway. And I'm like, I only got five shots, you know, so let's make sure that I'm careful. And so I call 911. They send somebody out. The guys start to walk down the street. Long story short, they were just out probably partying, got an Uber to a place they thought they were supposed to go, put the wrong address into the Uber and ended up at my house and ruined my night. Now, here's why I bring that up. I sat in Lily's playroom staring out the window until 4.30 in the morning, like not moving a muscle in case they came back. But I bring that up because I want to ask the question, what is it about us? What is it about me that when I saw a threat to my family, I jumped down the stairs and bang on the glass and have a plan to go get a kitchen knife and fight two dudes who are trying to break into a house? Like, listen, I don't want any of you to take advantage of this. I've never been in a fistfight. I don't know how valuable I would be. I know that I would fight dirty, and I know that you'd really have to hurt me to get me to stop. Other than that, I'm pretty sure I'd be terrible at it. If I started fighting these two dudes, I was going down. But that didn't even occur to me. I just instantly threw myself in harm's way because two people that I loved were upstairs. And I ask what is it that would make me do that because I am certain that any of you who love anybody would have done the same thing. Any dads who are listening would have not have hesitated to do and react in the exact same way that I did more or less. Any mamas listening would do whatever they had to do to protect their kids. We would do anything for the people that we love. And I think the reason that we do that is because we do genuinely and deeply love them. I love my wife, Jen, and I love my daughter, Lily, and I would do anything for them. Of course I would do anything for Jen. Do you realize that my wife Jen and I have been together nearly 18 years? We've been married 14 years. She puts up with me daily and weekly. You understand that? Like I'm a gross human. I have terrible manners when there's nobody around. She puts up with that. I'm a pain in the rear. She puts up with that, and she loves me, and she supports me. Of course, I'll do anything that she needs. I loved Lily when she was born, but I love her even more now. Just this last week, she's in the back seat singing along to a Wren Collective song, and I turn around. She's in a big girl booster seat now, and I start crying like a moron because I just can't believe that I get to love this girl. Like, I just love her so much. And you would do the same for your families and for the people that you love because love is this compelling thing because typically when we love people, they've done something to warrant that love, right? That's how it goes. They've showed up for us. They've listened to us. They've hugged us. They've cried with us. They've laughed with us. They've seen us at our worst. They hope for our best. Like the people that we have in our life who we love, who if you think about, if they picked up the phone and they called you and they said, hey, I need this, you would do anything to be able to provide that for them. Those people have typically reciprocated the love that you offer them. That's kind of how love works. It builds and we reciprocate it. That's what makes God's love for us so miraculous, because he didn't do that. He didn't wait for us to earn it. He didn't watch you live your life and then decide to love you. He didn't wait for you to reciprocate his love and then say, yeah, now my affection is growing for you. As a matter of fact, this is how Paul writes about God's love in Romans chapter five. I'll pick it up to deserve it. He loved us before we did anything at all to deserve it. We had never even existed. We weren't even a figment in our parents' or grandparents' imagination. God just decided that he loved us and he sent his son, his only son, whom he loved and whom he was well pleased. Jesus came down and he died for us even before we deserved it. And make no mistake about it, this was a huge sacrifice. Jesus came down and the night that he was arrested to be crucified and to die for you and I, out of his deep and abiding love for us, he prayed in a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. And he begged God, stressed to the point of sweating blood, God, Father, please don't make me do this. Please don't make me walk this path of crucifixion. I'm scared. I don't want to. And then he did because he loves us. He loves us when we've never done a single thing to deserve it. The only approximation I think we have of this love in our human experience, the type of love that God lavishes on us, is when we hold our brand new baby. If you're a parent or an aunt or an uncle, you know what it is to hold this child that is hours old and know in your soul you would do anything for this kid. For your heart to be so full of love that you can't stand it. We know what that love is. But God's love is even bigger than that because not only have we never done anything to deserve it, but he knows everything we're going to do. Imagine holding this child and knowing all the worst things that this person is ever going to do or be capable of and then trying to have that type of love well up within you. There'd be mixed emotions there, right? This is why I think God's love for us that he gives to us without ever earning it is miraculous. But the bigger miracle is that he continues to love us without borders. The bigger miracle of God's love, it's a miracle that he loves us before we deserve it, without deserving it at all, but he loves us knowing that we're never going to. He loves us without borders. This is why I know that's true. Because in Romans 8, Steve brought it up as a devotion a few weeks ago, and it rings so true this morning. Romans 8, to me, is the greatest chapter in the Bible. We did eight weeks in Romans 8 a few summers ago, and it finishes this way in what I think is the crescendo of hope. For it says, We cannot be separated from that love. And I phrased it that way, love without borders. God loves us without borders. This is a concept that I actually picked up from my counselor. And he was talking about human relationships and the borders that our love has in human relationships. And to me, it really makes a lot of sense that we love people in our life, but we love them within certain parameters, right? We love people within certain parameters. Kyle Tolbert's here this morning, Christmas Kyle, you may remember him earlier in the service. And I love Kyle. But if I'm honest, I love Kyle with some parameters. There's some borders around his behavior and around his actions. And if he ventures outside of those borders, it's going to impact my affection for him. This is how we love everybody. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a reality of life. If you think of me as your pastor, hopefully we have some sort of mutual affection for one another and you have an affection for your pastor. But you have parameters around me. You love me with borders. You give me affection with some boundaries. And if I were to go outside of those boundaries, then your affection for me would change. Just would. And it works the same way for our great partners. If I'm being honest, I love the great partners. But if I'm being honest, I love you within some boundaries. There's some things, there's some parameters around your behavior that if you were to do this thing or that thing, it would change my affection for you. And now some of these borders are necessary for our own self-protection, right? Like husbands and wives love each other, but even in those, the most intimate of relationships, there's borders around that love. Jen loves me very much, and she's offered me very generous borders for the continuation of that love, but if I begin to act in a way that's harmful to her or to Lily, well, now I'm acting outside the bounds of the love that she's offered me. So sometimes as people, we need these boundaries and these borders to protect ourselves. That's why I think God's love is phenomenal. That's why I think that's the biggest miracle of God's love. Because he loves us without borders. He puts no stipulations on our behavior. He has no expectations on us. He just says, hey, I love you. I love you so much that I've given you my son. I've given you everything. I've made a path so that I can spend forever with you. That's how much I love you. And if you really think about it, this is so powerful because we know that we love with borders. We know that other people love us in some ways contingent upon our behavior or the parts of ourselves that we allow them to see. And so very few of us, very few of us in life are fully known and fully loved. We reveal bits and pieces to ourselves. When you have an acquaintance, someone that you meet, whatever your public persona is, whatever that is, you present that to them. And the more they get to know you, the more the layers begin to peel back. And you're like, will you accept this layer? If I show you this side of myself, will you continue to love me for who I am or is that going to cause a fissure between us and now you can't love me like that anymore? And so we're very careful about who we let in and how vulnerable we become to people because we don't want to do anything to disturb the relationship that we have. And even in our most intimate of relationships, very few of us are fully known by our parents or our spouse or our close friends. There's always portions and pockets that we hide. Are these people over here who get this version and these people over here who get this version? And there's not a Venn diagram in our life of where somebody who fully knows us would intersect and know all the parts of us. And it's a sad thing to not be fully loved. It's a sad thing to pine, to be known and to be seen and to be vulnerable and yet to be accepted anyways. And it's an incredible gift that God gives us to love us without borders. Because none of those expectations are there. None of those parameters are there. Every time we realize our vulnerability to God, we are met with the warmth of his love. And so, God loving us without borders, what that means is this means that we are fully known, fully seen, fully vulnerable, and yet completely and limitlessly loved. We are fully known, we are fully seen, we are fully vulnerable, we are completely exposed to God the Father. All the things that we've done that would bring us shame. Some of the things that we have sworn to ourselves we are going to take to our graves. God knows about those things. The moments in our past that when we think of them they're painful because we don't like that version of ourself or what we did that night or that season or whatever it was. Jesus was with us in those moments and he was loving us anyways. The things in our future, the things that we're capable of, the thoughts that we have, the critical things that we think, the awful attitudes that we espouse and we continue to foster, Jesus is with us in that ugliness. And he loves us anyways. In our vulnerabilities, when life is heavy, when everyone in the world expects us to be strong and inside all we say is, God, I need you. I'm not strong enough for this. I can't do it. I can't be who they want me to be. God says, I know. I love you. I'll make you who you need to be. The miracle of God's love is not just that he loved us before we'd done anything to deserve it, but that that love perseveres regardless of what we do. And in him we are fully known, we are fully vulnerable, and yet fully accepted. And this is the thing that we all pine for. This is what we want. More than anything, that's what we want. If you think about your actions, think about your actions as an adolescent. Think about yourself in high school and then in college. Everything you did screamed, will you accept me now? Am I good enough now? Have I earned the world's affection and acceptance now? And the older we get, it doesn't change. That desire doesn't change. Am I good enough now? Am I enough now? We just learn more nuanced ways to pine for it. And I think what happens is, even though as Christians we know we are loved deeply and fully and completely and without hesitation, I think we tend to forget that. We go throughout our years, we go throughout our days, and we know that we have the affection of the Father, but for some reason we pine for it in other places, and we look to it from other people, and we put on other facades because maybe they will tell me that I'm enough. And I was trying to think about what this would be like, and I remembered one night this summer when I went over to Greg and Laura Taylor's house, and I was in their backyard. And now they have maybe the greatest backyard setup I've ever seen in my life. I was over there with a bunch of guys and we all made a pact to never show our wives this backyard because we don't want to do near the amount of work that Greg has placed into it. At the end of his yard, you go out, there's a deck and then there's like a water feature and there's like sidewalk and a garden, and there's probably like live dancing gnomes there. They just were off that night, and they were walking to the end of the yard. At the end of the yard, there's a fire pit, and the fire pit is level on the ground that you're walking on, but it's on a slope, so the end of it is about four feet high. So it's stacked up from the ground. It's stone that Greg hand laid. He probably hand hew it too out of his own rock. And he just laid it there. And then in the middle, there is a pit. It's like two feet deep. It looks like a big stone donut. And there's chairs all around it. And there's wood, like endless amounts of wood for fire. I have no doubt in my mind that Greg researched the best possible firewood and then chopped it down by hand and then brought it to his house on a burrow. And there it is. It's ready. We're waiting for the fire. And so I want you to imagine being invited over to the Taylor's house, which, lucky you, and sitting around this fire. You've got all the wood you could want. It's the perfect fire. It's the perfect environment right there on the edge of the yard and the woods. It's really peaceful. And it's cold out. And he's got drinks and he's got s'more setups. And you're sitting in there at that fire. And you get up. And you start to wander through the woods. And you're gone for a few minutes, long enough for Greg to go, hey, what are you doing? And you go, I'm just grabbing some wood. And he's like, you don't have to, man. I got all this. I brought it in last week. You're like, no, no, no. I'm going to make my own fire. He says, what? Why? I have a perfectly good fire over here. And you go, no, no, no, I'm just getting a little chilly. Just thought I'd make my own. And you just go wandering through the woods, picking up like wet twigs and a couple of leaves, and you wander out of the woods, and you've got this bundle, and you set it down, and we think, okay, they're going to get it together and come sit with us and warm themselves on this good fire. And then you start to walk back in the woods, and we go, you still going to build your fire? And you're like, yep, yep, just one second. And you just keep going back and you try to make this fire and it's never gonna be as good as the one that's in the pit. His wood's way better than yours. His fire's gonna be infinitely better than yours ever could be. And you don't even have s'mores. Like, what are you thinking? I think sometimes we forget that God loves us fully and completely, and we go pining for it in other places. I think we tend to forget, and we build our own fires. We tend to forget that God loves us, and so we wander into the woods, and we get these cruddy sticks and twigs, and we assemble our own little sad fire over here with God's got the one raging over there, and he says, just come on. I've got everything you need. Just warm yourself. It's here. Come in. He invites us into his love. And we go, no thanks, God. Actually, I do want the warmth that that fire provides, I'm just going to make my own really cruddy version of it over here. And I think that this is why we need Christmas. And this is what the Advent season does for us. Because Christmas is our yearly divine reminder that God loves us without hesitation, without borders, and without end. It's this time once a year as we observe Advent. And Advent is a time of expectant waiting where we prepare our hearts for the coming of the Messiah because so often we just flippantly say, yeah, Jesus is the reason for the season. Or we post something ridiculous. I'm sorry if this offends anybody, but it's ridiculous. Santa kneeling at the crib of Jesus as if to say like in this house, Jesus is a bigger deal than Santa. Yeah, no kidding. We do all these little things to kind of give this token appreciation of Christ. And sometimes we forget to just slow down and let the weight of the gift that he is sit on our shoulders. We say that God is love. We sing that God loves us. But how often do we sit in the reality of this love? How often do we sit and let it wash over us that God loved me before I did anything to deserve it, knowing I would never do anything to warrant it. And he loves me. He is the only being in the universe to pick up our own things and to build our own fires as a replacement for the love that God offers us. And so Christmas exists as this time once a year where God beckons us back to his love to warm ourselves at his fire and to remind us of who we are and how much he loves us. So as Christmas approaches, let's not observe it for another year, flippantly regarding giving passive intellectual assent to the love of God, but let's sit in the majesty and the miracle of it and be together grateful for it as Christmas approaches. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you so much. We love you, as your word says, because you first loved us. God, without that, we know that we never could. We could never have the slightest inclination to love you. Father, if there is anybody listening who doesn't know your love, who has not received your love, if we are out in the woods collecting our own wood, trying to make our own fire, trying to fabricate what it is that you've already created for us, God, I pray that we would drop all that junk right now and rush to you. Lord, if there's anybody who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. For those of us who, like me, move through this season with so much urgency and so much purpose and this feeling of busyness that can sometimes produce in us a flippancy as we consider your love, may we slow down and be hit with the weight of it this morning. Father, as sincerely as we can say it, we say thank you for your love and thank you for your son. And it's in his name that we pray. Amen.

Good morning. My name's Doug Bergeson. I'm a partner here at Grace, and I'm going to start off this morning by giving you all a very, very special treat. I'm going to sing a song from my childhood that some of you will be familiar with. Although I can't remember what I did yesterday, for some reason, this song that I learned in Sunday school when I was only four or five years old remains etched in my memory crystal clear. So here goes. You might want to say a quick prayer for me, but here goes. Oh, the wise man built his house upon the rock. The wise man built his house upon the rock. The wise man built his house upon the rock. And the rains came a-tumbling down. Oh, the rains came down and the floods came up. The rains came down and the floods came up. Sing along if you know this next chorus. Oh, the foolish man built his house upon the sand. The foolish man built his house upon the sand. The foolish man built his house upon the sand. And the rains came a-tumbling down. Oh, the rains came down and the floods came up. The rains came down and the floods came up. Splat! Now, if you can overlook the singing, you might be thinking, aw, that's a cute little Sunday school ditty. But of course, it's much more than that, as its lyrics are lifted directly from Scripture. And even more than that, they come straight from the mouth of Jesus. It's a reading from Matthew chapter 7. The streams rose and the winds blew and beat against that house, yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and theining the way you relate to God, and we're reading this book together, to answer that most central of questions. What does it mean to build one's house on the rock? And while the book doesn't use that exact language, that's precisely what the author in this sermon series are doing as we explore the many ways in which we relate to God. How we try to build our house, our lives, on the rock. If you've heard either of the last two weeks' sermons or are reading along in the book, you know that the author sets the table for where he's trying to take us as readers by describing the primary postures that many of us adopt in our relationship with God. The four postures are life under God, life over God, life from God, and life for God. In his introduction, the author Sky Jathani describes a scene at a 1,500-year-old Roman tomb in Italy where tourists are ushered in to the dark, unable to see the reason they came in the first place. A vaulted ceiling covered in an exquisite mosaic that depicts Jesus as the good shepherd, surrounded by sheep in a starry paradise. However, if one is patient, a light will eventually come on, illuminating the mosaic for just a few seconds before returning to darkness. Each time that light comes on, the visitors are given another glimpse of the world behind the shadows. And just like when the lights come on in the tomb, each of these four postures give us one perspective, one angle of what life with God is like, but it's not the full picture. Standing alone, each of these postures will give a distorted view. This matters a lot because the postures we adopt, that lens through which we view our relationship with God, is critical. And it is that view, that lens, which drives what we expect out of our relationship. And this is where the book is dead on. As what we expect has an enormous and defining impact on how each of us experiences life as a Christian. And it's especially tricky because not only do all four postures contain elements of truth, some more than others, but all four also find some basis and support in Scripture. So unless you don't mind being surprised, disappointed, and disillusioned with the Christian experience, we need to make sure that our expectations match up with what the full testimony of Scripture teaches us to expect, allowing it to properly inform, set boundaries and limits, and provide context for when each of these postures is appropriate in some measure and when they're not. When Jesus came to earth, his message was incredibly radical and countercultural, a message which challenged everyone and flipped the status quo completely on its head. But as the author of our book points out, in the ensuing 2,000 years, we've learned to cope with that message quite well by slowly but surely co-opting Jesus and his message, making him more like us, reflecting our priorities and desires, and less like him. I'm reminded of the chorus from the old Linkin Park song, Numb. All I want to do is be more like me and be less like you. That's not a very good impression of Linkin Park, but whatever. For many, it's morphed into a spiritual Rorschach test. In determining what our relationship with God should be like, we see whatever we want to see. And inevitably, we tend to assume that what we want for our lives is what God must want for our lives. And this assumption that what we want for our lives is what God must want for our lives is especially true of the third posture that we're looking at this morning, life from God. Now let me first say that for those of us who believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior, life, of course, does come from God. But what does that mean exactly? Our author defines the essence of the life from God posture as a relationship in which we are more interested in what God can do for us and how he might bless us than we're interested in actually knowing him. A relationship whose primary value is to help us solve our problems and navigate through life's challenges to achieve what we want. This posture is most often and most easily criticized when it's taken to an extreme, commonly referred to as the health and wealth or prosperity gospel. Growing up in Chicago in the 1960s and early 70s, I would sometimes listen on Sunday night to Reverend Ike's radio broadcast. His unrelenting and super upbeat message was that God wanted to bless each and every one of us right now in this life. His sayings included, God doesn't want you to have your pie in the sky by and by when you die. He wants you to have it now with the cherry on top. Or, he added this, you don't have to wait for the pearly gate. Reverend Ike also claimed good health is my divine right. And I remember him saying that God wanted me to have a Cadillac and that he had nine or so, enthusiastically adding, my garages runneth over. Although easy to do, it's not my intent to mock and refute such extremes because I don't think most of us fall into that camp. Furthermore, my complaint with the life from God posture isn't that it's wrong to want God's blessings. It's not. The Bible constantly encourages us to desire God's blessings. Rather, this morning, I'm going to take a different tact than our author in critiquing this posture. As I stated earlier, life is from God, but that's often misunderstood in the life from God posture in two primary ways. The first thing to realize is that God has already blessed us. An implicit premise of the life from God posture is that we have to do certain things and behave certain ways to somehow curry God's favor and procure his blessings in our lives. Whereas in fact, the Bible is abundantly clear that God's plan was to always bless us. Before the foundation of the universe was laid, God's intent was to bless us through his son, Jesus Christ. Before any of us lifted a finger or did anything good or bad, God was blessing us. As the Apostle Paul stated in Romans, but God demonstrates his own love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. It's like a gift from Amazon that's already been delivered. We don't have to convince someone to send it. We don't have to help order it. The gift has already been given. It's already been sent. It's already been delivered. In fact, it's already sitting on our front porch. All we have to do is open our front door and bring it inside. The life from God posture assumes blessing is transactional. But it was all God. No transaction. As the disciple John wrote, we love him because he first loved us. So the first major misunderstanding of the life from God posture is the notion that we need to get God on our side, working on our behalf. Truth is, he's always been on our side. Before time began, he was on our side. Our job isn't to get God to bless us, but to trust that he already has and will continue to do so. The second big misunderstanding of the life from God posture and what I'll spend the remainder of our time on this morning is the very concept of what constitutes a blessing from God. What does being blessed by God actually look like in our lives? And it's here that the life from God posture in a community of faith like ours operates much more subtly than extremes like Reverend Ike. Yet, it can still wreak havoc by creating expectations which aren't validated in Scripture. Life from God is seductive and appealing because it posits that Christianity is worthwhile because of the way it blesses me. Life just goes better as a believer. But again, what does that even mean? That's the $64,000 question. What does being blessed by God look like in the here and now? Particularly in more affluent societies, the tendency is to think that God wants the exact same things for us that we want for us. And my guess is that's how life from God posture subtly impacts us here at Grace. Although I doubt many of us genuinely believe that being blessed by God involves a bunch of Cadillacs or perfect health or a problem-free life, I would bet that for many of us, God's help and blessing correspond pretty closely to what we think is important. A good family, good health, happiness, comfort, professional success. I could go on and on. So in the next few minutes, I'm going to challenge our conventional understanding of blessing. And if what I have to say rubs you the wrong way, then I'm probably on to something. Although we can learn about God by observing the world he created, God's most intentional and fullest revelation is to be found in Jesus Christ. Jesus was God's best self-revelation, representing in his person and ministry the true nature of God. And as the original book about Jesus Christ, the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments together, is referred to as God's special revelation. So God chose to reveal himself through the written word. And more specifically than that, he chose to do it through a story. A great, sweeping, complex, long, and remarkable story unfolding down through the ages. And as a story, the Bible is really the opposite of a textbook or a theological dictionary. You can't go to chapter 7 and read all that is said about faith. There is no concise, complete treatment of all that is meant by salvation. We might prefer Wikipedia, where we can learn all we need to know in a few short paragraphs, and that can be helpful at times, but that's not the Bible. A story has plot and characters and a variety of storylines that emerge and develop over time. A story can capture the full range of the human experience, providing a richness and depth that simply can't be matched by a more systematic description of principles and concepts. Nuance, mystery, contradiction, paradox, tension, all are part of great storytelling and all are indelible elements of real life. Although I'd been a Christian most of my life, it was only about 20 years ago that I began viewing the Bible first and foremost as one magnificent and seamless story of God and his love for his creation. And I haven't looked back. I'd go even further and say that I believe it is imperative for all of us to approach and understand the Bible in this light. But not because that's my preference or because I say so, but because that's how God chose to do it. And in the Bible, God reveals his purposes and plans slowly and deliberately over time. A progression takes place. Concepts are first introduced in ways that the original audiences and later day readers, such as ourselves, might be better able to get their arms around and understand. But over the course of the story, a certain development, an expansion of the concept takes place until it reaches its fulfillment and climax in the New Testament. As an example, I've often thought that if you were new to Christianity and were just airdropped in on a Sunday morning and heard the story of Jesus in isolation, how weird and bizarre must it seem that Jesus had to die for us. But as you start reading at the beginning in Genesis, one is introduced early on to the idea that God saves by substitution. Something else dies for us instead of us on our behalf. It begins modestly with the story of Abraham and Isaac and is developed and expanded further in God's dealings with his chosen people, the Israelites. But it reaches its fulfillment and stunning climax in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God. Vaughn Roberts, in his book, God's Big Picture, illustrates the value of progressive revelation in this way. A century ago, a father promises his son that he will give him a horse on his 21st birthday. Cars are subsequently invented, and so when the birthday finally comes, the boy is given a car instead of a horse. The promise has still been fulfilled, but not literally. The father could not have promised his son a car because neither could have understood the concept. In a similar way, God made his promises to Israel in ways they could understand. He used categories they were familiar with, such as the nation, the temple, and material prosperity in the land. But the fulfillment breaks the boundaries of those categories. To expect a literal fulfillment is to miss the point. Here are just three quick examples. God uses evil for good, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat to ultimately accomplish his purposes. In Genesis, Joseph's brothers can't stand him and sell him into slavery. But years later, Joseph has risen to a position of such power in Egypt that he is able to save his entire family from famine and keep alive the promises God had made to his ancestors. A fortuitous turn of events to be sure, but that's just a horse. When God's only son, Jesus, comes to earth in human form and is crucified by evil men, but through his unjust and wrongful death redeems the world for all eternity, that's an automobile. God's people wanted a king, and God gave them kings. But even the best, like David, failed and disappointed. That's a horse. But a king who will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace, and who will reign with perfect justice and righteousness forever and ever, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Now that's an automobile. When God redeems his people out of slavery in Egypt and then promises to dwell with them, first in the tabernacle in the desert and then behind the curtain in the Holy of Holies in the temple in Jerusalem. That's something spectacular, but it's still just a horse. But when God redeems us from slavery to sin and death, offering us life through his son Jesus Christ, and God's Holy Spirit takes up residence in the individual human heart, and we, like living stones, are built into a spiritual house where God now dwells, that's an automobile. I explain all this because it's so relevant for our purpose this morning in looking at the life from God posture. For another big concept that undergoes radical development and evolution over the course of the Bible is the idea of how God blesses us. In fact, it evolves so much that by the time Jesus comes and the fullness of God and his redemptive plan is revealed, it's hard to even recognize what God now considers to be a blessing as it's been turned completely upside down. No longer is blessing what might make us happy or healthy or comfortable or successful or respected or understood or liked or safe. Rather, a blessing is anything that moves our hearts and minds to a place more receptive to God's grace. Anything can be a blessing if it helps to convince us of our desperate need for a Savior. Virtually anything can be a blessing if it helps better prepare and position us for eternity. Now, there is no verse that explicitly says that in so many words. But as you move along the biblical narrative, as God's magnificent story of love and redemption continues to unfold, it becomes abundantly clear that this is the case. Certainly, there were times earlier in the story when God did bless his people and reward their obedience and trust in ways that they and we would clearly understand and to which we can all relate. The Israelite sandals didn't wear out in the desert. God gave them food and clothing and so many descendants that they would rival the stars in the sky. A promised land flowing with milk and honey. Military victory, prosperity, long life, and peace. And this makes perfect sense, as God had to convince a primitive people some 3,500 years ago, who had little else to go on, that this particular God was the one you wanted to hitch your wagon to. Blessing them in immediate, temporal, and tangible ways was essential in order to build trust. But as the story goes on, and as God always knew, the power of sin would prove to be too strong. God's material blessings did not draw Israel closer to him, did not make them more inclined to trust, and in fact often had the opposite effect. More needed to be done. And before too long, the entire biblical narrative starts changing from a temporal vantage point, if I obey and if I trust, I will enjoy peace and prosperity, victory and long life, to an eternal perspective and a future hope. As you read on, it's as if your eyes are forced to look up into the distance, start to realize that what happens in this life is not the goal. It's not the be all and end all. What happens is as important, but only as it impacts eternity. God's endgame lies in the future. Children, land, prosperity, and peace in the present, that's a horse. Eternity with God, that's a big old fancy automobile. And by the time we get to the New Testament, the entire tone and tenor of Scripture is remarkably unimpressed with the kind of things we typically consider blessings and focuses entirely on how this life is getting us ready and how we might help others get ready for eternity. Although we should be thankful for great relationships, loving family, friends, health, material comfort, peace and safety, it's in the absence of one or more of these things that we are most acutely aware of our brokenness, of our lack of control, of our need to build our house on the firm foundation of the one and only one who actually is in control. And because of that, God simply is far less concerned about our momentary comfort, happiness, and success than are we. We do our faith no favors when we think of blessing predominantly in terms of what our culture and our world say it is. If you think this is how God blesses you, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Yes, we should be pleased and thankful to God when things go well. But to be honest, good things seem to happen as much to people who don't follow Christ as those who do. Success, comfort, wealth, health, happy marriages, well-adjusted kids, best as I can tell, don't fall disproportionately on believers. Anything that helps prepare us for eternity, anything that helps us move to a posture receptive to God's love and grace, any circumstance that conveys to us our desperate need for a Savior, in God's eyes, can serve as a blessing. On the flip side, anything we normally would consider a blessing turns out not really to be a blessing, not if it works against God's purposes. And of course, the rub is that a great many of the things we associate with being blessed do not prepare our hearts and minds for eternity. Even such universally desirable things as good health, a good job, a good marriage, a good family cease to be blessings if they undermine our sense of need for God, if they lead to arrogance and pride, to a sense of independence and self-sufficiency. If our success and good fortune draw us away from God and not towards Him, then these otherwise good things have become, to use a good Old Testament word, snares. I'm going to read just a few verses from Deuteronomy 8. these decrees that I'm giving you this day. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You may say to yourself, my power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me. And that's exactly what did happen. Sound familiar? It does to me. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul conveyed the same message, reading from 1 Corinthians 4. that we feel a greater sense of our need for God when things are difficult than when they're easy. Struggles and sorrow, tragedy and injustice are uniquely effective at disabusing us of any thought that we are in control, uniquely effective at reminding us of our insufficiency, brokenness, and desperate need. Yet so many times we question and agonize and wring our hands as to why a so-called loving God would allow a fallen world with so much sadness and evil injustice and injustice. Is it any wonder? Is it really that big of a mystery? Why are we surprised? It's my conviction that a fallen world was always part of God's plan, in part, precisely so that we would struggle. Again, it's that pattern of God using evil for good, how he uses our fallen world to accomplish his purposes, drawing a lost humanity back to himself. The pivotal question for each of us this morning is, when crummy things happen in our lives that do not look or feel anything like blessings, how do we respond? Do they move us to a place of trust or a place of despair? We have a decisive role to play if there's to be any redemptive value in our crummy circumstances. If we do not take advantage of them as opportunities to trust, we run the risk of rendering them meaningless, leaving them just crummy. So when we talk about the posture, life from God, and when we expect to enjoy God's promised blessings, we better understand in what form these blessings might come and over what time horizon they might pay dividends and how best we might respond in faith and trust so that God can actually use those things for good in our lives and the lives of others. I'm going to close this morning with the tiny book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament. Just for curiosity's sake, during these last six months of the pandemic, how many of you have read the book? Let me see a show of hands. I'm just kidding. I already know the answer. Zero. Approximately zero of you have read Habakkuk. Yet Habakkuk is a perfect example. I'm just kidding. I wouldn't have read it if I hadn't been asked to preach, so I'm not casting any dispersions. Yet Habakkuk is a perfect exclamation point for my message this morning of how God blesses and how he operates and what building one's house on the rock really looks like. It's a far cry from the life from God posture as commonly understood by most of us. The book of Habakkuk consists entirely of a short dialogue between Habakkuk the prophet and God. It begins with the prophet complaining to God of how it seems that all the violence and justice and strife that's running rampant in his country of Judah goes unpunished. Why is God tolerating it? God responds by saying, No worries, Habakkuk. I'm raising up the Babylonians, those fiercest and most dreaded of peoples, guilty men whose strength is their own God to swoop in and devour Judah. Upon hearing that, the prophet is flabbergasted and even more of a tizzy, complaining even further to God. What? You've got to be kidding me. How can you allow such a wicked and godless nation to swallow up those more righteous than themselves? You're blowing my mind. Then the Lord answered the prophet a second time. Let me worry about the Babylonians. They will get theirs in due time. However, you, Habakkuk, need to be patient and wait for my appointed time. Though it may linger, it will certainly come. But as for you right now, the righteous will live by faith. It made no sense to him. Nothing he heard was assuring. Nothing seemed fair. But in that moment, Habakkuk leaned in and chose to trust. Listen to his closing words. I heard and my heart pounded. My lips quivered at the sound. Decay crept into my bones and my legs trembled. Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity to come on the nation invading us. Though the fig tree does not bud, Verse 1. and no cattle in the stalls. Yet I rejoice in the Lord. I will be joyful in God my Savior. The sovereign Lord is my strength. He makes my feet like the feet of a deer. He enables me to go on the heights. Although he was not happy with what he had heard and thought it violent, unjust, and unloving, Habakkuk moved towards God rather than away, convinced that his God was both able and willing to do the right thing regardless of whether he himself could understand, an abiding trust that God was not only in control, but was also the ultimate victor. And in that moment, Habakkuk was being blessed, all circumstances to the contrary, prepared for an eternity with the God who loves him. That is where the rubber truly meets the road. Even when you can't necessarily see God's goodness or understand his purposes in the middle of the mess, when everything is shrouded in mystery and confusion, do you choose to trust? Do you believe that no matter what seems to be happening at any given moment in this life, that God has already won the victory and always has our best interests at heart? Building one's house on the rock is resting in that knowledge. I began this morning by singing a song about the wise man who built his house upon the rock. It's important to note that it doesn't go, oh, the wise man built his house upon the rock. The wise man built his house upon the rock. The wise man built his house upon the rock. And before I pray, I'd like to invite Steve and Lisa back up here as we continue to worship. But please bow your heads. Dear Lord, thank you for this morning. I pray that you'll convict each one of us and help each one of us understand just how desperately you love us and the extravagant lengths you went to to make it possible for us to be yours. Help us to know that despite the fact that we live in a world where sorrow and unhappiness and disappointment are part and parcel to our daily experience. I pray that we'll be grounded in the fact that you love us and always have our best interest at heart. And we thank you for making it possible for us to have an eternity with you. And it's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. I'm loving getting to share these times with you on Sunday morning. I hope you're watching along with us live. This morning we arrive at the end of our series called Storyteller, where we are acknowledging that Jesus was the greatest storyteller to ever live. And one of the main ways he taught was through parables, short fictional stories that are used to make a moral point. And this morning, we arrive at a parable that has confused me and dumbfounded me my entire life. Every time I come across this parable, I read it and I go, God, I don't know what that means. I don't know how to make sense of that. I don't know how to apply that. I don't understand it. I even have a note in my Bible. You can't see it, but there's a note right here that says, Lord, help me see this. Help me understand this parable. And that's why I put it in this series, because I wanted to force myself to dig in and do the work and understand this part of God's word that has always eluded me. So this morning we're covering the parable of the shrewd manager. You can find it in Luke chapter 16 verses 1 through 13. So if you have a Bible there at home, I want to encourage you to open that up. Again, if you have family around, open that up and look at God's Word together. Go through it together. It's always a great practice and habit to interact with the text as you're being taught the text. So open up Luke chapter 16, look in verses 1 through 13, and you'll see the parable there that has eluded me for my entire life. As I dug into the study this week, I became more and more grateful that God kind of pointed me in this direction because I love the message that comes out of this parable, and I find it to be an incredibly challenging one for us as believers. And I say as believers because that's an important part of this parable. If you'll look at the beginning of chapter 16, it says, Meaning Jesus has now turned his attention to just his disciples. Previously, he was addressing the crowds, the tax collectors and the religious leaders and the lay people and just the people in and around Jerusalem or Galilee. And now he has turned his focus directly to the disciples. And there aren't too many parables that are addressed just to them. Most parables are told to the crowds, are told to everyone who can hear, and there's this layered meaning. And sometimes Jesus will go back and explain the parable to the disciples later, like the parable of the sower that we covered weeks ago. But this one is just for the disciples. This one is just for an audience that has claimed with their life, Jesus, we are following you and our lives are about your agenda. We have committed to serving you. So if you're a believer this morning, if you would call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then it's my firm conviction that God's called us to be disciples, and therefore, as Jesus addresses his disciples in chapter 16, he's addressing us, you and I, as believers. He's addressing an audience that has committed, and this is what we do when we accept Christ as our Savior, to following Jesus and to use our life serving him. That's our commitment. It's the same commitment the disciples made. And Jesus is saying, okay, in light of that commitment, let me tell you something. So if you're watching this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't yet call yourself a Christian, I'm so grateful that you're doing this and investing in your spiritual health in this way. And I hope that this helps move you down the road a little bit spiritually. But I want you to know that this one doesn't apply to you yet. This is one that you can just kind of stand back and consider if you want to be a part of that. But if you're a believer, then Jesus is speaking directly to you. And the parable goes like this. He says there was a master who had a manager in his employ. And the manager's responsibility was to manage all of the accounts, all of the wealth of the master. And the master finds out that the manager's not doing a very good job, that he's squandering his wealth, that he's managing it poorly. And he realizes it's time to fire the manager and bring in somebody new. And the manager gets word of this. He realizes that the master is going to fire him. And he's smart. He starts to look out for himself. And he starts to figure out, what can I do to take care of myself after I get fired? And I love the discussion that he has internally. In scripture, we see that he says that he's too weak to dig and he's too proud to beg. So he's got to figure something else out. And I love that because I think a lot of us, if we were put in this situation, we would go, gosh, I am not in good enough shape to do manual labor. And I'm way too proud to go out there and ask for a handout. So I better figure this out. And he gets the idea that what he's going to do is he's going to go around to the people who owe a debt to his master, and he's going to forgive them a portion of that debt to curry favor with them to kind of create his own golden parachute so that when he loses his job, he'll have somebody that'll give him maybe a place to stay or maybe a couple days worth of food or maybe they'll actually give him a job. So he comes up with this plan to curry favor amongst the debtors to his master to take care of himself in his own life. And so he calls the people who owe his master money, he calls them in and he looks at one and he says, what do you owe my master? And the guy says, well, I owe him 100 measurements of oil. And he says, tell you what, take your bill, write down 50 really quick, go ahead and pay it, and we'll call it even, okay? He gives him 50 measures of oil for free. Then the next guy comes in, he says, what do you owe the master? He says, well, I owe him 100 measures of wheat. And he goes, tell you what, sit down, write on your bill that you only owe 80, and we'll just go from there. And he's forgiving them of their debt to curry favor with them. And that's all the way down through verse 8. And I would expect, if you've read other parables, if you've followed along, I would expect at this point for Jesus to use the master to drop the hammer on the manager. And the point would be that you need to settle up your debts. The point would be like, now you have to pay tenfold what you gave them because it wasn't yours and that we shouldn't steal. I would expect Jesus to really give this manager what for. But that's not what he says at all. As a matter of fact, in verse eight, it says that the master commended the manager for his shrewdness. And I've always gotten to that part of the parable and gone like, what? It feels contrary to everything that Jesus teaches. It was dishonest. It was slick. It was sly. It was icky. Why would the master, who in this case is holding the place of God in the parable, why would God, why would the master commend the manager? And it only gets weirder from there. Listen to what Jesus says. Pick it up in verse 8. It says, What? And then he says this. What? What does that mean? My whole life. I mean, I read that when I was a kid. I'm in high school and I'm reading that and I'm like, yeah, I don't understand that one yet. And then I go to Bible college and I encounter it again with all of the classes that I've taken. And I'm going, yeah, I'm not really sure. That's very clear. And then I go to grad school, and at some point or another, I got this Bible. I got this Bible as an adult. In my 30s, I wrote this note, help me to see this. Still, at every stage of my Christian walk, I read this story. I'm dumbfounded by it. I put it down, and I go, yeah, I don't see it. And so as I dug into it this week and looked at what other people said about it and thought about it, and as I prayed through it, I think I came to the conclusion that there's these two clarifying questions that can help us understand the parable. That if we'll ask these two questions about the parable, I think we can begin to understand it better and then apply the challenging message from it. The two questions to help us understand the parable better are what ability is Jesus acknowledging and with whose wealth is the manager being generous? What ability in this parable is Jesus acknowledging with the disciples and to the disciples and to us, and with whose wealth is the manager being generous? I think if we'll answer those questions, we can arrive at an understanding of this parable that is really very helpful and challenging. To that first question, what ability is Jesus acknowledging? I believe as we look at this, he's acknowledging within all of us the ability and the knack and the knowledge to play politics. Now, no one says that they like politics, right? No one says that they like playing politics. You'll never meet anybody who's like, you know what I love? I just love kind of sch it. We know how to do it. How many of your boss's jokes have you laughed at that weren't funny? How many times do you share a story just to get the reaction in the room that you need so that people will look at you and think you're great? How many of your father-in-law's jokes have you laughed at that are not funny? Now, I know that my dad is going to be watching this sermon, and dad, you need to know that 100% of Jen's laughter has been authentic over the years. Every bit of it, you're hilarious. But for the rest of us, how many times have we laughed at our father-in-law's jokes when they're not funny? How many times have we said nice things that we don't mean because it's the right thing to do? Parents, we play politics with our kids. We know how to ask them to do certain things to get our way so that they don't resist us, so that they just go along with us. Wives, you know how to do this to your husbands. You know exactly how to frame up a suggestion so that the big weekend project is his idea and not yours, right? Even our kids know how to do this. My daughter is four and she knows how to play politics. She knows how to use everything at her disposal to further her agenda. There have been nights when she'll get up out of bed and I'm the first person that she sees and she knows she's supposed to stay in bed, but she'll hug me and she'll say, Daddy, will you lay down with me? And I'll say, sweetheart, why do you need me to lay down with you? You need to go to bed. And she says, because I'm lonely. She's not lonely. She sleeps in that bed by herself every night. She's not lonely, but she knows that I'm a sucker. She knows that I'm going to have sympathy for her. She knows I'm going to feel bad for her and that I'm easy to take advantage of in that state. So she says, Dad, I'm lonely. Will you please lay down with me? She knows what she's doing. And what Jesus is saying in this is that we all know what we're doing. We even have words and phrases for it. We know what it means to grease a palm. We know that we're not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth. I don't know what that means, but I know that I shouldn't do it. We know that we're not supposed to bite the hand that feeds us. We all do this. We all have used our own shrewdness, our own ability, our own wit, our own charm, our own whatever innate abilities that we have to advance our own agenda. And he's telling the disciples, you know how to do this too. I think what Jesus wants us to see in part of this parable is that we all have a little bit of the shrewd manager in us. We all do. What that manager did is he marshaled the resources available to him, both internal and external, to further his own agenda. He used his own talent and his charm and his wit and his intellect and in concert with the wealth of the master to further his own agenda, to build his own kingdom, to serve himself. He made it about him. And what Jesus wants us to see and wants his disciples to see is that we all have this ability. We all have certain gifts and talents and innate abilities. We all have internal and external resources that we use at different times to build our kingdom and to further our agenda. We are all shrewd like the manager. We've all done it. Because we've all done that, because there's a little bit of that manager in all of us, the second question is hugely important. And answering this question is really when the light bulb started to go off about what this parable is about to begin with. The second question we asked is, with whose wealth is the manager being generous? With whose wealth is the manager being generous? And the answer is the master's. It's not even his wealth. It's the master's wealth. And again, I think this is where the disciples started to realize what Jesus was talking about. And this is where I started to realize what Jesus was talking about. He's trying to get the disciples to acknowledge, listen, the resources that you have, the money that we have, it's not your money. It's God's money. He gave it to you. Everything that you've been entrusted with, the resources that we have, the money that we have, God's made you a steward of that. That's his money. That belongs to him, and he's entrusted it to you. And I think we take it a step further, and we look at the shrewdness of the manager and what that requires, and we acknowledge that the gifts that we have, we didn't earn those gifts. We didn't place those gifts in ourselves. We didn't give ourselves those things. God did. And so I can almost see Jesus looking at the disciples and going, Peter, your courage and your willingness to be the first one out of the boat, your willingness to say the difficult thing, I gave that to you. That's not your resource. That's mine. John, your empathy and your love for others and your depth of knowledge and insight, I gave that to you. Matthew, your knack with money, I gave that to you. Those are all gifts that were given to them by the Father. And I think what Jesus wants the disciples to see and in turn us is that everything that we have, everything that we have was given to us by God. It's not our resource, it's his. And just like we marshal our resources and our abilities to build our own kingdom, what Jesus wants the disciples to see is that because the gifts that we have are his, it is his expectation that we would use those and leverage those to build his kingdom rather than our own. I remember when I understood this for the first time, when that particular light bulb went off in my life. I was 28 or 29 years old. I was a student pastor at my previous church. And that church had a pretty big youth group, and the youth group, it had cool kids in it. The kids were athletes. They were funny. They were charming kids. They were sharp. And I started in April or May and took them to camp in the summer and remember thinking,, how am I gonna win these kids over? How am I gonna get them on my side so that I can minister to them? They really liked their previous youth pastor and I was kind of stepping into his shadow and it's like, well, how am I gonna win them over? And that first day, that Monday afternoon, we had free time and as was my habit, I went to the ball courts. And you grab a basketball, and you throw it out on the court, and everybody comes running. And for a few hours, I played basketball with my guys, with the guys in the youth group. And God, for whatever reason, blessed me with a modicum of athleticism, not a lot. And if you think I'm bragging about being athletic, I can remember the specific moment in my life when I realized I was not an athlete. It involved an African soccer player in college running over me, putting me on my chest, scoring a goal, and then jogging back while he winked at me, okay? So I can remember the exact moment in my life when I realized, dude, you are not athletic. But I did have some ability to hang in there with the fellas. And so we played basketball all afternoon. And simply by playing basketball and by being competent and by staying on the court and staying on teams and doing the right thing, I was able to win them over. That afternoon changed things. The months previous, it was really hard to have conversation with those guys. And after that, it was easy. Something clicked. And I fell into place as a student pastor. And it dawned on me there at Look Up. You know, my whole life, I had been reasonably athletic. Not very athletic, but enough to get by. I had been at least a little bit funny. I knew how to kind of charm people. And my whole life, I just assumed that I had those gifts to build my kingdom. Remember in high school, I used those things. I leveraged everything that I had. I leveraged all my resources to get people to like me, to get girls to like me, to get guys to think I was awesome, to get people to want to be my friend. It was all about Nate. I used it to build my kingdom. And it wasn't until look up at the end of my 20s with the new youth group of kids there that I realized, oh my goodness, God didn't make me serviceable on a basketball court for my own good so that I could get people to like me. He didn't give me the ability to come up with a joke or to say a funny thing in the right moment to win people over to me. He has tailor-made me for this season in my life. He knows that the way you win over high schoolers is to be able to run around with them. He knows that the easiest way to connect with any group of dudes is to throw a ball out there and run around and get to know them that way. That's worked on the mission field. When I've gone to Honduras, I can't even speak their language, but I grab a soccer ball and I throw it out on the field and I run around with them and suddenly there's a connection. And I realized in that moment, my goodness, God didn't give me these small gifts so that I could get people to like me for the reasons that I've always used them. He didn't make me kind of funny so that I could win people over to me. He gave those things to me. He tailor made me so that I could connect with these guys that I was going to be ministering to. God knew in my future, he is going to have to connect with high school students, so let me gift him and enable him in such a way that he's going to be able to connect with these kids. And I realized, my goodness, my whole life I've been like the shrewd manager and leveraged all the resources, internal and external, to further my own agenda and to build myself up when God gave me these things to build his kingdom. God gave me these things, not to draw them into myself, but to draw them into God. And since then, I've become increasingly convinced that the Christian life is a gradual realization that all I have is God's, and I'm expected to leverage everything to build his kingdom. I really think that's true. The Christian life is this gradual expectation, this peeling back of the onion of one layer and then the next layer and then the next layer until we gradually understand that everything that we have has been gifted to us for the purpose of leveraging it to build God's kingdom. Yet so often we don't realize that and we use those things to further our kingdom. And Jesus wanted the disciples to see this reality. That if you don't pay attention, if you don't listen to me, you're going to have these gifts and these talents and these resources, but you're just going to be like the shrewd manager and you're just going to use them to build up your own kingdom, and there's something bigger than that going on here. This is why he makes the point that he makes. He says, listen, unless I can trust you with little things, to be shrewd in little things, how can I give you more? Unless you can take that shrewdness and that resources that I've given you and apply those to building my kingdom in little ways, how can I entrust you with bigger ways? If you won't leverage everything you have on this side of eternity, how can I welcome you into that side of eternity? Suddenly, that portion of the parable makes sense. And you know, I see people at Grace doing this in so many ways. I think of somebody at the church who's become a really good friend of mine, who is fortunate and is in a spot in life where they don't have to work. But recently, he had an opportunity come up, like a contract-type deal, a temporary agreement, where he had the opportunity to generate some more income for himself. And he told me, you know, I think I am going to pursue that. But recently, God has laid on his heart just the important work that some nonprofits are doing. And so he told me that he is going to pursue that opportunity to make that money, not to keep it for himself, but so that he can funnel that into the nonprofits that he believes are building God's kingdom and doing God's work. That's a man whose eyes have been opened to the gradual realization that everything he has in his life, his ability to close the sale, to do the deals, to manage the relationships, to play the necessary politics within those kinds of deals and structures, that everything that he's been given, he's now marshalling to build God's kingdom rather than his own. I think that that is the surest sign of someone in whom the gospel has taken root is that we realize what Jesus is trying to communicate to us in that parable, that, oh my goodness, everything I have is not about me. It's about building God's kingdom. I think about Rob Hounchell. In just this small way, a couple years ago, he realized the church didn't have a bassist. And apparently God has gifted him with some musical ability, so he bought a bass and he taught himself how to play it so he could serve the church in that way. And he stands right back there with no light on him, half the Sundays, and he plays the bass for the sake of the church to build God's kingdom rather than his own. I think about Elaine Morgan, who just quietly behind the scenes does so much. Unless you're an elder or part of the missions committee or in the children's ministry, you don't see everything that a woman like that does. And we have a bunch of people like that who show up at all the events and all the things and self to see that, hey, everything we have is God's and we need to leverage it to build his kingdom. But I think we need to see the layers of that unfolding more and more and think to ourselves, God, how would you have me use my resources? How would you have me marshal my abilities to build your kingdom? We need to begin collectively asking questions like, Father, my money is not my money, it's your money. How would you have me deploy it to build your kingdom? Father, you've made me good at building things. You've made me good at starting things. You've made me entrepreneurial. How can I use that to further your kingdom? God, you've given me a business acumen. How can I use that to further your kingdom? God, you've made me diplomatic. I'm a good people person. How can I use that to draw people towards you? God, you've given me a heart of care and of concern and of empathy and passion. How can I use that to express your love in the community and draw people to you and not to myself? We need to begin to ask questions like that and learn the lesson from this parable that everything we have is from God. And it's with his wealth and his resources that we are to be generous and we are to be shrewd and we are to deploy those to build his kingdom. That's why Jesus finishes the parable the way he does. It's the only way that he can finish it. He says, listen guys, now that you understand that I have given you everything that you have and my expectation is that you would use that to build my kingdom and further my agenda rather than your own, you need to understand that no man can serve two masters. There's no possible way you can further your agenda and my agenda simultaneously all the time. Sometimes they're going to conflict. He says at the end, no man can serve both God and money, which I think is another way of saying no man can serve both God and himself. We can't further God's agenda and our own agenda at the same time. They are going to conflict, and eventually we will love one and hate the other. And I think so often in life we straddle the fence where in this way I'm furthering God's agenda, but in this way I'm looking out for myself. And Jesus says, no, I need you all on team Jesus here. Marshall everything you have, all the resources, all the gifts, all the abilities to further his kingdom, not our own. And as we sit and we think about that, what it would look like to use every last square inch of our life, all of the resources available to us to further God's agenda and not our agenda, to build God's kingdom and not our kingdom, I think it can feel pretty intimidating. Almost like sitting at the bottom of a mountain going, gosh, I've got to climb that? How in the world? I don't even see a way to the top. I'm so far from marshalling everything I have to serve God. I'm so invested in building my own kingdom that I don't even know what to do to begin to build God's kingdom. And because it feels like such a lofty goal, I think sometimes we might shy away from it. But if we think of it as a mountain to climb, we don't have to know every step along the way. We just have to know the next one or the first one. And back in another lifetime in February, when we met in person, I shared a sermon about discipleship. I said, at Grace, we're going to define discipleship by simply taking the next step of obedience. So this morning, I would ask you in light of this parable, in light of the reality that everything we have has been given to us by God and it is his expectation that we would leverage that with all of our shrewdness and ability to build his kingdom rather than our own. What's the next thing in your life that you can leverage to build God's kingdom. Not what are all the steps, what's the next step? Not how are we going to climb the whole mountain, just how are we going to take this first step? I hope that you'll discuss that this week in your families and in your small groups. What's the next thing that you can give over to God that you can begin to leverage in your life to further his agenda rather than your own. And maybe we can continue to learn from the parable of the shrewd manager. Let's pray. Father, first we thank you. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. Now, give us the courage to acknowledge them. Give us the courage to acknowledge that you made some of us smart and you made some of us charming and you made some of us good with people and you made some of us humble. You gave us each gifts and abilities, God. Let us embrace what those are and acknowledge that they are from you. And let us leverage everything that we have, both internal and external, to build your kingdom rather than our own. Let us not serve ourselves so often and so diligently that we grow to hate you as a master. But let us serve you so much that we fall more deeply in love with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be together in this way on Sunday morning again. A few years ago, it dawned on me that Staples was a double entendre. The name for the store, Staples, had a deeper meaning. I never had pieced it together. I just assumed that maybe Staples started out selling actual like metal staples and then things were going well for them. So they expanded into like paper and pens and other office supplies and then desks. And now here we go. We got a whole big box store. But it dawned on me, oh my gosh, driving around, I don't know how I figured it out or why, like it's some great mystery, that it means that they sell staples, like things that offices need. And I thought, man, isn't that clever? It was this really obvious thing that had been sitting under my nose for years. The other one that I noticed was the arrow in FedEx, where the E goes into the X, it makes an arrow. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. If you've never seen it before, you should look at it. It's pretty amazing. The other example of this that I could think of was Sarah Lee, the baked goods company. Growing up, they had a jingle, nobody does it like Sarah Lee. And I, for years, thought that the jingle was, nobody does it like Sarah Lee. But I learned that the actual sentence, and some of y'all know this, some of y'all are already grinning at home and elbowing your spouses and your children because you're proud and you know, and some of you are faking it. But the actual logo, the actual jingle is, nobody doesn't like Sarah Lee, which is absurd. Nobody doesn't like Sarah Lee is better, but it's really nobody doesn't like Sarah Lee. You can Google it. That's true. And so one of these things I love in life is those obvious things, those little truths that if you're observant, you'll pick up on that have just been sitting there for years under our nose that maybe we've never noticed. I'm sure you guys and your family, maybe after the sermon, you can think of a couple other examples of that. But I think that there's an example of that in Scripture. This morning we arrive at one of the most famous parables, one of the most poignant and meaningful parables to me, the parable of the prodigal son. And I think most of us know this parable. Most of us could tell it. Most of us know the main point of this parable. But I think tucked into this parable is another lesson, another thing that once we see it, we'll think of this parable in a completely different way. It's something that I encountered a few years ago from a pastor and an author named Tim Keller, the way that he viewed the story, and it changed the way that I viewed it as well. And hopefully we can do that for you this morning. I think what we'll see coming out of the parable of the prodigal son is two profound questions that hopefully we'll all wrestle with this week, maybe with ourselves or our friends or our family or hopefully in our small groups. I hope that you guys are doing Zoom calls with your small group. I hope that we're participating and staying connected the best we can, and I hope that you'll enjoy talking about this parable this week. But the parable of the prodigal son comes at the end of Luke chapter 15. At the beginning of Luke chapter 15, the Pharisees are accusing Jesus of eating and carousing and hanging out with sinners, with people that he shouldn't be spending his time with as a presumed holy man. And so Jesus tells three parables all about the father's love and concern for the lost, all about him going after the person or the thing that doesn't know him or isn't with him. And the parable of the prodigal son is kind of the capstone on this. And so he tells the story of a man who had great wealth and he had two sons. And the younger son goes to the father and asks for his inheritance early. He goes to the father in this story and he says, hey, listen, I know that I'm supposed to wait for you to die. I don't want to do that. I just want my stuff now. And essentially what he's saying here, the subtext of this is, I would rather just have your stuff right now than I would want to spend more time with you. I don't want to live out my years here on this home here in our property or in our complex or whatever it was at the time. I would much, much rather just have your stuff and be able to go do what I want. So the father responds with remarkable grace because the question that the son has asked is really genuinely disrespectful. He says, I'd rather you just be dead. I'd rather you just die. I don't even want to have to live out the next several years. Just give me my stuff so that I can go enjoy my life right now. And if I were the father, I would respond to that request by essentially saying, first of all, no. Second, you're not getting anything. Forget it. If I'm going to give you anything, it's going to be a significantly reduced portion. Your slice of the pizza just got real thin. It's the last slice that nobody wants. That's yours. But the father responds with this remarkable goodness and grace. And he says, okay. He says, fine, if that's what you want. If you want all my stuff now, you can have it. So he divides everything in half and he sells off some property and he gives the inheritance to his son. And his son does what we would expect him to do. This is what he does. You can find it in chapter 15, verse 13. I hope that you have your Bible there at home. I hope that you guys as maybe families or individuals are going through the text with me as I kind of summarize the story. But in verse 13, we learn what the son did with the money. It says, So he goes to the father and he says, I don't really want you. I want your stuff. Can you just give it to me right now? And the father, in remarkable goodness and grace, everything that he worked hard for, everything that he had accumulated that he wanted to leave a legacy for his son, he takes all of that and he goes off to a far country and he squanders it on reckless living. And that's a really nice biblical way to say that he partied. That's what he did. Later we find out that he spent some of that money on prostitutes. No doubt he spent it on alcohol and whatever kind of drugs he could get his hands on at the time. He just went out and he did whatever he wanted. And he got people around him that wanted him for his stuff and for not himself the same way he revered the Father. And he ran out of money. He didn't invest it. He didn't like go to the city and get a job and try to set up a 401k for himself. He ran out and he spent it on whatever he won. He was led by his appetites. And eventually, he ran out of money. And right at the time that he runs out of money, Jesus says in the parable that a great famine came across the land. So it was a hard time. It was a lot like now. Unemployment was high. People are wondering about where they're going to get their next paycheck, and they didn't have a government stimulus check that was going to be coming in, and their businesses couldn't apply for a 250% of payroll loan. Like, that wasn't going on. So he had to get things figured out, and this young boy, this young man ends up living on a pig farm. He convinces a farmer to hire him to watch after pigs. And apparently he lived out in the field, in the barn, with the pigs. That's where he was allowed to sleep. And it says that he was so hungry and so destitute and had so little that he was looking at the pods that were being fed to the pigs with jealousy. And I don't mean to belabor this point too much, but what would have to happen in your life to be with a group of pigs and watch the slop come down the trough and think, gosh, if I could just get my hands on that? Seriously. What kind of place of destitution would you need to be at to not just want it, to not be willing to eat it, but to be jealous of the fact that they had it? That's where he was. And then in verse 17, we see this really human insight into this young man. And I really, I love this sentence and I love this verse a lot. I think it's a turning came to his senses, when he had time to think, when he finally realized what was going on. His life had been a blur. He took his father. He probably thought for months or years about how he just wanted his father's money. He didn't like his miserable life on his father's property. Just give me your money so I can leave and go enjoy myself and spread my wings and flex my freedom muscles. And so that's what he did. He took the money and he went and did that. And he was focused on having a good time and enjoying himself and doing whatever it was that he wanted. And then from that, he ran out of money, and now he's scrambling, trying to figure out a way. How am I going to pay my bills? How am I going to put a roof over my head? What am I going to do next? And his days are just consumed with that. But eventually, life slows down enough, and he looks at his surroundings, and he's like, I'm jealous of what the pigs are eating. At least my father's servants have bread. My dad pays his employees better than this guy pays me. And in that thought process, he came to himself. He realized what he was doing and what his life was becoming. He woke up. And you know, this isn't the point of this sermon, but I do want to stop here and make this simple point that one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot for the past couple of years, and I was just talking with staff the other day, I want to see if I can think through a way to do an entire series on this topic, but one of the sneakiest tricks of the enemy, I think, is to simply distract us. I think we are the most distracted group of people that have ever lived in human history. I think the option to pull out a phone and have the whole world and a screen in our hand means that we never have the blessing of boredom. We rarely have the blessing of idle thought. We get in the car, we turn on a podcast, or we turn on music, and we have a conversation. We sit at a light, we pull it out. We sit at home, we turn on the TV, we get in the shower, we turn on music. I think we are so distracted and distractible that sometimes we don't have the chance to come to ourselves because we don't have any quiet. We don't make any space in our life for the Lord to speak into because we no longer have the blessing of boredom. And it got me to thinking that maybe one of the hidden blessings of isolation will be the chance to come to ourselves. Maybe one of the hidden blessings of this time of isolation and quarantine when we don't have much to do. I was just talking to Steve before we filmed this, and he said, man, it was so weird for me to get up and leave this morning. I said, yeah, really? He goes, yeah, I mean, I leave once a week. We're all in our houses. And so maybe one of the hidden blessings of this time is just the opportunity to slow down, to reflect, to really think through. Is what's happening with my life what I want to happen? Is what's happening with my life honoring to God? Is this my goal? Is this what I want? Or do I need to come to myself? Do I need to wake up? Do I need to finally listen to God and say, maybe the reason I'm unhappy is because I'm not organizing my life according to his principles. I wonder if some of us need to have this moment where we come to ourselves like the prodigal son did, and maybe that moment can be one of the hidden blessings of this time of isolation. But in this moment, the son also does a very human thing, and I really do love this part. He develops a speech, right? He says he's going to go back to his dad, and he's going to say to him, listen, I've squandered away my opportunity to be your son. I don't deserve to be your son anymore. Will you just hire me? I'll work hard for you. You don't have to make me a manager. I'll be bottom rung. I just need bread and a roof. I don't even have that. I just need that. And so he's got his concession speech planned, which is a very human thing. This is what we do, right? You tick off your spouse. You do something that you know your husband or your wife is going to be mad about. What do you do? You rehearse the speech in your head. You figure out what are we going to say. This is what we did when we were little kids. When we got in trouble, something happened at school and we were going to have to go home and explain to mom and dad what we did. What did you do? You rehearsed your speech, right? You got it right. I don't deserve this. I'm really sorry that I did this. If you'll please just forgive me. That's a very human exercise. And so that's what the son does. He rehearses his speech. He gets ready to go home and apologize. And he hits the road to go back home and to grovel. And Scripture says that the father saw him coming while he was a far way off, and that the father ran to meet him. And that's an important detail because men in that day and age did not run. There was no joggers. People didn't get on all the gear and then go running through their neighborhood. You did not see distinguished older men running for the same reason that you won't see me dancing, okay? It's undignified. I'm not good at it. I don't want you to see me do it. It's embarrassing. That's the general sense that men would have when they would run once they were older and they no longer needed to go to battle or things like that. It was undignified to be in a hurry in that way. But the father didn't care. He saw his son and he wanted to go greet him. And he gets out to his son and the son starts into his speech. He starts into his prepared speech. And I would expect, I would expect the father to listen to the speech. I would expect the father to sit there arms folded. Yeah, you better have a good explanation. Yeah, you're right that you don't deserve to be my son anymore. I don't know. I'm going to have to consider whether or not I'll hire you as a servant. I'm going to have to consider whether or not, let me talk to my guys and see if any of them wants to be your boss. I got to think about this. Let me talk to your brother and see if he wants to welcome you back into the fold. That's what we would expect from the father. That's what he had every right to do. But that's not what he did. In the text, we see that the father stops the son. He's not interested in listening to his concession speech. He's not interested in, I'm sorry. He doesn't even make the son utter it. As soon as he sees him, he runs to him. He throws his arms around him and embraces him. He brings him back to the house and he gives the servants the orders, kill the fattened calf, the one that we've been saving for the big party and a big feast, go do it. The nice expensive bottle of wine that we got in Italy 20 years ago, go uncork it. This is the thing that we've been waiting on. And then he comes out and he tells his servants, give him my robe and give him some shoes. And those are symbols of being restored back into the family, being received back into the family. No, you're not going to be my servant. I'm not going to make you work for one of my guys. You are my son, and here is your robe. And then he takes his ring, and he puts it on the finger of the son, and that's a symbol of the authority of the family. So what we see in that reception, and the father running and flinging his arms around him, and clothing him, and putting his ring on his finger, and throwing him a party, what we see is something remarkable from the father, that the father doesn't just receive the son, he restores him. He doesn't just wait with open arms and receive him and hug him and say, yeah, you're right. You messed up, but I love you. You're my son. You're always going to be my son. Now, there's going to be a probationary period. You can't get an inheritance anymore. I'm not going to spend any more money on you. All that's your brother's. You don't deserve that. He doesn't do any of that. He not only receives him, he restores him to the full rights and privileges owed to his son. And the father's mind deserved by his son. And one of the themes through this story that blows me away every time I settle in and look at it is the remarkable grace and goodness of the father. His son asks him for his inheritance early. He spits in his face and says, I want your stuff more than I want you. And the father should have responded, get away from me, you don't get any inheritance. But instead he says, okay, if that's what you want. He wastes his money and the father knew that this would happen. And he comes back humble, hat in hand, broken, apologetic. And the father brushes that aside. He excused the apology. He embraces his son. He receives him and he restores him back to his full rights and privileges of being his son. Grace that he did not deserve. And I'm blown away by the remarkable goodness and grace of the father in this story. And I think maybe one of the most important things we could take out of it for ourselves is that our heavenly father offers us the same remarkable grace and goodness. Your father in heaven who created you and loves you offers you the same grace and goodness that he offers the prodigal son. He offers you the same reception and the same restoration that he offers the son that left him. He treats you with that same amount of grace. Let it sink in this morning how gently the Father loves and corrects you. Let it sink in this morning the kindness that he shows you when he doesn't need to. The concessions that he makes for us when he doesn't have to. The goodness that he offers us when we reject him. The same father that loves his son in this story loves you and offers you that same grace. And you know, often when we think of the prodigal son, the son that left and invested his life in wild living, those of us who grew up in church, we think of the people who maybe came up and didn't come up in church or maybe ran away from church and did whatever they wanted to. And they lived recklessly. They partied. They lived in ways that maybe church people wouldn't live. And then they come back and the Father restores them. And we think that this is great. And we think that that's who the prodigal son is, is people who literally go away and live recklessly and then at some point or another come back to the Father or come to the Father for the first time. And sometimes that is the prodigal son, and those stories are amazing. But you know, I am convinced that the longer you're a Christian, the more you can relate to the prodigal son. The longer you're a believer, the more seasons you have in your life where you may not wander away to a foreign country and live outwardly recklessly. It may not be noticeable that you've run away from God. It may not be apparent to everyone else that you're wandering from the Father. But you know that maybe in your mind or your heart or your spirit, you're thousands of miles away. Sure, we're coming to church every week. We're logging in. We're online. We're chatting. We're doing all the stuff. We're doing the Zoom calls, and we go to the small group, and we do our part. But even amidst all that, in our hearts and in our minds and in our spirits, we can have wandered thousands of miles away. And maybe this morning, we need to come to ourselves and rush back to the Father that's waiting on us with open arms and know that he offers us the same goodness and restorative grace now that he offered then. And that's the main point of the story. That's the main takeaway that we should get. But there's one more thing that we need to be aware of because the story doesn't stop there. It doesn't stop at the restoration of the leaving son. What follows is this incredible conversation that the father has with the staying son. The staying son is out in the field. He's working. He's being responsible. He's not living recklessly. He's not squandering the father's money. He's out in the field doing the right thing, doing what he's supposed to do. And then he gets word that there's a party. And he finds out that the party is because his derelict younger brother has come back and dad's gone nuts. And he's thrown a huge party. And so the older brother is ticked and he goes and he pouts on the stairs. He sits on his front porch and he pouts. And I gotta be honest with you, a lot of people I know, including myself, empathize with the staying son. Empathize and identify if you had to pick which one you identified most with in the story, the prodigal son who went out and lived recklessly or the staying son who stayed put and made responsible choices and did what was expected of him. A lot of us at Grace are the staying son. Our whole life we've tried to do the right thing. We've not gone out and squandered. We've not gone out and lived recklessly. We've always tried to make wise choices. And so when we see the staying son upset, we identify with him. I know I have one good friend who has flat told me she doesn't like this parable because she feels like the staying son and he gets in trouble too and it doesn't make sense to her. Or at least he didn't used to. And so the dad comes to the son. He leaves the party and he comes, he sits down with his older son who stayed. He says, son, why are you upset? And the son's response is, dad, why are you doing that for your derelict son? Why are you doing that for the one who betrayed you and left you and squandered your wealth? Why didn't you do that for me? I've been here all these years. I've made the right decisions. I've been with you all these years, and you've never thrown a party like this for me and my friends. It's not fair, Dad. And again, I empathize with that. I think he brings up some good points. But the father's response is remarkable, And it reveals something that I think is really profound. Look at what the father says. I'm in verse 31. And he said to him, actually, I'm going to start in verse 30. This is what the son is saying, but when this son of yours came who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him. Dad, you threw him a party. That's not fair. And the father's response is, and he said to him, son, you are always with me and all that is mine is yours. That response is incredibly revelatory. He says, son, son, son, son, you're missing the point. You're missing the point. The point isn't the parties that I could throw you. The point isn't the inheritance that you're going to get one day. The point isn't trying to get my stuff. The point is me. You've always had me. You've always been with me. You've always been in my presence. And the prize here, son, isn't the parties that I could throw you or the things that I could give you. The prize is being with me. And what we realize in that response is that the sins of the leaving son and the sins of the staying son are the same. The sins of the sons are the same. They wanted the father's stuff more than they wanted the father. Don't you see? They had different ways of going about it. The leaving son, at least I'll give him the credit of being more honest about it. He said, dad, I'm not really interested in you. I just kind of want your stuff. If you'll go ahead and give it to me, I can go spread my freedom wings. But what's revealed in the pouting of the staying son that was responsible and made good choices is that he wanted the same thing. He just chose a different path to the father's stuff and to the father's blessings. That's what he says. Dad, I want the party too. I want the things too. I want all the things that he's experienced, but I've gone about it in a better way. And the father says, son, that's not the point. The point is that you have me. And so ringing through the centuries as Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son, and we read it generation after generation, is the father's desire for us to want to be with him, for us to want the father, for us to want to be with God more than we want his blessings. This is what true love is anyways. I mean, when I'm at home with Lily, on a Saturday when Jen maybe will leave and go do things that she deserves to do because she's been in the house all week, she'll leave and she'll be gone. And so I'll take an extended dad responsibility day on Saturday and just kind of watch Lily all day, which is not babysitting because she's my kid. So I get that day to spend with Lily. And then in the evening, maybe Jen walks back in and I'll say, I'm so happy to see you. I'm so glad that you're here. She will rightly ask me, are you happy to see me or are you happy to have help? Right? What does she want to know? Am I happy because now she's going to relieve me of my duties because of the things that she can do for me? Or am I happy because I've just missed my wife? Because what does my wife want from me? She wants me to miss her presence. She wants me to value time with her. This is how our relationships work. In every relationship we have, we want people to want to be with us for us, not for what we offer them. And God is no different. The ringing lesson from the story of the prodigal son is not just that God receives us and restores us when we wander off, but that his heart's desire is that he would be our heart's desire. So in this story, I think we are left with two profound questions. The first comes from earlier in the story, the experience of the leaving son. And it's a question that I asked earlier in the sermon I want to stop and highlight now. Is it time for you to come to yourself? As we reflect on the sermon and what we've learned and what we should think and take into the week with us, one of the big questions I want us to be asking ourselves is, is it time for me to come to my senses? In this time of isolation and quarantine and slowing down where I have now the blessing of boredom, should I put down the devices and sit in a quiet room and think for a minute? And ask, do I need to come to myself? Are there things that I need to realize? What is God trying to say to me? I wonder if we could do that. I wonder if we would be brave enough to ask ourselves this question this week. The second question, and this is a tough one, is do we want God or his stuff? If you identify with the staying son, the one who's kind of done the right things and made the right choices, if you identify with the prodigal son and you're just kind of looking at everything and you go, listen, I just want the blessings, I don't want the life. We should ask ourselves, have I made these choices because I'm interested in God and his presence and in his goodness or am I interested in what he can do for me? That's a tough question to answer. Ever since encountering this years ago, I ask myself that question throughout the year. Every time I pray virtually, this question rattles around in the back of my mind. Am I pursuing God because I want his blessings or because I want him? Am I excited to get to heaven because of all the stuff that he's going to give me when I get there or because I'll be in the very presence of my Savior? I don't know. I hope that more and more each year I'm less interested in the blessings that God offers me and more interested in the presence that he offers me. I hope that more and more each year I'm drawn closer to God because the Father's response in the story is, you've always, everything I have is yours. These are all your blessings anyways. Of course there are things that come along with being with me. It's everything that I can possibly offer you, but I am the prize. Sometimes I wonder in my life, am I making God the prize or his things and his blessings the prize? So I'd like to invite you into that thought process as well. And this week with our friends, maybe even with our families as this wraps up, hopefully in our small groups this week we'll talk about these questions. Do I need to come to myself? Am I more interested in God or am I more interested in what God can do for me? I hope that you'll wrestle with those questions and I hope that this parable of the prodigal son will serve to bring us all closer to God as is always our prayer at Grace. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this story. Thank you for all the truths that are nestled within it. God, I pray that you would help us to see it with fresh eyes. I pray that you would help us to suss out in our lives where we are pursuing the things that you do for us and not you. God, if we are prodigal this morning, if we are wandering away, maybe not physically, but if our minds or our hearts or our spirits have wandered away from you, would you help us come to ourselves? Would you give us the gift of quiet and of peace and of thought and help us come to ourselves and make that crucial, pivotal decision to come back to you? For those that need it this week, God, help us come to ourselves. Father, for others who need to assess this, help us, give us a heart for you. Let us pursue you, not the things that you do for us, but just your presence, God. Give us a pure heart and desire for you. It's in your son's name we ask for these things. Amen.