Sermons tagged with Trust

Well, good morning, Grace. Oh, look at that. See, they clap and they answer. I don't know how I did that, but thank you all for being here. As Nate said, I'm Erin. I am the children's pastor, so I'm very excited to be out of little church and part of big church this morning. It's kind of a fun place to be. I'm also a little apprehensive to stand up here for a couple of different reasons. One, there's people in the audience that I didn't expect to be here, so that one adds a whole other layer to my morning, which is fun. But the other one too is that the book of Philippians that we get to talk about today is a really cool book, and it's a lot of fun, but it's also a very personal book. And I found it to be very personal for Paul as well as for me. So as I jumped in and started to study, I came very quickly upon the area that I felt is where I wanted to land. And so I continued to study. I continued to do my research. And then on top of it, I met with Nate, who helped me to even narrow my focus a little bit more. Because you guys know me. I have lots of words. He does not. And so the two of us hopefully could, yeah, pare it down just a little. But I got all of that together. So I now have my outline. I'm so excited. And I sat down to try to write, and I had no words. Zero. And again, if you know me, that's a rarity. And so I struggled for a long time, and there was one night after a particularly hard day of no words, I came home and I was talking to Harris, my sweet husband, lamenting the fact that I had no words. And he stops me in my tracks and he says, hey, Aaron, have you ever thought about the fact that you have no words because you're trying to protect yourself? And I said, what? No, I don't do that. And he said, well, yeah. He goes, you have been trying in all of your power to live out what you want to talk about for the last two and a half years. And he said, maybe it's time for you to break down the walls that you're using to protect yourself and put your words on paper. And so I took his great advice, And I must admit he was right. It's hard to say that. No, I'm kidding. But seriously, I took his advice. And the next day I looked at the passage with new eyes. And the words began to flow. So to you, Nate, a small apology. Because this may not be exactly what we talked about, but I hope that what I do get to present today is honoring to Paul and Paul's message to the Philippians, which I think is also very relevant to us today. So, let's jump in. One of the things about me that you may or may not know also is I am a huge history lover. I actually went to school to teach history. I never actually did that officially, but that's okay. But I believe that in history, in order to completely understand it, sometimes you have to get a full, like the back story. And then it all starts to make a whole lot more sense. So in our morning this morning, you're going to hear some of the backstory about the book of Philippians, so hopefully we understand where Paul is writing from. So we'll start though with the book of Philippians. Paul, it's AD 62. Paul is in a prison cell in Rome awaiting trial. This beautiful trial is going to basically allow, tell him whether he's going to live or die. That's kind of what he's waiting on. So in order to pass the time, he is ministering to those people who are visiting him. He is writing letters of correction and encouragement to his churches. Now, the prison cell that he sits in is not like anything we would understand today. He's in shackles all of the time, most likely shackled to a Roman soldier. And then the Roman penal system required him to provide his own room and board. So he sits in a prison cell, can't go anywhere, can't do anything, but they expect him to be able to pay his way. So he is completely and totally reliant on people for his care. This is where the sweet church of Philippi actually comes in. So now if we back up 10 years, we find Paul and Silas and Timothy and Luke all heading out on their second missionary journey. And as they have gone to left Antioch, they're in Galatia, they're running around Galatia, they've done their thing. They say, I want to move west. And so they try to go westward. And every time they make that trip towards the west, which would be Asia, they run into these roadblocks. And if you go into Acts 16, which is where this story is, you find out Paul attributes every single one of those roadblocks to the Holy Spirit, saying it's not time for you guys to go to Asia yet. And so like every good southerner, Paul and his friends decide to regroup and they head to the beach. They head to a little town called Troas, which sits on the Aegean Sea. And they camp out there for a while to try to discern what their next steps are. And then one night, Paul has a dream. And in this dream, there's a Macedonian man who appears to him and begs him to come to Macedonia. So you know where this is headed. He tells his friends. They get into a boat. They cross the Aegean Sea, and they head to Macedonia. The really cool side note to this is Macedonia is present-day Europe. So what we're talking about now is the first time the gospel has ever reached Europe, which I just think that's really, really cool. So they end up on the coast. They get off. They jump on what's called the Ignatian, if I pronounced that right. Who knows? Way. Which was a road that was constructed by the Roman Empire to connect all of the Roman colonies. One of those Roman colonies was Philippi. Philippi had become a Roman colony at the end of a civil war. The winner of the civil war had then become emperor. And he chose Philippi as a colony because it was rich in gold. It had fabulous location to the coast. And he'd also then decided that it was a great retirement location for all the Roman soldiers. So kind of like the villages in Florida. So this Philippi that Paul and his friends would have been walking up on held great prominence in Macedonia. They would have walked up to these amazing walls that were there to protect the city and a spectacular road system, which was all testimony to its strategic importance and all of the Roman influence. And then as they walked down the city streets, they would see this amazing Roman architecture. There would be temples to the Roman gods. There would be a bustling city life. And on top of that, the population would have been pretty diverse. You would have had the retired Roman soldiers. You also would have had other Roman citizens that had come to Philippi because, you know, it's kind of a cool city. And then on top of it, you're going to have the local Greek population. The one thing, however, that there were, I guess I should say, there were a few things that were missing. So as Paul and his friends are in the middle of Philippi, it becomes the Sabbath and they go to look for a place to worship. Now, Paul and the previous places that he would visit, they would always head to a synagogue as a place of worship. There was not a single synagogue in Philippi. And so the interesting part to this is it only takes 10 Jewish men in order to be classified as a synagogue. So there's a whole population of people that would have been familiar to Paul and his friends that are completely missing. So Paul leaves. He heads outside the city and goes to the river to worship. When he gets to the river, he meets a woman by the name of Lydia and some of her followers or her friends. They were all followers of God. He had a moment with them. Their hearts were open. He was able to preach the gospel. Lydia and her entire family are baptized. They come to know Christ. They are now officially the first recorded believers of Christ in Europe. I think that's just really cool. And so then you have this moment. Lydia says, okay, you guys now have to use my house. It needs to be your headquarters. You can just come and rest and eat and do all that stuff and travel and whatever you need to do. This is where you need to go. So they did. They used her house as headquarters. They ran back and forth. They continued to preach and they teach. They managed to get themselves in more trouble. Paul and Silas end up in jail again. Paul seems to like jail. It's just a good thing for him. But he ends up in jail again. Something about a slave girl and a demon. He cast them out and made people mad. I don't know. They ended up in jail. But while he's in jail, there's an earthquake. And because of that earthquake, the jailer and his whole family come to Jesus. So now all of a sudden we have two groups of people that are going to come together to form this beautiful church of Philippi. And so at this, he is released from jail and he decides it's probably a good idea if he leaves Philippi. They're not sure that they really like him there. So as they pack up to leave, he leaves Lydia and her family and the Roman soldier and his family to form this sweet church of Philippi. And so it's a church that sits in a city of prominence. It's a church full of believers that are now going to face a great deal of resistance and a great deal of persecution. If you go back to what we're looking at, Roman soldiers who believe in the Roman Empire, they believe in the Roman Emperor as God. There's going to be a lot of resistance. There'll be a lot of persecution, but they're in it. So here we now find Paul sitting and writing letters, and he picks to write a letter to his friends in Philippi. But the really cool thing about this letter is that it's really, really different from all of the other letters that he's written. You heard from both Aaron and Doug on Galatians and Ephesians, and there was moments of correction in there. He had heard that there were things going wrong in these churches, and he needed to correct it. That's not what this letter's about. This letter, Paul's basically, it's like you would sit down to write a letter to a friend. How are you doing? This is what I've been up to. What have you been up to? I hope you are well. Thank you so much for the gift that you sent me. It's done X, Y, and Z to help me. And that's what he does here. Because see, the church of Philippi had been a partner with Paul from the very beginning in his spread of the gospel. They had supported him in every way possible, whether it was people, whether it was money, whatever Paul needed, the Church of Philippi was consistent in their support. And so this letter shows that as he writes to them. You can also tell through the words that he uses and the way that the letter is phrased that he knows that he's writing to a mature group of Christians, a group of Christians who totally understand who the person of Christ is, the sacrifice that he made, as well as understanding that their citizenship is not quite here. It's in heaven. But also knowing that they have to figure out how to live in the here and now, in the city where it's full of the struggle of temptations of the flesh, its struggle with the constant fears of persecution. And so I can also say it kind of sounds like the world we live in today, right? We're believers. We sit knowing who Christ is. We sit understanding what he did for us, but also knowing our citizenship's in heaven. But how do I live right here and right now? We live in a world with a 24-hour news cycle. There's a little fear there, right? We live in the world with social media that can make us feel so often about that we're just not good enough. We've lived through a pandemic. We've come out the other side. It may have given us a few layers of fear now. Also can it happen again. And what's it going to be like if it does. And then if you're a parent or a grandparent. There may be a whole other layer of fear that you have. Because you are talking about your kids. Or your grandkids. And what the world is like. And the things that they have to face. So in this thank you note, Paul says to them as well as to us, it becomes this letter of an encouragement. And he says, you need to hold fast and hold strong. And you need to be there with a mindset like Christ, because he knows if you can control, if they can control their thoughts, that they can change the direction of their lives. He knows that the renewed mind leads to a life transformed. And this is what he actually says that the Christ-like mindset is. If you look at Philippians chapter 4, verse 8, it states, Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about these things. So Paul says to him, you need to shift your focus and fill your thoughts with the truth of God's word. You need to look at the world with the eyes and the lens of humility, of justice, of finding ways that your thoughts and your actions are attractive to others, that they're filled with gratitude and praise, and that you're grounding yourself in this present moment that we live in and finding God in the circumstances. I believe Paul knew his audience exceptionally well, because as I read this, and I imagine the Philippians heard it as well in his letter and went, hmm, that might be easier said than done. And it's true. This is not easy. But I believe Paul then gives us an action plan to help us learn how to renew our minds. And it's important to note that like any other action plan that you may have in your life, like to lose weight or to exercise more, whatever it may be, if you're not consistent in it and if you don't put in the time and the energy and the work, it's not going to do anything. So we need to be focused on it. So if you want to renew your mind so that you live a transformed life, the first thing that he talks about is that we must learn to choose joy. And if you look at Philippians chapter four, verse four, he says it, rejoice in the Lord always. I say it again, rejoice. And like any good pastor, if he wants you to remember it, he says it twice. Rejoice. I say it again, rejoice. I was in a small group leader for many years for a really cool group of girls. And from 6th grade to 12th grade for them. And when they graduated, they gave me a ring, which I still wear periodically. Inscribed on the ring, it says, choose joy. Come to find out, this may have been one my favorite phrases for them because, you know, sixth to 12th grade is the crazy time anyway. And what I wanted them to understand, and that's what Paul talks about in this passage, is the fact that you don't always have control over your circumstances. Circumstances change all the time. We may not be able to control them, but we do have control how we choose to respond to that circumstance. So, you know, we'd hear it from them. But, you know, I can't have joy because so-and-so broke up with me. Or I can't have joy because I can't go to the party next week or in our situation it may be more things like I can't have joy because I just got that medical diagnosis. I can't have joy because I lost my job. But my response to that is this is where we get to choose to have joy. I can't, I can't help the medical diagnosis, but I can shift my focus and choose to have joy in that moment. And what this comes down to is that we change our thinking from the what, which is very temporal, to the who, which is very internal, our joy abounds. I can have joy in that situation because he is the author and perfecter of my faith. I can have joy in that situation because he says he will never leave me nor forsake me. So, choose joy. The next thing he says that we need to do is we need to learn to release it. And I'm not talking about releasing your joy. We want to hold on to that joy. What he's talking about here is releasing your control. Let me, let me expand upon that. Verse six in Philippians four says, So we walk in a world today where we face stress, we face anxiety, we face fear, we face worry. It's all very normal. The thing that isn't is when it has control over us. And I think as a side note I need to put in here is that this anxiety, this fear, this worry that I speak of is the stuff that we just normally have as a human being living in the world, the fallen world that we live in today. There are other people who fear, worry, and anxiety are actually part of a mental health situation. And to them, I say, what we talk about today, it helps. But your medication and your therapist and everything else that you're doing helps also. You bring God into the situation, but you don't. I'm not going to stand up here and say you're praying away anything because that's not true. Okay. So now I come back to where I was. So fear, anxiety, et cetera, the world we live in, it causes it. It's normal. We don't want it to have control over us. That's just what we don't, we don't want to do it. Um, and when it starts to have control over us, what we start to see is because we're humans and because we hate pain and we want to do everything in our life to avoid pain, we will try to control or we will try to fix the situation that we're in. Because that pain of failure, that pain of loss, that pain of rejection is too much. So we choose to hold on super, super tight to it. Because then that way it's safe, right? I'm safe. I'm not hurt. But guess what? I'm exhausted because I'm working so hard not to release it, but to control it and to hold on to it. And, you know, it also states in Scripture, God says, cast all your cares on me because he cares for you. And so he cares so much he sent Jesus to die for you. So why are you still holding on to it? And if you look at verse 7, and then it puts up protectors around your heart and around your mind. So the next time you walk into the next situation, that peace is there if you're willing to let go of the control and stop thinking that you can hold on to it. So what circumstance is it that you are holding on to and refusing to allow God to work in it? What situation keeps you up at night? Who's had that 3 a.m. wake up call? I know. Go ahead and nod your head because it happens. But what are you holding on to so tightly that you can't allow God's peace to enter into it because you want to control it? Think about what would happen if you gave it all over to him. Because here's the thing, when we're in those situations where we're stressed, we're worried, we're anxious, etc. How are you as a person? How do you respond to your family? I don't know. Harris has seen it before. The more stress I'm under, the shorter I am, the grumpier I am, the angrier I can be. But yet if the peace comes in, now what happens? Then I'm hopefully responding to situations where I'm annoyed with a little bit more patience. Or maybe some more joy or love or gentleness or kindness or whatever it is. So when we talk about renewing your mind to transform your life, this is the kind of things that we're talking about. The change that can happen inside of relationships just because. You may not realize it, but that angst that you have, that stress that you're carrying is affecting those around you. And so by accepting God's peace and walking in it, it changes that. So this also then brings us back to where we started in verse 8. Because here we are. We now know that we want to choose joy. We now know that we want to release it all. But that still does not really help us out with, again, that mindset and how to live directly in the here and now. Because, again, we live here. You're going to have thoughts, right? The world that we live in today, there are a thousand things vying for your attention and your thought life. But guess what? I'm going to tell you again. You have control over your thought life. Huh? And I know that one seems big, but you really and truly do. You get to choose and decide what takes up real estate in your brain. You get to choose and decide what it is that you want to focus your thoughts on. The thing about the human brain is the way that it's actually wired is to conserve energy. So if your normal thought pattern is kind of negative, goes down that what-if trail often, so every time thoughts come in, that's where they're going to go. So this is the renewing of the mind part is that we don't want it to go down a negative path anymore. We want to renew it so it has the mindset of Christ so that we're now, when the thoughts come in, they take a different path because that's become the easy path. So what's that filter? That filter again is verse eight. You think about these things. You run all of those thoughts through what verse eight says. The truth of God. You have the truth of God in your hands. If it doesn't meet up with the truth of God, throw it away and don't give it time in your thoughts. If it isn't lovely, if it isn't pure, if it isn't honoring, if it isn't praiseworthy, just don't even give it your time or your attention. Is it going to be easy? No, it's not. Because again, what's the easiest thing for us to think on? Right? Where's your brain? The easiest place to think on quite often for us is the what ifs and the oh noes because that's where we've been. Another way to possibly think about this that I love is we are our own worst critic, right? So we have to stop listening to ourselves and start talking to ourselves instead. Quit listening to the lies that the world tells us. Quit listening to that little voice inside your head that tells you you're not enough, you're not good enough. You can't stand up in front of all those people. Like whatever it is that that little voice is telling you, you got to push it aside. And when I say you start talking to yourself, start talking to yourself through the lens of 4-8. Start talking to yourself like a coach. Yeah, we messed up this time. But guess what? We're going to get it right next time. And soon, you'll be hearing the words of God reiterating who you are in him. That you are capable. That you are lovely. That you are worthy, that he loves you. And that you can trust him. That even though my circumstances stink, he's right here with me. And then eventually we begin to interpret our circumstances through the goodness of God. And as we step into truth, we hear his voice and the words of scripture and we learn to trust. A few years ago, my circumstances changed. My parents were living part-time lives halfway in Florida, halfway in North Carolina. They were in their 80s and very independent and doing exceptionally well. Then one summer when my mom was home, we had some health issues. There was a fall,ed up with a little memory issues, kind of hiccups, whatever you want to call them. They made the decision not to go down to Florida that summer. And instead, or that winter, I should say. Instead, hang out in North Carolina and see if we could see where we were headed, right? Needless to say, her health continued to decline some. Dad made the decision, we're done, sold the place in Florida. They're now in Pinehurst full-time. It's fabulous because they're close, and we get to run back and forth. We get to hang out together, and the world is really good. But my mom's health and her mobility continued to decline over this time. And then in my dad, I began to see a lot of what we talked about today. His circumstances were not ones he wanted to be living in. And the fear of losing my mom did this to him. And he tried to control and fix all the things. Because, you know, she was his best friend. She was his soulmate. They had been together at this point like 62 years. And so he's holding on like this. And what he was doing by holding on like this, he turned into somebody who, for us, was hard to deal with sometimes. He got kind of, there were moments of anger. There were moments just pure frustration. We also had anxiety. It was all there, all the things that we've talked about. And he was grumpy, which if you've ever met my dad, grumpy was not a word that you would have used to describe him. So he's holding on for dear life. And in turn, I'm caught in the middle because I'm dealing with my mom as well as my dad and all of the frustrations that come trying to not choose sides. I can see his side. I can see hers. I'm trying to, you know, all the things, right? And the other thing I was trying to do too was fix it and control it. There were days that I will stand up before you and honestly admit I did not choose joy. There were days that trying to think about that which was true and lovely and pure and honest, and that just was not thoughts that crossed my brain. I tried, but it's not things that always came easy. Stress levels continued to increase. Then my dad had some health issues. We go down that rabbit trail because my mom's of no help, so it falls on my shoulders to help manage his care as well. So lots of running back and forth, lots of doing all that. The end of 2022 is the beginning of my mom's major decline. We end up in the hospital for many days. The hospice is called in. And then my mom passes away at the beginning of December of 2022. My dad was wrecked. The grief that hit my father at that point in time was beyond anything I'd had experienced. His wife of 63 years, it was hard. And again, he still had hoped so much to control, and that control just didn't work. So as you can only guess, I jumped in because he's a mess and he needs somebody to take care of him. So I went immediately into caregiver mode. I took off. We had to find him a place up here because, you know, he can't be in Pounders by himself. So thankfully I was gifted with, right? We found a really cool independent living community. He's actually across the street from me. We get him up here. We get him settled. And it is good. So I call this kind of our year of temporary peace. His veil of grief lifts a little. He makes friends. He's hanging out. He finds his new routine. He misses my mom every single day. But he's enjoying his time with us and we're loving having him with us. He's there for all of the birthdays and the holidays. We got to celebrate his 90th and it was fantastic. He was here when Haley and Zach got engaged. It was just an amazing year together. I think at this point in time for all of us, joy became a little easier to choose. We may have let go of control just a little bit. Because the one thing that I probably didn't mention about me and my control was this, to me me became my lifeline. Because the one thing I knew in dealing with both my mommy and my dad was that if I let go of this in my heart, in my brain, I felt I would drown. And so I held on with everything that I had because I, yeah, I was scared to death to let go for fear of not being able to come back up. And so last, this past April, my dad had a fall. So my temporary peace has now gone to here. It wasn't a big fall. It scared us all a little. It wasn't a big deal. We moved on. Harris and I are going out of town. We came back from out of town. My dad is in basically excruciating back pain. There's no explanation for it. So we spent the next week trying to figure out what's going on. Thought we were headed towards some answers and then we had another fall. Ended up in the hospital because of the fall. That was on a Monday. That Wednesday evening and the hospital stays were something that's for a whole other sermon. But that Wednesday evening, we finally got him to a place of rest. I kissed him on the top of his head. I told him I loved him, and I said, I'll see you tomorrow. Remember, I've got you. I went home. I went to bed. Middle of the night, I got a phone call. Your dad's taking a turn. We need you to come to the hospital. I'm holding at this point in time. Still holding on as tight as I can. But y'all, I got into that car and said, I can't do this. And I let go. And the whole way to the hospital, I just prayed, Lord, your will, not mine. Lord, I need you to be my rock and my strength in this moment. Your will, not mine. Now, come to find out, I pulled into the parking lot at Wake Med. And I know now that that was when my daddy went and met Jesus. And so when I walked into his room, y'all, he had a smile on his face. And I know in my heart that daddy came to his peace in the arms of Jesus. And he saw my mama. And the thing is, I found my peace too. I released it. I let it go and I let him have it. And that one moment of release was what I needed. Now, my circumstances are, I don't know that they've changed. I can't say that they've changed. They're just different. I now stand before you. I've lost both of my parents in the last 17 months. I'm dealing with all of the things related to dad and what's left behind. But the one thing I do know is that I live each day now in the moment. I don't focus on the what ifs. I don't go to those things that I can't, I have no control over. I try to stay grounded, choosing my joy, choosing to come at it with prayer and open hands and trying my very best that when those thoughts and those what ifs and all the things try to come into my brain, that I don't let it take up real estate and I push it aside. It's not easy. But the peace that I have when I do make those choices, I want more of. And so the daily, the hourly exercise of doing that, I will continue to do. And so here we have five little verses tucked at the back of this beautiful letter and thank you note that Paul wrote that act for us as an action plan so we can renew our minds to live a transformed life. Sounds easy. It's going to take lots of work. That day-to-day commitment about choosing joy releasing it and then I'm being very intentional about what comes into our thoughts so I want to ask you Grace Raleigh as we close it all up today where are you stuck in your circumstances so stuck that you've lost your joy or that you're finding that you want to control or hold on to your situation so much so that you're exhausted and you don't know what to do with it. Where are you allowing the world to influence your thoughts, to allow your thoughts to become that vicious cycle of fear and worry and anxiety? So can you instead release it knowing that when you release it, you will find his peace, a peace beyond all understanding that will guard your heart and guard your mind as you walk into your next circumstance. Will you all pray with me? Lord, thank you. Thank you for today. Thank you for your peace. And for Paul knowing that a renewed mind leads to a transformed life. So Lord, thank you that we have your words and that we have you by our side to know how to choose your peace, to choose your joy, and most of all, in all situations, to choose you. We just ask that you help each and every one of us, Lord, to be able to walk this action plan with intentionality and to live in your peace. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

All right, everybody. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us on this June Sunday. It's good to see you guys. It is incredibly hot outside. So thanks for braving that. Before we get into the sermon, just a small announcement. For me, this is my last sermon that I'm going to preach until August. A few years ago, the elders talked and decided that it would be best for the church for me to not preach in the month of July and best for me. And here's the reason why. And so we've been doing this for a few years now. The first and most important reason is this. There are other voices in the church that are very much worth hearing. They are thoughtful and insightful and articulate and wise and godly, and we are better off hearing from them. I don't know if you guys realize this or not. I'm sure you have if you've listened to a number of sermons. I don't really have something to say every week. So it's good for other people whose God has placed on their hearts things they do have to say to share with us. So first and foremost, we want to create an atmosphere of other voices. And that's why periodically in the year, I never go more than six or seven weeks in a row without someone spelling me and getting another voice up here. So that's always been a priority for us. It's always been a priority for me as a senior pastor. The other reason is taking that block of time allows me to focus on other areas of the church that I might not otherwise be able to give as much focus to in the regular rhythm of writing a weekly message. Last September, I stood up here on September the 10th, and I told you guys that I was going to be working hard, kind of in the margins and in the afternoons, behind the scenes, to develop some discipleship pathways for us that I believe is the next big step that we're going to take as a church, and maybe the most important thing I've worked on in the last year. So I've been quietly working on that behind the scenes and with other people in concert with others and putting things together. And I'm very excited in September, we're going to do a series on our five traits. Some of you may be aware that we have some, you might even be able to name one, but we're going to make those more a part of who we are and what we do as a church. And to accompany those, we're going to roll out what we're calling discipleship pathways that are kind of the next step for us to take towards spiritual growth as a church. So I'm finishing those up in July. I'm rolling those out to the small group leaders at the end of the month of July, and then you guys will be hearing about those in September. So that's how that work's been going on in the background since last fall. I'm finally ready to show it to you here as we enter into this fall. Now for this morning, as Mike said earlier, we have our last sermon in our series called Idols that's loosely based on Tim Keller's book called Counterfeit Gods. And in it, he presents this idea of source idols, things that really fuel the idolatry that we have in our life and other areas. Those source idols are power, approval, control, and comfort. And what he means by source idol is maybe our visible idol is greed or materialism, and we just want things. We want to get all we can, can all we get, and sit on our can. We just want more things. That's what we want. And so maybe that comes because we're really motivated by a desire for power. We believe money brings power. Maybe it's control. We believe money brings control. Maybe it's approval. Maybe it's comfort. But it's those source idols that really get sneaky and begin to turn our hearts away from God. And we talked about this idea of idolatry being so important because whatever occupies the space of our top priority in our life, and idolatry is anytime we put something in our life, we prioritize that over our devotion to God himself. Anything that occupies that top spot in our life is by default the recipient of our worship. And what we talked about is that nothing can bear the weight of our worship besides our God. So whenever we get that out of whack and we have something besides our God, besides Jesus Christ as our number one priority, then everything else in our life suffers. This morning, I've been excited to do this sermon because I believe it applies to everyone in the room. I've said along the way, different people have different source idols. We struggle differently with different ones. But comfort is one that even if it's not your number one, it's your number two. It's there. I think we all struggle with it. And the more I thought about this source idol of comfort, the more convinced I became that this is true. When it comes to comfort, we are the frog being boiled in cultural water. When it comes to comfort, we are frogs being boiled in the cultural waters of the United States in 2024. A desire for comfort is all around us. A desire to just be fine, to just be chill, to just feel comfortable, to have things set at the right temperature. Kyle just went back there and messed with a thermostat. You know why? Because we want to be comfortable. Because if we're not comfortable, we're not going to listen to Nate. That's why. So we've got to be comfortable. Here's a few ways I know that comfort is ubiquitously important to us. I have this theory in life that is yet to be disproven, that you can gauge a family's net worth by the number of unnecessary pillows they have in their home. Okay? And if you're thinking to yourself, joke's on you, I don't have any unnecessary pillows in my home, you're the problem. Okay? People have to move things out of the way so they can sit on your couch. And here's what I don't understand while we're here. While we're here, I'm just going to say this for the men, okay? Guys, I'm saying this on your behalf. Ladies, we don't understand why you go to the store and spend $200 on a chore to put on your bed every morning and every night. We don't understand why you go to HomeGoods and TJ Maxx and you dump 200 bucks on pillows to put further out from your sleeping pillows so that at the end of the day, you have to take them off when you're tired. And in the morning, you have to put them back on when you're in a hurry. It makes no sense. And you do it so it looks nice. For who? When's the last time you had a guest over to your house? And when you had them over, you were like, and here's our master bedroom. Nobody does that. Nobody does that. It's weird. Nobody sees your master bedroom. Listen, some of you I have been friends with the whole time I've been here. I am such good friends with you, I can walk right into your house unannounced, and I've done it before. You know what I've never seen? Your master bedroom. Because that's weird. No one sees it. Knock it off with the pillows. All right. There you go. Guys, you can talk about that at lunch. We have these symbols of comfort all over our culture. How many of you in your cars don't have heated seats? You don't just have heated seats. You have cooled seats. Don't raise your hand. Those things are wonderful. Yeah, two hands up back there. Whenever I'm riding with my friends that have cooled seats, I crank those suckers up all the way. I love those things, man. Those things are amazing. How many of you have a carefully negotiated thermostat temperature for your summertime nights and for your wintertime nights? These things have been, sometimes you had to bring in a moderating attorney just to get that settled. How many of you, how many of you, I'm being serious, how many of you have had the chance to fly first class before? and within 15 minutes of takeoff, you thought, I'm never sitting with the peasants again. This is amazing. Or you've been lucky enough to get the pods for international travel, where you extend out and you have a personal screen and there's a door to keep the pores out. That's how it goes. And you tell yourself, here's what you tell yourself. This is so funny. I've heard my friends say this. I need to be refreshed because I got to hit the ground running when I get there. I bet you do, buddy. I bet you do. That's why you chose the drinks that you did on the way over because you got to hit the ground running. I bet you do. That's why you chose the drinks that you did on the way over, because you got to hit the ground running. I bet. Sure. Maybe, maybe you just want to be comfortable. We like our space. We like our accompaniments. We like the things that make us feel good. And here's one of the ways I know that it's not a uniquely American problem, but it's a particularly American problem. I've watched House Hunters International. Have you watched House Hunters International? Without fail, the Americans go over to a foreign country, Costa Rica, Europe, New Zealand, wherever. They're looking at a $650,000 flat in the middle of Copenhagen. And you know what they say? This feels small. And it is. It's like a tiny little dishwasher, a one-burner stove. There's a toilet where you can control the shower nozzle from there. Like, it's all, it's real tight. And as Americans, we look at that and we're like, no way. I need my space. This desire for comfort is a particularly American struggle. In a culture, and this is true, where if you choose, if you have a desk job, and you choose at that desk job to stand, you have one of those high desks, people are like, look at the health nut over here. Look at Captain Fitness not sitting in a chair for eight hours a day. This is how much as a culture we prize comfort. And it's not just physical comfort that we prize, although that is a very good indicator. But mental, spiritual. We don't like to be challenged spiritually. We like to go to church. There's a certain amount of conviction that's okay. But over that, it's like, come on, man, you're being a jerk. And I'm not going to sit in this week after week. We want to be comfortable spiritually. I'm just going to edge right up to this and then I'm going to back off because I'm scared like you are. There are certain things I can't talk about and you know I can't talk about them because if I did, everybody in here would get fidgety and uncomfortable and it would feel like this. So I don't. And I talk about other things where we're comfortable, right? There are conversations that we need to have, but that conflict and that tension makes us uncomfortable, so we avoid them. In myriad ways, in myriad situations, we live in a culture that prizes comfort almost over and above all else. And what I want you to see this morning is we are like frogs being boiled in a cultural water. I came across this fact a couple of weeks ago in one of the books that I was reading, but it noted that if you, that there was an officer in the Spartan army circa 400 BC who got dishonorably discharged from the army because he was charged with taking a warm shower. He was charged with allowing himself the indulgence of a warm shower and he was deemed unfit to be a Spartan. How far we have come and the comforts and the things that we demand. So here's what I would say. And here's what I want us to realize this morning. If we don't idolize comfort, we've got to at least admit we have a tendency towards it. I doubt very much that anyone came in here this morning going, oh, comfort, that's me. I very seriously doubt that at the beginning of the series, when I did the first sermon five weeks ago and introduced this idea of idols and idolatry, that any of you went, oh gosh, if I just kind of survey the landscape of my life, I think comfort's probably my idol. I don't think anybody did that. And yet, I think it is prevalent and persnickety and pernicious and corrosive in all of us. And like I said, not just materially, but parents, how many things do you need to broach with your children that you don't? Because it would just be a hassle. I don't have the energy for that fight. I don't have the energy for that discussion. I know, and maybe it's confrontational. Maybe it's sympathetic. Maybe it's relational. Maybe you can see they're hurting and you just, you want to wait another day because it's going to be a hard conversation and you're tired. How many times do we choose our own comfort over what our kids need? Spouses. How often in our marriages do we tolerate a fragile peace? Because breaking that peace would cause so much discomfort that we don't want to deal with it. It's easier to just exist at this simmering tension. How much of what God asks us to do is blocked by the amount of comfort that we desire? I have a good relationship with my neighbor. I don't want to make it weird by inviting them somewhere or asking them about things. I have a good relationship with my coworker. I don't want to jeopardize that by asking an odd question or bringing up an odd topic. It's not just physically that we allow a desire for comfort to begin to derail us in our thought process. It's emotionally. We build up walls. How many of us, listen, how many of us know, know that God wants us to see a counselor? That we have some issues and some things in our life that we need to deal with that are rippling out and spilling onto the people that we love the most. And that what we need more than anything is to talk to someone that he has blessed and trained up to serve the kingdom in this way. And we need to go talk to them, and we don't. And you know why we don't? Because it will be uncomfortable to begin to deal with the things that could be brought up. So this desire for comfort goes way beyond throw pillows and first-class seats. And it permeates into every area of our life. And here's why this idol of comfort is so dangerous. Because idolizing comfort causes us to build our life around protecting it and we end up wasting it. Idolizing comfort causes us to build up our life around protecting that comfort, and we end up wasting our life in the process. I don't love admitting this, but I will, because I think some of us can relate to this in some way. After the first time I flew first class internationally, I got home, and I'm being dead serious. I started thinking to myself and racking my brain and talking to friends. What sorts of side hustles can I do to begin to generate more income so that when I travel, I can travel like that? What kinds of, how can I market myself in other areas? What kind of extra income can I make so that when I travel, I can get the upgrade? I can be in the excellence club. I can be the gold member. What can I do so that when my family has these experiences, I can turn them up a notch because I liked it so much? And listen, listen, that is so honest. It wasn't for other things. It wasn't, what can I do to monetize myself more, to work a little bit harder so that I can give more to God's kingdom, so that I can provide a more comfortable life for my family, so that my wife and my children can have a little bit nicer things and live life a little bit more easily. No, it was as simple as, God, I really like flying first class. I'd love to do that again. I don't want to have to fly back there with the peasants anymore, so let's see what I can turn up to travel nice. Listen, listen to me. How stupid is that? How stupid is that? But some of you do it for golf memberships. Or the cooling seats. Or the nice whatever. And isn't this so easy to do? Isn't it? Isn't our culture tailor-made to suck us into that trap? I was having lunch with a good friend this week. He's 35. And he's kind of come to a bit of a crossroads in his career where he could go this way or that way. And his entire career, he's been headed this way. He got the job. This is what the people in charge of me do. This is what I'm supposed to do. This is the next thing. This is what I'm going to do. And now he's picking his head up at this crossroads going, is that even what I want to do? And how often does that happen? For how many of us is that our story? How many of us have friends with that story? Who graduated high school or graduated college or got their masters and entered into the workforce? And when you entered into the workforce, all you were trying to do is prove yourself and make enough money to survive at some sort of level that you liked and that you wanted to attain. And then you got it. And then you needed to continue to pay for it. And then you married somebody. And then you looked and you said, okay, we're doing this thing together, either single income or dual income. We have goals. And then you spin it forward and you spin it forward and you spin it forward and you just put your head down and you do the next thing and you get the next promotion and your friend buys a white SUV and now I want that. And your friend flies first class and now I want that. And your friend buys this house and now I want that. And oh shoot, we're doing beach houses now? I guess I'll figure this one out too. I didn't know I needed white marble in my bathroom, but I really, really do. This tile is terrible, right? And we just need the next thing. And we never think about if we're spending our life and investing our years in the right thing. It's just the next thing. And by the time, listen, by the time we pick up our head and we wonder, is this even the direction I'm supposed to go? We have mortgages and we have and we have bills, and we have a standard of living, and we have certain expectations that we've built up. I took the kids to Turks and Caicos last year, so if I don't do it this year, I've somehow failed as a father. And on and on it goes. And we stay on the treadmill, organizing our life around comfort without ever realizing we had done it. This is what makes this the sneakiest, most pernicious idol of them all. Because none of you started your adult life and verbalized, you know what I want to do? I want to be comfortable. And I'm going to organize my whole life around it. But as you sit here, you're wondering if that's what you've done by accident. And if that's how we invest our whole life, we will have wasted it. And for me, there is nothing more sad, there is nothing I am more afraid of than getting to the end of my life and looking back on the decades and knowing in my heart of hearts that I wasted it. That I didn't use my years for things that mattered. And let me tell you what ultimately doesn't matter. Your comfort. It just doesn't. And I bring this up because I do think it's so easy to slip into this pursuit. I do think it's so easy to, without realizing it, almost by mistake, to have organized our entire life around building comfort and then marshalling our resources to protect that comfort without ever risking anything for God's kingdom. I can think of no better example of this in the Bible than in a parable that Jesus told of someone who in this instance marshaled their life around protecting comfort. And we see how the master responds to them. It's a well-known parable found in Matthew chapter 25. I'm just going to read verses 24 and 27. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there, but this is the parable of the tenants. I'm going to read from the NIV. It says bags of gold. That's one of the places where the scholars have let you down. It's talent. It's a talent. It's a denomination of money that may feel like to us a bag of gold. But in this parable that you guys know, but in case you don't, or in case you need a refresher, there's a master of the house. The master of the house represents Jesus. And the master of the house is leaving. He goes to these three servants and he says, hey, I'm going to go out of town for a while. Here's some money. Give me a report on what you did with the money when we come back. To the first servant, he gives five talents. To the second servant, he gives two talents. To the last servant, he gives one talent. And he goes out of town. And then he comes back in town. And when he gets back in town, he goes to the servant with the five talents. And he says, what'd you do with the money? And the servant says, see, I took the money, I invested it, I traded and sold, and now I'm giving you ten talents in return. I've doubled your investment. And the master says, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things. I will make you lord over many. And then he goes to the two-talent person. And he says, what did you do? And the two-talent person says, see, I have bought and sold and invested, and I have doubled your money. I'm giving you back four talents. And the master says to him, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things. I will make you Lord over many. And I would pause right here and just say this. I should do a whole sermon on it, but I'll just say this and maybe it'll sit on some of you like it sits on me. That phrase, well done, good and faithful servant, is worth living your life for. Pursuing that phrase, chasing hearing that from your God in your eternity, at the end of your life, marshalling all of your resources and all of your time and all of your talents and all of your interests and all of your effort and all of your discipline so that one day when we stand before the Lord, he will look at us and he will say, well done, good and faithful servant with the life and the time that you had. That phrase is worth your whole life. You will never be disappointed by the things that you pursue to hear that. And what's wonderful about that phrase is the five-talent person got the same response as the two-talent person. God doesn't care how big of an impact you make or how wonderful your work is or how many people know who you are or how many people come to your funeral or any of that stuff. He does not care about the size and the grandeur of your impact. What he cares is about the faithfulness and your small actions. What he cares about is that you are a good and faithful servant, and he will say, well done, whether you have five talents or two or one. I love that. But then he goes to the servant to whom he gave one talent to you. His master replied, you wicked, lazy servant. So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed. Well, then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers so that when I returned, I would have received it back with interest. He goes to the last servant. He says, what did you do? And the last servant says, well, I'm scared of you. I did not want to risk losing your money, so I buried it. Now, I cannot tell you in good faith and a good conscience that I have a depth of insight into a fictional character's soul in a very short parable in the Bible and can tell you that that man struggled with the God of comfort, but here's what I can tell you. In that moment, in that instance, that's what he chose. He chose to not risk anything and to be comfortable. And in that story, Jesus is represented by the master. And what was Jesus' response to that? You wicked and lazy servant. And he takes the talent from the one and he gives it to the one with the five because he knows it's going to be in better hands. This is what's at stake if we choose to marshal our resources around comfort and by default waste our life. Just bury the gifts and the talents and the abilities and the plan that God has given us because we're too afraid to risk anything. Then one day when we stand before him, we will not hear well done, good, and faithful servant. And here's the thing I want us to go home with today and understand. The more I thought about this God of comfort and how it juxtaposes with works of the kingdom, I was sure of this. Stories of kingdom-building faith always require a sacrifice of comfort. Stories of kingdom-building faith always require a sacrifice of comfort. You will never find anyone who's doing things for the kingdom who didn't, in order to do those things, have to give up some of their comforts in life. Later this week, next Sunday, I'll be flying to Ethiopia to visit Addis Jamari over in Addis Ababa. And I think of the women that founded that ministry. I think of Suzanne Ward and Cindy Douglas. And Cindy is over there months on end. She's over there months at a time with two teenage sons. You don't think that she's had to give up some comfort and that her family's had to give up some comfort for the sake of what God is doing over there in Ethiopia? And what God's doing there is amazing and needed and absolutely necessary. It's a wonderful work of the kingdom for which she had to sacrifice comfort. If you think of the godly people you know in your life, the people who love well and who serve well and who are always here during the week setting things up, they're always at their place wherever they serve, wherever they pour into, they're always pouring into it, they're always doing, they're always serving. Those people give up the comfort of doing that. When you think about good and godly parents, you have to give up your comfort for the sake of your children. Good and godly spouses give up their comfort for the sake of their spouses. Good and godly friends give up their comfort for the sake of their friends. You will never, ever find an act of the kingdom and an act of faith that is done without giving up some comfort on the other end. And we see this biblically in story after story. Two that spring to mind right away are of Saul changed to Paul. And I have to go quickly because we still got communion to do. And I think I'm going long, but just bear with me. When I think of Saul, he was on his way to Damascus to persecute the Christians there. Jesus appears to him, blinds him, sends him to a room, names him Paul, and says, I've got big plans for you, pal. And then goes to a guy named Ananias, and he says, Ananias, I need you to go see Saul, turn to Paul, and get the scales off of his eyes, because he needs to start serving me now. And Ananias says, no way, I'm not going to do that. He's a Christian killer. That does not sound very fun. And God says this in one of the most ominous statements in the Bible, Acts chapter 9, verses 15 and 16. But the Lord said to Ananias, go, this man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. But no, no, by all means, God is super concerned with your comfort. He is my chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. Do you understand that Paul is the most influential post-disciple Christian to ever exist? No one has influenced the church as widely and deeply and profoundly as Paul. And in order to do that, he sacrificed all comfort. And God said, I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. Shipwreck and beatings and floggings and imprisonment and disease and poverty. He endured it all for the sake of God's kingdom. In the Old Testament, I think of Ruth and Boaz and Naomi. Ruth was a Moabite woman. There was poverty in Israel because of the drought, and some families started moving to Moab, and she happened to marry one of these Jewish boys that had moved over. And then the dad and the two brothers died, and it left the mom, Naomi, with two daughters-in-law. And the other one said, hey, I'm going to stay here. And Naomi looked at Ruth and said, you need to stay here in Moab. You're young and pretty. You can marry, and you'll be fine. But Ruth knew that if she did this, that Naomi would be destitute. And so she said this in this famous line, no, where you go, I go. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. And she did the right thing, and she stayed with Naomi. She ended up marrying a man named Boaz. And if you fast forward several hundred years, you come to the book of Matthew. And in the first chapter of the book of Matthew, you have the genealogy of Jesus Christ. And when you read those genealogies, what you find is that you can trace a line from Jesus back to King David, the second and greatest king of Israel. And King David came from a man named Jesse. And Jesse came from a man named Obed. And Obed came from a woman named Ruth, married to Boaz. Because of her great act of faith and her sacrifice of comfort, God included her in his family tree. So first of all, we never will do anything for the kingdom that doesn't require a sacrifice of comfort. Second, we have no idea what can come out of that sacrifice and what God might do. The greatest example of this we see is Jesus himself, who gave up all the comforts of heaven to condescend and come here. I don't know what the pillow situation is in heaven, but I bet it's pretty good. I don't know. It can't enumerate all the comforts that Jesus gave up. But when he came here, it says in Matthew chapter 8, verse 20, that foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. For three years, Jesus sofa-surfed so that he could do ministry to us and build up disciples to leave us, to establish the church in which we now sit. Jesus is the greatest example of all time of what it means to give up comfort for the sake of a work for the kingdom. And what I want us to understand about this, because we do, all of us, somewhere have this God of comfort, that our proclivity for comfort stands in direct opposition to our desire to be used. I know most of you. I know a lot of you really well. And I know in your hearts more than anything you want to be used by God in this life for his kingdom. I know that you do. And what I want you to see this morning is that your desire for comfort stands in direct opposition to your desire to be used by God. God wants to use you in mighty ways. You are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. And I know you want to walk in those good works. But your desire for comfort almost more than anything else is what's keeping some of us from those. So here's where I would end with this simple question for you to consider as we move into a time of communion together. When is the last time you did anything at all that made you uncomfortable for the sake of the kingdom? When is the last time you made an intentional choice to allow yourself to be uncomfortable for the sake of the kingdom of God. This could be in a conversation that we know we need to have. This could be in a neighbor that we know we need to approach. This could be starting a small group that we know we need to start. Starting a ministry that we know we need to start. Volunteering with a place or with an area or in a team here where we know we need to do, we just haven't done it. This could mean broaching a subject with our spouse. This could mean taking the step to go into counseling and begin to let things tweak there so that we can do a little bit better for the people around us. This could mean what we give towards the kingdom of God. When's the last time our giving made us uncomfortable? When's the last time you intentionally chose to sacrifice your comfort for the sake of God's kingdom? And let me tell you this. I have never, ever talked to anyone who got towards the end of their life and said, gosh, you know what I regret? Just doing so much for Jesus. You know what, I think we gave too much. I think I did too much. I think I, here's what I've never heard. I should have made my life more about myself. Wish I would have. We have no idea what can happen when we begin to sacrifice this dearly held comfort for the sake of God's kingdom. And so I would simply ask you to consider as I pray and as we move into a time of communion, what is God pressing on your heart? Where is he asking you to sacrifice your comfort? I believe he's pressing something on each and every one of us. What conversation does he want you to have or action does he want you to take or invitation does he want you to extend or discipline does he want you to adopt or habit does he want you to give up? Where is God calling you to be uncomfortable? Let's pray. Dear God, thank you so much for sending your son who took on all of us and all of this and left behind all of that and all of you for our sake. God, we confess that we are slaves to comfort far more than we intended to be. That not being upset and not being rattled and not being stressed and not feeling uncomfortable in any way imaginable matters to us far more than we would have been willing to admit and perhaps more than we're still willing to admit. But Lord, in your gentle way, where you just navigate into our souls, will your spirit bring about the necessary conviction that you would have for us here? Help us to see with your eyes where we are choosing our comfort over you. And give us the courage, God, to choose you and to find out what happens on the other side of that choice. God, thank you for your patience with us. Thank you for your grace with us. Give us the strength to walk in the good works that you have planned for us and to set aside the comfort that keeps us from that so often. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So good to see everybody. And it sounds like to me that only the singers come during the summertime. You guys were singing great. And that was really always love it when the church sings together like that. If I haven't gotten to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby. After the service, you have dropped in. If this is your first time, you've dropped into the middle of a series called Idols that's loosely based on a book by Tim Keller called Counterfeit Gods. If you haven't picked up a copy of that, we are out, but they are competitively priced on Amazon and will be brought right to your door for ease of purchase. So I would encourage you to grab one of those and kind of read through that as we finish up the series. This is week four. Next week is the last week. Week five, we're going to talk about comfort next week, which I'm very excited to talk about that because I think it's something that every American alive needs to hear. And I think it's going to be an important one next week. This week, we're looking at the source idol of control. And when I say source idol, one of the more interesting ideas that Tim Keller puts forward in his book is the idea that we have surface idols and source idols. Surface idols are the ones that are visible to us and people outside of us, a desire for money, a desire for friends, a desire for a perfect family, for appearances, things like that that are a little bit more visible. Source idols are things that exist in our heart beneath the surface that fuel our desire for those surface idols. And he identifies four. Power, which I preached about two weeks ago. That's the one that I primarily deal with. And then approval, preached about last week that's what he deals with a lot that is not one that that's probably the one I worry about the least and then control this week and comfort next week so as we approach this idea of control in our life I want us to understand what it is and what it means if we struggle with this source idol. And again, an idol is anything that becomes more important to us in our life than Jesus. It's something that we begin to prioritize over Jesus and we pour out our faith and our worship to that thing instead of to our Creator. About four or five years ago, I was in my therapist's office. I was seeing a counselor at the time just doing general maintenance, which I highly recommend to anyone. It's probably time for me to get back in there and let them tinker around a little bit. But one day I got there and whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, what a cliche, but whenever I would go in and sit down on the couch, he would always ask me what's been going on, what's happened since I last saw you. That was always the first question, so I knew that was the question. So in the car, in my head, I'm thinking, how am I going to answer him? I can tell him about this thing and this thing and this thing. I think that'll be enough. Well, I'll start the bidding there, and we'll see where it goes. So I go in, I sit down and he asked me the question, how's it been going for you? What's been happening? And so I told him my three things, five or eight minutes. I don't know. And I get done with it. And he just looks at me and he kind of cocks his head and he goes, why'd you tell me those things? And the smart aleck in me is like, because you're a counselor, because this is the deal? Because that's what I'm supposed to do? What do you want me to do? But I said, well, I knew that you were going to ask me what happened, and that's what happened. So I told you those things. And I don't remember the exact conversation, but he pushed back on me and he goes do you do you ever enter a conversation without knowing what you're going to talk about and what the other person is probably going to talk about and I said not if I can help it I always plan ahead whenever I have a conversation or meeting coming up I always think through all the different ways it could go and how I want to respond because I don't want to be caught off guard in the moment. And he said, how many times are you in a situation that's taken you by surprise and you didn't expect to be there? I said, very rarely. And he goes, yeah, I think maybe you've got an issue with control. Because you have a hard time not being the one driving the bus, don't you? And I was like, you have a hard time not being the one. And I kind of thought about it, and I said, my gosh, is it possible that this need for control is so ingrained into me that the reason I told you those stories is so that I could control where the conversation went and we would talk about things I was willing to open up about and I could steer away from the areas that I wasn't willing to talk about. He said some effect of, and circle gets the square. Good job, buddy. And so this need for control that some of us all have to varying degrees can be so sneaky. Sometimes we don't even recognize it in ourselves until someone points it out in us. So let me point it out in you. Some people deal with this so much that it shows up in every aspect of their life. For me, it's relational, it's conversational. I don't want to look dumb. If someone has something negative to say, I want to be gracious and not be caught off guard, whatever it is. But for some of us, we're so regimented and ordered that we have our life together in every aspect of it. We have our routine. We wake up at a certain time. We go to bed at a certain time. Our kids do certain things on certain days. If you have a laundry day, you're gaining on it. If you make your bed, you're gaining on it. Like there are things that we do. We have a workout routine that we do. We have the way that we eat. We have the places that we go. We have our budget. We have our work schedule. We are very regimented. And a lot of that can come from this innate need to be in control of everything. I think about the all-star mom in the PTA, the one who runs a better house than you, who drives a cleaner car than you, and who makes cupcakes better than you, that mom. And her kids are always dressed better than your kids. This is this need for control. And if you're not yet sure if this is you, if this might be something that you do in your life where everything needs to be ordered, and if it's not ordered, your whole life is in shambles. I heard in the last year of this phrase that I had not heard before. I'm in the last year of the Gen Xers. I think the millennials coined this phrase. You boomers, unless you have millennial children, you probably have not heard this, but maybe you can identify it. It's a term called the Sunday Scaries. Anybody ever heard that term? You don't have to raise your hand and out yourself, but the Sunday Scaries. Okay. Now for me, I have the Saturday Scaries because about three times every Saturday, I kind of jolt myself into consciousness and ask if I know what I'm preaching about in the morning. So that's, that's what I have for me. Sunday scaries are when you take Sunday night to get ready for your week. And on Sunday afternoons and evenings, you begin to feel tremendous anxiety because the meals aren't prepped and the clothes aren't washed and the schedule isn't done and the things aren't laid out and the laundry isn't all the way ready and you start to worry, if I don't, I've got this limited amount of time, if I don't start my week right, everything's going to be off, it's going to be the worst and so you get the Sunday scaries and you experience stress on Sunday night. If that's you, friends, this might be for you. And when we do this, when we make control our idol, when we order our lives so that we manage every detail of it. And listen, I want to say this before I talk about the downside of it. Those of us who do live regimented lives and who are in control of many of the aspects of them, that ability comes from a place of diligence and discipline. That's a good thing. That's a muscle God has blessed you with that he has not blessed others with, but we can take it too far. And we can allow that to become what we serve. And we can allow control over the things in our life to become more important than the other things in our life and to become more important than Jesus himself. And here's what happens when we allow this sneaky idol to take hold in our lives. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful. The idol of control makes us anxious and the people around us resentful of the control we try to exert over them. I'll never forget, it's legendary in my group of buddies. I've got a good group of friends, eight guys, and we go on a trip about every other year. And one year we were in another city and one of my buddies named Dan just decided that he was the group mom on this trip. And I don't really know why he decided that, but he was bothering us the whole time. Don't do that. Don't go here. Where are you guys going? What are you guys talking about? Come over here. Be part of the group. Put your phone down. Let's go. Like just bossing us around the whole time. And we got mad at him. He spent the whole trip anxious. He didn't have as good a time as he could. And we, we spent the trip frustrated with Dan to the point where whenever he starts it now, we just call him mom and tell him to shut up. When we try to control everything in our life, we make ourselves anxious and we make the people around us resentful. We make ourselves anxious because we're trying to control everything. Everything's got to go according to plan. And now that we've structured this life, we have to protect this life with all the decisions that we're making and see all the threats, real and imagined, to this perfect order that we might have. And then the people around us grow to resent us because we're trying to exert unnecessary control over them as well. And it's really not a good path to be on. And the best example I can find in the Bible of someone who may have struggled with this idol of control and made herself anxious and everyone around her resentful is Sarah in the event with Hagar. Now, I'm going to read a portion of this, Genesis 16, 1 through 6, to kind of tell the story of Sarah and Hagar and Abraham. A couple bits of context. First of all, I know that at this point in the story, technically, her name is Sarai and his name is Abram, okay? For me, it feels like saying the nation Columbia with a Spanish accent all of a sudden after I've been talking in southern English for 30 minutes. So I'm not just going to break out into Hebrew. Okay, so they're going to be Sarah and Abraham, and you're going to bear that cross with me. And then what's happening in the story is in Genesis chapter 12, God calls Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans. He was in the Sumerian dynasty. He says, I want you to grab your family. I want you to move to this place I'm going to show you that became Canaan, the promised land in modern day Israel. And when he got there in Genesis 12, God made him three promises. He spoke to Abraham and he said, hey, this land is going to be your land and your descendants' land forever. Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and one of your descendants will bless the whole earth. He made those three promises to Abraham. Can I tell you, the rest of the Bible hinges on those promises. If we don't understand those promises, we can't understand the rest of Scripture. But all of those promises require a descendant to come true. Sarah and Abraham were getting on up there in age, maybe in their 80s. And Sarah had still not born Abraham a child. She was barren or he was impotent. And she begins to get concerned enough about this that she takes matters into her own hands. She arrests control away from God's sovereign plan. And this is what happens in Genesis chapter 16, verses 1 through 6. We're going to read it together. I don't see any problems so far. Okay, a little recap here. I, for one, am shocked that the story went that way. After she said, hey, here's what you should do. I have an Egyptian slave. You should sleep with her. She'll carry a baby, and then we'll raise that as our own child. I don't know what Abraham's moral compass was at this point in his story, what laws of God he had been equated with and not. I don't know how aware he was of the myriad egregious sins happening in this one instance. But this goes exactly how you'd think it would go. After a wife, likely much older than her slave, says, why don't you sleep with my slave and you all have a child together? And then what happens? She gets anxious. She gets resentful. She sees that Hagar is haughty towards her. And then she begins to resent Abraham, blames it on him. This is your fault. Excuse me. I'm sure it was your idea. And then runs Hagar off. By taking control in this situation, she made herself anxious about everyone around her, and she made everyone around her resentful of who she was. You can see it in Abram's response in verse 6. He says, listen, she's yours. You deal with it. Don't come to me with those problems. He's tired of dealing with it. And as I was thinking about the sin of Sarah, and as I was thinking about what it's like when we take control of our own life, when we kind of take the wheel from God and we say, I've got it from here, you can ride passenger, I'm going to be in control and orchestrate everything. That what we're really doing when we take control is this. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. We just get in the way. When we insist on taking control, we just get in God's way. What did Sarah do? She got in his way. He had a story that he was writing with Isaac. He knew exactly when he would, God knew exactly when he was going to allow Abraham to make Sarah pregnant. He knew exactly how the rest of the story was going to go. Ishmael doesn't need to exist. That root of Ishmael doesn't need to exist. If Sarah would have just been patient and waited on God and his timing, if she had just been patient and waited on God to write the story that he intended, if she waited on his sovereignty and his will, but she got tired of waiting, she thought it should be happening differently than this, so she took control. And as a result of that control, we have this split in the line of Abraham that has echoed down through the centuries that we're still dealing with today, over which we are still warring right now in Abraham's promised land because Sarah took control when she wasn't supposed to. She got in the way of the story that God was wanting to write. And the more I thought about that, what it's like to be getting in God's way when he's trying to direct our life the way he wants it to go, I thought about this. Now, you can raise your hand for this one. Who in here loves themselves a good cooking show? I love a good cooking show. Just me and Jeff and Karen. Perfect. Nobody else likes cooking shows. You're liars. I love a good cooking show. At our house, the things that are on the TV are house hunters, cooking shows, and sports. That's it. By the way, my three-year-old son, John, calls all sports golf. Yesterday I was watching soccer, and he said, Daddy, you watch golf. And in our house, we have a rule. When a kid is making a dumb mistake like that, we do not correct them because it's adorable, and we want them to do it as long as possible. Like the days gone by when, to Lily, anything that had occurred before today was last-her-day. Could have been last year. Could have been last week. Could have been a couple hours ago. It happened last-her-day, and it was great. At some point, she figured it out, and now we don't like her as much. But I love a good cooking show. And my favorite chef, no one will be surprised by this if you know me, is Gordon Ramsay. I really like Gordon Ramsay. I like watching him cook. I like watching him interact. I think he's really great. And so I watch most of what he puts out. And I was thinking about this, getting in God's way. And I think this fits. Let's pretend that at an auction, at a charity auction from Ubuntu, which would be a great prize, I won a night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. First of all, I was given a significant raise. Second of all, I've spent it all on this night of cooking with Gordon Ramsay. And the night comes around. I'm so excited. I would be thrilled to do this. It would really, really be fun. I do like to cook. And so let's say that night finally rolls around and I go to his kitchen and I walk in and all the ingredients are out on the counter. And he hasn't told me what he's going to make, but all the ingredients are there. And what I don't know is he's planning to make a beef Wellington. That's one of his signature dishes. I've only had one beef Wellington in my life. I loved it. I would kill to have one that was cooked by him for me. That would be amazing. But the deal is, I look at the ingredients and he's going to teach me how to do it. So he's going to walk me through it step by step. First, you want to sear the loin. Get that, get the skillet nice and hot, sear it. Then you rub the mustard on it. Now dice up some mushrooms. And I don't know where we're going or what we're doing. I'm just following him step by step doing what I'm supposed to do. And his goal is to show me how to make a beef wellington that we've done together. Great. Except stupid me sees the ingredients, sees the steak, sees some green beans, and I go, you know what, Gordon? Actually, I've got this. It's your night to cook with Nate. What I'd like you to do is just go sit behind the bar on the other side. Let's just chat it up. I'd like to hear some of your stories. I'm going to make you steak and green beans. And I take those ingredients, and I get in his way, and I go make overdone steak with soggy green beans, and I slide it across the table to him. Having no idea what I just missed out on. Because I insisted on taking control and making what I thought I should make with those ingredients. I think that when we insist on turning all the dials in our life ourselves, taking control of every aspect of our life. That what we do is very similar to being in the kitchen with a master chef and telling him we've got this. We see the ingredients available to us and we make the thing we think we're supposed to make. Having no idea that he had so much better plans for those ingredients than what we turned out. And as I was talking about this sermon and this idea with my wife, Jen, who has a different relationship with this source idol than I do, she pointed out to me, she said, you know what they're trying to make? If your idol is peace, you're trying to make in that kitchen or if your idol is control. She said, we're trying to make peace. People with the idol of control, you know what they're trying to do with that control? They're trying to create a peace for themselves. They're trying to create rest for themselves. If this is your surface, if this is your source idol, and you try to control every aspect of your life, chances are that what's really motivating you to do that is a desire for peace in all the areas of your life. It's why your spirit can't feel at rest until your bed is made. And this is true. Why did I think of the things that I wanted to say to the counselor? Because I didn't want to get sidetracked. I didn't want to get surprised. I wanted to walk into that office with peace. Why do we prepare ourselves for the situations that we're going to face? Because we want to be peaceful in the midst of those situations. Why do we prepare for the week and get the Sunday scaries? Because we want to enter the week feeling at peace, feeling ready to go, feeling that we are in a place of rest and not a place of hurry. But here's the problem with the peace that we create with our control. It's fragile. It's threatened. It's uncertain. It's always at risk. We can do everything we can to create peace in our life with the way that we control every aspect of it. But the reality is we are one phone call away. We are one bad night away. We are one accident in the driveway away. One bad business decision. Two bad weeks of just being in a bad spot away from ruining all that peace. There are so many things that happen in life that are outside of our control that any peace that we have created for ourself is only ever infinitesimally small and thin and fragile. And when we live a life, even achieving peace, but when we live that life of a threatened peace so that now we have peace, we've done it, we've orchestrated, we've controlled, we have what we want, everything is ordered as it should be. Things are going well. Then where does our worrying mind go to? All the things that could possibly happen to disturb this peace. All of the threats real and imagined to my peaceful Monday. And then here's what we do. I know that we do it. I've seen it happen. Then we pick a hypothetical event that could possibly happen three months from now to threaten the peace that I've created, and we decide to stress about that today. And it's not even happened yet. But we're already jumping ahead because our anxiety monster needs something to eat. And I am reminded with this idea of a threatened and a fragile peace of the verse we looked at in our series, The Treasury of Isaiah, Isaiah 26.3. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. Isaiah says, and God promises, that he will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. And so what's our part in that peace? It's trusting in Jesus and not ourselves. And it occurs to me, I'm not saying this for sure, because it could just be poor planning, but I kind of believe in the Holy Spirit and the way that he times things out. I've seen over and over and over again how we've had a sermon planned for eight months, and I'll preach that sermon on that day, and someone will say, this is my first time at Grace. I'm so glad I heard that sermon. That's exactly what I needed. It's the Holy Spirit. I know that we just visited this verse. And I know that we just talked a couple weeks ago about a fragile peace. But maybe we're doing it again because some of us just need to hear it twice. Maybe some of us in this room need to hear this again and let the Holy Spirit talk to us again and be honest with God about what we're holding dear to our heart and what we may be idolizing without having realized it. Because what God promises us is a perfect peace. You know what perfect peace is? Perfect peace is an unthreatened peace. Here's what perfect peace is. Jen's family used to have a lake house down in Georgia on Lake Oconee. And my favorite thing to do when I would go down there was to kind of separate from everybody, big surprise, and go and lay in the hammock right next to the lake. Because when I got in that hammock, and I could hear the occasional boat putter by several hundred yards away, and I could hear the waves slowly just kind of lapping against the wood at the edge of that lake, and I could hear the birds and the sound of the lake, that was all I could hear. It drowned out everything else. It never seemed to matter what was happening in life when I laid down in that hammock. Everything was at peace and everything was okay. When we trust in God's sovereignty and in God's peace instead of our own, it's like laying down in that hammock next to the lake. Everything's going to be okay. Everything's going to be fine. God is in control. He knew this would happen, and I trust in him. I don't know what story he's writing. I don't know where he's going. This is not what I would have made with these ingredients, but I know that he wants what's best for me, and he wants what's best for the people that I love, so I trust him with the results of this. It's laying in that hammock and trusting in the sovereignty of God. Perfect peace is trusting in God's sovereignty, in God's goodness, in the truth that we know that he always, always, always wants what's best for us. And that he will bring that about in this life or the next. And we can trust in that. So, here's what I would say to you. My brothers and sisters who may struggle with control. I'm not here this morning to make you feel bad for your worry or your anxiety or to make fun of you for your Sunday scaries. I think all of those things are natural and a normal part of human life. It would be weird if you never worried about anything. I think it's a good goal to grow towards. But I'm not here to make you feel badly about that. But here's what I would say. If you're a person who's given to worry and anxiety and seeks to exert control, and when you don't have it, it starts to freak you out a little bit, that doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like perfect peace to me. That doesn't sound like laying in the hammock next to the lake trusting in God's protected peace rather than trusting in your fragile, unprotected, risky peace. You see? And so what I would encourage you to do is to see things this way. Excessive worry is a warning light. Excessive worry on the dashboard of your life is a warning light that should cause you to wonder what's really going on and what you're really worried about. A few weeks ago, I talked about those of us with the issue of power being a source idol and how that begets anger, and I said the same thing. Anger is the flashing warning light for us. When I'm having days when I'm excessively angry or frustrated all the time, I need to stop and pause and go, what is the source of this, and why am I so upset, and why do I have a hair trigger? What's going on with me? And wrestle that to the ground. For my brothers and sisters who who struggle with control maybe more than you realize before you walk in the door excessive worry and I don't know what excessive worry is I can't define that for you that's that's between you and God to decide how much is too much but here's what I do know excessive worry is a warning light and here's. And here's what it's telling you. It's telling you I am not existing in perfect peace. And what's our part of perfect peace? To keep our mind steadfast by trusting in him. So somewhere along the way, we've started trusting in ourself a little bit more to grab those ingredients and make what we want. Somewhere along the way, we've started taking control back from God, trusting in our sovereignty, not his, and beginning to create our own peace that is fragile and stressful. And so the question to ask yourself when that warning light starts to go off is simply this, whose peace am I trusting? I don't know what to tell you to do. Because I'll be honest with you. Like I said, I talked this sermon through with Jen. And she kind of said, yeah, all that's true. Okay, I get it. I agree. All true. What do I do? How do we not do those things? How do we not worry more than we should? What are my action steps? And I said, well, what advice would you give to so-and-so? She goes, I don't know. You're the pastor, so I'm asking you. Here's what I would simply go back to, is this question of whose peace am I trusting? Am I trusting in the peace that I've created? Or are my eyes focused on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith, so that my mind is steadfast in him and I'm trusting in his peace? Whose peace are you trusting? My prayer for you is that you'll experience the rest of trusting in God's peace. And as I enter into prayer for you, there's a prayer that I found in a devotional that I have from the Common Book of Prayer from 1552. It's amazing to me how timeless the truths of faith and spirituality and Christianity are. And how this could be written today and still every bit as accurate. But I'm going to read this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. And then we're going to enter into a time of prayer together and then we'll worship. Oh God, from you all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works proceed. Give to your servants that peace which the world cannot give, that both our heart may be set to obey your commandments, and also that by you we, being defended from the fear of our enemies, may pass our time in rest and quietness through the merits of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen. Father, we love you. And we thank you that through your Son, we can have perfect peace. God, we are sorry for not claiming this gift that you offer us more readily. God, we are sorry for grabbing the ingredients and trying to make our own peace and write our own story. God, we are sorry that we sometimes trust in our wisdom and our sovereignty more than yours. Lord, I pray that no matter where we sit with this idol or how we might wrestle with it, that we would leave this place more desirous of you than when we came. And God, for my brothers and sisters that do struggle, that do find it difficult to give up control, that do find themselves battling that demon of worry sometimes, God, would you just speak to them? Would you let them know that you're there, that you love them, That you have a plan for them that they don't see but that they can trust? And would you give us the obedience to just do the next thing that you're asking us to do, not worrying about what the result is going to be, but worrying about just walking in lockstep with you? Father, make us a people of peace so that we might give that peace to others and that they might know you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. Grace, I would just like to point out that I'm the guy who fixed the sound. Let's pray and go home. I think we can leave on that one. Actually, and I fixed it by doing absolutely nothing. That's what happens a lot of times, right? Like you go try to fix somebody, somebody asks a question, and you just act like you do something. It's like, thanks, man. You know so much about everything. Hey, I'm so glad that you are here and you decided to join us this morning if you're new. My name is Aaron. Happy Father's Day to all you dads out there. Thank you for choosing to come to church instead of asking your wife if you could stay home and watch the U.S. Open. Jesus does love you more for that. I'm just kidding. He doesn't. I know some of you. Hey, we are in the third week of a series called Idols. And just to kind of set us up, kind of get us moving in the direction we're heading this morning. So you've got like the US Open, right? Very prestigious event, great golfers and all that. Then there's another event that's really close to it. It's the Grace Raleigh Golf Tournament. It's same prestige, same level of competition, same caliber of players and we had it back April, but nobody signed up. So what we did instead, we actually, there was like 16 people who signed up to be a part of it. So we quickly veered away from like tournament and we said, okay, so what we're going to do instead is just give whoever wants to play a reason to take Monday off and go play golf and hang out with one another, right? And so I just want to be very open and honest. I am, I'm not a good golfer, okay? And because of that, like, I don't typically sign up to be a part of stuff like that because I don't need you to see and remind me that I'm not a good golfer. Like, I'm learning. I love to play. I play often. I'm just not playing well. So I typically avoid stuff like that. But I look through the list. I look through the roster, and I was like, okay, I may not be the worst one there. I was. I was the worst one there. Absolutely. And I can tell you, there's proof that I was the worst one there. So what happens is as soon as you pull up, we were at Zebulon Country Club. If you've ever played there, you'll know what I'm talking about. You pull into the parking lot, and immediately atop of a conversation is the ninth hole, right? Because as you go to park, like some people will remind you and like warn you, hey, listen, you see that? There's a tee box right there. Like it's really close. The green is really close to the parking lot. It's really close to the clubhouse. And you don't want to park there because some idiot's going to hit the ball too far. It hit a car. You don't let it be your car, right? And so immediately what happens is you, okay, yeah, let me move. Like I'm going to go somewhere else. then we went. We played the eight holes, and I played terribly. Like there's all this added pressure, which is dumb. I'm not a good golfer. Everyone knows I'm not a good golfer. Why do I feel like I have to play like a good golfer? That's another reason. If you play golf and not well, why do you get so mad that you're not playing? What do you expect to happen? So we go through the entire eight holes or we go through eight holes. Then we get up to nine and then you start thinking about the parking lot again. Right? Well, I start thinking about the parking lot again. When I went up to the tee box, what was going through my mind was not, hey, there's a sand trap just in front of the green. Make sure, play the left side. I don't think, hey, you know what? I want to hit this in the back of the green and make it spin. I don't even know how to make the ball spin. I don't know if it does spin when I hit it. I have no clue. So that's not what going through my mind is. I line up to hit the ball. What I start thinking about is, don't be the idiot who hits a car. Like, don't be that guy. And I take my backswing, and I come through, and man, y'all, I blade it. Like, it's just, I hit it, and it just rockets towards the parking lot. Not just towards the parking lot, towards the Mercedes flipping bins, okay? Now, was anybody here? Did anybody go? Dude, either of you drive a Mercedes. Because if you do, this was going to have a very different ending. Like, it went past the Mercedes. There was this banged-up truck. I hit that thing. But no, so as you can figure out by now, like it went straight. I'm telling you, like everything got real. It was movie type slow motion. You know what I mean? Like I could see which way the blades of grass were going. There was a groundskeeper. He was in the sand. He just watched it. Uh-oh. It just looked. And then I'm telling y'all, like it was the loudest bang I've ever heard in my life. It sounded like this dude's ex-wife was really, really mad, found a sledgehammer in his car, and went to work. It was so loud, and everything in me just sank. I was like, oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. For one, the first thought was, my wife is never going to let me play golf again. I just played an $80,000 round of golf at a mediocre golf course. What kind of, I'm the idiot that everyone's thinking about. And then my second thought was, I have people with me. Like they all saw that I'm the idiot who hit the car on the other side of the green at Zebulon Country Club, right? And so I turn around, I'm like, well, maybe,, there's this idea of, okay, I'm one of their pastors. Which I am, by the way, if you didn't know that up to this point. But I'm one of their pastors. Maybe I'll turn around and there'll be some grace and some kindness. Here's what I. That's what the heck I turned around to. That was just that exact noise. No, I'm telling you. There's a guy. I'm not going to. We share the same first name, Carly Buchanan. It's his husband. You don't need to know the rest of it. But I turn around, and here's what I see. Like, he's laughing so flipping hard. Like, he can't even control his shoulders. I'm like, are you, you're a jerk face. And then I said, okay, well, there's still two others. And I look and there's another guy swinging a golf club. Just, oh, let me act like I don't see anything. But still there's a single shoulder. He's not as big. I'm like, are you kidding? There's one other guy. And I look over to him and his face is like this because I'm on his team. And he's like, we can't use that ball. I gotta, I gotta show up now and do something really good. Right. And I'm like,, my, this is the worst day ever. Okay, so immediately I start going into damage control. How do I make sure nobody else finds out? And about that time, the little golf club swinging guy, he yells out to people on another hole. He hit the Mercedes. I'm like, are you kidding me? Listen, I'm not joking about this. Two weeks later, two weeks later, we were at the AJ event. I think it was two weeks. Anyway, it was a couple weeks later. Somebody came up to me who wasn't even at the golf course and said, hey, I heard about the ninth hole. Dude didn't even go to our church. I'm like, are you kidding me? And the entire time I'm thinking, everybody knows I'm the idiot who hit the car. Not just a car. It was a Mercedes. And, like, everything that was the reason that I don't go get involved in stuff like this. Now, we did go. We went and we really looked over the car pretty well, make sure there was no dings or anything like that. And there was at some point the guys that were there with me, they tried to start consoling, except for the one jerk face whose shoulders are going like that. Like everybody was like, hey, don't, Aaron, it's all right, buddy. Like it happens. They certainly have to take a little bit of accountability. Like when you park there, like you knew there was going to be an idiot. You didn't know you were going to be the idiot, but like you knew there was a possibility. So they started to give some comfort, but I'm telling you, I'm telling you, like there was just this overwhelming overwhelming sense of not good enough, and everybody knows it now. Like, there was this overwhelming sense of everyone sees that I don't belong here. I don't belong at this tournament. I don't belong being here. Like, there's nothing about it. And fortunately, these guys came, they consoled, and then I do just want to say, like, I piped the next drive, right? Like, it looked really, really, so much so that the greenskeeper who watched it go like this, he was like, that wasn't the same guy who hit the bins, was it? I was like, shut up, dude. So, but there was this sense and this need, this overwhelming awareness where I was different. I didn't belong in that place. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever felt the not good enoughness? Have you ever felt like your weakness, your insecurity, all the things that you're worried about? Everybody kind of sees. And maybe it's just not a weakness, but maybe it's just a difference that someone else doesn't approve of. Maybe you feel it when mom-in-law or dad-in-law or mom or dad come to the house, and suddenly they start looking at everything, and you know there's going to be some criticisms. You know where they're going to say, hey, you should really do this different. You know they're going to say, you're not raising your kids right. I didn't let you do that. You've got to do this differently. Maybe it's in co-working world, right, or with your boss, or maybe it's whenever you go with a group of moms, and all the moms seem like they have houses that kids don't live in, right? Like it just, there's this overwhelming sense and awareness of different. Don't belong. Not good enough. And there's this pressure that in order for you to accept me and to like me, to approve of me, I have to become who it is that you want me to be. Not good enough. It's a powerful motivator. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. I have. And that's what we're talking about today. We started a couple weeks ago a new series, as Aaron was saying a little earlier, called Idols. And essentially what an idol is, an idol is anything that we elevate to a position of authority in our life. It could be anything at all. But I love what St. Augustine says about it. He says that the matter, the challenge, the problem, the difficulty with living the holy lives that we want to live is a matter of disordered love. It's loving things out of their appropriate order. That's not just a Christian thing. That's a human thing, right? Well, whatever's at the top of your list, whether it's a person, whether it's a thing, that's what's going to call the shots in your life. That's idolatry. Whatever is at the top of the list is going to determine the steps that you take because we shape our lives around pleasing that person or attaining that thing. And Nate talked with us last week. I don't know why I pointed over there. He's not over there. Nate talked with us last week about power and how when power becomes something that becomes the ultimate thing, it just rattles everything and how it destroys relationships. If you missed it, you can check it out online. Go and listen to that. Today, we're talking about approval. And I know the thought, I know the argument. You may have even had someone who leaned over to you and said, I really don't care what people think about me. Yes, you do. Because you wouldn't have said that if you didn't want us to think you were cool for saying it, right? Approval is not a bad thing. And approval, I wouldn't even say is a desire so much as it is a need. A need for approval comes from an awareness of self. A need for approval comes from this awareness of that I'm not perfect. And so what we need in these moments is if you are a Christian, you became a Christian because you were aware that you fell short and you needed Jesus. The sense of approval. It's not a desire, it's a need, but maybe you are a person who generally walks through life with an understanding that none of us are perfect. None of us have everything together. Like we all have things that we're working on. And so the opinion and ideas of others generally don't bother you. Here's what I would ask you to consider. and here's what I would argue. There is someone in your world whose voice influences the things that you do. There is someone in your world that what they think about the decisions that you make influences the decisions that you make. Approval's not a bad thing. It just makes a crummy God. Because here's what happens. The danger with approval, the idol of approval creates a fear of rejection that places our identity and worth in the people around us. The idol of approval, when approval gets to the top of the list, when it becomes the ultimate thing that we have to have, we have to have it from the people around us, we have to have it from the person, whatever it may be, it shapes who you become. And what we avoid is this fear of rejection. All of the idols are connected to your identity. All the idols that we'll talk about in this series, they determine who you become. Approval is the only idol that places your identity in the hands of the people you seek to be approved by. You know this. In order to be approved by someone, you have to either become or show them something they would approve. And what happens is when approval becomes ultimate, your sense of value and worth is determined by the acceptance of the people around you. And it creates this internal tug of war. You see an example of this in John. Jesus is pretty far into his ministry at this point. He's at kind of rock star status. Like everyone who knows who he is. Some people like him, some people don't. There's some people who do believe in him. There's some people who don't believe in our life. It creates this internal tug of war. This is who I am. This is what I believe. This is what I want to do. In order for people to accept, approve, like, love, respect, I have to do this. And when approval's at the top of the list, it's always going to win. Your value, your worth, your identity is going to be in the hands of the people around you. And let's think about that for a second. What version of right and wrong do you choose today? We live in a world full of opinions. Everyone has an idea about the way you should or should not raise your kids. Everyone has an idea about what is right and what is wrong. And it's also people don't see the action that you do in light of who you are. They determine who you are based off of the action that you do. We see it with political affiliations, political views, religious views. You don't believe this. You are this. You see it with, again, like the way you raise your kids, the way you discipline your kids. You see it with whether you shop at Target or Walmart. I get that one a little bit. Like, don't go to Walmart. Like, there's nothing good that happens at that place. But like, we see these things in our life and people determine who we are based off of who we do. And when approval becomes our idol, it creates this exhausting desire to please. It creates this exhausting pursuit of a fragile approval that can be taken away at a moment's notice. Because when you gain someone's approval, in order to be approved by one is to be disapproved by the other. It's a dangerous place to be. It's a dangerous thing. And so the thing that we really need to take away from when we idolize approval, we ask people to fill a need that only God can satisfy. And so this exhausting race, this pull back and forth, this constant trying to, okay, I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this to this over here. Like we, it's exhausting. And you're always going to be left feeling less than because it highlights the differences and typically what we would assume as weaknesses where we've dropped the ball. It brings those to the surface. Because people, and again, let me reiterate, I want to make sure that you're not hearing the wrong thing in this. Approval, it's not bad. It just can never serve you the way that we're asking it to. Because we start looking at broken people to fill this need that we were designed to have filled by God. And so approval from people just creates this fragile pursuit of never good enoughness, never quite arrived yet. The best person that I've seen, the best story throughout scripture that I've seen to kind of illustrate the difference of a life defined by the fear of rejection and a life defined and transformed by the approval of Jesus is with the Samaritan woman. Let me read for you just a second, then we'll talk about it a little bit. This is in John chapter 4. If you have your Bibles, you can turn there. We're going to put it on the big digital Bible in the sky, too, so you're more than welcome to read that one. But in John 4, starting in verse, I'm going to start in 4, but it from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, will you give me a drink? His disciples had gone into town to buy food. Verse 9 says, the Samaritan woman said to him, you're a Jew and I'm a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews did not associate with Samaritans. If you've been in or around church very much, you've probably heard this story. Even if you haven't been around, you may have heard reference to it. But in case you aren't familiar with some of the implications of the details that John gave, right? So the fact that it says she went to the well at noon says a lot about the life that this lady was living and the life that she was avoiding. So going to gather water was a common practice from the women in that day, but they would typically go one to two times a day, but it would always be in the morning or just before sunset because it's a cooler portion of the day, right? So, but not just was it practically better to go at those times, but it was also a time and an opportunity for community. Like there was a lot of ridiculous restrictions on women in that day and the way that they could function in public and especially around men and things of that sort. So whenever they would gather at the well, it was an opportunity for them to just be. Like they could hang out. They could hang out in their community. They could have conversations. They could talk about whatever it is they needed to talk about. They were just free to be there. And the fact that this lady, when at noon, shows us she was intentionally trying to avoid the people from her own town. Like she went at a time when she wasn't expecting anyone else to be there. And not only that, there's a lot of scholars and a lot of theologians point to that there was a lot of springs of water, a lot of wells closer to her village that she could have went to. So not only did she go at a time when she was expecting not to see someone, just in case, I'm going to go to a place further off. Like we don't know if, we don't know for certain if it was an idol of approval that she was dealing with. But what we do have a very good indicator of is she was avoiding rejection. She was avoiding the fingers. She was avoiding the conversations. Because what we find out a little later in the story is the life that she's living, some of the mistakes that she's made, some of the things that she's done would have been frowned upon by her community. And so what we can see in her life is that she is being shaped by an avoidance of rejection, which is a good indicator that there's a lack of approval in her world. I struggle with this. I struggle with the idol of approval much more than I'm proud of. Like, it rears its head up often. Like, I just need people to like me, partially because I'm so awesome, but also because the, like, no, there's just this, it's just something that pops up. Like, all of the idols do. I think they were all susceptible at different times. But this is the one that seems to pop up with me more often than not. And I was having a conversation with a couple of, actually three different people. So y'all are the fourth person I've ever told. Don't tell anybody else. An analogy that I used is with every interaction, every person, there's a brick wall. There's an imaginary brick wall. And the less bricks that are on that wall is an opportunity for me to come over. It's you accepting me, you bringing me in, you respecting me, you thinking whatever it is that I need you to think of me. It's I need you to love me, I need you to welcome me, I need you to do whatever. The less bricks that are there, the closer that I get to being fully brought in by someone. But the more bricks that are there is just the opposite, right? The more bricks that are there, it's more of a reason for you to not accept me. It's more of a reason for you not to like me. And so what I had told these people in this analogy was it feels like at times every conversation, every interaction, it doesn't matter if it's at like a rehearsal, it doesn't matter if we're hanging out and passing and going to grab lunch, if I'm passing you and barely talking to you in Walmart, in certain seasons of my life, it feels like every conversation I'm carrying a brick. I'm either putting a brick onto the wall and giving you a reason to not take me, to not like me, to not love me, to not accept me, or I'm taking a brick off of the wall. It's an exhausting pursuit. You're constantly carrying this weight of being whatever people need you to be, whatever people want you to be, oftentimes at the sacrifice of your own personal convictions, your own personal beliefs, your own ideas of who you want to be. We've all stood on the other side of a decision of regret. Like, why did I do that? For me, in my life, most of those decisions have been on the other side of, I've got to either remove a brick or I've got to put one up. That's an indicator for me. I didn't realize it until like I was writing this sermon this week, that whenever I feel that weight, whenever these moments start to happen in my life, when I feel like I'm either removing or putting a brick on, it's an indicator that approval is being elevated in my life. Not just simply because there's a need for it, but I'm looking to people for validation. I'm looking to people to affirm that I'm someone. I'm looking for people to help me realize that I am who I need to be and that I'm okay being who I am. I'm looking for people. That's an indicator. I don't know what it would be for you. Maybe that resonates with you. But some other indicators that approval has gotten really high on our list, is moving up the list in terms of desires, is when the one criticism speaks so much louder than 100 compliments. Like, you've got something, you've done something, you believe something, something happened, and there's so many people who are telling you, love that, you killed it, but there's one person, and that voice keeps you awake at night. When the idea of one person not liking you, being disappointed in you, thinking you messed up or that you let down, like it just rattles you to the core. Another indicator would be a lack of confidence, not just in you, but a lack of confidence in decisions that you have made or are making. And so what happens is we seek constant reassurance. I need validation. I need you to affirm that I'm doing the right thing. And honestly, in those seasons when approval is way up there, you can't make a decision without getting input from other people. These are indicators that we're seeking approval from a broken people. We're seeking approval from people who can never feel that need. This is what's happening in the world of the Samaritan woman. She's living a life avoiding the whispers, avoiding the reminders that she's not good enough, avoiding the reminders of the mistakes that she's made, and then she talks to Jesus. And this conversation changes everything in her world. Now, so something to understand, you saw that she was surprised that Jesus even approached her and talked to her. So remember, she's trying to avoid people. She's trying to avoid the people of her town. So she's going even further than what she needed to. And as she approaches Jesus, she's certainly thinking, okay, today's not the day that I'm gonna get a break from it. Because in this conversation, in this man, like with the man and woman, there was so many reasons why she would feel rejected by him. As she approached and as she got closer, as she saw that not just is he a man, but he's a Jew, as she got closer, she realized, oh man, there's religious tensions here that go back thousands of years. There's racial tensions there. There's cultural tensions that say men are not allowed to talk to women in public. Most husbands didn't even talk to their wives in public, much less a single man talking to a single woman in public. It just didn't happen. And as she got closer and closer and closer to the well, what had to start resonating with her a little bit more is, okay, today is going to be another day, just like the rest. But that's not what happened. Jesus talked to her. He broke cultural and religious norms, and he treated her like a person. Treated her not like she just had something, that he wanted something from her, but she had value in her world. And then there's a funny part of the conversation where they're talking about the water, and he's like, Jesus tells her, hey, so the water I've got, like, you won't ever be thirsty again. She's like, you ain't even got a bucket, man. Like, you asked me for water. How you got water? Like, what are you talking about? And then this happens in verse 14. Maybe not 14, 15. Actually, I'm going to go to 13. Jesus answered, everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. Whoever drinks the water that I give them will never thirst. This is quite true. So she goes and approaches and has this conversation, and then comes the question, right? Jesus brings up this very thing that has shaped her life. Jesus brings up what is likely the very thing that is causing her to feel rejected by the people in her town and need to be approved. It's the very thing that's made her feel not good enough. And Jesus, you had to bring that up? Like, you can't really, like, Jesus knows everything everything. He knows everything. Like he just told her. So you have to kind of ask this question. Like Jesus, why did you have to bring this up? I really don't think it was because he wanted to remind her. See, you're not quite perfect, are you? See, here's this thing in your life. You got to get this worked out. You got to fix it. She didn't need reminding of that. I think that Jesus brought up the question because he wanted to let her know, you don't have to do that here. You don't have to pretend with me. You don't have to feel the weight of your failures. You don't have to feel like you are the sum total of your mistakes. You don't have to feel like you have to be someone else in order to be accepted, approved, and loved by me. For the first time in probably a very long time. This lady who has been rejected time and time again comes to a conversation with someone who knows everything and welcomes her in. And suddenly there's a rest. I don't have to chase. I don't have to be. I can just be. I don't have to conform to what your idea of good and bad is. I can just rest in the approval of Jesus. And it changes her life forever. You can come on up here. It changes her life forever. What's incredible is you read throughout the rest of the story, there's a boldness and confidence after finding this approval that she runs back to the town. She runs, she leaves her water jug. She runs back to town, back to the place where she has faced rejection over and over again, back to the place where she's reminded you're not good enough, back to the place that people have told her and made her feel like you don't belong here. You're not one of us. You aren't good enough. We'll never approve of you until you fix everything. She's a boldness and a confidence that takes her back to that place and resting in the approval of Jesus, she becomes the person these people need in their life. She has influence on her community. She has influence in the people's lives around her. Resting. Listen to me. This is just an aside. I said I wasn't going to say it, but I want to. And so here we are. The people in your life that you feel like you have to measure up for, the people in your life who rely on you and depend on you, the people in your life who need something from you, what they need from you is to be the person that Jesus is asking you to be. Jesus is not going to lead you to be a poor wife, a poor husband. This lady, this, the first evangelist, I think she, she was, she was the first person to hear, hey, wait, you're the Messiah? And she went back to her, and she had influence in the lives of people who wanted nothing to do with her. When the voice of Jesus became the voice that she rested in, when the voice of Jesus became the voice that she found her approval, she found her identity, she found her life in, it changed her world. She realized that she didn't have to be all things to all people. There were certainly still people there, still people in her community that didn't respect, that didn't like. They may have still whispered. There were certainly people in her community who still didn't listen to what she had to say. But the beautiful part about it is after she found rest in the approval of Jesus, she didn't need them to anymore. They were no longer shaping who she became. Whose voice are you listening to? In certain seasons of your life, whose voice are you listening to? Do you know what Jesus thinks about you? Like, do you know what God thinks about you right now, knowing you fully? Ephesians 2.10 is one of my favorite verses. It's the Apostle Paul. He says that you are God's masterpiece chosen in Christ Jesus to do the good works that he prepared for you ahead of time. He says you are God's masterpiece. There's some versions that say worksmanship, craftsmanship, but the Greek word that Paul used there is poe. Let me look at it. I want to make sure I say it right. Well, I'm going to read it. Those are the right letters. I'm going to say it wrong. Poema. He says, you are God's poema. It's where we get our word poem from. Do you know what God thinks about you? You are his poetry. You are God's poem. His work of art that before time began, he loved. You do all of the things that you do, but do it from an awareness that you have of God who looks at you as his work of art. Let's pray. God, thank you so much. Thank you for the love, the life, the grace that you offer. God, there's going to be seasons, some of us more often than others, when the need and desire for approval begins to become our focus, when image management becomes the thing that we work on the most because we need people to let us in. God, what I ask you to do is just with the softness and gentleness of your Holy Spirit, remind us. Remind us who we are in you. Remind us of the life, the freedom, and the rest that we found in you as our Savior. And let us live our life, God, from a position of approval from God instead of seeking the approval of man. We trust you. In Jesus' name, amen.

I feel like I need to do some preaching after singing like that. You guys were on it this morning. That was really, really great. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, my name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. And I'm so glad that you guys are here in this June Sunday. I can't believe the perfect weather that we're having. I like to laugh at Southerners because during the summer we complain that it's too hot all the time. And I just wish it would cool off. And there's like a week and a half where God gets it right, and then we complain that we're too cold, and I wish it would warm up. And it's like God's got to be in heaven going, you know, pick a spot. So to you that can never be happy, praise your God for this last week because it was amazing. This morning, we are starting a new series called Idols based on the book that Michelle mentioned, Counterfeit Gods, by Tim Keller. These are available out there on the information table. I got about 30 because I didn't want to lose my rear end on them if you guys didn't want to buy them. But we're just asking for $10 a piece for those. You can just add $10 to your tithe, go online and just do a $10 transaction. You can put $10 in the offering basket or one of the boxes when it comes by and then grab one afterwards. If you've already grabbed one because you saw them there, I noticed we have less now than we did before you guys were invited. So you have stolen and you are in the debt of the church. All right. That is on your head. All right. You have to deal with that. If you happen to put $10 in the offering basket when it comes by and then there's no more books out there, thank you for your donation. We appreciate that. I can get it back to you. It's a very complicated process. You can email me. When we plan series, we sit in a staff meeting and I ask everybody who's on staff to come to the meeting with one idea that they feel like is so good for a series that they'll be disappointed if we don't do it. And then I try to come with my own ideas as well. And then we put everybody's idea up on a whiteboard and then we just pick out the worst ones and we humiliate one another until we whittle it down to a series that we like. This series was Gibson's idea. So if it's good, tell him so and thank him for that. If it's bad, it's definitely in the delivery. It is not in the material, I assure you. But we put it on the calendar. And this was, I mean, we planned to do this probably back in the fall. This is just the order and how we do things. And I had kind of forgotten about it. And halfway through the last series, I realized I need to start getting ready for this one. And so I'm like, hey, what was that book? And on a trip down to Atlanta, I listened to it and then listened to it on the way back. And I'll be honest, when I kind of reached back out to Gibson, I was like, hey, what's the series? What are we doing? Can you help me wrap my head around it? When he was explaining it to me, I remember thinking like, why did we agree to this? What is, that staff let me down. This is a terrible idea. But before I canned it, I read the book, listened to the book. And as I was listening to it, I just thought, man, this stuff is so good and so important that I think every believer needs to think through these things. Now, if you're not familiar with Tim Keller, it would behoove you to be. He was a Presbyterian minister in Manhattan for at least 30 years, I think. Wonderfully smart, wonderfully thoughtful, and a very good speaker and author. Very professorial in his approach. And as I listened to it, I knew that we needed to talk about this topic together. So this week is going to kind of be a setup for the next four weeks. And what I'm going to do is invite you to just be thoughtful with me, to think about the topics that we're going to be discussing. My prayer for you is that the Holy Spirit will open your heart and open your eyes to let you see what's inside you. And then hopefully, if what's there isn't what's supposed to be there, then we move through a process of repentance together and allow God to begin to eradicate some of the sin that we might have in our lives that we might not know about. As we approach the topic, it's based on this one verse in Exodus, this very short verse. We're going to do a whole series out of this singular verse, Exodus chapter 20, verse 3, you shall have no other gods before me. Now, my Bible scholars know that that's at the beginning of the Ten Commandments. As the Israelites, God's children, are freed from slavery, wandering around the desert, eventually God says, I'm going to now give you the Ten Commandments. And Moses comes up on this mountain with God, and God himself writes on these tablets the Ten Commandments and a bunch of other stuff. There's a bunch of other things on there besides just the Ten Commandments, but he starts with the Ten Commandments. And I always think it's interesting to point out, I'm not going to camp out here, I'm just going to mention it and let you think about it and process this. It's very interesting to me when God chooses to give his children the Ten Commandments. When God chooses to give his followers the rules. Because I don't know if you've thought about this or not, but God was interacting with humanity for several thousand years before Moses comes on the scene and he gives them the rules. God's already interacting with people like Melchizedek and Abraham and Enoch and Noah and Adam and potentially Job. God's already been interacting with his children and revealing himself to creation for several thousand years before Moses comes onto the scene. And I think that's important to acknowledge. And I think as we think about the Ten Commandments, again, I'm not going to linger here, but God knew that when he gave us rules, we'd make it all about the rules. He knew we'd mess it up, that we'd get off track, and that Jesus would have to come correct things. So we do not start here to make the point that God is a God of rules. He really is not and wasn't for thousands of years prior to this, and I think that's important. But as he decides, finally, to give his children the rules, here are the ten most important ones. The very first one, right out of the gate, you should have no other gods before me. Now, I don't necessarily think that the sixth commandment is of greater import than the ninth commandment because the ninth commandment comes later. But I do think it's very interesting which commandment God chooses to lead with. You should have no other gods before me. You shall have no other idols. There shouldn't be any idols in your life. And when we think about that in our context, our minds know where to go. We've done that exercise before. In the ancient world, there was other gods. There was other gods to choose from. We still have other gods to choose from. I mean, you could leave today and be like, you know what? I think I'm going to go with Norse gods. I think Thor is real. The movie is dumb, not an accurate depiction, but he's there, and I'm now Norse. Okay, you could go be a Druid if you wanted to, but most of you in this room are probably not going to make that choice. So we don't think about it like the ancient mind did, choosing some other god. We've chosen our god. But we also understand that when we have something in our life that's more important to us than Jesus, then that becomes an idol and that that is a problem. We understand that. But the way that Tim Keller frames it up in his book, I found to be very helpful for me. And it made me put a much finer point on what idolatry is and what I idolize in my life. And it's a little bit of a kick in the teeth when you have to answer the question, but I'm getting kicked in the teeth too. And we're going to move through this together. But he defines an idol as whatever goes in this blank for you. My life only has meaning slash I only have worth if I have blank. Whatever you put in that blank, that's your idol. Whatever you put in that blank that isn't Jesus, then that's a God that you have before our God. And I think that that's pretty tough. Because if I'm being honest, there's probably several things at different parts of my life that I could fill in that blank with. I know for me, there was a season, and I think, I genuinely think I'm over it. I also hope I never have to find out if it's true. But there was a season where my job would fill in that blank, my title and my position. That if you took this from me, and I don't get to be a pastor anymore, that's part of my identity, that's who I am. That if this got taken from me, I wouldn't really know who I was, and I really wouldn't feel nearly as valuable as I once did. And so it's absolutely true of me that there have been seasons where I've idolized my career. I hope that I don't still do that. I think I'm secure in who I am and who Jesus has made me to be and how he wants to use me in his kingdom. And if it's not doing this, I think I'd be okay with it. But I don't want to find out. My career goal is to retire from grace because, A, I just want to know what it is to do ministry in one place, in one community for decades. And man, I just get, this is just an aside, but I was so moved by our community last week, by our church gathering around those families that got to baptize. It meant so much to me, and I'm so grateful for the community of grace and the way that we love each other. So I want to be a part of that for a really long time. And then if you manage to retire as a pastor, it means that you went for pretty much all of your life without doing anything really, really stupid, and that seems important. So I want you to, yeah, thanks, Harris. You two are cute, by the way. I wasn't going to say anything, but then you did. I know, I totally lost my place now. That's what I get for being a smart aleck. I don't know what you would fill in that blank with. I don't know, I know some of you, I know some of you. I know you well enough to know that if you can't admit that you have filled in that blank with your career at seasons in your life, you are lying to yourself. I know that there's plenty in the room that it might not be career, but it might be the title of mom or dad, that without having this role in my life for my children, I would not feel worth and I would not feel valued. And in that way, we can idolize parenthood. Maybe at different points, we say I would not feel worth or value if I didn't have my spouse. And without meaning to, we begin to idolize them and put them in a place where they don't belong. And if you guys could join me in praying for Jen, that's her great struggle. It's oppressive. But my guess is that there is something in your life, your money, your status, your success, your friends, there's something in your life that you could place there. That if this were taken away from me, I would really struggle to feel worth or value and my life would be void of meaning. When you can fill in that blank with anything besides Jesus, then that's the thing that you're idolizing. And here's what happens when we begin to make an idol out of something in our lives. Do you understand that when you have an idol, that you are fundamentally worshiping that thing? That your worship is devoted to that thing. We sang at the end of the song set. Our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of Jesus. And I'll brag on Aaron a little bit because I told him right before the service that I was going to use that song. And what's the name of the song? And he told me, he goes, do you want me to just put it at the end of the set? And I was like, you can do that? Yeah. And you guys, y'all didn't know that wasn't even planned. He just did it. Very good. But we sang together and I heard you sing. I heard you say it. Our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of Jesus. Jesus, we love you. Oh, how we love you. And I love that song. And that's a wonderful song. But when we have idols in our life, can I tell you what we're singing with our lives? With our mouths on Sunday, we say our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of Jesus. But in our efforts Monday through Saturday, we sing with our lives, our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of my career. Our affection, our devotion, my affection, my devotion poured out onto my children. Oh, how I love them. Yes, I love them. My affection, my devotion poured out at the feet of acquiring more, poured out on the feet of status, poured out. Can we be honest about ourselves in this culture that many of us, our idol is materialism? Our idol is things? Our idol is a perceived lifestyle? I mean, as a culture, we've invented influencers. Try to explain that to your great-grandparents. Some of you in here are going, I don't know what that is. You are better for it. It's just people who create a lifestyle that other people want to have, and then we make our idol being perceived as having the lifestyle that we want to have. And it's absurd. But when we allow these idols in our life, when we begin to idolize things, to put things in a position of primacy where they do not belong, we begin to worship those things. And if we're honest with how we invest our time and our money and our talent, then we can be honest about the things we're idolizing. And like you, I have sung on Sunday that I pour out my devotion at the feet of Jesus and by Sunday afternoon I have forgotten that and I'm pouring it out to the God of comfort or I'm pouring it out to the God of performance or I'm pouring it out to the God of lifestyle and materialism and perception and approval. But I think it's really important for us to admit that we have idols, active idols in our life that we continue to put in place in positions of primacy for which they were not designed. Because if you would have asked me this question before I really started thinking about this, before I read this stupid book by stupid Timothy Keller, and it made me feel bad, if you would have asked me that before I started thinking about this topic, hey, Nate, do you have idols in your life? I would have said, without much thought, yeah, yeah, of course I do, absolutely. There's seasons where I make this more important or that more important. There's seasons where things get wonky and I'm not really living for Jesus day in and day out. I get convicted and I get back to it. I've certainly had idols, but I would tell you that I don't think that there's any one thing that I idolize too much. But now what I realize is that's being far too kind to myself. And I think our temptation is to be far too kind to ourselves too. And so what I want you to do this morning is be really honest about what goes in that blank. Be really honest about what we need to put there. Because here's the thing, I don't know what your idol is. I don't know what your idol is, but idols cannot bear the weight of our worship. Idols cannot bear the weight of our worship. Robbie, if you need to take a break, man, you can go take a break. Okay. You're fighting a good fight over there. I'm trying to give you an out. You can go out there and make all the noise you want. Our idols cannot bear the weight of our worship. Do you understand how awesome of a thing worship is? What a great responsibility it is. This idea that there can be a life devoted to a thing that we can go through the years and go through the decades and you can watch the lives of other people and see the things that they're devoted to and see the things that they worship and that our worship is an awesome thing because God created us to worship him. And when we get into eternity, into the perfect eternity for which he has purposed us, we will worship him for all of eternity. It's what our soul yearns to do. We were designed intentionally to be worshipers. So when we put something in the place of primacy in our lives, we are fundamentally worshiping that thing. And the problem is the idols that we worship cannot bear the weight of that worship. Our career can never, ever make us happy. It can never make us satisfied. It will never be enough. There will always be another mountain to climb. There will always be another deal to close. If that is what we are worshiping, then we will never find a place where we are happy. And I'll tell you where we can see in real time that idols cannot bear the weight of our worship. As you parents who have kids that play competitive sports, and you see these other parents losing their minds at the ump or at their child or at the ref or at a coach. You see these dads literally punishing their sons for what they perceive as underperformance. Those men and women are idolizing their children. And they're idolizing the performance of their children because it's their identity. How good their kids perform is how good they get to feel about themselves. And those children were not designed to bear the weight of their parents' worship. Your spouse was not designed to bear the weight of your worship. They will be human and they will let you down. Money was not designed to bear the weight of your worship. There will never be enough. You will always want just a little bit more. I heard this anecdote last week or week before last, and I thought it was appropriate. At some point or another, Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, and Andrew Heller, the author of Catch-22, were at a party in the Hamptons at this just monstrously huge house. This extravagantly wealthy person throwing a huge party and Kurt leans over to Andrew and he says he says he makes more in a week than you ever made than you have made and ever will make from catch-22 your greatest accomplishment and Heller says yeah but I have something that he can never have and Vonnegut says what's what's that? And Heller says, enough. Well, that's a great point. The things that we idolize cannot bear the weight that our worship places on them. And they will always, always end in misery. Idolizing something that isn't Jesus, organizing our life around something that isn't Jesus, pouring out our affection and our devotion at the feet of things that are not Jesus will always lead to discontentment, to dissatisfaction, to misery, to unhappiness, to anxiety. It will always lead down a bad path. Always, always, always. What's at the end of those pursuits, if we dedicate our life to anything that is not Jesus, what we have at the end of that road is dissatisfaction and misery. And not only does it make us dissatisfied and us miserable, but the people around us too, while we flail around trying to achieve happiness and meaning and meaning and identity from things that are not equipped to provide that for us. So this is why I think God puts it first. Because you can go follow the other nine commandments, but if you've got this messed up, then you're on the wrong path right out of the gate. Nothing we can pursue in our lives can lead to the contentment and happiness that a pursuit of Christ leads to. Everything else will fall short and is empty. This is why Paul tells us that we are to live our lives as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is, he says, our spiritual act of worship. If we, by default, worship the thing in our life that we hold most dear, then if we are going to be people who are worshipers of Christ, it cannot just be with our mouths on Sunday. It has to be with our lives on Thursday. We have got to do that. And here's the other thing that I think is so wonderful about this commandment. When I was a kid and I heard this commandment, I grew up in the church. I don't know when you first encountered this idea there should be no other gods before me. But I remember hearing that as a kid and I kind of thought like, yeah, that checks out. I mean, he made us. He's the boss and he wants us to think of him as the boss. So like that makes sense. I get it. Okay. But when you really think about it, and when you look at how dangerous idols can be to us as people, what we understand is that God is looking out for us in this commandment, not himself. The reason he leads with it is because he's like a parent watching a 17 or an 18 year old make a series of bad decisions and he knows what's going to happen. He knows that's going to end in pain. He knows you're going down the wrong road, but you're not willing to listen. And he's just going to have to sit back and watch the train wreck and help the child pick up the pieces. He knows that when we, I, that we are so given to idols, we are so given to put other things in that place of primacy. We will by default worship things, and God knows that. And he knows that if we worship anything that isn't him, if we devote our life to anything that isn't Jesus, that that's going to end in misery for us and for those around us. And so he's trying to help us avoid that by saying, give me your worship. Give me your affection and devotion. I will not let you down. I am a capable bearer of the weight of that worship. You were designed to worship me. I am the only right receiver of that worship. This is what God wants for us. This is what is best for us. And I actually love this principle about everything that God ever tells us to do. Any standard that we can find in the Bible, anything he says about what it means to pursue holiness, any rule that we feel like we're given, anything that we're supposed to live up to and pursue, all the things that God tells us to do, do you realize that not a single one of those things is self-serving? Not a single thing God asks us to do is somehow self-serving as the creator. I'm the boss and I want you to treat me like it. Every single thing in scripture that we are told to do, that we are encouraged to do, that we are forbidden from, that we are pushed towards, every single thing is for our best. Every single thing is for our good. That's all God ever wants for us. And really, I think that the Old Testament says that you should put no other gods before me, and the principles there remind me of the principles in one of my favorite verses, John 10, 10. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. And I believe that most of Christian life comes down to whether or not we think that's true. Do I believe that God actually wants to give me life to the full, the best, most meaningful, richest, most purposeful life possible? Do I really actually believe that? Because if I do, I will not idolize other things over him. If I do, I will actually trust him and follow him. If I believe that the words that John wrote are true, that Jesus came that I might have life and have it to the full, that I might have the richest life possible here. Now he gets to define that life. We don't, but what we'll find at the end of the road is that was the best way to live my life. And so much of Christianity comes down to, do I believe that or not? And if you have an idol in your life right now, and listen, you do, what you are saying to God is, yeah, I understand that you want me to have a full life, but I actually think that by putting my efforts into this, I'm going to create a better life for myself than you could if I were to follow your standards. So I'm going to try this for a while and not do it your way. And then, because we're Christians, here's what we do. And we all know we do it. Don't act innocent here. We choose other things to prioritize over Jesus in our life. And then because we're Christians, we turn to Jesus and we ask him to bless the things that we've prioritized over him. Jesus, could you please help me be a better parent so that my children can behave better so that I can feel better about myself? Really reworded is Jesus, can you please help my sinning and misprioritizing my family over you go a little bit more smoothly so that I can feel better about it? God, I know that I've placed my career in a place where it doesn't need to be and that that occupies a place of primacy in my life, but I'd really like it if you could just help me out with this so you can make my sinning over here more easy. And I know, I know that that's harsh language. I know that that's very direct, but I'm not being direct top down. I'm being direct with myself and with you. That when we just sprinkle a little bit of Jesus into our life because we're Christians, what we're really asking him to do is to bless the ways that we are sinning so that sin, so that that sin can be more peaceful. Maybe the best thing he could possibly do is make it harder until you fully rely on him and quit looking at those other things. And this is why I think it's worth our time to take the next four weeks after this going through this idea of idolatry and how it sneaks into our lives. And I hope that you leave today with at least an awareness that you're more given to idolatry than you thought you were when you got here. I know that I am convicted of that. And this is how we're going to spend the rest of our time. There's this really interesting idea, I think, in the book that Tim Keller presents, and it's something I had never thought of before, and it's the thing that when Gibby mentioned it to me, I went, yeah, that's pretty interesting. We should think through that. It's this idea. Our visible surface idols have invisible source idols. So our visible surface idols, the things that we would fill in the blank with, our children, wealth, career, sex, approval, materialism, lifestyle, the things that we have marshaled our lives around, those surface idols that are visible, all have what he calls source idols. And the four source idols are power, control, approval, and comfort. And I think what's so interesting about these motives of our idolization, of our idolizing, is that we could have said, you could have said, I don't know that anybody outright says this, but this could be an answer, that your thing is greed. My idol? Money. I just want more of it. I just like making it, and I like watching it grow. Great. You picked money. But what Tim Keller says is, there's a reason you picked money. And it wasn't just because you love money. It was because you either love the power that you feel like money brings. Now you're untouchable. Now you can do what you want. Or maybe you like the comfort that money provides. I be at peace here and that's that's my hedge around myself or it could be for control and money provides you that or it could be because your source idol is approval and money provides you with that so with these source idols the surface idols can be fueled by any of those four and so we're going to look at the next four weeks. We're going to look at those source idols. Because each of those source idols has a besetting sin that will manifest itself in your life. The first one we're looking at next week is going to be power, because that's mine. And I really am uncomfortable admitting that. I thought it was control, but the more I looked at it and thought about it, it's power. And there's a besetting sin of anger. And we're going to talk about that next week. And I think we're all capable of having multiple sore cycles. So I hope that you'll get the book. I hope that you'll be willing to walk through this with us. I hope that we'll be willing to think through this together. And again, my biggest prayer as we go through the series together is that we would allow the Holy Spirit to open our eyes and our hearts to what we have put in a position of primacy in our life that does not belong there. And how we can slowly begin the repentant process of putting Jesus back where he belongs so that our affection and our devotion will be poured out at his feet and not the feet of something that is unworthy of our worship. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the conviction of idolatry. God, thank you for helping me to see that I am far more guilty and vulnerable to that sin than I thought I was. Father, I pray that we would see the very real threat that that sin is to us and how these idols seek to weave themselves into our lives and into our psyche so that we organize our lives around them instead of around you. And Father, would you please forgive us for asking you, for treating you like someone who is designed to help with our pursuit of things that are not you, for sprinkling you into our lives rather than devoting ourselves to you. And Father, I pray that grace would be a place that when we sing songs like that, that we would not only mean them with all of our hearts on Sunday, but we would live them out on Tuesdays. Be with us as we go. In Jesus' name, amen.