Sermons tagged with Sin

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. We'll be reading from Matthew chapter 6 this morning. This, then, is how you should pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you get to be the senior pastor here. Congratulations to Tar Heel fans. Please be humble about it, lest you become unbearable to your Christian brothers and sisters. That was a heck of a game last night. Yes, yes. That's good. That was some very tepid applause there. I know you feel bigger than that, but you're being humble as we speak. We have been going through our Lent series. This is, I believe, part six of the series, and I hope that you have been keeping up with the devotionals, as I say, every week and reading and being encouraged by those and by the other folks in the church as you've gone through those. This week, we arrive at the topic of forgiveness, and we've been kind of walking through that all week. Hopefully, as you've read the devotionals, you've thought about forgiveness in your own life. I think when we arrive at the topic of forgiveness, we can't help but wonder, do we owe some forgiveness? Whenever I encounter that topic of forgiveness, whenever I see the word, whenever I'm challenged by scripture, whenever I'm talked about how God has forgiven me so I should forgive others, I immediately think, who in my life am I holding a grudge against? Who am I withholding forgiveness from? And I would bet that most of us, when we hear that idea, begin to think about who in our life have we had to forgive? Where have we had a difficult path to forgiveness? Is there anybody in my life that I need to work towards forgiving now? And so with that in mind, I wanted to kind of talk about the challenge of forgiveness and the instructions that we find in the Bible concerning forgiveness. And the best place, I think, to start is with the very words of Jesus. We're going to allow Jesus to frame up our discussion on forgiveness this morning. The Bible in the Old Testament, New Testament, all throughout it has a ton to say about forgiveness. But again, I think if we can go to Jesus and read his very words and what he has to say about it, that that's the best framework for the discussion that you and I need to have about forgiveness as we rest on that topic this morning. So I would first look at two different passages, two different things that Jesus says about forgiveness that are really in harmony with a lot of other teachings throughout scripture about forgiveness. The first is the one that Jacob just so eloquently read a few minutes ago. I don't know if you've noticed it before. Most of us know the Lord's Prayer, and you identified that as the Lord's Prayer as soon as he started to read, right? But in Matthew, when Jesus finishes the Lord's prayer, which is where Jacob was reading from, he does a little bit of commentary. He has some comments to make about it. And we read those this morning, but I'm not sure if we heard it or if you've paid attention to those before. So I would call our attention back to the way that Jesus comments on the prayer that he just prayed. Because part of that prayer is, Father, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. At least that's how I memorized it growing up in the King's English. But sometimes forgive us and then help us forgive other people. So Jesus says this after that in verse 14, for if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your father will not forgive your sins. So this is a pretty stark and interesting teaching. And I'll be honest with you, I don't know how this works theologically necessarily and intertwines with the doctrine of salvation. I just know that when, that Jesus himself says that if we will not forgive other people, then our Father in heaven will not forgive us, which is pretty stark. That leaves us very little option, right? So forgiveness immediately we see is required. It is not optional. And then later in the passage, or later in that same book, Jesus is having a conversation with his disciple Peter. And Peter asks about this forgiveness. Surely by now Peter knows that forgiveness is not optional, that if we do not forgive other people in our life, then God does not forgive us. And that seems like a place that we don't want to be in. But Peter asks, certainly there has to be a limit to the forgiveness that we are instructed to offer to others. But to that, Jesus says this in Matthew 18, verses 21 and 22. Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times? Jesus answered, I tell you, not seven times, but 77 times. Some translations say, but 70 times seven. And see, we need to give Peter a little bit of credit. He says, Jesus, how many times should I forgive someone for sinning against me, for wronging me, for harming me? Up to seven times? Which feels very generous, if we're being honest about it. Someone slaps you in the face seven times in a row. You're just going to keep forgiving them? A business partner steals from you. Maybe you can forgive them once. You're going to, up to seven times, you're going to do that? Your neighbor backs into your mailbox. One is a whoopsie, but three, come on, man, knock it off. Like seven times is pretty generous. And Jesus says, no, no, not seven times, but up to 70 times seven, up to 77 times, which is a figurative way of saying as often as they require it. No, you forgive others as often as they require your forgiveness. And when we look at these two teachings from Jesus on forgiveness, these two statements, we have no choice but to conclude this, that unlimited forgiveness for the Christian is not optional. If you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, I would say that the good part of that is that you don't have to forgive anybody if you don't want to. You can just hold grudges, which may be nice. But for the believer, unlimited forgiveness is not optional. And I think that that's important to say out loud and to acknowledge. Because so often, we Christians have a habit of kind of viewing instructions that we're given as things that maybe we're supposed to do. Maybe we can try to do. Maybe one day I'll get there. Maybe one day I'll work up to forgiveness. Or we will think of it as optional. Someone hurt me. I don't want to forgive them. I don't need to. That's in the past and we've never done the work to do that. Or someone did something to us and we have every right to withhold our forgiveness from them. And so we do because it hurts so deeply. And what the Christian ethic is on this is to say, hey, we're instructed to offer unlimited forgiveness, and it is not optional. Now, to some of us, to many of us, that sounds like a challenge. That sounds difficult. If you think about some of the people who have hurt you in your life, some of the things that would require your forgiveness, to simply pithily say, well, God tells you to offer unlimited forgiveness, it's not optional. That's tough. And so I thought it best to have this conversation kind of in light of different groups of people in life that we will feel called to or pressed on to forgive. So I've got three categories of folks, three categories of situations that require forgiveness from us. And I want to talk about how we should kind of address those things because some are different than the others when we get into forgiveness. So the first and maybe the easiest category of people to forgive are those who have apologized and sought restitution. Your neighbor backs into your mailbox. They knock on your door. They say, hey, I'm so sorry. I just knocked over your mailbox. That's my bad. How can I pay for it? Okay. If you withhold forgiveness from your neighbor in that scenario, you've got issues, right? Like you've got problems. Someone stole 50 bucks from you 10 years ago. You still haven't forgiven them. Simple, everyday offenses. Your spouse said something that had a bad day. Just yesterday, I was kind of just being snippy in the morning, and Jen just looked at me. She goes, are you grumpy? Like, did you wake up grumpy? And I'm like, yeah. Sorry. I'll fix it. And, you know, thankfully, I got a little bit more chipper, but I had to apologize. Sorry. Sorry I woke up. I don't know why. I had slept eight hours. It was a great night. I had a great night last night, a good day. I don't know what my deal is, but I'll fix it, right? So there's sometimes just these run-of-the-mill things. Someone wrongs us. They apologize and seek restitution. And the right thing to do is to forgive them and move on. And if in these scenarios, you can't simply forgive them and move on, that's a you problem. You should do that. If you are holding grudges and can't just forgive people when they apologize to you, listen, I sent that email and you shouldn't have been copied on it. And I know I said those negative things about you in front of our coworkers, and I'm very sorry. and I will not do that again. Okay, that one stings a little bit, but still, you're a grown-up. Get over it. Forgive. So in these situations where someone has wronged us, but they've apologized, admitted their fault, they're seeking restitution, we should forgive. And we all know that. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought like, yeah, that's pretty easy. You're all adjusted adults. If you can't do that by now, you need a different sermon. Okay, this isn't for that. Let's just suck it up and forgive. The second one is a little bit more challenging. The second one is when we are tasked to forgive those who do not know they need to or simply refuse to apologize. That's a little bit more difficult. When someone has wronged you and they refuse to apologize for the wrong or acknowledge that it was wrong, and yet you find yourself in a position where you need to forgive them. Spouses get into a fight. They argue. They each say hurtful things. They go to their separate corners of the room, and they sit there like children with their arms folded. I mean, are you going to forgive him? I'm not going to forgive him until he says he's sorry. Okay, well, you sure are teaching him a lesson. Congratulations on being a grown-up. I always say in those situations that children are concerned with whose fault it is, and grown-ups are worried about making things right. So as adjusted adults, as people who love Jesus, we seek to make things right. Now, it's more challenging when someone has hurt you and they won't admit it. They refuse to admit that that was their fault. They refuse to admit that what they did was wrong, but we need to find it in ourselves to forgive them. It's a more difficult task, and yet we should simply extend forgiveness. Another one that I thought of this week is, you know, in this category too, is when people don't know that you even need to forgive them. When people don't know that they've hurt you. And so when you forgive them, you just forgive in silence and they'll never know that you forgave them. And I don't know if this is appropriate for me to share or not, but one of the difficult things in my position is when people choose to no longer be at grace, when people choose to move on from grace. The longer they've come to grace, the more difficult it is when they choose to leave. And I understand that we're not all going to go to the same church for our whole life. Like, I get that, and not everybody leaves poorly, and not everybody hurts when they leave, and some people leave really, really gracefully. But sometimes people leave, and as they're leaving, they say things that hurt. They say things that are insensitive to me, and they'll hurt my feelings. And I understand that I operate in a world where most of the people around me don't think I have those. But I do. I do have feelings. I don't have as much as you all. That would be rough. But I have some. And sometimes they get hurt. But they don't know that they hurt me. They don't know that that's difficult for me. They don't know that I haven't forgiven them. They don't know that I need to. And I'm not going to call them up and say, hey, you hurt me. I just want you to know you hurt me, but I forgive you, so we're good. So I just have to forgive in silence. We don't get any credit for that. But God calls us to forgive nonetheless. And in both of these situations, those where people have wronged us, they've apologized and sought restitution, and then those where people have wronged us and they don't know they have or they refuse to admit that they have, I think it's very helpful for us to refer back to Jesus' instructions and say, to the Lord's prayer, and say, Father, forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Forgive us our debts. Forgive us our sins as we forgive the people who have sinned against us. It's this reciprocity. It's this awareness of the more I focus on Christ, the more I allow the reality of his forgiveness to wash over me. The more I see myself as the happy recipient, undeserving recipient of his grace and of his goodness and of his mercy and of his kindness and of his forgiveness, the easier it is for me to be a conduit of that forgiveness to others. When I reflect on what God has forgiven me of, the fact that he has forgiven me before I even know that I needed to admit fault. Before I was willing to admit that I had wronged him, God in his goodness still offers me and extends to me forgiveness as soon as I'm ready to accept it. And so particularly for these first two categories, when someone's wronged you and apologized, or when someone's wronged you and they haven't apologized yet, but it's your run-of-the-mill average amount of frustration or hurt, it helps us to reflect on Jesus and who he is and how he's loved us and how he's forgiven us and say, yeah, how could I possibly hold a grudge in light of all that love? And so in most situations where you need to offer forgiveness to someone else because they've wronged you, in a vast majority of them, 95% of situations that require our obedience, My official pastoral counsel to you would be, just suck it up and forgive them, man. Figure it out. That would be my counsel to you. Now, I might arrive there in a gentler way. I might say it like, well, you know, and we'll pray about it and wait for you to call me back and realize that's what you need to do. But at the end of the day, the advice would be just suck it up and forgive them and move on. God forgave you. You forgive other people. He empowers you to forgive. We have no right to hold grudges. We've all messed up. Let's move on. But there is a third category where I would never, never give that clumsy of advice. And it's really where I want to spend the bulk of our time today because I feel like it's probably the most helpful for us. And that's those of us who have this group of people to forgive. Those from whom you have every right to withhold your forgiveness. If there is somebody in your life who has hurt you so profoundly and so deeply that you have every right to never forgive them. No one could come to you with an argument and say, you know they deserve your forgiveness, right? Because they don't. No one could come to you and be like, you know, you just need to kind of eventually, it's been 20 years, eventually you got to figure out how to suck it up and forgive. No, no, no, you don't. No, you don't. I have a very good friend who used to be married to another really good friend of mine. Their names are Kevin and Lacey. They live in another state, so I can use their names. If you know Kevin and Lacey, just shut up about this. About seven or eight years ago, Lacey had invited me and another friend of mine, Tyler, to their house to surprise Kevin for his 40th birthday. And we went up for a couple of days to celebrate the birthday. And it was a little weird. There was a little bit of tension. But Kevin and Lacey also had an adult daughter who was engaged. And then five children aged like 10 to 12 and younger. So the oldest was like 10 or 12 and then they had four younger ones and one of those was adopted. So their life was crazy. So to go to their house and for it to feel a little bit crazy or a little bit stressful wasn't totally out of the ordinary. So I didn't really have any red flags going off. It just felt a little tense, right? So we spent a couple of days there, Tyler and I do, and then we hit the road to drive back to, at the time I lived in Atlanta, so we're driving back to Atlanta. And we get about 45 minutes away, and Lacey calls me. I answer the phone, and she said, hey, her voice was shaking. She said, hey, can you come back? I said, sure, what's up? She said, I think he did it again. Three, four years prior to that, Kevin had admitted to an affair with a friend of theirs. And, you know, we kind of all walked through that together, and they had sought restitution and made things right and worked on their marriage, and she had extended forgiveness and yada, yada, yada. But when she said, I think he did it again, I knew immediately what she meant. So we turn back around, go back to Lacey's house. She kind of explained why she thought what she thought. We get into Kevin's computer and read text messages, and she's right. It was a woman in their church small group of all things. And they had made plans in a couple of weeks to tell their families because she had three young kids too. They had made plans to tell their families and somehow existed in this fantasy world where everything was eventually going to work out okay. They just had to get over this difficult challenge at first. But Lacey had figured things out too soon. So Kevin had gone over to her house, picked her up, and they ran off together. And we didn't know where they were, and he wasn't answering his phone. But see, Kevin and Lacey only had one car and Kevin had it. And they only had one bank account and Lacey, they had one bank account and Kevin had moved everything to his business account. So she had no car, no resources and she had five kids. And I spent the next two days convincing my friend Kevin to let Lacey have a car and a couple thousand dollars. And I sat in that house as Lacey gathered up the kids with some close friends of hers and explained to them that sometimes people make poor choices and your daddy's been making poor choices. That is pain. That is hurt. That is being wronged. And I would never, never look at Lacey in those moments and say, you know that offering unlimited forgiveness is not optional, right? You're a believer. And yet that's still true. And I don't know everyone's story, but I'm confident that we have some Lacey's in this room. Some women who have been hurt in that way. Some men who have had to walk through that pain. I know in a congregation our size, we have people who grew up in abusive homes. We have people whose parents victimized them. I know that we have folks in our midst who have walked through being a victim, who have been abused by a parent or by a grandparent or by a spouse or by a partner, and your hurt is deep, and that wrong is big, and that chasm is wide. And what I wanted to know when I was looking at the topic of forgiveness is, what do we tell those folks? How do we help you, those of you with the deepest hurt and the deepest lies and the most challenging path to forgiveness, what can we offer you? So frankly, if your issue is someone hurt my feelings or someone hurt me and they apologize and they've sought restitution but I'm choosing to hold this grudge, figure it out. Figure it out. Forgive them. But for those who sit in profound hurt, what do we do? How do we even start towards forgiveness? The thing that kind of played in my head as I thought about deep hurt is kind of this question, is how could the father look at his victimized children and instruct them to forgive? How could our good heavenly father take Lacey, pull her in, hug her and hold her and tell her, you know, eventually you're going to need to let go of this. Eventually I'm going to move you to a place where I'm going to ask you to forgive Kevin. How can God do that? If we've been hurt in that way, how can we hope to do that? And listen, listen, listen. If you're like me and the path to forgiveness in your life, you're lucky, you're blessed. It's never been that difficult. When I think of, gosh, what are my challenges in forgiveness? They're not a lot. I've not had to walk the road that Lacey's had to walk. So if that's you, I would still encourage you to lean in to what we're talking about this morning. I would still encourage you to listen to what I'm about to share with you that Lacey told me this week, because you might find yourself one day in that room when your friend's life is falling apart, and you might want to counsel them well, or God forbid, you might walk through this too. And let me also say this. Last week, talked about repentance, walking away from the things in our life that don't need to be in our life and walking towards Jesus. If you are doing things that have the potential to require someone to forgive you the way that Lacey is working to forgive Kevin, please stop doing those things before they require the forgiveness that you do not want to force on anyone. But I picked up the phone this week realizing my ignorance, realizing I have not much to offer for deep hurt. And I called Lacey. And I basically asked her that question. How can the Father look at you and love you and yet still push you towards forgiveness? How have you processed forgiveness over the course of the last seven to eight years? What would you say to this topic? And it really, it kind of made me sad. I'll just be honest with you guys. We talked for about 45 minutes, and at the end of it, I realized how badly I wish that I would write sermons several weeks out because it would have been so much more beneficial to have Lacey here and to let us just have a conversation and let you guys listen to it and listen to her perspective. And I told her that. I said, I wish that we could just play this phone call for the people of grace, for the folks in the church. I wish that they could hear these come out of your mouth and not just me bloviating for 30 minutes trying to repeat what you said that was so, so great. I wish you could hear that conversation. But since you can't, I wanted to share with you some of the more helpful things that she shared with me about how she's moved through this profound season of hurt and tried to walk in obedience to offering unlimited forgiveness in the way that she is called to do. And so a couple of things that she said about forgiveness were particularly insightful. And I wanted to share those with you as well, particularly those of you who are walking through profound hurt. And you could say, I have every right to withhold forgiveness from this person. Okay, a couple things for you to know. First, that she pointed out to me, forgiveness does not require trust or affection. To forgive someone, you don't have to reinstitute them into the position that they were in. You don't have to drum up some artificial affection for this person. Lacey has forgiven the other woman, the woman that was in her small group that claimed to be her friend that Kevin left her for. She has forgiven her. She feels no affection for her and she feels no calling to do it. So if one of the things holding you back is, I don't know how I could ever like that person, I don't think you need to. Forgiveness looks like loving somebody. Biblical love, we're instructed, is that we should love others as we love ourselves. How do we love ourselves? We want what's best for ourselves. So how do we love others? To offer biblical love to someone else is to simply desire what is best for them. It is possible to desire what is best for them without actually liking them. Last night, I desired that Duke would win because it's a more interesting story. It was best for Coach K. I do not like the man. I don't have any affection for him. It was just an interesting story, right? We can want what's best for someone without having feelings of affection towards them. And if that helps you get over that hump, so that's good. We also don't have to reinstall them into trust, right? If you have a business partner who steals from you, you can forgive that business partner. You do not have to go back into business with them. If you do, the next one's on you, man. That's your bad. We do not have to reinstall trust. If someone cheats on you, you can forgive them. You do not have to go back and stay with them. So if that's helpful for you, just understand that forgiveness, as I understand it, does not require a reinstatement of trust or affection. It's simply wanting what's best for them and moving on. This one was helpful too. Forgiveness doesn't get to be an arrival. For deep, profound hurt like that, someone lied to you for years, someone hurt you in an incredible way, it doesn't get to be an arrival. Lacey told me she kept expecting to kind of cross this finish line, that she would have one day where God had worked in her heart, with through enough prayer and enough counseling and enough time and enough space that she would be able to say, okay, he's forgiven. I'm moved on. That's done. Except the ripple effects of his actions show up again and again and again in her life. The weekly task of just coordinating the kids with him, where to pick them up and where to drop them off and what are you going to pay for and what are going to pay for, and all the crap that you have to deal with when there's a divorce now, and you have to shuttle kids around, and it's just fresh aggravation every week. Right now, she's got a couple kids going into college, and she has to fill out all of that paperwork on her own, and it's difficult when there's two different parents and two different families, and she's experiencing fresh frustration at the reality of her divorce because of choices that he made and she didn't. That's fresh frustration that she has to then forgive him for again and again. One of the most profound things she ever said to me as we were kind of talking through it, and I was asking what are the hard parts, she said one of the hardest parts is watching your kids grow up alone. Because they do that thing that they do and they make you smile or they make you laugh. And you get to look over at your husband or your wife and you both acknowledge what they just did and you get to experience that intimate joy together that no one else gets to see. And now she has to do that alone. That requires fresh forgiveness. And so it made me think that maybe this is what Jesus was talking about. When he said, no, no, no, not seven times. As many times as they require it. Because maybe Jesus understands that profound hurt has ripple effects. And they show up again and again and again and again. And if you're not prepared to offer ongoing forgiveness, then you're not yet prepared for forgiveness. Because those ripples show up over and over again in your life. And so if you're facing profound hurt like that, just understand, you don't get to cross the finish line. It's more of a mindset of forgiveness. And really the thing that she said that I wanted to finish with is she said, you know, Nate, this would all be impossible without Jesus anyways. She said, I don't know how people walk through hurt like this without Jesus and then try to forgive without Jesus. He's the only reason I can even ever forgive. And she said, in this really funny way, everything that's happened has pushed me more to him, has pushed me closer ever forgive without him. And it reminded me of this verse in 1 Corinthians. And I thought, oh, how appropriate and how much sense does that make in the context of forgiveness when he says to Paul, Jesus says this to Paul, my grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in your weakness. Or rather, that's God the Father saying that to Paul. We are insufficient to offer the forgiveness that we need to for some of the offenses that have been committed against us. It is only through Jesus that we are able to offer that forgiveness. His strength is made perfect in our weakness. It is only through him that we are able to forgive. So if you're one of those people who's carrying that profound hurt, just know that I don't believe you will ever find true forgiveness outside of Christ empowering you to offer it, compelling you to offer it. And when we do that, and when we allow Jesus to empower and compel us towards forgiveness, I think this really great thing happens. By empowering us to forgive, Jesus untethers us from our hurtful past. By empowering us to forgive, Jesus untethers us from our hurtful past. Lacey described it like this. She would just be going through her day, having a perfectly fine day, and then she would see something. She would see a store that Kevin liked to shop at, or a place that they used to go to, or just something that would trigger her and remind her. And then instantly, because she was holding all that hurt, and because she had not yet moved to a place of forgiveness, it was like there was this tether attached to the back of her head that would just jerk her attention into years in the past and jerk her right back into that hurt of those days following the decisions that he made. And she said it was terrible to go through days not knowing when or how my attention was going to be jerked back into the past and I was going to experience that pain fresh. And so really and truly, and we know this about grudges, and we know this about hurt, and we know this about pain, when you are walking through life carrying hurt, when you are walking through life carrying anger, when you are walking through life holding a grudge, that's not hurting them. It's not hurting them for you to be angry at them, not nearly as badly as it's hurting you. And so when Jesus empowers us to forgive, he cuts that tether and he gives us the freedom to walk forward into our future, not being constantly jerked back into our painful past. And I think that there is some freedom there. He unburdens us from the hurt and the pain that we carry every day. And he says, here, let me take that from you so that you can walk in freedom. And so I would say to you this, very carefully, very gently, if there is deep and profound pain in your life, if forgiveness for you is hard, and that person or those people have no right to ask it of you, okay. But when you're ready, Jesus offers you freedom from that hurt. When you're ready, Jesus offers to untether you from that past. When you're ready, you can move into a more free and loving future where you can't get snapped back into your pain at a moment's notice. But it requires you to forgive. It requires you to offer that. But when you do, you find a freedom in Jesus that you can't find anywhere else. I don't know how deep your hurt is, but I do know that life is better when you're not holding it. I don't know how hard forgiveness is for you, but I do know that the reason the Father would hold you and call you to him and say, you know that I'm going to ask you to forgive that person is not so that you can be morally right and morally exemplar and so that he can push you into this uncomfortable situation just so that you feel like a good human. He's telling you to do that because he loves you and he knows that freedom and love are going to be found on the other side of untethering yourself from that. He holds his victimized children and encourages them towards forgiveness precisely because he loves them and wants them to experience the freedom of life on the other side of that pain and he knows he's the only one that can make it go away. Which incidentally is why if your pain is in the first two categories, and I flippantly say, just get over it and forgive, because the same promise is extended to you, that Jesus will empower you to do it and that you will walk in love on the other side of it. So I would encourage you this morning, wherever you are on the spectrum, however you've been hurt, if it's possible to forgive, do it. Allow Jesus to empower that. If you're not there yet, if you say, I hear you, Nate. I know, I understand. Hopefully you don't disagree with what I've said. I haven't said anything clumsy. But you're simply not there yet. It's okay. Maybe just pray this prayer. And say, Father, I know you call me to forgive. I'm not ready. Will you please work in my heart so that I want to forgive? Just pray that prayer. I know I'm supposed to forgive. I don't want to. But I'm asking you and giving you permission to work in my heart to change that so that I do. And just take that step towards forgiveness. But I hope and I pray that as I pray in a second, that if there are people in your life who have hurt you, who you do need to extend forgiveness to, maybe just take a second while I'm praying right now and go ahead and offer that. And let's move out these doors free from some of the pain that we carried in with us this morning. And if you can't do that, let's take a step. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for modeling forgiveness to us. God, we know that we have offended, that we have hurt, that we have trampled with our actions, and yet you offer us unlimited forgiveness. So God, first, I pray that we would be grateful for that and overwhelmed by that. Second, Father, I pray that in turn we would offer forgiveness to others. And Lord, I pray in particular for those who have walked through deep hurt, through a hard betrayal, through abuse, through manipulation, through whatever kinds of awful things we people can do to one another. God, I pray that you would give them the courage to take a step towards forgiveness, to simply maybe even just pray that you would help their heart move, that you would soften their heart. Father, if we do offer forgiveness and obedience to your instructions, I pray that you would meet us there, that we would find you there, and that we would experience a peace there that maybe we haven't had in a long time. In the meantime, God, thank you for loving us so well. In Jesus' name, amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning, my name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. I've got a couple of things for you before I just dive into the sermon. The first thing is that Kyle, who did our announcements, is engaged, man. Yeah. That's right. And she's pretty okay. He's getting older. This is right. No, in all honesty, I can't say much, Kyle. I can't say much. I'm so excited for you. I was sitting over here trying to think about what to say. And I just started like tearing up as I thought about all the things because you guys are perfect. So I'm excited and the church is too. The other thing, let's move away from that quickly so that I can actually preach a sermon. The other thing that I want you to know, and I wanted to say it during this part of the service, not during the announcements, because I actually want you to know about it if you're catching up throughout the week or if you're listening on a walk or whatever it is. I want the whole church to know about this and be prayerful in this. At the end of this year, 2020, what is it, two? Goodness. At the end of 2022, we're going to have three spots available on the elder board. So we're going to spend the rest of this year nominating and naming up to three new elders. And I feel like this is a really big deal because we only have eight elders, including me, max. And so we have an opportunity, or in addition to me, I'm the ninth, Max. And so to put three people on the elder board is a big deal. It impacts the culture of the church. It impacts the culture of the board. And I happen to feel that the people who go on the board are of the utmost importance because I'm trying to constantly remind the elders, this is not Nate's church. It's Nate and Jen's church as much as it's your church, as much as we are partners here and we care about the things that happen here. But this is not my church to lead. This is the elders' church to lead on behalf of the partners of grace. I have been asked to steward grace, but under the direction and leadership of the elders. And the elders, again, represent the wishes of the partners. And I would argue that there is no single portion of grace that has a greater impact on the health, integrity, and character and fitness of the church than to have a board that is healthy and fit and integral. So it's important who goes on that board. So if you are a partner, you're invited over the next month to submit people to be considered to be an elder. The process is we take a month to submit names. We take two months for our nominating committee to kind of talk to those folks and vet those names. And then we take a month for the elders to discuss the people that get there. And then we present them to the partners for a partnership vote. I'll say up front, I don't nominate anybody. I try the best I can to stay out of the process and just receive the people that are nominated by all of you guys. And then we discuss all of that. But I don't want to get too deep into the weeds. I just want you as partners to prayerfully consider who you might nominate to be an elder if you feel led to do that. If you look at the Grace Vine this week, there's a link there. If you scroll down, this announcement is in there. There's a link where you can go to the elder page and there's an online form. We have some forms that you can fill out in person if that's your preference. We just don't have them yet this morning because I oopsied this week and forgot to do that. But we'll have them next week on the information table. So please prayerfully consider that. Now for this week as I get into the sermon finally, sorry for such a long preamble, we're talking about repentance. We've been moving through Lent and kind of pulling different Lenten themes out each week through the devotionals and through the sermons. As I've said each week, I hope that you're being ministered to by those devotionals. I've really, really enjoyed reading through those every week and love all the voices speaking into grace. This week we focus on repentance. And as I got into studying repentance, I was taken aback, honestly, by how often repentance shows up in Scripture. It's all over the Old Testament, this call to repent, to throw off our sinful ways and to move towards God. It's all over the New Testament. All through the Gospels, Jesus calls us to repentance again and again. All of Paul's letters call us to repentance. A lot of the general letters call us to repentance. The end of the Bible, Revelation calls us to repentance. We're called to repentance throughout the whole of Scripture. And as I read that, and as I saw that, and as I studied it, I honestly, I'm not saying this to make a joke. I'm not saying this to make light of anything. I genuinely felt a prick of conviction that I have been your pastor now for five years. Next Sunday is five years, and I have not preached on this. It is to your detriment that I have not. No, it doesn't mean that we haven't talked about the idea of repentance in the service, but I have not slowed down and focused our collective gaze onto this issue that comes up over and over and over again in scripture, and I do sincerely apologize to you for that. I believe I have shortchanged you in not discussing this. And if it is not a part of our regular Christian life, then we have shortchanged ourselves in how we are applying the Scripture. So this morning, I want us to sink in and talk about this principle, this act of repentance. To do that, it's important that we're all on the same page and that we understand what it is. Because repentance can be one of these churchy words like sanctification that we say sometimes and we hear church people say, but if we asked you to say what it was, you would feel very uncomfortable about that. Now, half of you in the room probably know a good definition that I would agree with, which by the way, if I would agree with it, that makes it good. Sorry that that snuck in there. That sounds arrogant. But you would probably have a good definition. But half of us maybe not. So for the sake of the sermon and for the sake of the conversation this morning, we're going to define repentance this way. Repentance is to turn away from sin and move towards God. Repentance is to turn away from sin and move towards God. The word literally means to turn 180 degrees. So the idea of repenting is I'm moving this way. I'm committing this sin. I'm suffering from this addiction. I have this habit. I say these words. I hate this person. I'm moving towards sin and I realize it's sin and I stop. But I don't just stop moving towards that sin. I turn and I move back towards Jesus. So there's an action in repentance. Repentance is not a mindset. It's not a place of sorrow that we reach, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. It requires action of us to actually move away from what we are doing and back towards the Father because, I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but it is impossible to be actively sinning and not also actively drifting away from God. If there are things in our life that ought not be there, if there are things in our life that God would tell us, hey, I don't want that to be a part of your life, then that's sin. And to keep it in our life is to actively and intentionally choose to move away from God. And so when we repent, we acknowledge that that is sin, and we stop it, and we move back towards God. So that's the definition of repentance. As I studied this, I also thought it would be worth kind of detailing, and this is my thought, okay? This is me. You guys are adults. If you're Christians, you have the Holy Spirit. You read the scripture. You decide what it means to you. But for me, I actually see in scripture two different kinds of repentance. I see in scripture kind of a call for what I'm thinking of as initial repentance and then a call for ongoing repentance. So in scripture, I see these calls to initial repentance and ongoing repentance. And I'm going to tell you what I mean. We see a picture of initial repentance in Acts chapter two. In Acts chapter two, Jesus has died. He's come back to life. He's appeared to the disciples. He's ascended up into heaven. He's told them to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, the son, the Holy spirit. And they don't really know what that means. And Jesus told them, just sit in this room and wait until the Holy Spirit comes, and then you'll know what to do. And they're like, all right. So they just sit around in this room and they wait. And they wait, and they wait. And then one day, at what we call Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues. And they go out on the porch and they begin to preach the gospel. And everybody who's there hears the gospel in their own language, in their own tongue. And it's important that we note that the people who are there are presumably the same people who days earlier insisted that Pilate crucify Jesus and kill him on the cross. It's the same crowd, right? And so what is Peter preaching to them? He's preaching to them this message of, hey, you know that guy that you killed? That was Jesus. That was the son of God. That was the Messiah who came to take away the sins of the world. That was the one that Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel had been prophesying about for all those years. All those scriptures that you learned growing up, he was the fulfillment of those things and you killed him. So, whoops. And then their response is, oh no, you're right. What do we do? How do we fix this? How can we be in with God? What we would think of, probably, as being saved. How can my relationship be repaired with God? And Peter answers them this way in chapter 2, verse 38. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is an invitation to what I'm thinking of as initial repentance. And before I go on to explain that as an aside, I'm so glad that this morning the Lord laid on my heart a passage that speaks about baptism because we have Easter coming up. And I think at Easter we're going to have the opportunity to baptize at least two folks. And the whole service really is going to be wrapped around those things because baptism is a picture of Easter. You understand? It depicts the death, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus. It's a reminder of that. It is the oldest of church traditions, and the early church would only baptize on Easter. So if you are one that the Lord has been pricking your heart towards baptism lately, would you please reach out to me? And let's make this Easter one of the most special ones that you've ever had in your life by moving you through the rite of baptism. But Peter calls them to repent and be baptized. And I think an interesting question is, repent of what? Perfectly repent of all your sins? If you need to be right before Jesus, then you need to perfectly repent of all your sins and be baptized and move forward? Well, certainly that can't be the case because no one can repent of their sins perfectly. It occurred to me this, this is true, not even Jesus can perfectly repent of sins because you have to sin first to perfectly repent. Jesus does not know repentance. So literally no one has ever repented perfectly of their sins. So this can't be the instruction of Peter. I think, and again, this is me thinking, that this initial repentance, that what Peter is calling them to repent of is repent of who you thought that Jesus was that you crucified. That guy that you killed, repent of who you thought he was and believe that he was who he said he was. Repent of thinking that he was a teacher or a prophet or an insurrectionist or just some guy or just a carpenter. Repent of those things and believe that he was who he says he was, who is the divine son of God incarnate who came to live a perfect life to die on the cross for you and for me to gain our citizenship in heaven, to secure us a seat at the table for the marriage supper of the lamb for all of eternity. And so I would invite you this morning, if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't yet call yourself a Christian. You have an invitation to the exact same initial repentance that the people in Acts got called to. And I would invite you this morning, if the Spirit so moves in you, that you would repent of whoever you thought Jesus was when you came in here. A historical figure, a humble teacher, a prophet on par with Muhammad or Confucius or Buddha. Repent of who you thought he was and accept that he is who he says he is, the divine Son of God who died on the cross for you and for me to secure your seat in all of eternity and to rectify your relationship with your Creator God. That's who Jesus is. And if you didn't believe that walking in here, you're invited into the initial repentance of walking away from who you thought Jesus was and walking towards who we now believe him to be. That's the initial repentance. But I think after that repentance, that's the moment when our salvation begins. The Bible teaches salvation as a process. So when you're saved, are you saved? Are you secured? Are you going to heaven? Yes, but your process is also ongoing. It reaches its completion in our glorification as we enter into heaven. So yes, that begins the process. But then as we enter into this process of salvation and sanctification that is secured for us, that is guaranteed for us, that we will experience in glory, God continues to call us to ongoing repentance as a portion of our Christian life. And he calls us to repentance in verses like this. I'm gonna read it again. Ed did a great job of reading it as we started, but in Romans chapter 2, do you suppose, oh man, you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness them that God has enough grace to cover over all of your sins. And no, that doesn't mean that you should just go on sinning so that God's grace may abound. That means that you need to realize his grace as kindness and understand that his kindness and his goodness and his grace and his overwhelming patience with you is designed by God and bestowed upon you by God to lead you into a position and a posture of repentance over and over and over again. God's kindness leads us into repentance. We need to be people of ongoing repentance because we are people of ongoing sin. Because we are people that no matter how far we go, there will always be things in our life and in our heart that don't belong there. John Owen, one of my favorite authors, writes about sin that the only way to win the battle against sin is to die fighting it. Otherwise, we just give up. So we are meant to be people who are a people of repentance in an ongoing way. And I think one of the reasons that we don't talk about this as much, and one of the reasons that we get confused about repentance is because we kind of equivocate it with some other Bible terms. We equivocate it with conviction and with confession, I think. That we kind of lump all those together and we make them all mean the same thing. I'm convicted about this sin. I've confessed this sin to God. I'm repenting of this sin. And I think sometimes we equivocate those things and make them mean the same thing, but they are all a part of the same ongoing process of repentance, but they are very different things. So conviction is feeling badly about your sin. Confession is agreeing with God that what it is is sin, and repentance is to actually do something about that sin. Conviction is that prick from the Holy Spirit that we get. Hey, that doesn't belong in your life. Hey, God doesn't want you doing that. Hey, It's really unbecoming to talk to people in that way. Maybe you should think about doing something about this anger issue. Maybe the way you treat your wife, maybe the way you take your husband for granted, maybe that's not holy. Maybe this pattern or practice or habit in your life is not something that pleases God. That's the prick of the Holy Spirit. That's the beginning of conviction. That's where repentance starts. But then from conviction, we're called to confession, where we confess our sin before God, which basically means to agree with God that it is sin, to agree with God that the thing that we're doing that we now feel guilty about is actually sin and is something that doesn't belong in our life. That's confession. And the good news is that 1 John 1, 9 teaches us that if we confess our sins, that God is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So again, I'm not talking about repentance as we earn our salvation. Our salvation is secured. The process begins at that confession, and then we begin to move towards glory as God works to sanctify us, and we work in ongoing repentance. But the idea of repenting requires us to actually do something about it. To illustrate this, I'm going to share this thing about me, and I don't want to share it, all right? This is the very first example that I thought of when I thought of this sermon, and I needed a good example to illustrate this point. And I went to Jen, and I was like, here's what I got so far. I don't want to share it, but I can't think of anything better. And she's like, yeah, think of something better. But I couldn't. I couldn't. I snore like bad. I snore a lot. And I do want to tell you this because A, it's embarrassing, and B, some of you love me and you want me to not experience any displeasure in my life. And so you have advice for me. You have a device or you have an uncle or you have a husband and this worked for them and you're going to want to tell me about it. Okay, but I just, I'm not in a place in my life where I'm ready to receive that. So if you could just respect my privacy during this time, that would be great. But I snore. And when I snore, it makes it hard for Jen to sleep. And when it's hard for her to sleep, it's hard for me to sleep. And I feel bad about it. When we go on family trips, like my sleeping accommodations are sometimes annoying because I snore. And it's a real issue. And every now and again, we'll come to this place where she's like, you should really, like our life and marriage would be better if you would take care of this. And I say, you're right. I agree with you. I've been pricked by you, the Holy Spirit, of my conviction. I confess, I agree with you that it is wrong. It does not need to be a part of my life. And I am sorry that it has gone this far. And then what do I do? Nothing. I go to sleep and I snore. Do I get the devices? Do I like eat well and run and try to get in better shape so I don't snore as much? No, I don't do anything. I agree, I'm pierced with conviction. I confess and agree this is wrong, but I don't do anything. I don't actually take any steps. And listen, if your process ends with confession, then you're just sorry. If your process of conviction ends with confession, then you're just sorry. Do I mean that in the double entendre way of you're sorry that you did this and you're sorry as a human? Yeah, yes I do. I do mean that, let's be very clear. Because you're stopping short of repentance. You're stopping short of action. Sorries don't mean anything. Sorries mean I'm ready to start the path of repentance. Falling on our face before God, you're right, I'm convicted. This doesn't need to be in my life. Give me the courage to get rid of it. That's great. But that's the starting line, man. What are you going to do after that? What are you going to actually do about it? What actual steps are you going to take to make sure that this sin cannot exist and cannot grow in your life? And the other thing is, if we stop at sorry, eventually our hearts get seared. You can't sit in sorry year after year after year and still mean it. Once you sit in sorry long enough, and you who have had crippling and debilitating and ongoing sin throughout your life, you know that I'm telling you the truth. Once you say you're sorry enough times, you stop meaning it and you can't bring yourself to say it because you know that it's as empty as your intentions. And that thing that used to prick you is scarred over now. And that's seared. And we don't experience the conviction that the Holy Spirit has for us. Because we've learned how to mute his voice out of our life by stopping at sorry. When we stop at sorry, we just see our own consciences, and we short-circuit the repentance process. So we have to actually do something. And I work very hard to preach here that it is not human effort that God is looking for. It is the power of the Holy Spirit in us. It is not human effort. It is focusing our eyes on Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith. I preached a sermon in Colossians in February talking about if we want to put on the new self, what do we do? How do we overcome the old self? Will we focus on Christ? And all that is true, but when it comes to repentance, the rubber meets the road and you got to do stuff, man. So think of it this way. The Holy Spirit empowers, but we act. The Holy Spirit empowers us for repentance. Before you knew Jesus, repenting was impossible. The only thing you could possibly repent of was who you thought Jesus was and then move in faith and the Holy Spirit breathed life into you and now it's possible to repent of all the other things in your life. That's what Romans is talking about when it says that we are no longer a slave to sin. Now we have the option to repent. So the Holy Spirit empowers us to repent, but it is us that must take the action. It is us that must produce the activity of repentance. If that's true, then what does it mean to repent? What does it mean to actually repent of a sin? And this is the part, honestly, that I'm most excited to talk to you about. So if you've tuned me out because my word salads have just gotten confusing up until this point, then pay attention now because this is important. How do we actually repent? By taking steps to make it as darn near impossible as we possibly can to not allow that sin to on-go in our life. How do we repent? By taking actual action steps to remove temptation and distraction from our life that will cause us to commit that sin again. Not just white-knuckle discipline of, I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to do that, but to figure out why you do that, to figure out when you do that, to figure out what triggers you to do that, and to remove those things strategically from your life. If your issue is looking at things on your phone that you shouldn't look at, saying another prayer and saying another I'm sorry and doubling down on how much you mean it isn't going to do anything, and you and I both know it. So invite some accountability into your life. Have a scary conversation with someone who will meet you with grace, I promise. Take action steps to reduce your screen time on that phone. Let someone else put a passcode on your phone so you can't get to the apps that tempt you. Do whatever it is you have to do, but take the steps so that that can't tempt you anymore. If you struggle with anger or anxiety to a point where it cripples you and it begins to be harmful to the people around you, if you struggle with those things, go to counseling. Don't just pray, God, please make me a happier person. Make me a more patient person. Please don't let me be angry. God's gonna answer your prayer by going, great, here's a wonderful counselor to help you figure out why you're angry all the time. Go to counseling. If your marriage is rocky, yeah, start praying with your husband or your wife. But also pray that God would find you a good marriage counselor so that you can work those things out. If we want to move away from a bad marriage, we have to move towards a good one. If we want to move away from anger, we have to move towards peace. Take the steps that are necessary to get that sin out of your life once and for all. If it's an addiction that hounds you, shed some light on the dark corners of your life. Tell people about your addiction. Ask them for their help. Get the things out of the house that you're addicted to and refuse to bring them back into the house until you know you can handle them responsibly. Take the steps that you need to take to move away from the sin that is in your life that is entangling you and causing you not to live the life that God wants for you, not to be the person that God created you to be and is experiencing this stunted Christian life here that God does not want for you because we keep the sin in our life. Get rid of it, man. Take the steps. Do what it takes. Don't just be sorry. I don't care if you're sorry. And sometimes, eventually, according to Isaiah chapter 1, God doesn't care if you're sorry either. Do something. Let's take some steps and move away from the sin that hounds us. When we do this, when we repent, if it's true that sin pushes us further away from God, then when we repent, we are choosing a pursuit of his presence. We are choosing to be obedient to what Peter writes as he reiterates Leviticus, be holy as God is holy. We are choosing to pursue holiness and we are pursuing the very presence of God. To repent is to move away from sin and to pursue the presence of God. And my Bible in Psalm 16 tells me that in God's presence, there are pleasures forevermore. the full so that when I pursue the things of Jesus and when I pursue holiness and when I move away from the things that have been dragging me down for years, that I'm actually going to begin to experience the life that God always wanted for me. The rewards of repentance are intuitive. What would it be like to finally walk without guilt for that thing? What would it be like to finally be the person that everybody else around you thinks you are but that you know you're not? What would it be like to finally live a life free of this sin? That's the reward of repentance. The reward of repentance is the presence of God. And here's the thing that dawned on me this week. Repentance affords us the opportunity to begin to experience the fruits of our salvation here and now. Here's what I mean. Salvation is a process. Salvation is not completed until we are glorified in heaven forever. You are secured. I'm not preaching against that, but the salvation process goes on throughout the rest of your life. And in heaven, one day you will be glorified in your new body and you will experience the presence of God. And if we repent, and if that repentance takes us closer to the presence of God, then you have a very real opportunity to begin to bring heaven down into this place to experience flashes and moments of what heaven will be like here in this place when we walk in the goodness and the gifts that God gives us. When I sit with my family and we're all smiling and we're all happy and Jen and I can't believe the blessings that we are experiencing on this sunny day on the floor of our living room, I've got to believe that that's just a taste of what heaven is like. And when we repent and we move into God's presence and into the good things that he gives us in our life and away from the things that would seek to thwart these good things in our life, I have to believe that we are experiencing the presence of God and the pleasure of God and just a small fraction of the eternity that awaits us when our salvation is complete. So when we repent, it affords us the opportunity to begin to experience some of the fruits of our final salvation here and now. I want you to see desperately because it can be a scary thing to repent. If I take the steps I need to take to be serious about this thing in my life, I'm going to be ashamed. Some people are going to think differently than me. I'm going to give up some freedom that I don't want to give up. I'm going to have some accountability that I don't really want to have. And so there's some things about repentance initially that could bum us out. But I've experienced this in my own life and I know that it's true. Greater joy awaits us on the other side of genuine repentance. I don't know what else to tell you, man. On the other side of genuine repentance is a joy that's so much greater than whatever it is that's dragging you down. So I pray that grace will be full of people of repentance. Will be full of people that the Holy Spirit convicts. That we move to a place where we say, yes, this stuff does not belong in my life. Will be full of people who confess and say, yes, God, you're right, I'm sorry. But full of people who don't stop at sorry, but allow the Holy Spirit to empower you to actually move away from things. My prayer as I got up to preach was that God would soften even the hardest of hearts, and that those of us who have soft hearts, that God would cradle those two and usher them into a gentle repentance. Because there is so much greater joy found walking away from sin and towards our God. Maybe that's why we're taught in Romans that it's God's kindness that leads us to repentance. Because he knows what waits for us there. Let's pray. Father, Father, I pray that we would be people of repentance. Give us eyes to see the things in our life that don't belong there. Give us ears to hear your spirit as he convicts us. Give us tenderness in our heart as we confess. And God, empower us through your spirit to move towards you, to leave behind the things that drag us down and to move towards you who gives us life. God, give us the courage, the conviction, the desire to repent, to name the things or the thing that doesn't need to be in our life right now and offer it up to you. And ask you for the power to move away from it and give us the courage to take the steps that you lay out before us. That we would not be people who simply stop at sorry. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now now, be still, and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. I'm reading from Matthew chapter 4, verses 1 through 4. Then Jesus was led by is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. We are starting our new series this morning called Lent, A Holy Pause, and I have been very excited for this Sunday and for this series. Excited since about this time last year. So excited that this week on Tuesday, Jen and Lily and I fly to Disney World to spend a few days down there. We're very excited about that. And some folks in the church know that that's what we're doing. And so this morning I've gotten a lot of like, are you excited? And I'm like, yeah, I'm so excited. And they're like, yeah, Disney World is going to be great. I'm like, oh, I'm talking about today. Like, I'm excited for this series. I'm excited to launch this out today. And I don't know how you guys work, but when I have something that's big on the horizon, it's kind of all I think about and focus on. And then I get on the other side and the dust clears and I'm like, okay, now what's next? So this afternoon, I'll be excited about Disney. But right now, I'm excited about this series. And I would tell you that this series really started, the idea of it started last year at Lent. Last year at Lent in a staff meeting as the Sunday before Ash Wednesday was approaching, which is the beginning of Lent, we said in a staff meeting, hey, we should observe Lent this year. We should try to like, let's challenge the church to fast and do that this year. And I thought, oh, that sounds like a good idea. That's something that we haven't done at least since I've been here. So that's a good idea. Let's do that. And they're like, well, it needs to happen quick. So Nate, let's make a video. I'm like, all right. So we made plans for me to show up the next day and do a video that we were going to email out and challenge the church to fast because like Wednesday was the next day and we had to start. And I showed up that day and when on video days, I shower and I do my hair and I shave. So I have to look good for them. On non-video or meeting days, I just wear sweats and like a hat, you know, like it's very professional over there on a random Tuesday. And so I showed up not dressed for a video. And at the time, our worship pastor, Steve, was like, what are you doing? And I said, we're not doing a video today. He said, okay, why? And I was like, I don't want to do this half measured. I don't want to do it quick. If we're going to observe Lent as a church, I want us to mean it. And so we started thinking through how we wanted to approach this series. And so what I get to share with you this morning, and I guess this is why I'm so excited to do it, is really the result of a year's worth of reflection and prayer and learning and discussion. And I feel like I get to kind of introduce that and share that with you this morning. I would say this too about what I'm going to share with you this morning. This morning really technically is not a sermon, okay? In a sermon, I think you open up the Bible, you read it, you talk about what it says. The point of a sermon is for us to open up Scripture and let it speak to us. And so this morning, I don't have any verses. I will refer back to the ones that Carter just read for us, but this is really more of a message from me to my church. And I'm thinking of it as we approach the series almost like an epilogue to set it up so that we understand what it is that we're doing and why we're observing Lent in this way and what our hopes are for it as we move through the series. You're probably also wondering why I have random things up here with me. This is a stack of Bibles. This makes coffee. This is the coolest thing that you'll ever see in your life. This is an ashtray boot lamp because of course it is. This lamp down here still works. This is a boot and then this is a horse and it's my favorite thing that I own. Incidentally, it's Jen's least favorite thing that I own. But I have these things in my office. And I have them in my office because they're from portions of my family. And they all mean something to me. This stack of Bibles I've referenced before, this is my papa's Bible. And this is my dad's Bible from the 70s. And this is my Bible from high school and college. And I have a preaching Bible. It's in my office right now. But these sit just above my computer screen every day. And every time I look at these Bibles, I'm reminded of the spiritual heritage that came before me. I'm reminded that part of my papa's story was that he was not a believer, was that his daughter, my mom, accepted Christ at the age of eight and drug her parents to church, and they became believers because of the ministry at that church to children. And my papa is a guy who was very imperfect, Typical 60s dude in the South. Racist, probably abusive, and all those things. But God reached him and changed him. So by the time I got to know him, he was one of the most gentle, charismatic spirits I have ever met, to know Don was to love him. But God got a hold of him as an adult and changed him. And then my dad grew up in a broken home. The only reason that my dad knew that he was really loved by a man in his life is because his granddad stepped into the void and loved him and made him feel loved and appreciated. This is my great-grandfather's. This belonged to the man that made my dad feel loved. And so, yeah, it's awesome because it's a lamp and an ashtray with a boot, for sure. I would have it if it didn't belong to him. But because it does and did, it makes it all the more special. And it's important to me to see these things. This is my mama's coffee maker. This is what she used to make coffee in growing up. And in the waning years of her life, I would go over every other Monday to her house. There were Mama Mondays. I had special mugs made. And we would just talk for an hour, hour and a half, two hours. And she, I've spoken about her before. You know, she was never out front, never outspoken, always just loving quietly, but lived a life of tremendous import and impact because of the way she quietly served God. And there are other things too. There's a lamp that my late father-in-law built for me, that if I went to the store looking for lamps, I would not choose this one, but he made it for me, so it's in my office, and it's the first thing I turn on every Sunday morning. I have something cross-stitched, an old gospel hymn about fathers and sons that my dad got from my mom when he became a dad for me, and he gave that to me with tears in his eyes when we had John. That's in my office. And I keep all of these things in my office because they remind me the shoulders that I stand on. That's in my office. And I keep all of these things in my office because they remind me the shoulders that I stand on. They remind me that I didn't just float into grace out of a vacuum, that I come from somewhere. And that a lot of the reason that I know scripture, a lot of the reason why I can prepare a sermon in the length of time that I prepare a sermon is not because I'm not studying scripture and learning new things, but it's because I've been learning scripture my whole life. Why have I been learning scripture my whole life? Well, because he got saved when he was an adult and he committed himself to it. And then his great grandfather loved him and kept him in church and he committed himself to it, and he taught me the Bible, and then I stayed locked in in high school and college and learned those things. I'm here because I stand on shoulders, and we all stand on shoulders. We have previous generations that poured into us, and we're better off for it. And we're foolish and ignorant and prideful if we can't acknowledge that some of the comforts and successes that we have in our life, the blessings that we have in our life, we have because we stand on shoulders. Because we are tethered to previous generations. And I bring this up because it's not just true of me personally and you personally, but it's true of church. Grace Raleigh stands on shoulders. We come from a rich, deep spiritual heritage that goes all the way back to millennia, to 33 AD. And you could argue even before that, that as a church in 2022, any church, we must acknowledge and recognize that there are relics all around us. There are family heirlooms all around us that remind us that we stand on shoulders too. And see, I think this is important for us as Grace Raleigh to think about because we're an independent church. We're non-denominational. And I think that there are great benefits to that in our congregation, in our partnership. We have Catholics and Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists and Christian Missionary Alliance and Pentecostals and Church of God and people who are very far from God and have absolutely no spiritual heritage whatsoever. And then this is it. And we're just all here in a melting pot of backgrounds. And it's really wonderful and diverse, and I think that that's a positive thing for us. It's also positive to me that no one who doesn't sit in our fellowship every week can tell us what to do. There's not some office in Rocky Mount that can dictate to us who we can hire and where we can go. There's no one who can tell us what we can and cannot believe who does not sit amongst us each week. And I think that is tremendously valuable and I'm happy about that. But I think that one of the potential downsides of being an independent church is that we can sometimes float along week to week, month to month, year to year, untethered to the traditions that came before us and forgetful of the shoulders that we stand on. Neglectful of the traditions and the heritage and the writing and the theology and the hymns and the blessings and the liturgies and the prayers that served the church for generations before Grace Raleigh ever showed up, for millennia before we ever showed up. And that when we do this, we make a great mistake to just rely on our wisdom and our new things and our fresh perspectives without relying on the wisdom that has been passed down to us through the centuries by forgetting the shoulders that we stand on and never reaching back to look at where we came from and consider how to implement and acknowledge that in our worship. And churches actually commit this sin a lot. I've seen plenty of times over my life and my church career, churches that make the mistake of throwing out the old in favor of the new. In church world, young families are the sweet spot, man. That's what you want. If your church is growing in young families, then your church is growing. If your church isn't growing in young families, then it is slowly dying. That's just how it goes. And so what churches do to reach young families and to feel vibrant and to feel like they're growing is they tailor things to the sensibilities of young families. They tailor the worship to what the younger generation wants. The sermons are about topics that apply to the younger generation. The sanctuary is set up in a way that will apply, that will appeal to the newest generation. And sometimes in all of that change and in the forgetting of the old, a brave, a brave older person from a previous generation will raise their hand and say, can we just maybe like do a hymn? Can we, can we decorate in this way? Can we put this up? Can we, I would love to hear sermons out of this. I would love to hear sermons about this. Do we have to, every year, do we have to do a parenting sermon? Like I'm done with that season of my life, right? And so usually I've seen that older generation will be met with something to the effect of, it's not about you anymore. It's about reaching them. So tithe, pray, lead, but also pipe down. Because we're not here for you. We're reaching young generations and that's what you need to be excited about. And I've seen it happen over and over again. And I think it's a great sin of the church. I think it's incredibly foolish for a young pastor, for young leadership to take a church and to set the older generation off to the side and say, we need your finances, we need your support, but we really don't value your wisdom and we definitely don't value your preferences. So if you could just kind of pipe down, we're going to move on. And we end up sacrificing the wisdom of the old on the enthusiasm of the new. And we forget about the generations that came before us. And it's just a constant, what's the next song? What's the cool way to do a sermon? What kind of stupid lights do we need to make it feel more awesome in here? And we just keep moving down the road of what's most relevant, and we forget about the generations that came before us. And God forbid that grace ever become a place where we don't value the wisdom of the generations who have preceded us. If you are of a generation that has preceded me, and you feel disregarded in this space, and you feel like we don't listen to to you or that you are not important to us, I hope that you will please tell me that. Because the last thing I want to do is get involved in that pattern of sacrificing the wisdom of the old in sake of reaching the new. Because here's the other thing. If you listen to the generations that came before you, you're going to reach anybody with a heart. You're going to reach anybody that Jesus is trying to reach. You'll be more effective in ministry than if you just cater a dog and pony show to the sensibilities that are the freshest and the newest. So my hope here at Grace is that we would not do that. The way that I phrased that this morning is let not the enthusiasm for the new cause us to forget the wisdom of the old. And I think in the way that we form a service, in the way that we worship, in the way that we approach even designing a Sunday morning, that we have done that. I'm guilty of that. And I realized that slowly over the course of the year. That for centuries, there were whole liturgies and some of you come from backgrounds with more liturgical services where you stand and you read. If the word of God is being read, then you stand and you read it together where the service will end with a prayer or a benediction, or there'll be a portion of the catechism that's read at different parts. And it ties us back to the shoulders that we stand on in the generations that came before us. And there's good, rich, deep wisdom that we find there. And we haven't really incorporated that in what we do. And in doing so, we've just kind of floated along untethered to the generations that came before us, which is really a shame because in grace, as I enumerated a little while ago, we have so many different rich traditions that have so much to offer in our space and in our worship that we simply disregard for the way that we are comfortable, for the way that we've always done it, or for whatever my sensibilities might be as we construct a worship service. And we disregard the centuries of church history and the rich faith and tradition and hymns and prayers and blessings that they have left for us. And I believe that there's something beautiful in these traditions. And I want to be intentional as well as the staff and the elders as we move forward. I want to be more intentional about reaching back, about including those blessings. I want to get us to a place, I'm not going to do it this morning, okay? We're going to ease into this as a church together, but I want to get us to a place where we're willing and look forward to standing and reading something together, standing and reading scripture together, or a short blessing together, or something like that. I want it to be more a part of our worship because when we do that, it tethers us to the shoulders that we stand on and it reminds us that we are not independent, that we do not exist in a vacuum, that the blessing and that the things that we have now are because of where we come from and we ought to acknowledge that and we find a depth and a richness there that I believe will bless our souls. So because we desire to embrace and acknowledge our rich spiritual heritage, we are observing Lent. Because we want to tether ourselves to those who came before us, because we want to acknowledge that we sit on deep wells of wisdom, we are going to very intentionally observe Lent as a church. And we're going to do this for reasons that I'm going to talk about in a second, but also because of the way that it does tether us. Lent, how many of you, let me pause and just ask this, how many of you grew up in a tradition that observed Lent and you have regularly observed Lent in your life? Okay. That's not me. That's not me. Baptists don't think we need to observe anything except for baptisms and tithing. So we didn't observe Lent. And it's always been kind of mysterious for me. So even in the last year, I wanted to wrap my head around, okay, if we're going to observe this in a serious way, let me understand it a little bit. So for some of you, this will be a refresher. For some of you, it's new information. But when basically put or defined, Lent is a 40-day fast designed to focus our hearts on Jesus and prepare them for the miracle of Easter. That's what Lent is. It's a 40-day fast designed to focus our hearts on Jesus and to prepare them for the miracle of Easter. That's why this series is subtitled as A Holy Pause. Because especially now, as the world opens back up and our schedules begin to be filled up again, we're as busy as ever. We're going and we're going and we're going. And many of us, some of us have the luxury to get up and sip a coffee and sit down and have a nice, easy morning. But most of us are shot out of our bed like a cannon because we have things that are screaming for our attention. And we just, we go and we go and we go, and then we fall down exhausted at the end of the day. And then we get up and we go and we go and we go. And we're busy and we're busy and we're busy. And it's good for us as humans because we were designed to do it, to just stop and pause and breathe and reflect. Similarly, as a church, we can get harried and hurried, so focused on the pandemic and should we or should we not wear masks and what are the decisions that we need to make about that and we've got a worship pastor to hire and what are we going to do this ministry and that ministry? And we're planning this thing and we're moving and we're doing this. And we've got this objective coming up and how our finance is doing. And have we found a building yet? And there's all kinds of things that consume those who are in church during the week. And it's as good for us as well as a church to just stop and pause and focus our hearts on Christ and ask the Spirit to move in our individual and collective hearts as we prepare for Easter. So a big part of this series is inviting you into a space where we just pause and we worship and we listen and we pray and we fast. And it tethers us to these previous generations because Lent first shows up at about 300 AD. It's the first time it was written about by the church fathers and intentionally followed. No doubt it was happening before that as well. It just got actualized around 300 AD. And they chose a 40-day fast because they wanted to model it after Jesus' 40-day fast in the desert before he began his earthly ministry. That's why we had Carter read that particular passage, because the 40-day fast from Lent is modeled after Jesus's 40-day fast, which incidentally, for those of you that care about these kinds of things, the number 40 is incredibly significant in Scripture. I learned, somebody even texted me yesterday, and I did not know this, three separate times in Moses's life, he fasted for 40 days, either in preparation to something or in response to something. We know that the flood, the rains lasted for 40 days and 40 nights. We know that the Jews wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. We know all of these things. And then Jesus fasted for 40 days as he was tempted in the wilderness. So I can't pretend to know what 40 means. I just know it's a significant biblical number. And so when the early church saints chose a length of the fast, they chose 40 days. They realized that it's pretty untenable to fast for 40 days for most mortals. So they started making these weird rules. You can eat fish on this day and Friday, like have a goat if you want. I don't know all the different meat rules, but there's different ones, right? And then they said, you know, we need to, we can't do this all the time. This is getting old. We need to be able to take a break. We need to be able to break fast. So first, some traditions picked two days, and it made Lent last eight weeks. And they're like, that's too long. Let's do it shorter than that. So let's just take one day and make it last six weeks. So Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is this Wednesday, March the 2nd, and it ends on Easter. And technically, you're allowed to break your fast, whatever you're fasting from, on Sundays. Although some church fathers say, essentially, suck it up. All right, don't do that. That's cheating. But that's up to you to decide, depending on what it is you give up, if anything. But that's why it's a 40-day fast that lasts six weeks, if you're trying to do the math in your head. You get to take Sundays off. But that's what we're going to do as a church. And everyone's going to be invited as we do this. Everyone's going to be invited and challenged to fast from something. And I'm not going to talk about fasting too much because the whole sermon is about fasting next week. So I'll simply say this, that the purpose of a fast is to abstain from something in your life that you use and desire regularly so that when you are abstaining from it and something is triggered and you know that, oh, I wish I could have that thing, you take your desire for that thing and you turn it to Christ. It's a pause where you stop and you go, let me take this desire and turn that desire to my Savior and ask the Holy Spirit to speak to me and work with me during this season. It is an intentional foregoing of something. And if we fast and we just grit our teeth and bear through it and we just think about how much we want food and just don't eat food and we get to the end of the day and be like, eh, I won, that's not really the point. The point is to take the desire of food and let it turn your eyes on Jesus. That's the point, okay? But it doesn't have to be food. It could be wine or bourbon or social media or TV or screens or whatever it is. But I would invite you to consider fasting from something. I would also invite you, if you didn't already, to grab the devotional booklet that we have out in the lobby. I'm really excited about those because we began to ask people to write on certain topics back in the fall, and we have compiled them, and they're available to you for free. Carly over here has done them at great effort and really, really put in a lot of time, worked a lot of overtime to get those things done. The people at the printers know her by name. And we are very grateful to her, and we're grateful to those who wrote. But it begins, you can grab one now. The intention is to begin it this Wednesday, and then there's a devotion every weekday all the way up to Easter. And the way that the series works is each week there's a topic. This upcoming week is fasting. And so every week as we look at the topic that's associated with Lent, we're asking the question, how does this point me to Jesus? How does fasting point me to Jesus? The next week is stillness. So we say, how does stillness point me to Christ? How does forgiveness, how does generosity, how does sin and forgiveness point me to Jesus? And so that's the question we'll come back and answer every week. And so the devotionals are written so that you'll read about that topic as we prepare our hearts for that Sunday. And what I really love is it's over 30 different folks from the church who have written these things. So it's not just my voice. It's not just the staff's voice. But it's the collective voice of the collective wisdom of the church that gets to speak into everybody every day. So I hope that you'll take one of those devotionals and that you'll follow through with it as we move through the season. And I would really invite you to take the next two days and prayerfully consider whether or not you want to do this. Ecclesiastes tells us that it's better to not even make a vow to God in the first place than to make one and then break it. So I would encourage you, don't walk out of a service with an incredibly compelling message and decide, yeah, I'm definitely going to do this thing, and then get into week two and peter out and nothing ever happens. But prayerfully consider if this is something you want to commit yourself to. Prayerfully consider if it is what you might fast from. And then share that with somebody. Maybe it's the person who knows your next step of obedience. And prayerfully consider reading the devotion every day and partaking in the same wisdom that the rest of the church partners are taking in that day. And let's be mutually encouraged by that. I would challenge you to consider participating in Lent this year for those reasons. And I will also say this. For this series in particular, and I honestly hope that this happens more and more, but for this series in particular, I would love it if we could decentralize the sermon. In church life, as you kind of go through the rhythms of church, the sermon is really kind of the main attraction of the Sunday morning. It's kind of the worship can be really good and the sermon's really bad and we'll say it was okay. But really, it's kind of sometimes all about the sermon. And I don't love that at all. I never do. I think that gives these words too much weight. And frankly, it gives me too much weight. I've got plenty, as it is. We need to decentralize the sermon and not look to it to encourage us spiritually as much as all the other elements around us. So for this series in particular, I hope and I pray and have been fervently praying that Jesus moves in your heart, that he does something in your heart, that this is a time of spiritual renewal for us as individuals and for us as a church, and that it happens by simply slowing down and pausing and inviting Jesus into our life and into our thoughts and into our habits for this six-week period leading into Easter so that when we get to Easter, it might be one of the more worshipful, holy, wonderful Easters that we've ever experienced. And I'm talking about sermons in this context because let's let our daily devotional move the needle on our spiritual health. Let's look to that to inspire and enliven us. Let's come expectant of good worship, which it really was this morning as we sung full-throated and mostly maskless. It was really a great and joyful sound in here. But let's come expectant, expecting to be moved by worship. Let's expect God to move in the daily habit of having our devotion. Let's expect God to move in the uncomfortable discipline of fasting, and let's allow the sermon to simply be a supplement to those things, but not the thing that moves us. Let's let God's Spirit move in us through all the other myriad ways that he is trying to speak to us and get our attention as we move through this series together. And let us as a church invite Jesus to speak to us as we turn our attention to him daily. Let us consider how he might move us, how he might grow us, how he might call us back to him. And let us expect that as we move through this season as a church that it will be a profound time of spiritual renewal and restoration for us. And let's look forward to moving out of this season and celebrating a wonderful and holy Easter together as we give God the next six weeks to prepare our hearts for that. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to sing a song, and then as an added element at the end, we're going to have the chair of our board, Brad Gwynn, he's going to come up and share a closing prayer for us as we go into the Lenten season. So let me pray. Father, you are good to us. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for loving grace. Thank you for blessing this place. Lord, we turn our hearts to you collectively and expectantly, eagerly asking you to speak, eagerly asking you to move, eagerly asking you to heal what is broken and what is hurt. Inspire us, God, to serve you, to love you, to be moved by you, to hear from you. God, I just pray that these next six weeks as a church, seven weeks as a church, are just some of the most special in memory. Not because of what's said or what's done, but just simply because of how you move. We invite you into this space to do that, to draw us near to you. We invite you into our hearts to draw us near to you. And God, I just ask that you would do amazing, unexpected things in our hearts and in our lives as we observe Lent like so many of your faithful bodies and churches that came before us. It's in your son's name we pray all these things. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. That was great, Kirk and the band. It was really good. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. So if I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. And sincerely, thank you for being here on this cold holiday weekend. It's really great to look out and see faces, ones I hope will be smiling and not yawning here shortly. If you're wondering why is Nate limping around and on a stool, well, to much of your glee, I have gout again. So I know the worst part of gout, which is very painful, is not the pain. I can limp around for a couple of days and really not fuss about it very much. It's you. It's the jackals here, the hyenas that circle my pain-ridden corpse as I have to admit things like this. But that's what's going on. And I'm only telling you now because I'm referring to him as Uncle G. Uncle G's come for a visit. He's going to show up later in the story this morning. So it's important that you have this preface right now. We are in the fourth part of our series in Colossians, where we've moved through the book of Colossians together. And admittedly, it's portions of the book of Colossians. We've not moved through the whole thing. We've just kind of moved through and selected the things that seem to me most relevant to grace. And I've really enjoyed being able to do this in ways that were unexpected. I've really enjoyed this series. And so what we've been through so far is to look at this church in Colossae and acknowledge that they were a church that existed with some pressure. They were doing a good job. They were loving God well. They loved one another well. And in that way, I felt like they were similar to grace, but they're also similar to grace in the pressures that they were facing from within and from without. In the culture in which they sat, there were pressures for them to skew legalistic in their practices and in their theology. And then there was pressures for them to skew liberal in their practices and in their theology. So Paul's goal is to write them and encourage them to stay true to the true faith. And so how does he do that? Well, he does that in the opening chapter and for us week one by painting a soaring picture of Christ and who he is and focusing us on him. And then he lets us know that we are actually our brother's keeper, that the spiritual health of the people around us who we love and care about is your responsibility as one of God's children. And so we carry that together to try to bring everyone to spiritual maturity. And then last week, we talked about this idea of living as a new creation, as focusing on Christ, daily letting His love and His grace and His mercy and His compassion wash over us and so put to death in us the things that would have us behave as our old self or the bad, less healthy versions of ourself. And so this week he finishes up the letter with what's commonly referred to as the household codes. And they show up a couple different places in Pauline epistles or in Paul's writing. Okay. And so we're going to be looking at those this morning and I'm going to start start to read the passage. And immediately you're going to think to yourself, oh boy, this is a sticky one for 2022. What's he going to do? I'll tell you. But let's read together and then we will look at the meaning of the passage together. I'm picking it up in Colossians chapter 3 verse verse 18, and I'll read through the very beginning of Colossians chapter 4. Read with me, if you will. Paul writes this, For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality. Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven. All right, there's a lot there and a lot of dynamics covered there. The dynamic covered between husband and wife, between father and children, and then between master and slave. And some versions have the word bond servant put there. And really that's an attempt of the editors of that particular translation to soften the original text and say, no, no, no, it didn't mean slave, it meant bond servant. And that's intellectually, okay? So as believers, we should encounter what it says in Scripture and deal with it with honesty without trying to artificially soften it. So the word there is slave, which is problematic, and we're going to refer to that in a second. But as we read this passage, and as you hear it, my anticipation is that you would expect me now to break that down. What does it mean? Wives, submit to your husbands. What you going to do, sucker? That one's pretty sticky, right? In 2022. And then we read the rest ones, and then there's the problematic things for Christians about provisions for masters and slaves and the whole deal. So what are we going to do with that? Well, the answer is we're not going to talk about that. All right. I'm going to talk about something else. Now, why am I going to talk about something else? Well, two reasons. The first one is the one that you're assuming right now, because I don't want to. I don't want to do that. That's too much work and too much effort and too much thought and too much parsing out all the words. And honestly, I don't think it's what Grace needs to hear most right now. So we're not going to camp out on gender roles in the home, okay? We're just not going to do that. Second, I think that there's a bigger theme here to these verses that is super important to us, that is very relevant to us, and that is worth camping out on. Before I just jump to that, though, I will say this to fight back just total cowardice on my part about the first verse, wives submit to your husbands, gender roles in the home, things like that. I will tell you two things, and only these two things, and I will not offer much explanation. If you want more, talk to me about it. Email me. I've never once turned down a lunch opportunity, especially if you're buying. I've never once done that. I always respond to emails. So if you want to talk more about this and these themes, I'm open for that. That's just not where I want to camp out this morning. But since we're there, I will say these two things. I will say it is my personal understanding and belief based on not just this scripture, but myriad passages, that in the structure of marriage, God has chosen to give men the tie-breaking vote. But it is also my belief based on other passages, particularly Ephesians 5, where men are told to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who laid himself down for it. That men are to sacrifice everything we have for the sake of our wives, and therefore, though we have the tie-breaking vote, it is our holy responsibility to use it as little as possible so that when it is used, it can be trusted. Okay. The other thing that I will say about that on kind of the opposite end of the spectrum is we cannot just pluck that verse, wives submit to your husbands, out of context and understand it at face value. We have to put it in the context in which it rests. And the context in which it rests is in the following verses, there's a lot more provisions about how slaves are to behave and how masters are to behave towards slave than there is about family codes. So if we're going to contextualize and culturalize the instructions about masters and slaves, then we can't just do it to one part of the passage. So the whole passage is best understood with the nuance of the culture going on around it and with some good academic study, not simply plucked out of context. We cannot understand verse 18 in a way that we would not use to understand the passages that follow. That's what I'll say about those two things, or about that thing, those two things. Now, to the bigger point. There is something going on in this text that I think applies to all of us right now and is a far more relevant sermon than just how do we parse out these particular things. And to get to that point, we do need to understand the cultural context in which these things rest. These are, again, household codes, where Paul is saying, in light of the gospel, in light of Jesus and who he is, in light of the provisions that I'm giving you, in light of putting on a new self and how do we live this Christian life, how are we to organize our lives? And what we need to understand is these codes that he gives out here in these verses, these instructions, and the ones that we find in other Pauline writings, like Ephesians, are given in a Roman context. These cities are Roman cities with a Roman heritage. And those cities and those cultures are incredibly patriarchal. They are man-centered. The man of the house, the father, the patriarch of the family, is a king of his little fiefdom. Now, they're little pathetic kingdoms. I mean, there's nothing to be proud of, but he is the king. The wife is the property. She is subservient to him. Everything is built around him. Everything focuses on him. Everything exists under his direction with no question and with no questioned authority. The wife is someone that is there for use or not use, for purpose or no purpose, and she can be cast aside just as quickly as she is added into the family. The marriage covenant is a marriage contract, and he can terminate it whenever he wants. She can terminate it never. Children are accessories to the marriage. They are future heirs. They are not little people. They do not have rights. The rights that they have exist under the authority of the father, and they have no more rights than he wants to give them. Slaves, likewise, have no rights. They exist under the rule of the man of the house. They exist under the rule of the master. They have no one to appeal to. They have no other authority. He literally is the king of his small kingdom. That's the way that the Roman culture and society was set up. As an aside, can you imagine the abuse and misogyny that went on in that culture, where a man is in charge with unquestioned authority of all of the people in his life. Thank God we have figured out how terrible of an idea that is. My heart breaks for the women and children that were in that culture. And all of that makes Paul's writings incredibly radical in the time that they were received. He says, husbands, treat your, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. More on top of that, in Ephesians, he says, love your wives as Christ loved the church, laying himself down for them, giving himself up for them, which is totally radical to the Roman view of wife as accessory. It's a completely different train of thought. I can't be harsh with them. I have to consider them. I have to be nice to them. I have to listen to them. Yes, man, it's called being a human. You have to do all those things. And then it says, do not provoke your children to anger, which is not something that a Roman father would ever consider. He doesn't care if he makes his kids angry. He doesn't care if they don't like him. He doesn't have to. They're just there as accessories to the marriage. And one day there'll be heirs. And one day maybe they can contribute to the wealth of the home. But right now I don't have to care about them, Which, having a nine-month-old, I understand that mentality sometimes. John likes to play a really fun game of, hey, I'm going to kind of cry all day, and you just figure out how to make me stop doing it. Fun. Let's go, buddy. But children were accessories to marriage. They had no rights. And then slaves, I don't need to explain to you how much they could be mistreated. We know the crimes over the centuries. And so for Paul to come in here and say, hey, masters of the house, you treat your slaves, paraphrase, treat them however you want, but God's watching you. And however you treat them is how he's going to treat you. However you judge them is how he's going to judge you. The mercy that you apply to them is the mercy that he will apply to you, which again is radically different than what's happening in the rest of Roman culture. So Paul is telling the church in Colossae, if you want to be believers in light of Jesus and the fact that he is now in your life, your family needs to look radically different than the families that are around you. And bigger than that, he's telling them this. He's telling them that right now, your family life, your life is centered on the man. It's centered on the father. It's centered on the husband. It's centered on the master. He needs to be decentralized, and Christ needs to become the central figure and tenant in your home around which everything revolves. And he's primarily addressing the man here because the rest of them are under no auspices that they are the focus of the home. They don't need to reorient how they expect others to treat them. They need to reorient where they put the father of the home and put Jesus in the center of that. So what's going on here is radically different than everything in the Roman home. And this is the larger theme, I believe, of the household codes that we find in Colossians and in Ephesians, which is to say this, that Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives around him. That's the point, I think, of this passage, the larger point that is more applicable and important for us to consider this morning, that when we become believers, Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives around him. So to these cultures, to these families that were entrenched in this patriarchic, unhealthy culture in ancient Rome, Paul says your life needs to look completely different. You need to completely reorient your family and household life around Jesus and not around the Father, not around the man. It's got to look radically different. And I actually, in those notes, I said Jesus invites us to radically reshape our lives. And I don't know why I did this. I intentionally softened it a little bit when I turned in the notes on Thursday. But in thinking about it over the weekend, it's not invites, it's insists. Jesus demands that we would radically reshape our lives around him. And it's so much so that I would say that our lives after Jesus need to look a lot different than our lives before Jesus. Our lives with Jesus as Lord of our lives by necessity will look a lot different than our lives without Jesus as the Lord of our lives. And if those two versions of ourselves and our lives and our priorities look pretty similar, there's probably a problem going on there. And the problem is this. I think we often attempt to fit Jesus into our lives rather than reshaping our lives around him. We often attempt to find ways to kind of shove Jesus into our life in this predetermined shape in a way that he will fit. And we're more interested in making Jesus fit into our life than we are about reshaping our life so that Jesus takes it over. There's kind of two illustrations I would use here. The first is pretty simple, but maybe it's the one we need this morning, so I'm just going to leave it in. But it's as if we become a Christian and when we become a Christian, Jesus is going to move into our house and he's going to now live with us. He's now a part of our life. And so a lot of us probably have a guest room. And when we realize that Jesus is going to be moving in with us, we're like, well, I got to update this thing. The thread count is too low for Jesus. So we go and we get the finest Egyptian, we get 800 or more thread count for Jesus is what he needs. And we get all the best things and we make sure that there's a good charger. We don't give him the one that's chewed on or frayed. We give him the nice charger for the nightstand. And we buy, maybe we buy a new small TV and we put it over there and we hook it up to an Apple TV and the whole thing and we go ahead and we cover his Apple TV subscription because it's Jesus and he probably wants to watch Ted Lasso. And so we kind of set up everything for him, right? And we're ready. And then Jesus moves in. And he says, look at this guy, this is a nice guest room. And we're like, well, yeah, I mean, you're moving in. So we wanted to make sure it was up to your standards. And he's like, well, no, I mean, I'm taking the master. That's your room. I think some of us just prepare a nice guest room for Jesus, and then everything else stays the same. Another way to think about this, that I actually wanted to do a visual aid illustration of, and so I need to beg your forgiveness and your imagination, because I'm going to invite you to imagine this illustration with me, since I'm not able to do it. And here's why I'm asking you for your forgiveness. I was not able to do it because I had to go get some materials and prepare it, and I had a couple afternoons where I probably could have, and I just didn't. I'll do it this weekend. And then over the weekend, you know, we had a kid get sick, and some unexpected things happened, and my old buddy Uncle G came to visit, and it's not really a time to be walking around stores, and I just didn't have time to do the things that I needed to do. So I failed you as a pastor. I did not budget my time wisely, and I sit up here illustrationless. So if you'll accept that tepid apology, then I will invite you to use your imagination, because here's what I wanted to do, okay? Here's what I wanted to do. I wanted to go get like a big block of like modeling foam, if that's even a thing that exists, and get a square one, and then have a board with a big hole cut out of it, and say the foam block represents Jesus, and the board with the hole in it represents us. That's our life. And what happens is we take Jesus, the square, and we try to fit it into the circle, and it doesn't work out. And so we're faced with a choice. I can reshape Jesus according to who I think he ought to be and to what my life already is and just kind of shove it in there and make it work, or I can change my life. And what most of us do, all of us in different ways, choose to do is we choose to reshape Christ according to who we already are and just assume that he probably is too. And we remake Christ in our image and then we make him fit the life that we've already chosen to live. And there's a bunch of examples of how we do this. I'm just going to give you a couple this morning. When I was thinking about how is it that we do this, what are practical ways that we kind of reshape Jesus in our own image to make him fit into our existing life, the very first thing that occurred to me, as touchy as it is, is politics. I know people on both sides of the political spectrum, Democrats and Republicans, and everything in the middle. I don't know if libertarians in the middle or if it's like over here on the other side of Republicans. I don't know where that belongs, but all of the parties. I have known people who just assume that because this is my political affiliation, certainly Jesus agrees with me. Certainly because this is the most important moral value for me, it's also the most important moral value for Jesus. And sure, my party doesn't champion some of the causes the way that it talks about in Scripture, but we cover the important ones the exact same way that Jesus wants to. And so I know that my political party is the right political party. And further, the other political party, those people are not even Christians. They think they are. They're stupid. And if they went to my church, my pastor would tell them. No, I would not. I would not. I'd tell them in person, but not corporately like this. And it's funny to chuckle at, but what's really disappointing to me, and I've seen it more and more, if we don't think that this is true, is the fact that I have seen a lot more Christians change their faith than change their politics. I have seen a lot more Christians who are, they are clinging to their political party, they are clinging to their social justice paradigm, to the way that they think about cultural issues and the way that they think about political issues and then be met with places where it seems to clash with their faith and one of them has to give way way, and it's not their politics. It's not their faith, rather. They choose their politics. I've seen a lot more Christians adjust their view of who they think Jesus is according to what their certain politics should be. And I've seen very few believers, just being honest, I've seen very few believers who change their politics in light of the Jesus that they learn about. And I think that that's a big problem. Another way we do this is with our time, right? We become Christians and we see that Jesus makes certain demands of our time. Jesus says, I'd like to meet with you every morning. I'd like to meet with you every day. I'd like to meet with you in prayer. I'd like you to study me. I'd like you to get to know me. I'd like to spend some time with you. And our response is, listen, Jesus, I do too. I want to spend time with you. You seem great. But I'm sleepy, okay? So I'm not going to set that alarm. Jesus, listen, I want to spend time with you too. But it's the playoffs, all right? So I'm going to be up late. Jesus, I know that I need to prioritize church. I get it, and I'm going to. But it's football season, and I'm going to be tailgating. You know what happens at tailgates. So I'll see you during basketball season, Jesus. And he says, hey, I'd like to spend this time with you. I'd like to do these things. I'd like you to reprioritize your life. And we're like, I will, but not right now because there's other things that I'm doing. I'd love for you to connect with people in small group who can encourage you and push you towards me. Jesus, I'm gonna, but right now I'm just kind of tired. And so even though we know that he places certain demands on our time, we just decide we can't give those right now. Sometimes we reshape Jesus by hanging on to just blatant sin in our life and just excusing it away and being like, listen, I need a Jesus who accepts me as I am. I just need someone who just takes me in as I am. And listen, Jesus does love you as you are. But he also tells the adulterous woman, after he loves her as she is, to go and sin no more. He balances grace and truth. But some of us just hang on to sins that we have in our life, figuring it's not that big of a deal, and Jesus couldn't possibly mind. Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm drinking too much. I know I'm drinking. It's not healthy. I'm starting to hide it from people. This is not very good. But Jesus has bigger fish to fry, so I'm just going to hold on to this one. Yeah, maybe I regularly look at stuff I don't need to look at, but it's better than actually cheating. So I'll just hold on to this one for a little while. Maybe, and this one's personal, maybe I drive like a jerk. Maybe it's possible that I bought a nondescript Honda Accord that does not have the church sticker on the back of it so that I can continue to drive however I want and not make anyone think poorly of the church that I lead. Maybe I sometimes can drive in such a way that the pastor of a church ought not drive, but certainly Jesus has bigger fish to fry than that. And so I just hang on to it like a dummy, like it's okay to just weave through traffic with my six-year-old in the car. He says, Daddy, you drive fast. Like, yeah, no, I like driving fast. But we have these things that we just allow in our life as if Jesus doesn't call us to repentance. And I know that last week we talked about let's just focus on Christ and that will kill the nature in us that wants to sin. And that's very true. But on the same hand, we are called to repentance, to walk away from the sin that Jesus shows us in our life. And so very often we handle it casually and we just allow it in our life as we just move on. And Jesus says it has no place there. And we're like, well, this has a place in my life or you don't. So come on and make some space for it. Another easy example I think of is our sexual standards. Scripture's, I think, pretty clear. Sexual activity outside the bonds of marriage is classified by Scripture as sexual immorality. And Scripture teaches against sexual immorality. But we go, yeah, I mean, I got loud and clear. Makes total sense. Jesus, I get it. But it's 2022. Come on. We don't really still mean that, do we. And for each one of these examples, as we talk about shaping Jesus to fit our politics, just trim off a corner of the block and to fit our standards on sexuality and trim off a corner of the block, and to fit into our schedule, and for his goals to fit in with our goals, and for his priorities with my life to fit in with my priorities of my life, and just trim off portions of Christ until he became a rounded circle that was able to fit into our pre-existing life. And I think that this is what so many of us, including me, do to Christ. As we look at the rough edges, we look at the things that don't fit into how we've already organized our life and our priorities, and we say, certainly you don't mean that, and certainly you understand it can't fit. And so we change our Jesus rather than changing ourselves. When what we need to do, and I was gonna have another fresh square and another fresh board with a square hole in it, is not change who Jesus is, but fundamentally change who we are. Fundamentally reshape our lives for the standards of Christ. Not clinging to the things that we used to cling to, not prioritizing the things that we used to prioritize, but opening up our life to Jesus and saying, Jesus, what's in here that doesn't fit? Show me the parts of my life where I need to make space for you, but Lord, please don't let me insist that you reshape yourself for me to have the audacity to say, well, now I'm willing to include you in my life. And so that's the question I wanted to invite you to this morning. What is it that we have in our life that we refuse to reshape? What are the things that we are clinging to? Political thought? Sexual purity? Blatant sin in our life? Our time? Our goals? Our talents? What is it that we're claiming to where we're kind of keeping Jesus in the guest bedroom? We're kind of saying, you just stay over there. When you fit into my life, I'm gonna let you come in. When you don't, I'm gonna expect you to change. What are the places in our life where we're asking Jesus to change who he is instead of being willing to allow him to change who we are? That's what I'd like us to prayerfully consider as I close here in a second. Is to say, Jesus, where are you not fitting? And how can I change to accommodate you and quit insisting that you accommodate me? As I read through this radical reshaping of the Christian family in a Roman context, I can't help but think that the most important thing for us to draw out of this passage is our very human tendency to reshape Christ in our own image and our refusal to be reshaped in his. So this morning, let us open ourselves up in prayer to where we might need to reshape our lives around who we know Jesus to be. And let us further pray that as we pursue Jesus and know him more and learn more about him and he becomes more real to us, that different aspects of him are opened up to us that then demand that we make more space for him. And let us be generous and quick in making that space. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this morning. We thank you, God, for grace, for all that you're doing here, for what I think is a palpable sense of enthusiasm and energy as we move forward and maybe, maybe finally begin to think about what a post-pandemic world looks like and what grace might look like in that world. God, thank you for Colossians and all the truth that's found in it. I pray that we would be people who are focused on you, who radically reprioritize our life around you, God. We give you permission to reshape us in your image and we repent of trying to reshape you into ours. Give us courage and honesty and integrity this week as we examine our lives and ask where we need to make space for you. And God, when we do that, I pray that we would be met with your grace and with your peace and with your joy. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.

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