Sermons tagged with Christ

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm making grace a part of your Sunday morning. If you're watching online, wherever you are, whatever you may be doing, thank you for joining us in that way. We are beginning our new series, or we're continuing in our new series, called You'll Be Glad You Did. And the idea is to take the wisdom of Proverbs, proverbial wisdom, written by King Solomon, who the Bible claims is the wisest man who ever lived, and to look at some of his wisdom and say here at the top of the year, if we confront ourselves with it, if we listen to it, I bet, I bet that by the end of the year, you'll finish 2026 being glad that you listened to the wisdom of Solomon here at the top of the year. You guys will have to forgive me. We've got a small contingent of Bills fans in the church, and they're all sitting in the front row with, I even forget the name of those pants, but there's a particular, what's the name of those kinds of pants, do you know? Zubas, yes, that look like zebra stripes, and then Susie's got on the best fan shoes I've ever seen in my life, so I just need to say that out loud before I can continue as if there's nothing happening right in front of me. But we're looking at this proverbial wisdom, and one of the reasons I wanted to do it, and one of the reasons I wanted to spend a month looking at the wisdom of Proverbs is because one of the best things I've ever done is to take very seriously reading the book of Proverbs. You've heard me say, hopefully multiple times, that the greatest habit anyone in their life can develop is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in God's presence through prayer. And I still believe that to be true. And there was a season where for three years, every day, I read a Proverb dated as just read a chapter. It's a great place to start. And if you want to read your Bible and you don't know where to start, you don't know how, that's where I would encourage you to begin. If you are someone who reads your Bible, I will tell you that most days for three years, I read whatever proverb was commensurate with that date, that day, and then read whatever else from the Bible I wanted to read that day. And those were some of the richest three years of my life. I immensely enjoyed it and never got tired of reading those Proverbs. So that's a good place to start. And if you hear nothing else from me today of any value, but you leave here and you go read Proverbs every day for the next year, I promise you, you'll be glad you did. This morning, we're going to look, did you like that, Tom? This morning, we're going to look at a proverb about generosity. And I said this in the Gracevine this week. I send it out. And if you're here and you don't get the Gracevine, you don't know what that is, and you would like to receive it, just please fill out a connection card or email me, and we'll get you on that distribution list. But I said in the Grace Find this week that we were going to be talking about a proverb on generosity. And those of you who are my church friends and church people, you know that generosity is pastor code for give us some money. Generosity is code for I'm going to preach a sermon compelling you to give to the church because we need to get some stuff done. And I want to ally that fear this week. Maybe that's why it seems a little bit more thin this week than last week is because I sent that email out. Those of you who have been here for a long time can attest to this. I've never preached a sermon trying to get you to give to grace, nor do I think that the New Testament teaches that you need to give 10% to your local church. I don't even think the New Testament teaches you need to give 10%. I think it just is a good marker based on something that happened in Genesis with Melchizedek and Abraham that we'll talk about later. But I don't even think the New Testament teaches you that. So you'll never hear me preach a sermon trying to compel you to give to grace. So that's not what we're doing this morning. But what you will hear me do, hopefully, repeatedly, is preach sermons on generosity. And the sermon on generosity would make particular sense this morning as it relates to the strategies and desires of grace, because you guys are well aware, we just had a big push towards this building campaign, and we're're hitting go and we're going to try to be in there by the end of next year. So that's particularly relevant to our church. But that's not what I'm preaching about this morning. I can tell you that next week one of our elders, David McWilliams, who's faithfully operating the camera back there, is going to give us an update. We had end of the year giving. We have some very good, exciting news to share. He's going to give us an update. We just want another week to get all of our numbers together so that what we present to you will be the most accurate thing possible. We don't want to talk in what ifs and hypotheticals. We want to talk in precision. So David's going to do that next week. By the way, David has been serving with Jim Adams for a year now as elders, and we still have yet to bring them up here and pray over them because I'm not good at planning things like that. Also, just while we're here, Wes and Doug served for six years, and I was supposed to bring them up here and pray for them too. I've not done that yet either. So Wes, David, Doug, Jim, sorry. But as we think about generosity this morning, I think this proverb allows us to frame it up in a very robust, encompassing way so we can think about the idea of generosity from a more holistic view. So let's look at Proverbs chapter 11, verse 25, which simply says this, a generous person will prosper. Whoever refreshes others will be refreshed. I don't think that we think about generosity the way that Solomon frames it up here. First of all, he says, a generous person prospers. And we should be careful there because we're tempted to kind of fall into a health and wealth gospel that says, the more that I give, the more that will be given back to me monetarily. The more money I give away, the more God will bless my bank account. And that's really terrible teaching, and it ends up making poor people poorer. So that's not what we want to do. So we have to understand what prosper is. And we have to open ourselves up to maybe it means more than just prospering financially. And one of the ways that we prosper is what follows. He who refreshes people will be refreshed. The people who refresh others will be refreshed themselves. I think that opens us up to what prosperity there actually is. But I like this verse because it doesn't tell us how to be generous. It just tells us to be generous. And that the more you give to other people, the more you refresh others, the more you restore the souls of others, the more you look out for others, the more you care for others, the more your soul will be refreshed. And I think that's a really helpful and valuable way to think about generosity. And the truth of it is, God has always wanted his children to be characterized by generosity. God has always wanted his children to be characterized by generosity. All the way back at the beginning of the Bible, beginning in Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy, where the laws are meted out for the ancient Israelites, for the ancient Hebrew people. God is very diligent and fastidious about making sure that his children are generous people. He says, care for the widows and the orphans and the aliens and the sojourners, which means care for those who can't care for themselves. Care for the widows because they have no way to make money and no one's paying for them. They need your help. Care for the orphans because they have no way to take care of themselves. Take care of them. Take care of the sojourners, the aliens, the people who are foreign, who are coming to your country from other places. We should always have a heart for them and their plight. So take care of them. And God gets so specific as to give this law in multiple places in the books of Moses. When you harvest your fields, leave the corners there, healthy, ready to be picked. For who? For the widows and the orphans and the aliens and the sojourners. Leave that there so that they can wean from your crop. That ethic, that ethos is there from God at the very beginning of the Bible. And then we see again, Abraham meets the king of Salem, a mysterious figure, the most fascinating figure in the Bible to me, Melchizedek. And he, upon meeting him, gives Melchizedek 10% of everything that he has. And this 10% law becomes called the tithe, and it gets written into Jewish law, Hebrew law, which we inherit in the New Testament. And it was so extensive that they gave, those who were being as righteous as possible, would give 10% of everything that they owned. They would literally empty the pantry and give 10% of the cream of mushroom soup can that they had and give 10% of the spices. They would give 10% of everything. That's how important it was to God to write it into law to do in that way that his people would be generous. Then we get into the New Testament and we see Jesus teach generosity over and over and over again. And listen, almost every time it's taught, it's taught to be generous in order to care for the have-nots. It's almost always taught as don't tithe to be obedient, don't tithe to be blessed, but give what you have to give to take care of the people who don't have something to give. This is the story of the widow's mite, where the rich man gives a bunch and the widow gives all she has, and it's two pennies. And Jesus says she just gave more than he did to the kingdom of God. We cannot argue with the idea that our God has always wanted his children to be characterized by generosity. With that in mind, I would like for us to consider how we can be generous. We're going to swallow the frog and do the obvious one first. We can be generous with our finances. We can be generous with our finances. This is the obvious one, and this is where our brain goes when we think about generosity. And so I'd like to talk about this, but then spend the rest of our time on other ways to be generous. But I was listening to a book recently, and some of you guys like to judge people for listening and not reading, because you're stuck up. And it was by an author named Scott Galloway, who is, it's difficult to define what he does. He sits on boards, he runs companies, he's a professor of economics at NYU, and he's someone that I find interesting and thoughtful. And he wrote a book called Notes on Being a Man, and that's something I've thought about a lot is I've got a son named John who's four and a half. And I don't know why the half matters. He's four. I'm a grown up. And then I have a daughter named Lily who's going to turn 10 here in a week. And I think a lot about what is it that I want to teach to John that I don't want to teach to Lily? What is it that Jen, my wife, should teach to Lily that she doesn't teach to John? And I don't have a good answer for that. And I would invite this, if any of you have answers for that, I want that discourse. Particularly if you're a little bit longer in the tooth than me. Then I really want to hear that. If you're shorter in the tooth, maybe just relax. But he wrote a book, Thoughts on Being a Man, and I would, the only criticism I have, I'm not recommending it to you. There's cuss words, so as a pastor, I cannot recommend it. But the only critique I have is I really think it would better be titled Thoughts on Being a Human. Because the things that he was espousing in there didn't feel to me like things that only men should think about. I think women should think about these things too. And Scott is a devout atheist. He has respect for people of faith, but he's not a person of faith himself, and he's open about that. But in his book, and he's become, by any stretch of the world's measure, very successful, all right? He's in his mid-50s, really successful dude, flying on private jets when he goes places, that kind of thing, all right? But here's what he said, and this is what I thought was interesting that I wanted to share with you. He said when he started his career, it was all about accruing for himself. It was all about what he wanted to get. It was all about getting rich and getting more for himself and just build, build, build, build, build. But that one day, once he felt like he had enough, there was this seismic shift in his mindset. And he became a lot more interested in being a generous person than being an accumulator. He realized it made him feel good. This is wild. It made him feel good to buy dinner. In his words, it made him feel like more of a man. In my words, I would say it made you feel like more of a grown-up. But the way that he phrased it was, it made me feel like more of a man to buy dinner for my friends, to take my friends on trips that I could afford and let them come. It made me feel like more of a man to give things away. And again, I'm not trying to be over-masculine here. I think it really makes us feel like more of a responsible human. But he said that there was this shift, and after that shift that he made this decision, that he made it his goal to give away more money every year than he spent. Not more money than he made, but give away more money than he spent on himself. And he said, in doing this, it makes me feel better about myself and about who I am. Makes me feel like a better human. This, to me, and if Scott were here, he might push back on this, but this, to me, is an atheist nodding towards the way his creator inclined him to be. What he was saying in his book was, when I refresh others, I am refreshed. And I realized it made me feel better to give away my resources than it did to accrue them for myself and my own selfish ends. And my challenge or my thought to the church this morning, because this is a room of largely church people, is if an atheist can stumble upon the simple joy of generosity and find in his own experience that he is refreshed by refreshing others, then can't we as Christians learn from that lesson and be people who seek to be generous? I told you the story a few weeks ago of the former student that I have, a kid named Alex. He's not a kid anymore. He's in his 30s. He graduated in 2010, and he and I haven't had a ton of contact since then, but I've always thought very highly of him and been glad that he's been in my life and that I had the opportunity to be in his. And he had a tough story and ended up not going to college. He had to watch his brothers when he was 19 years old. But he found a way and he became a general contractor. And some of you know the story, but just by way of refreshing, he reached out to me a month or two ago, and he just said, hey, I'm making good money now. That's not what he said, but that's pretty much what he said. I'm making good money now. I want to be generous. I want to give. I want to honor God the way that he's blessed me. I want to bless others. What can I do? And he, to answer that question, drove. He had a job in Charlotte. He lives in Atlanta. So he drove the day before the extra two and a half, three hours from Charlotte to Raleigh, met me, took me to Sullivan's where I got a bone-in filet, which is really great. And then we met in my office and I said, hey man, here's six nonprofits that I know of whose founders I know very well, who I trust and love. Let me just tell you what they do and you tell me where, and then you just do whatever you want. I don't need to know, but then you can kind of figure out where your heart's led, which ones of these capture you, yeah? And that conversation led to him having breakfast the next day with the founder of one of the non-profits and then giving that founder the largest single donation they've had in the history of that non-profit. That's cool, isn't it? Now listen, Alex also told me in that conversation, in our discourse about wanting to be generous, that out of this desire to simply be generous, he had a job in downtown Atlanta. They were building a building or they were refurbishing one or whatever. There was a job with a fence and the things and all the stuff. And he would go there every day. And he said on his way there, he would go to the ATM and get out cash. And keep it in his truck. Because there was homeless people surrounding this job site. And he would make sure to go around and give money to every homeless person that was there. Because he felt like he had the opportunity to do that and he wanted to do it. Now here's where our brain goes. Okay? And here's where mine went. Dude, that's not wise. There's a better way. I love your heart. There's a better way to give money than to do that. And that's why he and I were having the conversation. Let's think about a wise way to do it so we can make sure that that money's going to God's kingdom. We can make sure that's an effective expenditure. But here's why I tell you this story this morning. It's to say that what I truly believe, and this is just my opinion, you may disagree. What I truly believe is the spirit of generosity that led him to give in both situations, whether it's a large donation to a responsible nonprofit or smaller multiple donations that we really don't have any control over, in God's eyes are the same. Because it's not about what we give. And I don't even think, and I'm careful when I say this, because I do think we need to give to God's kingdom. But it's not about what we give, and I'm not always convinced it's about where we give. It's about the fact that we just give. So we should be generous financially, whatever that looks like for us. We should also, I believe, be generous with our time. This is not a way we think about generosity, but it is a way we think about our days. And the story that I will share about being generous with our time is actually critical of me, which is what I would prefer. I'd much prefer a story where I look bad than to tell you a story where I'm the hero. So I'll tell you a story where I look bad. In November, we went home for Thanksgiving, and I needed to preach that upcoming Sunday. My dad is a CPA. He has his own firm, and he was going into the office on Tuesday morning, and I said, hey, dad, can I come into the office with you? Excuse me. I said, can I come into the office with you on Tuesday? I need to write a sermon. I've got a couple things to do, and I'd like to get that done and be done with it so I can just focus on family this week. He said, sure. So we rode to the office together. And on the way to the office, I'm thinking about, and I think some of us can relate, I've got a lot of work to do. I have a very important task to write a sermon for 145 people to listen to. This is the most important thing happening in the whole world. Thank you for the laughter over there. That was what was intended. But that's where my head's at. I have to get this done. I have to do this. And there was some other things I needed to do. So I was really focused and I was in what we call in my family task mode. Like I'm not interacting, engaging. I'm just trying to get stuff done. And so we get to the office and we're walking in and dad stops. There's a car pulling in and he stops and he says, oh, that's so-and-so. And he kind of steps back. Like he's going to wait on so-and-so to get out of her car and come see us. And this is where, if you'd like to be disappointed in me as your pastor, this is a great place to start. I looked at dad and I said, what difference does it make? And he went, okay. And we went inside. Because my thought was, dad, this is just practical brain, okay, I'm sorry. Practical brain. I'm never going to talk to this lady again in my life. I don't know who she is. She only knows who I am because I'm your son. I don't want to talk to her. I have a job to do. I need to get done quick because my wife has the kids with her mother-in-law out on the town. And she'd really like me there as a buffer, frankly. She'd like me to be there. I need to go. So I need to get this done as soon as I can. I need to get in the car. I need to drive to Monroe and go to some stupid store I don't care about so that I can hang out with my family. That's what I need to do. That's the pressure that I feel. So when dad says that so-and-so, I think, who cares? What's it matter? And so he's like, okay. So we go inside. My sister works for dad and she had brought us Chick-fil-A biscuits that morning, which are the worst of all the biscuits. And they really are. They're the worst. And she has the Chick-fil-A biscuits, but I am grateful it's free biscuit, fine. And I said, Dad, where can I work? What conference room or cubicle are you going to tuck me into? And he says, well, you know, you can, one of those down there. He goes, but don't you want to eat first? And I said, again, practical brain. No, Dad, I'm visiting you for three days, all right? I don't need to have breakfast right now. I'm going to go eat the biscuit while I write the sermon and get my important work done. And so I said, no, Dad, I'd really just like to get to work. He's like, okay. So I go get to work, and I write the sermon. I text Jen. I'm done. Where are you guys at? I go to the thing, and we do the things. And then, this is why I'm telling you the story, that evening, Dad snaps at me about something that was pretty innocuous. And those of you who, I have a good relationship with my parents, but Dad and I can get on each other's nerves. And those of you, Kristen's nodding her head as she sits next to her dad. All right, perfect. Let's just unpack this right now, Sartoriuses. If you have grown kids, you know you can get on their nerves. If you still are fortunate enough to have your parents, they know how to get on your nerves, you know how to get on them. We got on each other's nerves. And I thought it was silly. And I finally, I didn't snap, but I just kind of said, I don't know what you want me to do. You know, we were talking about whatever. And I just, like, I needed to go. So I stepped away. And I came back after a calming down period of 72 hours. And it was like 15 minutes later, I said, hey, Dad, I'm sorry. That's not how I want to handle that, but here's what's upsetting me. And he said, I understand. And we started talking. And here's what I learned, and this is why I'm sharing this story. He said, son, essentially, you matter a lot to me. I talk to you a lot. I talk about you a lot to my employees. And it would have meant a lot to me for you to have taken the time to have met them and to be gracious with them. But you were too self-important and you couldn't. And that's why I'm upset. And I went. What a lesson. What a lesson. I don't like saying this, particularly on a permanent record. But he was right, and I was wrong. I was so focused on my tasks and what I needed to get done that I couldn't see the value in investing my time in people. And so I missed a chance. How much better would my afternoon have gone if I would have simply been generous with my time and honored my dad? How much more refreshed could I have been by taking the time to meet the different people that he wanted me to meet. How arrogant of me to think that I have nothing to benefit from small talking and exchanging pleasantries and shaking hands and learning names. What, honestly, what a jerk. And so it was a lesson. Be generous with your time. How many of us have opportunities throughout the week when someone imposes on our time and we have a task or we have a thing that we want to do, but this coworker has texted us, this coworker has popped in, this person has emailed us, this person has called us, this friend needs us. It might be dinner time, but they don't normally call at this time, so what are they calling about? How often do we have opportunities to be generous with our time that we miss for whatever reason? Maybe your reason isn't task-oriented self-importance like me, but maybe it's something else, but how often do we have the opportunities to be generous with our time that we miss because we don't think of those times as opportunities for generosity. We just think about them as impositions on our schedule and on our tasks. I'm reminded as I think of this, every time I read through the Gospels, I am amazed at Jesus' generosity with His time. Those of you who have read through the Gospels, can you recall the amounts of times that Jesus finishes an arduous day or week of ministry? Does the Sermon on the Mount, heals people, speaks to people, casts out demons, teaches, combats with the rabbis, and then once that's done, it says Jesus went off to a quiet place to pray. He went off to be by himself and to rest and recruit. And here's what stuns me is how many times in the gospels it says after finishing a day like that or an event like that, Jesus goes off to pray by himself and on his way to do that, someone says, Rabbi, can I talk to you? Will you talk to my mom? Will you come meet my son? They need you. And Jesus always, sure, what do you need? Yes, I would love to. Yes, let me talk to you. Yes, let me pray to you. Jesus is the greatest example of someone who is generous with his time. And I think, I suspect, that we can probably all be more generous with ours. The last idea about generosity I want us to consider is that we can be generous with our spirit. We can be generous with our spirit. We can be generous with our disposition towards others, with our assessment towards them, with the benefit of the doubt we are willing to give them. I had a friend in college named Paul Honeycutt. Paul Honeycutt and I, we played on the soccer team together and we did the landscape crew together. We were in charge of keeping the grounds of Toccoa Falls College pristine and we did great. It was a fun job. I got to do the zero turn mowers and the weed eaters every day and I loved it. And Honeycutt was this really interesting guy because Honeycutt was cool. Everybody liked Honeycutt. Everybody did. He had all the friends in the world. And at this stage in life, try to remember, you know, I've been in high school and now college and cool people are cool. Cool people, they make friends easily. They make friends well. And they tend to be a little bit exclusionary in the way they move through the world. If you're not as cool as them, they're not going to give you their time. They're not going to be as nice to you. It can get to be exclusive, right? And so that was my experience of cool people. And Paul was cool. Everybody liked Paul. But Paul was unique in that he was kind to everyone. We ran in the same circle, and I watched some people try to get into the circle, and other guys in the circle would kind of hold them in arm's length. I don't know if you're going to cut the mustard. I don't know if I like the cut of your jib. What a great phrase that is. But I don't know. So they kind of hold them away. But Paul was always the first person to welcome them in and to make them feel like a part of things and to be a good host and to be a generous person with his spirit. And I remember asking him one time, this is now 25 years ago, I think, and I still remember the conversation. I asked him something to the effect of, Paul, you're so nice to everybody all the time. How are you this nice to everyone? And Paul said this simple phrase to me, and I'll never forget it. He said, Nate, if they're cool to Jesus, they're cool to me. Isn't that great? If they're cool to Jesus, thanks Jeff. If they're cool to Jesus, they're cool to me. If Jesus likes them, I do too. And here's the problem for us Christians. Jesus likes everybody. How inconvenient is that? I don't know. I've thought about this over the years and I'm not going to make any declarative or definitive statements this morning. I really don't know how much space there is for us to choose to not like somebody. I don't know how much space there is for that. I don't know how much space there is for us to just hold a grudge against somebody. I don't know how much space there is to think the worst of somebody and write them off. Now listen, I want to be very careful. I'm not asking us to trust everyone and to make ourselves vulnerable to everyone and to return to painful relationships when they've burned us in the past and it's hurt so much. I'm not asking you to be unwise. Scripture says that we should be as innocent as doves and as shrewd as vipers, and I think that that absolutely applies. But what I am saying is, I'm not sure how much space we have to just choose to not like someone and write them off. If they're cool to Jesus, they're cool to me. And unfortunately, Jesus likes everybody. So I think maybe you don't have something to learn from my buddy Honeycutt, but I still do. And here's where I would say this too, and I say this carefully. Our country is very divided right now. We know that. By simply saying that statement, everybody in this room just tensed up about 25%. Here's my estimation of part of that division. Is that we are not generous in spirit towards the people who don't vote like us. And what I've noticed is our tendency is to think and assume the worst of them. But what if we would be more generous in spirit and assume the best of them? Not just politically. People who think differently than us. People who don't share the values that we do. People who don't root for the bills. What if we started to view generosity as being a way to assume the best of others, to believe the best of others, and to give them the benefit of the doubt whenever we could? Let me tell you what would happen. Not just on a church level, but on a personal level. It is refreshing to refresh others. This series is called You'll Be Glad You Did. If you will listen to the wisdom that Solomon wrote down, you'll be glad you did. This week, we have an opportunity to consider what kind of people we are in regards to generosity. And my main point is, how refreshing would it be to spend this year being more generous with your resources, with your time, with your spirit, with your demeanor towards other people. And here's what I would challenge you with. If you think about these things, and there's other ways to be generous as well, but if you'll just think about these things. How can I this year be generous with my finances? How can I this year be generous with my time? How can I this year be generous with my spirit towards others? I highly doubt you'll finish the year and think, I wish I'd have kept more of it for myself. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for this church body, for this family. Thank you for the love that we share and the community that we have. God, all of us in this room have been given resources. From your fullness, we have received grace upon grace in different ways. And I pray, God, that you would increase our heart and increase our desire to be people who are characterized by generosity. May we be people who are happy to give, who are happy to refresh others, and in so doing find that you refresh us as we do. Give us the eyes to see and the ears to hear opportunities for generosity. And give us the willingness to step into those. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching online, wherever you are, whatever you may be doing, thank you for doing that and joining us in this way. This morning, we continue in our series called Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the character of Christ. Is that Kyle and Ashlyn back there? They're here. Look, with the new baby. Hey, guys. We continue in our series called Gentle and Lowly. I was going to say that we have more books on the information table. We do not. So if you don't have a book and you still want one, first of all, that makes no sense to me because we've been talking about this for three, four weeks. But if you don't and you want one, reach out and we'll tell you where to find one. Okay. But in this series, we are looking at the character of Christ. We are marveling at and learning about and from who Jesus was. And the second chapter of the book points out that Jesus was characterized by his compassion. Jesus was a man of compassion. And that's where I want us to focus this morning. And I want to do it in such a way where we kind of build a case for the compassion of Christ, because I want you to see just how prevalent it was in his character. And to me, the most prevailing instance of his compassion is found in the shortest verse in the Bible. Many of you know what the shortest verse in the Bible is. You may not know its address, but this will not be unfamiliar to you. It's John 11, 35, and it simply says, Jesus wept. Now, I meant to do the research this week and forgot, but syllabically, from a standpoint of syllables, it is not the shortest verse in the Bible. There is one verse with three words that are all singularly, they have one syllable, and it's actually shorter technically speaking. But this we acknowledge as the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. Without the context of it, we might not know why that is profound, or we might not know why I find it to be the greatest example of Jesus's compassion. But here's why. Let me give you the context for it. Jesus, in his life, had what many theologians and scholars believe were some besties. He had his very good friends that were not the disciples, that were not a part of the 100 to 120 people that would travel around with them, with him and his disciples. But it was Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus. These were, a lot of people presume, some of Jesus's best friends. It was kind of home base for him, and they lived in a city called Bethany. And this is, some scholars say, Jesus's favorite place on earth. These were his dear friends. I don't know if you're fortunate enough to have good dear friends, but when you're with close friends, you can be your complete, total, vulnerable self. That's what friendship is. And many people believe that that's what he had with Mary and Martha and Lazarus. And so one day, word comes to Jesus by way of Mary and Martha. He was two days away by foot. And they said, hey, Lazarus is dying. Can you come heal him? And Jesus said, yeah, I'll be there in a minute. It's a loose paraphrase. He waited two days, and then he began the journey. In the time of his journey, Lazarus passed away. So as he's approaching Bethany, they hear of his approaching, and Mary runs out to meet Jesus. And when she meets him, she asks the question that we would all ask. Why did you wait? You could have prevented this. My brother has died. What are you doing? Why didn't you come sooner? What was so important that you couldn't come do this for us? It's the question we would all ask. And that through history in different ways, we have asked at different times. And then after asking the question, Mary begins to weep. And Jesus' response to this question that makes sense to every generation was John 11, 35. Jesus wept. And here's where the profundity of this passage struck me for the first time. And I've told you guys about this before. You may remember this story. There's a pastor in California named Rick Warren who's been very successful, sold a lot of books, and his church does very well. And even amidst that success, his son at the age of 27 took his own life. And when he did, he stepped away and took a leave of absence for either six weeks or six months. I can't remember. And when he came back, he preached a series called How We Got Through What We Went Through. And I watched that first sermon back and he highlighted this verse. And he said, I'd love to understand why Jesus lets things like this happen. But he doesn't explain it to us because we're not capable of understanding it. And even if he did, it wouldn't take my hurt away. So what we have in Jesus is a Savior who doesn't offer us explanations. He offers us his presence and his hope, and he kneels and he weeps with us. And I found that to be an amazing point. And in this instance, when Lazarus dies, Mary weeps, and so does Jesus. But here's what makes this further compelling to me. Jesus knew the rest of the story. He wasn't wondering if he was going to go resurrect Lazarus, which he does. If you haven't read the story, I'm sorry, I just ruined it for you. But he goes and he resurrects Lazarus. He says, Lazarus, come forth. And he does. He comes out of his tomb and he resurrects him. When Jesus meets Mary on the road, Jesus wasn't wondering about what would happen. He knew that he was going to raise Lazarus. He knew that Mary and Martha would be overjoyed. He knew that he would have his friend back. He knew that. So listen to this. When he's weeping with Mary, he's not weeping because he is sad. He's weeping because he's moved with compassion and his friend is sad. That's the Jesus that we worship. He was so moved with compassion that because his not shed a man tear. The older I get, the more I cry. I cry so much that when I'm watching a show with my nine-year-old daughter Lily, and we're watching a kid's baking championship, and a kid has to leave once we get to the final four, she looks at me to see if I'm crying. And I am. I can't help it. We watch Hometown, which is a great show. I highly recommend it to everyone. Ben and Aaron are the best. We watch Hometown. When they do the home reveal and the people are thrilled at their home, do you know what I'm doing? I'm crying. But I'm not inconsolably crying. My nose isn't running. I've just got a couple man tears and I wiped them away. It's fine. And forget you if you judge me for that. I emit this salty liquid from my eyes and I'm moved by emotion. Those are not the tears Jesus was crying. He was weeping. His shoulders were heaving. His nose was running. He was a mess. And he was not a mess because he'd lost his friend Lazarus. He was hurting because Mary was hurting. And Martha was hurting. That's what compelled him. And I think that is remarkable about our Savior. To further my case about compassion being personified in Christ and him being a man of compassion, I have a litany of verses to go through. We're going to go very quickly, okay? But here's what we have. And me and Lynn, we worked on this before the sermon. We'll see how we do together. But here's the verses very quickly to show you the compassion of Christ. In Matthew chapter 9, what we see, when he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. In Matthew 14, when Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and he healed their sick. And Matthew chapter 15, Jesus called his disciples to him and he said, I have compassion for these people. They have already been with me for three days and have nothing to eat. I do not want to send them away hungry. And Mark chapter 6, verse 34, when Jesus landed, he saw a large crowd and he had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. In Mark chapter 8, I have compassion for these people. They have already been with me three days with nothing to eat. In Luke chapter 7, when the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, don't cry. There's more. Jesus at every turn was a man of compassion. And here's what strikes me about the compassion of Christ in those instances when he chose to heal and he chose to feed the 5,000 and he chose to spend time with one person. I think one of the more interesting questions about the life of Christ is, why did he not go around healing more people? If he had the capacity to heal and to make illness go away, why didn't you just teach them to wash their hands? Just basic science. Why didn't he go around healing more people? Why didn't he do it all day, every day? The only compelling answer to that question is because it's not what he came to do. What Jesus came to do was to live a perfect life, die a perfect death, and train young men and women to run the church that he was establishing. That's what he came to do. He came to live a perfect life, to die a perfect death on the cross for us, and to train people to run the kingdom that he was establishing with his ministry, which is what we call the church, which is where we sit now. That's what Jesus came to do, which means, and I know that this is a weird thing to say, especially for a pastor in this spot. It's not inconceivable to think about every miracle of healing as a distraction from his purpose. It's not altogether unfair to consider the feeding of the 5,000 a distraction from what he actually came to do. It's not unfair to think that the widow that he healed that was bleeding was a distraction from whatever his real mission was that day. And yet, being moved by compassion, he feeds the hungry. And yet, being moved by compassion, he heals the sick. And yet, being moved by compassion, he preaches to the masses. When we see Jesus perform these miracles, when we see him heal and we see him feed, I think it's fair to see those as times when he veered off the point of his ministry because he was so moved by compassion in his heart to help others, to serve others, to be distracted because his heart moved so much for the people around him in need. This was who Jesus was. If you don't yet believe that Jesus was a man of compassion, I would simply make this point. Jesus' dying words were words of compassion. We did a Good Friday service this last spring, and we focused on the seven things that Jesus said while he hung on the cross for you and for me. And one of the things that he said was, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. The men, putting a spear in his side, driving nails through his feet and hands, putting a crown of thorns on his head, whipping him, blindfolding him and saying, you're a prophet, tell us who hit you. He said about those people, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. His dying words were words of compassion. And so here's the truth about Jesus. And here's what I want us to understand about his character and seek to emulate in ours. Hurt people hurt Jesus. Hurt people hurt Jesus. When Jesus sees people hurting, he hurts. When Jesus sees people suffering, he suffers. He suffers so much that he weeps, even though he knows the end of the story. He hurts so badly that he allows himself to be distracted from his divine purpose to execute this one. Hurt people hurt Jesus. And so, we talk a lot here about what the word sanctification means. And sanctification, as we understand, is the process between when we're saved and when we're glorified. When we accept Christ as our Savior and when we exist with Him in eternity. It's life. And through life we go through the process of sanctification. And sanctification, the easiest way I've ever found to understand it is to become more like Christ in character. And so, as believers, and some of you here are not, and that's fine. But this is a peek inside the curtain. If you are here as a believer, what God wants for you is to become more like Christ in character. Not in nature, because that's not possible, but in our character as we go through the years. And hopefully those of us who have been believers for a long time are slowly moving to be more like Christ and for our heart to beat with his. But if our goal is to be more like Christ in character, then we cannot do that without being people of compassion. We cannot do that without being moved by the hurt of others. So much so that we don't simply go, oh, that stinks. I hate that for them. But that we are compelled to go and do. We cannot be like Christ in character if hurt people don't hurt us to such a degree that we are activated to some action in service of God's kingdom for people who are hurting. How can we possibly, church, claim to be Christ-like if we are not people who are moved by compassion? Not just empathy. Not just seeing the floods and hurting for the people affected by them, but actually buying supplies or driving them out there. And that's just one example. And I'm not telling anyone that you should do anything except allow yourself to be moved by compassion. And we have stories in grace that I'm very proud of, of people being moved by compassion and doing great things. So here's the question for you this morning. How might we employ our compassion? How might we employ and deploy our compassion? We all have the capacity to be stirred. How might we employ it? Here's one of the things I'll tell you. When we think about compassion and being so stirred by the hurt of others that like our Jesus, we serve them and we help them because we can't stand it anymore. Here's one thing I'll tell you, and I can't presume or project my life upon you, but let me tell you about my day-to-day, okay? And you'll see if you relate. I wake up every day. I was going to make a joke there. I'm not going to make it. I'm going to be disciplined. I wake up every day. Most days take a shower, unless I don't have any meetings. Then I dress in basketball shorts and Crocs. But most days I take a shower. And then I take Lily, my daughter, to her private school. And I'm in the carpool line with a bunch of other people taking their kids to their private school. And I can only say that the car line at NRCA is not a place that moves me towards compassion. I don't weep for the people that I see. I'm in my ensconced, nice, safe bubble, right? And then I drive to church. And I get in the office. And I have this glorious hour where no one else is in the office. And I have it to myself. And then I loathe the first person that shows up and ruins my solitude. Usually it's Kyle. He's been mercifully on paternity leave for three weeks. Sorry, Kyle, I love you. And then I sit in my office and I have calls and I have meetings and I and I go to lunch yeah three times a week with someone and then Jen Jen jokes with me must be nice it's a nice life this last week I played in a golf tournament and I went to lunch twice look at me and then I go home or I go to soccer practice with a bunch of kids that whose parents $650 to play that season. That doesn't move me towards compassion. And then I go home in my ensconced little area. And we have dinner, and we watch Hometown, and I cry and my daughter makes fun of me. And then we go about our day. And I wake up the next day and I do the same thing. Here's my point. There's not a lot of spaces in my life where I encounter people who engender compassion. If your life is like mine, then you have to make a choice to go outside of your comfort zone and encounter people who engender compassion in you. You will not, most likely, come upon them honestly. You will not experience compassion if you do not choose to expose yourself to those who deserve it most. So if we want to be people of compassion, and if you're sitting here going, that is who my Jesus was, and I recognize that's what I need to do, then we need to be people who expose ourselves to being able to be compassionate and stirred towards hurt for others. If in our life, if what I'm saying is true, hurt people hurt Jesus, and in our life we have elegantly navigated a path to never encounter genuinely hurt people, then how can we possibly be hurt by their hurt? So we have to choose to engage outside of our bubble so that we might be moved as Jesus was. A great example of this in our church, and I've told this story many times. I'm so proud of it. I'm so proud that they call Grace home, and they predate me. They allow me to continue to be their pastor. But Suzanne and Wes Ward, some of you know their story, some of you don't. Suzanne was in youth group here. She grew up at Grace. And at some point, gosh, it's got to be six, seven years ago, if not longer than that, she went on a mission trip to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, with her friend Cindy. And she saw in Addis an orphan crisis where families literally can't afford to keep the children that they're having, and so they have to give them up for adoption, and those children end up in orphanages. And she saw with her own eyes that the young girls, 17 and 18, who age out of those orphanages, not educated, not eligible for college, have very few choices about what they can do in life. And most of them ended up in the kind of work that you're assuming right now. And they were moved with compassion. And so they started a ministry called Addis Jamari. We partner with them. They were moved with compassion for the plight they saw in the Ethiopian, so much so that they did something about it and they started a house. And it was a house for the girls who aged out of the orphanage to come and to live in, where they're taught life skills and they're discipled and they're taught about Jesus and they're launched out of there going to college or having the capacity to get a job so that they can avoid the life that they would have lived had not Addis Jamari stepped in. And then to further it, they realized, you know what, if we can get ahead of this on the front end, we can prevent orphans altogether. And so they started what they call the FEP, the Family Empowerment Program, where for, I think it's $80 a month, you can donate that to Addis Jamari. And those $80, listen to this, this is amazing, allow a family to keep their child at home rather than having to give them up for adoption. How simple is that? That's like, what, eight lattes? That's easy. Also, Starbucks is stupid, okay? Germaine to nothing, sorry. And so they started doing that. And now, instead of just a home with three or four girls occupying it post-orphanage, they have what amounts to a daycare with 80 children every day, with programs for moms to educate them, to feed them, to take care of their kids, with counselors, like degreed counselors to work with their children and with the moms and with the dads. Compassion drove them to do that. So that's a big one. I don't think all of you need to go start a ministry in Africa. Actually, you probably should. But that's not the point. That's a big step. And in life, sometimes God moves us to make big steps. And we get moved and it changes the trajectory of our life. Suzanne is one of my heroes. She does not yet take a paycheck from Addis Jamari. And she works tirelessly for them. Every day. All the time. Because she's moved by compassion and believes in this. And some of us, God wants us to take steps like that. Others, first time I went to Addis Jamari, was in January, was it 2020 that we went, Karen? I think it was. I think it was. January 2020. Yeah, Andrea was there too. And we went over and Suzanne told me a couple weeks before, she was like, hey, it's just you and a bunch of ladies. So maybe invite somebody. And I had to think of the retired people that I knew that might be able to go. And so I invited a buddy of mine, Emil Lasavita. And I was like, hey, come to this. He goes, what is it? And I was like, it doesn't matter. Just please come with me. And he did. But when he saw the ministry, he was so moved by compassion that he got involved too. And now he sits on the board. Now he serves. He and I had a conversation last week where he called me about the future of Addis Jamari, and we talked about it. He was moved by compassion, so he acted. We have people who have been going to Mexico for 20 plus years to build houses for people less fortunate. Because when they went down there for the first time, they were so moved by compassion that they go back every year. We have people who have been doing that for 20 plus years. My buddy Keith right here, who, trust me, I do not like saying nice things about. The stupid Steelers jersey in church and the whole deal. Keith went years ago and was so moved by compassion that he's been a grandfather to someone who's grown up in that ministry. He's sent baby pictures. He's sent wedding pictures. They reunite every year. He's watched him go from this kid volunteering to this man who's in charge of all the construction of the houses now. He's the project manager. What happened was Keith went on a trip that he didn't want to go on very much, but his heart was moved by compassion and it changed the course of his life. There's at least one good thing you've done, Keith. If we want to be like Christ, we have to allow ourselves to be moved by compassion for others. And if we're going to be moved by compassion, then we have to make choices to expose ourselves to something that can move us in that way. So where I want to finish this sermon this morning is to simply challenge you with this. What step can you take towards compassion? What step can you take to expose yourself to hurt people that might hurt you in such a way that you begin to take steps of compassion as a result of that? And maybe you're already doing it, and that's wonderful. Lean into those places. But if you're not experiencing that, and you're not serving anybody outside of your bubble, and you haven't been moved by compassion for a long time to help and to sacrifice. Maybe the next step is to just think about how can I expose myself to portions of our society or our world that will compel me to do that. So let's think about that this morning.

All right, good morning, everyone. Happy Palm Sunday. Somebody asked me before the service who's got a Catholic background, they said, do Christians still do Palm Sunday or is that just a Catholic thing? Which I found to be a wonderful question and yeah, Christians do Palm Sunday. Okay, so just so we're all on the same page, it's Holy Week for us too. And we've been doing this whole series through Mark, asking God to prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate Easter and to reflect on and properly value the resurrection. And so this week we prepare to do that. We have our Good Friday service on Friday evening. If you are able to come, I would really encourage you to do that. That is on Friday. We intentionally sit in the heaviness of the crucifixion. We intentionally focus on the cross and on the reality that Friday was believing that when we do that, our hearts are prepared to celebrate the resurrection better on Sunday. So Friday, I will just tell you, is a heavy service. I would not recommend bringing children to it. We are somber and sober on purpose because it helps us appreciate Easter Sunday better. This morning, as we do celebrate Palm Sunday, we will focus on the reality of Jesus on the cross, and we'll finish with having communion at the end of the service. But this is really a continuation of the sermon I preached to you, or I even said that Sunday that it wasn't a sermon, it was me sharing. This is a continuation of what I want to share from Istanbul. Okay. When, when I was sharing about Istanbul and somebody said that they just listened to the sermon, uh, from that morning on the way over, um, which I'm so glad that people are doing that and keeping up. But I shared with you my two takeaways from the experience that I had in Istanbul. And for those of you who maybe this is your first time, this is totally out of context for you. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to go to Turkey and sit in a room with persecuted Iranian pastors who were being trained by a friend of mine. And it was a really impactful week, such a privilege to be there. And so when I came, I got home on a Saturday and then I had to preach on a Sunday. I didn't even know where I was in space or time, and I thought, I'm just going to share what I took away and hope that that works. And you guys were gracious with me and said that that counted, and I got paid that week. But there was two things. There's two things that I took away. The first was just the chasm of difference in how the persecuted church thinks about church and how the secure church thinks about church. And there may be a series coming on that, which I'm sure you guys will be really thrilled about to come in every week and be made to feel terrible for how we think about church. But that may just be what we need. So I'm thinking about that. The other point that I made was out of this verse in Mark. This is the quintessential Mark verse. If you were to say what verse encapsulates the book of Mark that we've been going through all spring, it is this verse, chapter 9, verse 36. I'm sorry, verse 35. Sitting down, Jesus called the twelve and said, Anyone who wants to be first must be very last and the servant of all. That is the quintessential Marconian verse. That's the gospel of Mark. Whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all. It's a book about service. And I talked with you guys about a man that I met named Yahya who personified this type of service. And I described him as capturing the essence of that Colossians verse, that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God. That was the sense I got with him. And so the other takeaway was, let's lead and serve like Jesus does. Let's be inspired by the model of Yahya and lead and serve like him. But here's what I wanted to say after that. I wanted to make another point, but as I wrote that point in my notes and I was going through it that Sunday morning, I thought I can't just drop that at the end of a service and not talk about it and not give it adequate space. We need to be able to develop this idea and talk about this idea. That's like a whole separate sermon. And then I went, huh, I'm in charge of the sermons that we preach. I can just do that one later. So this is later. All right. I wanted to talk about what we talked about last week. Last week, I wanted to talk about this on Palm Sunday. I felt like it was more appropriate leading into communion, but this is really part two of that. This is what I wanted to say. When I say we should lead and love and serve like Christ. We should be inspired by the examples of holy people who lead and serve and love well. The point that I wanted to make is this. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. I'm going to spend the rest of the day talking about this so that I can make sure we have an adequate understanding of it. But we cannot love others as Jesus loved. That's a quintessential. I said Marconian, so now I will say Johannian. That is a quintessential verse in John to sum up that gospel is when Jesus says, go and love others as I have loved you. That is the gospel of John encapsulated. And so we take the gospel of Mark and we take the gospel of John and we say, yes, Lord, this is what we want to do. is we cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. And here's what I mean when I say that. We all have a sense of identity and value and worth that we get from something somewhere. This is universally true. We all have something that we measure ourselves by that makes us feel valuable or not valuable. We all have a sense of identity. I am blank. I am this. And this identity and our sense of identity and where we get our worth evolves over time, right? I remember when I was a kid in elementary school at Camp Creek Elementary, that my value and worth was based on my knowledge of SportsCenter that morning. Like when I would watch Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I would watch Stuart Scott and Scott Van Pelt. I would watch them and be ready with their catchphrases that morning at school. My ability to talk about sports and to argue with you that Georgia Tech was better than Georgia, that's where I grew up. Here, you don't really argue about anything. No one's good at football here at all. So it doesn't really matter. Oh, also I wanted to say this, uh, this is just an aside. This is just me for fun. Uh, I would never, ever use this platform to pray for a sports team or an athlete. But if I were going to, I would invite us to join in prayer for Rory McIlroy today. If you, if you need more reason to root against Bryson DeChambeau today, Alan has money on him. He told me before the service. So let's just double down on Rory today. Yes? Good. But when I was a kid, my ability to do that, to talk about sports, is where I got a sense of value and worth. And how fast you were is how valuable you were. How hard you could kick a ball, how far you could throw it, how good you were at sports. If a dude was better than you at sports, he was a more valuable human than you. That was just the nature of the beast. That was the jungle when I grew up. Then it evolved. In high school, I started learning that I could also get value from making people laugh. Every now and again, I could convince a girl to like me. And that makes you feel valuable. And then in college, it develops. Then I began to get a sense of value and worth out of my ability to be a pastor. And then I got hired as one. And my sense of value and worth came from my job performance. And God, in his goodness, has redeemed this. But anybody who would try to argue with you that they don't get a sense of value and worth from extrinsic things, from things on the outside, isn't being honest with you. And so I think we all have this sense of value that evolves over time. And what I want to press upon you this morning is for the Christian, the natural and right evolution of our identity is to rest in our identity in Christ. For the Christian, the natural and right evolution of that identity, as you progress through the years and you land in a place, is for that place to be rested in Christ. It's for us to find our identity in him. Because the world has all these messages about who we are and what we should do. But Christ does too. And I think one of the hardest things about being a Christian is to listen to that voice of Jesus that tells us who and what we are. Because the world is so loud and it is so convincing and it is so ever-present that you begin to listen to what the world says about you more than you listen to what your creator says about you. And we forget, I think, who we are in Christ. And we start to believe what the world says we are. So this morning, I want to remind you of who you are in Christ. I would encourage you to look, to Google who I am in Jesus. Look up all the verses that proclaim who you are. I don't have enough time to go through even 10% of them this morning. There's so many ways the Bible affirms you and who you are. But I've got four for you that I want to read to you this morning. The first is Romans, I think 15.1 or maybe 5.1. It says, you are accepted. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We've been justified by Christ. We are accepted. We are accepted by him. And when I say this, I think that we just kind of mentally go, yeah, I know. But think about how hard you struggle for acceptance in your life. Think about how much you want the approval of others. Some of us can readily admit, yeah, the opinion of other people matters to me. Others of us like to say this stupid thing. I don't care what other people think. Yes, you do. You just care what some people think. But you don't care what nobody thinks. All right? Tough guy? I'm talking to me. We all of us struggle to be accepted. And what Jesus tells us is, you are accepted. You're never going to be more accepted than you are. You're never going to be more desired than you are. He tells us that we are chosen. John 15, 16, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go bear fruit, fruit that will last. And so that whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give you. This is my command, and I'm including it because I mentioned it earlier. Love each other. That's what Jesus says. You didn't choose me. I chose you. You were accepted by Christ. You are chosen by Christ. We've all had times in our lives when we didn't feel chosen. When we didn't feel picked. When we felt looked over. When we felt passed over. When we felt inadequate. Like maybe we didn't matter. And Jesus says, no, no, no, I accept you. And I choose you. 1 Corinthians 3.23 tells us that you belong to Jesus. Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours and you are of Christ and Christ is of God. You belong to Jesus. You are of Christ. This is what the Bible says about you, and this is my favorite one. You are safe. Romans 8, 38, 39, the crescendo of the greatest chapter in the Bible. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. You are safe. You are kept. We're doing a series that we just got done planning. The next series coming up is FAQs. And we've sussed out some questions from our small groups to see what kinds of things y'all are thinking about and wondering about. And one of the questions that came up a couple of times is, once you're saved, are you always saved? If you ask that question, read Romans 8, verses 38 and 39. Read it to yourself again and again and again, and know that you are held in God's hand. And know that if Christ has saved you, Christ will keep you. If Christ has chosen you, he will protect you. If he has redeemed you, he will glorify you. Guys, I don't think that we sit in the reality of... I don't think that we sit clearly in the reality of these things, that we are accepted and that we are chosen and that we are loved and that we are safe. I don't think that we do that. I think that we still continue to trust what the world has to say about who we are. And here's the problem. These identities that we've built for ourselves, these ways that we gauge ourselves and our value, when they are not Christ, they will all fail us. They will all fail us. Every identity you build for yourself will eventually fail you. And sometimes it fails you because you've chosen to gauge your worth on a thing you're not good at. I have friends who are not, they're not career driven men and they feel like failures all the time because they get a sense in our society, men have to achieve. We have to do, what do you do for work? What's your next step? Where are you going? How many direct reports do you have? Or are you starting a company? How is that going? We get our sense of value and worth from how we are as professionals. But some of us are not wired to be professionals. And some of us are not wired for success. And we don't want to climb the corporate ladder. And we're very happy to put the thing down at 5 o'clock and go home and be with our family, and that's really what we want. But the world has told us that we are how successful we are, and so we walk through life feeling bad about not meeting a goal that we never wanted to meet. I talked with a mom this week who gets her sense of worth and value from her kids' behavior. And it made me sad because I know some moms, even in this church and in my circles of friends, that have uniquely challenging children. Not because those children are bad and not because they're bad moms. Because they have severe ADHD. Because they have different pressures on them that we don't understand. Because they have sensitivities to things that are hard. And these moms beat themselves up because their kids act out in church or at school or because they're the one to get the phone call. And when that is our sense of worth and value, we just get beat up over and over and over again. When we listen to what the world says we need to be, when what's true about those moms is they're incredible moms. They're wonderful and they love their children very much. But we let the world beat us up and tell us that we're not and that we're not valuable because we forget who we are in Christ. And we let that voice drown us out. But many of us in here don't feel as worthy as we should because we're not listening to Jesus. We're listening to the world and we've allowed the world to put us in a game that we can't win. That's not where we should get our value from. And here's another way that your identity will fail you. Maybe you've been fortunate in your life to move the target of your worth to something that you can actually hit. Maybe you've been fortunate and wise enough to go, you know what? I'm not really going to listen to the world. I'm going to choose my own path, and this is what's going to make me feel valuable. But even when you choose something you're good at, that will fail you too. I pride myself very much on being a good friend. I have told people on my tombstone, I simply wanted to say Nate was a friend. Friendship is so important to me. And I've always placed a high value on my ability to be a good friend. And in the last couple of months, I failed a friend. I was a bad friend to someone I love a lot. And when I realized that, it shook me for weeks. And I realized, my goodness, I've idolized this sense of my value. I haven't been finding it in Christ. I've been finding it in my ability to do this for other people. And this is actually a good thing. It's shaken me and helped me realize that I hold this in a disproportionate way. So even the things that we build in our life that we're good at, eventually that will fail us too. And we'll have to repent of that. But here's what I know is true of you and why we build our identities in this way. Because we, all of us, we all want to be accepted, chosen, safe, and to belong. We all want that. And I'll be honest with you. When I write sermons like this, they're a little touchy-feely. We all want to be safe and chosen. Sometimes I speak to this part of the room because this is where our young families are, and sometimes I talk to parents here. Today, I'm going to talk to that portion of the room, because that's where our stubborn, crusty men sit. And when they hear me talk like this, everyone wants to be chosen and accepted and loved. I always, in the back of my head, I think, how are they processing this? Because they probably think I'm a sissy, right? But even you guys want this. Even you guys struggle for this. Everybody wants to be accepted and chosen and loved and protected. And we have that in Christ. He gives it to you. He tells you through his word. He preaches it to you. He reminds you of it. We sing about it. And yet some of you will go from here and you will walk out those doors and choose to believe what the world says about you instead of what Jesus says about you. So I just want to remind you of it this morning. And we come full circle to what I said at the beginning. And hopefully now it makes sense and carries a weight for you. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. Do you have any idea how well you will love other people when you let Jesus love you? You'll be able to celebrate their success. You'll be able to celebrate their rise. You'll have an equanimity and a calmness of demeanor because you know who you are in Jesus. And you wake up every day knowing I am fully loved. I am fully protected. I am fully safe. I am fully chosen. The world can do to me what it wants, but I have Jesus and I have his love and I'm good. Can you imagine walking in that level of help? Walking in such an awareness of the love of Christ that he has for you. That from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace and now God's grace overflows from you onto the people around you. Can you imagine being an agent of that kind of love where you know every day God loves you so much that it literally oozes out of you onto the people around you that they feel God's love because you are present in their life. Can you imagine that? It's only possible when we let Jesus love us first. Grace, Jesus loves you. He died on the cross for you. This week we celebrate Holy Week. This is Palm Sunday, where they laid down the palm branches and the children said, Hosanna. And Jesus knowingly walked to his death for you. So please, when you go out these doors today, do not listen to what the world says you are. Do not listen to what you say you are. Listen to what Jesus says you are, to who he says you are, and how much he loves you, and how he has chosen you. And let's walk in that love and see how God uses us. Can we do that? Let me pray for you, then we're going to celebrate communion. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how much you love us. Thank you for who you are and how you've provided for us. God, I pray that we would hear you, that we would accept and receive you. I pray that we would love and serve others well because we allow you to love and serve us. Help us to exist in the reality of your overwhelming love, of your acceptance and your affirmation. Father, if there's anyone here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. If there's anyone here who has not received your love, I pray that they would receive it today. Help us to walk in light of the fact that we are chosen and accepted and safe. Help us to walk in light of your love. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and if I hadn't got a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that. Thanks for coming on Time Change Sunday. I know that we're all, our wagons are dragging a little bit, but that's all right. Before I just launch into the sermon, I do have a bit of a retraction to print. Last week, I maliciously and falsely accused my wife, Jen, of smoking a cigar in college. We did not agree on the story, and that afternoon, she texted her friend Carla, her roommate, and I know Carla very well, and she asked her to confirm her side of the story, and Carla said, no, I was there. You pretended and gave it to me, and I'm the one that smoked it. It was a black and mild. It was disgusting. So I was wrong. Jen, as usual, was right. She's at home now with a sick kid. So anyways, if you see her, let her know that her character has been restored. One thing that is true that Jen and I do, and I bet that you've had the same conversation with your spouse if you have one of those or you're a good friend or something like that but I don't know about y'all but for us every time the a Powerball lottery gets up but like a ridiculous amount like 330 million dollars or something like that like so much it gets so big that your mom starts buying lottery tickets just in case it's God's will that she have that money to use it for his kingdom. You know, that's how we Christians justify the lottery ticket purchases. But every time we see that, when we'll see the billboard or mention it or something like that, then what conversation do we immediately have? Right, nodding heads. What would we do if we won the money, right? So then we get to have that fun conversation, and it goes, by now we've had it enough times that it goes in some very predictable ways. Out of the gates, you know, you have to sweep aside, get rid of the practicalities. Like, don't tell me how you're going to invest it. That's boring. Don't be a nerd. Like, what's the fun stuff you're going to do? What are the extravagances that you're going to allow yourself? And it always starts small with us because we're trying to be humble because we're trying to be humble people. We're not going to be ostentatious. But the one extravagance I always lead with, this one's consistent for me, is a private chef. I want a private chef to just live at my house and make me food all the time. That's what I would like. Jen will eventually admit that she wants to get a condo in Manhattan. And those are our extravagances. And then I'll be like, and maybe, you know, I mean, the car's got a lot of miles on it. So maybe I need a new car. Maybe you need a top of the line Honda Odyssey. You know. You guys know that's what I want. Maybe for travel, we should just buy into a private jet, like a share, not our own, but maybe we'll just share. We try to stay humble, and then as we have the conversation, it just gets more and more absurd until we're the Kardashians, so then you just laugh and whatever. But those are, that's fun to do. That's a fun game to play. What would life be like if? And then you imagine this life that maybe you would have one day, and I don't know what you guys would do if you hit it big, but it's fun to play that game of imagining what life could be like if. But one of the things that we all do, even if you're not ridiculous like Jen and I and daydream about what it would be like to win the Powerball, what I am convinced of is that every person in this room, every person who can hear my voice, does have plans and hopes and dreams for their life that are real, that are substantive, that actually matter to you because they're actually attainable. This is so ubiquitous in our culture that we have a name for it. It's the American dream. People move to this country in pursuit of what you have access to because we live in a place where we are allowed to dream our own dreams, we are allowed to make our own plans, and we are allowed to begin to pursue those. And so everybody here has hopes and plans and dreams for their life. And those are less funny. Because I'm probably never going to have a private chef. Probably not. I might be able to hire one for ad night to make me stay. I'm probably not going to ever have a private chef. I'm not going to mourn that. We'll probably never have a condo in Manhattan. I'm not going to mourn the loss of that potential condo, but I do have hopes and dreams in my life that if they don't come to fruition, I will mourn that. If I don't get to do Lily's wedding, that's going to make me sad. If I don't get to meet my grandchildren, that's going to make me sad. If I'm not still married to Jen in 30 years, that's going to make me sad. So we all have hopes and dreams that we marshal our resources around, that we pursue with our life, that we intend to execute. And some of us are less detailed than others. Like I've got a good friend in Chicago, and they were as meticulous as when they were first married before they had kids, they moved to Chicago and she had an opportunity to get her master's at Northwestern, get her MBA there, which is an expensive prospect. And they basically said, hey, if we do this, and we're going to borrow that money, then we are committed to both of us having full-time jobs and using our resources to pay for a nanny. That's just how our family is going to be. And they said okay, and they executed that plan and they've done that. And now they have three kids and a two bedroom condo in Chicago off of Lake Michigan. And their plan now is in 2026 or maybe 2027, they're going to move to the Atlanta suburbs to be closer to his family, to be closer to his mom. So they've got their plans mapped out like that. And maybe that's how you do your plans, and maybe it's not. But you all have them. You all have, if you have kids, you have hopes and dreams for your kids. It could be as minuscule as the kind of job you want them to have. It could be as broad as the kind of person that you want them to be. If you're married, you have hopes and dreams for that. If you have a career, you have hopes and dreams for that. But we all do this. As soon as we kind of come online somewhere in adolescence and realize that one day our life is going to be our own, we begin to imagine how we want to build it. Nobody in this space doesn't have plans and hopes and dreams for themselves, however broad or humble they might be. And I bring this up because the passage that we're looking at today in Mark chapter 8, if you have a Bible, you can turn to Mark chapter 8 verses 34 through 37 is where we're going to be focused. As we continue to move through Mark, we arrive this morning at one of the most challenging teachings in scripture. It's this incredibly high bar of demand that Jesus sets on our life. And it is one that we may not even be familiar with. It's one that I am certain that we don't consider enough, that we don't come back to enough, that we haven't wrestled with enough. It is one of the most impossibly high bars that Jesus sets in his ministry. And what we see in that bar is this, is that God has a dream for you, and it's better than yours. You have hopes and dreams for your life. You have things that you want to see come to fruition. Maybe you want to have a long marriage. Maybe you want to have a good career. Maybe you want to be a generous person. Maybe you want to be a good friend and a good member of the community. Maybe you want to see your kids flourish. These are all good things. Very few of you, if any, have terrible dreams for your life where you want to go do evil things. I'd like to be like Vladimir Putin. I don't think anybody's doing that. We all have good things that we want to see come to fruition. But here's what I'm telling you, and here's what I want you to begin to think about this morning. God has different plans for you, and they're better than yours. All right? With that preamble, let's look at, bless you, let's look at what Jesus has to say as he's teaching the crowds and the disciples, and let's look at what this high bar is for us. Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? Here's what Jesus says. He gathers the crowd around him. He gathers the disciples around him. And he says, if anybody wants to be my disciple, they must take up their cross and follow me. Now there's a lot about that statement that we need to understand. As kind of an aside to the flow of the sermon to where I want to go, I do want to stop here. And I want to look at that word that Jesus chose to use. Whoever wants to be my disciple must take up their cross and follow me. Whoever wants to be my disciple must do what I'm about to ask you to do. And one of the things that we've done in Christianity, in Christian culture and church world, is we've taken the terms Christian and disciple and we've made them mean two different things. We've said that a Christian is someone who's got their foot in the door. A Christian is someone who's going to go to heaven. They are saved. They are in right standing before God. They believe God is their father and Jesus is their savior. The way we talk about what it means to become a Christian at grace is to simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And once we believe those things, we are ushered into the kingdom of God as a Christian. And then at some point in our life, if we want to begin to take our faith very seriously, then we can become a black belt Christian, which is a disciple. Yeah? Like, Christianity is like discipleship light. We've separated those words. We've made them two different things. I'm a Christian. Are you a disciple of Christ? I don't know. That's pretty serious. Let's not get crazy. And listen, you know I'm right about that. And here's the thing. That is not how Jesus defined those terms. Jesus never used the word Christian. They were known as the followers of the way for years after his life. We made up Christian. Jesus called them disciples. And that's what he told the disciples to do. The end of his life, the great commission, go into all the world and make disciples. Right. Not Christians. Not converts. We think Christians are converts and disciples are people who take it seriously and try to make more converts. And to Jesus, he says, no. You are all the way in being a disciple of mine, following me, becoming more like me in character, doing the work that I do, becoming a kingdom builder, building the gospel, reaching people with the gospel. You are all the way in, or you're not following me. But we've made it possible to be a Christian who's not a disciple. And I just want to point out this morning, it's not the point of the sermon, but I just wanted to stop here and point out, that's not how Jesus defined it. So if in our heads we separate those terms, then we don't understand them the way that Jesus does. And we should have to decide if we think we're right or he's right. But he says, if you want to be my disciple, you must take up your cross and follow me. Meaning, you must take up your life, you must take up your sacrifice, you must take everything that you have and walk it to Calvary with me. And sacrifice your life with me for the sake of the gospel. The way we say it here is you must become a kingdom builder. Quit trying to build your own kingdom. Start getting on board with building God's kingdom by growing it in breadth and depth. He says, if you want to be my disciple, it's not about getting in the door and becoming a convert. It's about taking up your cross, taking up your life, taking up everything you thought you wanted, laying it down at the altar and following me and letting me do with your life what I would like to do with it. And he says it. It's very clear. It's explicit in the text. For the sake of the gospel. And he even uses the term, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me will save it. Jim Elliott, famous missionary, I believe in the 40s and the 50s and the 1900s, died trying to reach some Ecuadorian tribal people who were cannibals. And he said, prior to that trip in his writings, that he is no fool who gives up that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. It is absolutely in keeping with this teaching of Christ. If you call yourself my disciple, here's the tax. You give up your life. You give up, listen to me, you give up your hopes and your dreams and your plans. You give up the career you thought you wanted. You give up the goals for your children that you created. You give up who you thought you were going to be. You give up your finances and your time and your treasure. And you set those aside. And you go, Jesus, what would you have me do with these things? Are these the things that you want in my life? Or do you want now to choose a different life for me? But that's why I say that this is an incredibly high bar. Because he says, listen, if you want in, if you want in, let me tell you what the tax is. Let me tell you what it's going to cost you. It's so funny. When I was growing up, I used to hear this phrase all the time. Salvation's a free gift. Can't be earned, can't be deserved. And I'd always go like, yeah, but it does cost you something. Jesus tells you. It costs you your life. That American dream that you have, you've got to give that up. That's what Jesus is demanding. In fact, what we see from this text is Jesus insists that we trust his dream more than our own. Jesus in this text insists, you've got to trust my hopes and dreams and plans for your life more than you trust your own. That's the tax. You've got to give up your own. You've got to let me replace my vision for you for your vision for you, and you've got to go. And you've got to get to work sharing the gospel for the sake of the gospel. That's what he asks us to do. And this is a remarkably high bar, particularly for those of us who come into faith as adults, or even for those of us who begin to take our faith seriously as adults, because the toothpaste is out of the tube. We're already down the road. We got a mortgage. We got things that we're responsible for. We already have our life ordered, and so it's a really difficult thing to hand our life plans over to Jesus and go, if you want to change them, if you want me to do something else, if you want us to go somewhere else, to live somewhere else, if you want to change the way I raise my kids and what our values are, if you want to change the way I'm married, whatever you want to do, do it. I trust you. And in a sense, give up our plans for our future. That's a really tough ask. I sat with someone this week, a dear friend who in the last several years, her marriage has just become really, really bad. Just really awful and hard. And it's to a point now where it's very clear that the best thing for her and for her children are to not be in the house with him. Because that's not a good environment. And that's a really tough decision to make. And as I sat with her this week, she said, you know what? I'm not even really sad about him. I fell out of love with him years ago. But I'm grieving the life I thought I was going to have. And finally admitting that I'm not going to have it. She sat in the playroom and watched her children divide up the stuffed animals, deciding which ones were going to mommy's house and which ones were going to daddy's house. That was not her plan. That was not what she wanted to experience. When she walked down that aisle, her hopes and dreams and plans for her life were to be with him for the rest of their life, to see their grandkids and go on trips with them together. That was their hopes and dreams. And so now she's in the middle of mourning what she thought she was going to have. And so it's, I'm acknowledging, it's a big ask, midstream in life, to hand over everything that you had planned for yourself to Jesus. And so you do with this what you want. And if that causes you to mourn something you thought you wanted or you thought you needed or you had marshaled your resources around pursuing, then so be it. But Jesus says, go ahead and mourn. Get it over with. Because we've got work to do. And it's here that I want to say this. As we listen as adults and we try to process this and think through it and how to integrate it into our lives, what do we do with it if we want to apply the truth? As I mentioned a little bit ago, the reality of it is that the older you are, the more challenging this instruction becomes. Until you retire, then it's like, whatever you want, Jesus, I've got all the freedom. At least that's how I assume retirement is. I don't know. But the further down the road you are, the harder this gets to be obedient to. You know, I think about Zach and Haley over here. I just did their wedding in the fall. They don't look at them. They don't know anything about anything. They don't know nothing. But they're also at the cusp of life and can respond to this in a way that has more freedom than the way that others of us can respond to it. So we acknowledge that. Here's what else that implies because we have a lot of parents in the room who are still raising children. You can get ahead of this. You can get ahead of them creating their own hopes and dreams for themselves. You can start to raise them, reminding them all the time, God has plans for you. God made you on purpose. God's gifted you to do things in his kingdom. And it's my sacred duty as your parent to guide you to those. I remind you guys all the time of the verse in Ephesians, Ephesians 2.10. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. My most sacred duty, I believe, as a father, is to tell Lily and to tell John as often as they will listen, you are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that you might walk in them. My sacred duty is to help you see those good works and walk in them. It sounds counterintuitive, especially for Americans. I don't want John and Lily to create their own dreams for their lives. I want their biggest dream for their life to be to walk with God. Hold me close and teach me to abide. We just sang it. I want their biggest goal for their life to be to abide in Christ. And that one day, when they get to heaven, to hear, well done, good and faithful servant. That's what I want for them. I'm really not very interested in them creating their own dreams. Because God has bigger ones for them that are better than theirs. And this makes sense, doesn't it? So I'll get there in a second. But to the parents, you raising your kids, you have a chance to get ahead of it now and to help them become young adults who know my life is not my own and God has plans for it and his plans are better than my plans so I'm going to follow them anyways. We can get ahead of this, guys, for the rest of us, as we try to integrate these things into our life. The problem is, that's exactly what we tend to do, isn't it? That's exactly what we tend to do. This isn't revolutionary information. It might be packaged in a way that we haven't thought about in a while, but it's not revolutionary information that Jesus asked for our life and wants us to live our life according to his plans. But when we hear that, trying to be good Christians who we don't yet know if we're disciples, we try to integrate Jesus' plans into the nooks and crannies of our plans, right? We try to take the life that we're already living and the path that we already chose. And then we try to work Jesus into those things so that being obedient to his word and choosing his dreams over ours doesn't cause very much pain. So we don't have to mourn a possible future. So we don't have to change a lot of things. So we don't get too uncomfortable. We just do a tiny little course correction and we feel better about ourselves because now we're giving Jesus this part of our life when that's not what he asks for. Take up your cross. Deny yourself. Follow me. If you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. If you don't, you will lose it. And here's the thing that I was thinking about as I was thinking through this. As we think about the idea of choosing our plans for our life or choosing Jesus' plans for our life. Your plans, I know this is a little whatever. So go with me or don't. But my hunch is your plans are just an amalgamation of who you were in childhood and who your parents were and who your friends were when you were in high school and college and you were developing your values. Your plans are just a hodgepodge of stuff that you receive from the people around you. If you had good parents, you wanted to be like them. If you had bad parents, you didn't want to be like them. And so that's at the correction of your life. If you had good friends in high school and college that had decent values, they pointed you in one direction. If you had bad friends, they pointed you in another direction. Very few of you ever sat down with a legal pad and research and wrote out a plan for your life in a thoughtful, meaningful way. Your plans are an accident, man. That's my point. Whatever you think you chose you wanted to intend, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. You stumbled into it by accident of birth and culture. But we cling so tightly to the plans and the dreams that we have for our life that were made by flawed, finite brains. When what Jesus is offering to us are plans that were made by a perfect, divine brain that sees everything all at once. And yet we still stubbornly and ignorantly choose our own. C.S. Lewis once said that the kingdom of God is like you're a child in your backyard. He said making mud pies, which I guess is what you did for fun in like the 1910s, is you're like, mom, I'm going to go play with mud. Okay, be safe. He said it's like being offered to go on a one-year holiday, on a one-year vacation around the world to see all the greatest sights in the world, and instead we choose to sit in the backyard and play with mud. Here's the thing about these plans that Jesus has for you, about his desire for you to spend your life building his kingdom, not your own. And here's why it's okay for him to ask him to give up everything you thought you wanted for what he wants, because they're better than yours. And Jesus is not a tyrant. He's not a dictator. He's not interested in making your life worse at all. In fact, we have verse after verse in Scripture that assures us that Jesus actually wants us to have a good life. One of my favorite verses that's in my office, I use it a lot, it brings me comfort a lot, is John 10.10. The thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Christ says. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus wants you to, literally, he wants you to have the best life possible. Now here's the deal. He probably doesn't define best life like you currently do, but his definition is better than yours. A couple more, and then I'm going to make a point and we'll wrap up. David writes in two different places in Psalms. In one place he writes, better is one day in your courts than thousands elsewhere. And then in Psalm 1611 he says, at your right hand, God, there are pleasures forevermore. In your presence there is fullness of joy. Does this sound like a God who's interested in making you miserable? Does this sound like a God that doesn't have better plans for you than you do? Your plans are an accident. His are intentional and divine. Lastly, in Scripture, I often point out to you the Ephesians prayer, Ephesians 3, 14 through 19. We did a whole series on it last January. I pointed it out at the onset of this year. It's my prayer for grace and my prayer for you. And the heart of the prayer is that everything that happens in your life would conspire to bring you closer to God. That's the prayer. But I always stop when we go through it at 19 because you have to stop somewhere. But if you keep reading and you get to 20 and 21, you see one of the most amazing, encouraging little passages in scripture. It says this, it says, now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us. To him be the glory in the church and in Jesus Christ throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. He finishes up that segment of the letter by offering the prayer to God, by him who is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine. I know it's a high bar for Jesus to set, to say, I want all of your hopes and dreams. I want all of your plans. I want you to sit down and prayerfully consider with your career if that's what I want you to be doing. Prayerfully consider with your finances, is that really how I want you to invest in those? Is that really the future that I have dictated to you, or is that what you want? Jesus asked that we sit down and we think through these very difficult things that the answers could potentially make us deeply uncomfortable. But here's what we know. He's going to hand you better plans. He's going to hand you better dreams. And here's what I know experientially. I would never ever pretend to be someone who's always living life according to Jesus' plan. I would never ever pretend to do that. And you may be thinking, you're a pastor. You've committed your life to Jesus' plan. Not really. I became a pastor because I wanted people to respect me and think I was cool. That's why I became a pastor. Just full disclosure, that came out in counseling like six years ago. I know that that's true. God has sanctified those motives. Now I don't care what you think. That's not true either. But God has sanctified those motives and helped me not do this for myself and for the sake of others. So I know what it is to not live according to God's plan. I know it very well. But I've been blessed in my life that there have been pockets where I did accept his plan over mine and I did live his plan for me rather than my own plans and I can tell you without reservation or hesitation or exception when I am living my life according to God's plan my life life is richer, fuller, better, more lovely, more wonderful, more alive. Without exception, my friendships get deeper. Without exception, my marriage is better. Without exception, I find it easier to get up and I'm more motivated to do the things that God has put in front of me that day. Without exception, I hold my children tighter. Without exception, I cry more happy tears and experience a fullness of life that never comes when I live by my plans. And I don't want to paint a falsely rosy picture here. You can live according to God's plans and experience pain. You can mess up and pursue your own plans that weren't God's plans, and as a result, you're in a ditch somewhere. As a result, your life got sidelined. As a result, you were in the middle of great pain and hardship. But make no mistake about it, that's probably not because you were ardently following God's plan for your life. It's probably because you're following your own and he's trying to get your attention. But those of you who have lived your life according to God's plans for even a season cannot deny that that season in your life was one of the best ones. And that those seasons are some of the best ones. And there will be pain in the midst of living according to God's plan. We do not judge the raindrops of tragedy because we're believers. But, on balance, if you invest your life following God's plan for you rather than your own, if you take up your cross and follow Jesus and give up your life for the sake of the kingdom, I promise you, you will live a better life if you do it. I promise you it will be more rich and more full and more lovely. I promise you it will be immeasurably more than you can ask or imagine for yourself. I promise you. So as we finish this simple thought, and then I'll pray. Jesus is asking for your life. Do you trust him with it? Do you trust him with it? Let's pray. Father, you are lovely and good and wonderful and we are grateful. God, it is a scary thing to hand our hopes and dreams over to anyone else outside of our control. But Father, I pray that we would trust you with ours. Help us trust you with our children, with our careers, with our financial goals, with our friendships, with all the things we want to accomplish, all the things we want to acquire, and all the things we want to accumulate, God. I pray that we would trust you with those things. Give us the strength and the courage to ask hard questions and to receive hard answers and replace our cruddy hopes and dreams with your incredible ones and help us be people who live our lives for you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. Thank you all for being here, for listening online. My name is Doug Bergeson. Thank you, thank you. It was my hope that I would get that. But to kick things off, I'm going to need a little help from you. The audience, congregation, flock, whatever you want to call yourselves. I need a little help. Who in today's culture, books, movies, TV, podcasts, or even real life would be considered a great detective, a master of deductive logic, one able to take the most cryptic clues, hints, and innuendo and figure out what's going on. I'm asking you all so as not to date myself and come across as a hopelessly out of touch boomer. So a little help, please. Just shout out some names of great detectives, masters of deductive logic from any realm of your experience. Sherlock Holmes. Okay, that's kind of a boomer response, but that's okay. Who else? I would have gotten that one. Who else? Columbo. That I had down too, and I wasn't going to share because it's so out of date. Anyone else? Axel Foley. Okay. Okay. In the first one or the one in the new release? Axel Foley. Okay. Who else? Ace Ventura. Okay. Okay. That's good. That's all I need. I really needed those names, and I appreciate your contributing to make this one point. When you see me being trotted up here to speak on a Sunday morning, you do not have to be a Sherlock Holmes, a Detective Columbo, an Axel Foley, or an Ace Ventura to know that we must be deep, deep, deep into the lazy, languid days of summer. When I plot up here on stage, you have the legitimate right to ask yourself dang why am I not on vacation but be that as it may I am here and I'm excited to share when Nate first reached out to me way back in March he wrote that he we'd be in the middle of our summer series which we started last year called 27 that covers the books of the New Testament and specifically the letters of the Apostle Paul and he said I could pick whichever one I wanted and build a sermon around its overall message. Now typically when asked to preach I deliberate, I agonize, hem and haw wringing my hands over whether I really want to do it or not. But not this time. I was excited and quickly responded to Nate, saying that I would leap at the chance to do the book of Colossians, as it is magisterial and soaring and easily one of my favorite books in all of Scripture. I was pumped. However, just moments later, Nate wrote back, and I quote, Doug, thanks for taking me up on the offer, though I have bad news that I hope will not dissuade you from your acceptance. Aaron preached on Colossians last year, and I failed to mention that to you in my request email. Kyle has also preached on 1 and 2 Thessalonians, so those are off the market as well. So remembering that old saying, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, I went back to Nate, explicitly asking him to confirm in writing what books were actually able and available for me to pick. And thankfully for me, and hopefully for you, Paul's letter to the Ephesians was one of them. And that's the book we're going to look at this morning. This letter was written by the Apostle Paul, once among the fiercest and most formidable opponents of the early Christian church. But God, in his wisdom and grace, had chosen Paul, this fervent enemy of the church and most unlikely of all candidates, to be his chosen messenger in spreading the life-changing news of Jesus Christ throughout the known world. And for two to three years, they don't know exactly how long, the city of Ephesus had been base camp for Paul's ministry, for his missionary work, establishing churches throughout the region. Now, by AD 60, some 25 years after his miraculous conversion experience on the road to Damascus, Paul is thought to have written this letter from a prison in Rome. Now, for those familiar with this letter, it is chock full of beautiful and iconic passages. Nate frequently has brought to our attention the last half of chapter 3, which is his favorite prayer in all of Scripture and one he prays over grace often. Ephesians also contains the verses that would shape and fuel the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago. Ephesians 2, 8, and 9 asserting that salvation is only found through God's gracious gift of Jesus Christ and is by faith in him alone. In other words, there's nothing we can do to earn or curry God's favor. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not fromesians, there are the frequently misunderstood, misappropriated, and sometimes even abused house codes, describing how the relationships between wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters, are to work in light of the Lordship of Christ. Finally, in a very famous passage near the end of the letter, Paul exhorts all believers to put on the full armor of God. And there are more, but this morning, our focus will be on the one overarching theme of this entire letter, our identity as believers, who we truly are now that we are in Christ. According to Paul, everything in both the individual and collective Christian experience, hangs in the balance, directly dependent upon the extent to which we can wrap our minds around this one transcendent and surpassing reality. At this stage of my life, if you were to ask me why I believe what I believe, my most honest and transparent answer would go something like this. I believe because everything I've seen, everything I've learned, and everything I've experienced in my life so far has validated the truth of Scripture. Not just some things, but literally everything has reinforced what the Bible has been saying all along. And despite being such an ancient book, I've for the most part stopped being surprised when I again discover another way in which the Bible is fresh and profoundly modern, relevant, life-changing, and most importantly, true. Here's one quick example from my long-ago past. In 1966, Professors Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn at the University of Michigan published a groundbreaking work in the field of psychology and organizational behavior. By the time I started graduate business school up in Chicago in 1980, Katz and Kahn's cutting-edge theory, only about a dozen years old, had swept through academia and was now all the rage at the elite business schools. What this theory offered was a sweeping transformational alternative to classical business management that up to that point had viewed organizations as machines. Now what this new systems theory proposed was that organizations should best be viewed not as machines but as living organisms. When I first heard this I was floored, blown away. What insight, what brilliance, so outside the box. I'd never in my life heard anything like that before. Oh, wait. Yes, I had. The Apostle Paul had made that very same point when he compared the church and how its members were to operate to a human body in his first letter to the Corinthians, written around A.D. 55. Turns out the Bible had beaten Dr. Katsakan and Kotz to the punch by just over 19 centuries. Much more recently, I was again struck by Scripture's remarkable freshness and relevance, revealing truth and wisdom long before the rest of us even begin to catch up. The occasion was this past fall when I listened to the book, The Coddling of the American Mind. And it has direct relevance and application to what Paul is trying to do in his letter to the Ephesians. Written in 2018 by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff, the book makes the case that our society and culture have gradually but steadily moved towards broad acceptance of three great untruths with terrible consequences, particularly for our young people. The three great untruths the authors cite are, one, always trust your feelings. Two, avoid pain and discomfort if you can. And three, life is a battle between good people on the one side and bad people on the other. Even if well intended, as they often are, the book asserts that these beliefs represent terrible and demonstrably false ideas whose adoption and embrace by large swaths of our society have contributed to an epidemic of anxiety and depression and overall decline in our mental health, to the intolerance and turmoil roiling our public discourse, and to the tearing apart of any semblance of social cohesion in this country, to name just a few of the disastrous consequences of these ideas, these patterns of thinking. The book went on to show how these flawed beliefs not only contradicted thousands of years of wisdom literature from a variety of traditions, but also fly in the face of the latest findings of science and modern psychology. That the Bible is prominent among wisdom literature debunking those three great untruths came as no surprise. What did come as a new revelation to me was when the authors introduced something I've never heard of, something called cognitive behavior therapy, or CBT, as an especially effective remedy and tool in combating these three great untruths. Why this is pertinent to Ephesians is that the Bible in its entirety, and the Apostle Paul in particular, espoused and practiced cognitive behavior therapy almost two millennia before it was even a thing. Some of you older folks, as well as any country music freaks out there, might remember the 1981 chart-topping duet by Barbara Mandrell and George Jones, I Was Country Before When Country Wasn't Cool. Does anybody remember that? Yeah, there we go. Well, tweaking that a little bit for my purposes this morning, it turns out that the Apostle Paul was doing cognitive behavior therapy before cognitive behavior therapy was cool. First pioneered in the 1960s, CBT is premised on the idea that how we think and what we think is what determines to a large degree both our emotions and our behavior. Rather than focusing on the origins of a problem as happens in traditional psychotherapy, cognitive behavior therapy works to change our current thinking. It is our incorrect, distorted, and emotional thinking about ourselves and our world, what cognitive behavior therapy refers to as cognitive distortions that must be addressed and changed. In clinical practice over the last several decades, this has been shown to be true as CBT has been proven to be remarkably effective. But zoning in on just the first of those three great untruths, always trust your feelings. It's an important, even vital question to ask, to what extent should our feelings and emotions influence and shape what we think, what we believe to be true? If one has been paying any attention at all, we now live in a society and a culture which have elevated and anointed emotions and feelings to such prominence that they control the moral high ground. And in many instances instances assume ultimate authority, even to the extent of determining what is true and what is not. One simply doesn't question or challenge another's feelings in polite society. After all, that's what you feel. That's your truth, right? Well, no. Wrong. Wrong. Not according to cognitive behavior therapy, and certainly not according to what God has revealed in his word. It turns out that in many instances, God cares far less about our feelings and emotions than we do. It can be off-putting at first, even shocking. After all, if God's supposed to be so loving, how does that compute? But lest anyone here this morning or listening online misses this critical point, it's not that God doesn't care about our feelings and emotions, but that he cares more for those things that have the greatest chance to help us. And from God's vantage point, just as in cognitive behavior therapy, the mind is the key. The mind is the key because how we think determines how we act. Our behavior follows our thoughts and beliefs. And we intuitively know this to be true. If I care to know what you really think, what you really believe, there's no need for me to ask you or for you to tell me. I'll simply watch closely what you do. How do you spend your time and treasure? What you prioritize? What are you willing to stand up for, come what may? When are you quick to compromise and make exceptions? What sacrifices and trade-offs have you made? How do you treat people? How different are you in public than in private? Your actions are the tell. Even the old adage, follow your heart, which I love, is not so much an appeal to one's emotion as it is to what one truly believes is right and true. In actual practice, the heart doesn't do most of the leading. It is typically more of a follower. It is the convictions of your mind that set the wheels of action in motion. It's what one thinks and believes that does the leading, and our hearts then follow. That is why, whether we like it or not, it's a far greater concern to God how we think and what we think and why we think the way we do than how we might be feeling at any point in time. The priority on the mind rather than the emotion is found throughout scripture. Time and time again, the Bible asserts that our minds are the key. But you may ask, don't feelings and emotions greatly influence how we think? Absolutely they do. And therein lies the problem. God is obviously not against emotions, revealing in scripture his own deep emotions and feelings. Furthermore, he's imbued us, his treasured and loved creations, with gobs of both. Emotions can be wonderful and transcendent, an indispensable and indelible part of being human. But the downside to our feelings and emotions is that they are often fleeting and fickle. They can also easily deceive, mislead, and distort. Here's a simple case and point from real life. If we have any poker players in the house this morning, do we? Any poker players? Okay. It's probably not, I was hoping to get a little bit more, better response. Have to move to Vegas. But if you do play, well, if we have any poker players in the house, you're probably familiar with the term tilt. If you do play and are not familiar with the term, then my guess is you probably lose a lot. Always leaving the table a bit mystified as to why you have such bad luck. Tilt is when emotion knocks a player off balance, disrupting and distorting his objectivity and ability to discern what's really happening. Tilt most commonly occurs when a player suffers, is unlucky due to a bad beat, a hand he should by rights have won but didn't, as it can spiral into frustration and subsequent decision-making infected by emotion. But tilt can also happen to a player on a winning streak, where strong positive emotions lead to equally poor and distorted decision-making. In both instances, emotional reasoning, patterns of thinking unduly influenced by how we are feeling at the moment, leads to bad outcomes. But unless you're trying to make a living playing poker, that example might not strike much fear in you. But I think it should. Feelings are always compelling, but they are wholly subjective and not always reliable. For example, I might be thinking I'm absolutely killing it up here this morning, really giving Nate a run for his money. But just because I feel that way doesn't make it so, does it? We live in an age of emotional reasoning. Way, way too much importance is placed on how we feel, elevating our feelings to such a degree that they can overwhelm the facts and distort reality. It's not been good for our mental health. It's not been good for our public discourse. It's not been good for our social cohesion. And it just so happens it's not good for our faith either. The powerful and often pernicious ability of our emotions to distort reality and overwhelm our thinking, to convince us something is true that is not, or to convince us something is not true that really is, presents a clear and present danger to the vitality of our faith. Imagine being in a story in which you think you know what's going on. All your senses are in touch with that story. Yet, in fact, there is a much bigger story and a different reality at work. Guess what? We're all in that bigger story. And the challenge is that our feelings and emotions aren't going to be of much help as they often point us the wrong way. As the writer and pastor Eugene Peterson most famously known for his popular paraphrase of the Bible called the message states, my feelings are important for many things but they tell me next to nothing about God or my relation to God. My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel. Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not by what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors. In other words, it's not so much the feelings we have about God, but the facts we know about God, what we are convinced of, that need to be right. Whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, there is a raging battle going on for our minds, and the stakes couldn't be higher. The key to victory, in a nutshell, is to think right about the things that matter. Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Romans, do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing, and perfect will. This task of renewing our minds is made even more difficult because influenced by both our own sin as well as the fallen world in which we live, we all begin our journeys of faith with a constricted and impoverished view of what's possible, of what God wants and has in store for us. And this is Paul's overriding message in Ephesians, to convince us of the things that are actually and eternally true. Paul knows that we all need a radically new orientation in our thinking. Because only when we change the way we think do we change the way we live. And in Ephesians, Paul starts right up front. In the opening verse, offering a view of a reality that immediately confronts and calls into question my own. Addressing his readers as saints or holy ones. Those set apart by God. Paul is directly contradicting my feelings about myself. For I don't very often feel saint-like or holy or set apart. That's certainly not how I would describe myself. Yet Paul is asserting that it's true. I have been set apart by God for his purposes. That is who I am in Christ Jesus. In essence, Paul is conducting a master class in cognitive behavior therapy. Just like in modern CBT, Paul goes about combating our incorrect, distorted, and emotional thinking about ourselves, our world, and our faith by laying out the facts and the truth. And as in cognitive behavior therapy, the goal is that the process becomes a virtuous cycle of sorts, slowly but surely changing the way we understand and interpret things, which causes a change in how we respond emotionally, which in turn causes our thinking to change a little further. And so begins Paul's full frontal assault on our small and constrained views of ourselves and our world that constitute reality as we know it. Like rapid, sharp staccato bursts of machine gun fire, Paul rattles off a whole slew of facts that we are in fact part of a massively bigger and grander story, one that began long ago and will continue for all eternity, that we were chosen by God before the creation of the world, an act rooted in the eternal purposes of God, to have a people, holy and blameless, set apart for himself, something only made possible through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and that now unites all believers as one, that although once dead, we are now alive, despite rightfully deserving the judgment of a just God, someone else has borne our guilt and suffered in our stead, And by and through that extravagant act of love, we have been declared not guilty. Once consumed, controlled, enslaved by our own sinful natures, the ways of this world, we've been set free and made new through faith in Jesus Christ. And that even now, all of God's spiritual blessings in Christ are available, active, and evident in believers' lives. These are the things Paul thinks we should know. This is who we truly are. We can't intuit them. We can't feel our way towards them. Our feelings and emotions offer little help in arriving at these transcendent and transformational truths. Only by repeatedly reflecting on these things, allowing them to seep into us, to question and challenge our existing patterns of thinking and emotional reasoning, will we ever be able to renew our minds. Paul is asking, he's cajoling, commanding, encouraging us to put on a completely new lens, a lens designed to color everything that we think about and all of our thinking. We are indeed part of a bigger and grander story. And as Paul writes in chapter 1, verse 10, this story will culminate when the times will have reached their fulfillment to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. So, though the world may often seem chaotic, mystifying, and out of control, a time is coming and is advancing already when all will make sense under the lordship of Christ. In the meantime, believers in Jesus Christ have been given the gift of God's Holy Spirit as the first installment and guarantee of our salvation, a magnificent promise and blessing. However, this has led to a tendency for Christians to sometimes describe their conversion process as inviting Christ into their hearts, as if salvation entailed a mini-Jesus or a little bit of Jesus being in us. While that, in a sense, is true, it can lead to a misconception that downplays the extent to which all believers are united together in Christ and whose identities are found together in Christ. Far more common in Paul's writings and conceptually more powerful and accurate is the idea that believers are part of a larger reality of God. We are now in Christ, not the other way around. In fact, Ephesians describes two separate and completely distinct realms, that of Christ and that of the world, which are polar opposites diametrically opposed to utterly incompatible spheres of influence. To be in Christ means we are moving from one sphere of influence to another, from the realm of the world to the realm of is in them due to the former way of life to put off the old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires to be made new in the attitude of your minds and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. Putting off the old self and putting on the new is the process which happens as we move from the world's sphere of influence to that of Christ, a migration to a new identity that will define us for all eternity. However, again, we're not going to move very far unless this increasingly becomes how we view and understand ourselves and our reality. Paul insists that we must engage our minds rather than our emotions. Again, it is only when we change the way we think that we change the way we live. That's when transformation happens. Now, personally, I've often observed in my own life that if I really believe what I said I believed, my life would look a lot different. The great majority of the time, I don't feel like I'm a new creation or that I put off my old self. Far from it. On the contrary, I still struggle with the things that I've struggled with all my life. This has been convicting and has made me feel like a giant hypocrite at times. However, if my mind, what I think and what I believe, is decisive in determining how I act, then all this disconnect really means is that I obviously have a long ways to go in changing my thinking and renewing my mind. I'm still very much a work in progress. Fortunately for me, and for all of us, one of the most consequential and vastly underappreciated blessings of having been given God's Holy Spirit is that the Spirit helps us to make this transition by helping us to better grasp these truths, by purging our minds of those influences which distort, deceive, and mislead. In other words, by helping us to renew our minds. God's spirit in us seeks to shape us by reminding and teaching us who we are now in Christ. Only when we more fully know and believe can we authentically move and change. But we need to do our part. We have a role to play. Again, just as in cognitive behavior therapy, we need to deliberately, intentionally expose our minds to the truths of God and ourselves. If we were to have any chance of changing our thinking. It's simply not going to happen otherwise. And this is why worship, prayer, study, community are so vital. Christians, including myself, often act like these activities are certainly good things to do, but essentially voluntary ones, more or less. That we have times and seasons in our lives when they can have less prominence, be less of a priority, perhaps because we're so busy. And other seasons when we can allocate more time to them and really get our spiritual mojo back. The Apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesians does not share that view. Being a believer, being saved, to use a nice evangelical expression, being a follower of Christ, having our identity found in Christ, are all descriptions of the process of moving from one sphere of influence, the world, to a completely new sphere of influence in corresponding reality, Christ. that requires a radically new orientation in our thinking because only when we change the way we think do we change the way we live. And we can't depend on our feelings, emotions, and intuition to convince us of these things, for they often tell us something very different, which is why we're going to close by listening to Aaron sing a song from about a dozen years ago called Remind Me Who I Am. I personally find it so, so compelling because it captures my desperate need to be constantly reminded of the truth of who I am and who God is. I'd like to read a few of the lyrics. When I lose my way and I forget my name, remind me who I am. In the mirror all I see is who I don't want to be. Remind me who I am. In the loneliest places when I can't remember what grace is, tell me once again who I am to you, who I am to you. Tell me, lest I forget, who I am to you, that I belong to you. When my heart is like a stone and I'm running far from home, remind me who I am. When I can't receive your love, afraid I'll never be enough, remind me who I am. Tell me, once again, who I am to you, who I am to you. Tell me, lest I forget who I am to you, that I belong to you. Worship is how we are reminded. Spending time in scripture is how we are reminded. Getting down on our knees in prayer is how we are reminded. Being in community is how we are reminded. These ancient and timeless disciplines remain profoundly modern for when we worship together on Sunday mornings, when we open our Bibles, when we bow our heads, when we sit quietly alone in God's presence, when we spend time with others who share the same Savior and the same hope, we are working on and renewing our minds, implicitly acknowledging that we are part of a much grander story.