Sermons tagged with Content

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday. This morning, as we were getting ready for the service, I looked at the chairs and I went, it's the summer months, crowds are going to start to dwindle. I don't want people to show up in the room to feel cavernous. So I took a chair off of the end of each row. Yeah. And then I was talking with Shane and Phil, who've been here longer than me. And they said, hey, next week, maybe leave all the chairs in there. And I said, yeah, I'm going to consult with you two before making any more rash decisions about this. So I'm as surprised as you are that it's crowded here. And my standard joke is if you had a hard time finding a parking space, or if you had to make your own, you know what time it starts. So that doesn't feel like it's my problem. Welcome to Grace. Several years ago, I was at my previous church. And at that church I served essentially as an associate pastor, but one of my roles was to serve as the family pastor. Hang on, this is driving me nuts. I was not the IT guy, just the family pastor. One of my roles was to serve as a family pastor and in a larger church staff, it was a larger church at the time, the family pastor oversees the children's ministry and the student ministry and the people who run those ministries. So in that capacity, I had a guy that worked for me named Alan. He was a youth pastor. And Alan, it was getting to be the summertime, and we told him that he could hire some interns for that summer. And one of the guys he hired was a kid named Aaron. And I don't really know. Aaron was young, in his early 20s. I don't really know how he found the church. I think he just kind of started coming and volunteered and wanted to get involved in the youth ministry program. And Alan wanted to hire him as an intern. And so I heard that he got hired. And so I kind of went and met Aaron. And he was one of these guys that just immediately upon meeting him, I thought to myself, I don't like this dude. I like this guy. I don't like him. I don't like the way he chooses to present himself to the world. I like the way he looks. I like the way he talks. I'm not going to describe any of those things, lest I offend some of you. But the biggest thing I didn't like about this guy that rubbed me the wrong way was that everything he did, everything he did, he may as well have worn a t-shirt every day that said, please like me. And he was one of these people that had gotten involved in youth ministry because in my estimation, he had never been around people that liked him a lot. And he thought, well, then I'll shoot fish in a barrel. I can win middle schoolers over and get them to like me. So it was like he was in ministry as his own personal ego project to make himself feel better about himself. So he wanted to be cool. He was never cool. So I'll go into youth ministry so kids will like me and I'll feel cool. And I'll be honest with you. I've been at this a while. It takes one to know one. Early on, I had to repent of that same attitude of I just want to be respected and I want people to like me. And I think a dirty little secret of being in professional ministry and all I did is go pro with my faith. Okay. That's all I did. We're all supposed to be ministering. We're all supposed to be Jesus's ambassadors. I just decided I'm going to take my talents to the professional level and get paid for this. Okay. But everybody's supposed to do the same thing. And a lot of the people who get into ministry early on, it's an ego project. I want to feel important and respected, and God sanctifies that and massages that out of us. So hopefully we can minister out of a gentle and contrite spirit and a humble heart and genuinely want to usher people towards Jesus and towards his kingdom. But what I sensed in this guy, Aaron, was that he was off the charts, look at me, like me guy. And I thought it was gross and I didn't like it. And I went to Alan and I said, dude, I said, I like that guy. It doesn't need to be around youth ministry. Nothing nefarious was going on. I didn't suspect anything nefarious. I just suspected that his motives for ministering were wrong. And I didn't want that around our ministry. That's not why we get involved in what we're doing. I was like, I don't like him, not comfortable with him. You need to get rid of him. And he kept defending him, but all summer long, he was just one of these guys that immediately when I met him, I didn't like him. And it makes me wonder if when I start talking about people that you just don't like, if any of you can think of somebody right now that you just don't like. And I would ask you, besides the older gentleman that greets at the front door, Ron Torrance, that's mine that I'm thinking of right now. So y'all aren't allowed to pick Ron, you have to pick somebody else. I think everybody in this room has somebody they can think of when I say, who's somebody that you just don't like? And now maybe immediately our minds will go to celebrities or people that we've never met, but we've seen in different medias and we just don't like them. I'm not talking about them this morning, although that is an ancillary application of this. I'm talking about people in your life that you know that you don't like. Now, some of us are like Kyle. This morning, I asked Kyle for some sermon research before the service. Hey, man, can you think of anybody that you just don't like? And he was like, I'm sure if you gave me a minute, I could come up with somebody, but no. And then there's other people I talked to this morning were out of nowhere. I was like, hey, don't you know so-and-so? And he says, he's a good buddy of mine, and he says to me, yeah, I do know him. You would not like this guy. I can't stand him. So there's people on different, and I said, you're going to like the sermon this morning, dude. There's people on different ends of the spectrum, but no matter where you sit on that spectrum, we can all think of people that we've met in our life that we don't particularly care for. Sometimes very justified, sometimes small, silly reasons. I don't like their attitude, whatever it is. I don't like the cut of their jib. Whatever it might be, we have people that we don't like. And because that's a reality of life, because the reality of life is from time to time, we will meet people, we will be surrounded with people, we will be in close contact with people that we don't particularly care for. A co-worker from time to time, our spouse, our parents can rub us the wrong way sometimes, our children can rub us the wrong way sometimes. But there are people, those people we kind of bring back into the fold because we need to, but there's some people that we will just write off. Like, I just don't like that person. Don't want to deal with that person. A neighbor that is your mortal enemy, whatever might be going on in your life, we have those people that we simply don't care for. And a question that has come up often in my life as a Christian is kind of this theoretical question, is it okay as a Christian to not like someone? Is that all right? And so that's really the opening question of the day. There will be some people you simply don't like, but is that okay? There will be some people that you simply don't like, but is that, as a Christian, is that okay? Now this comes in the middle of a series, or This is actually the last part of the series called In Light Of. We've been going through Romans since February. We went through the first eight chapters, which meticulously build a case for humanity's need for Jesus. And then there's the culmination of those chapters in Romans 8, where we do need Jesus very much, and then promises are made to us that nothing can ever separate us from his love. And in light of this wonderful truth that Jesus accepts us, loves for us, paved a way for us to spend eternity in relationship with Almighty God, how should we then live our lives? So every week we've been looking at a different chapter in Romans 9 through now 15. In light of that truth, how should we live our lives? And so this week we come to Romans 15, and I believe it asks this question, or at least it answers this question, one that we deal with from time to time. As Christians, is it okay for us to have people that we simply don't like? Now, if you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, thank you so much for being here. And I have good news for you. I'm not preaching to you this morning. If you're not a believer this morning, you are free to not like whoever you want. You do not have to hold yourself to the standards of this. But if you're a Christian, that may not be our answer. So to that question and to the unavoidable reality that from time to time there are people in our life that we simply don't like, is this okay? Are we allowed to do that? Paul writes this, Romans 15, verses 5 through 7. May God, who gives endurance and encouragement, give you the same attitude of mind towards each other that Christ Jesus had, so that with one mind and one voice you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Verse 7. Accept one another then, just as like people? And sometimes it's for very justifiable reasons. But as we approach Scripture and say, is it ever okay for a Christian to simply not like someone? This is the instruction. Accept others as Christ accepted you. What does he say in verse 5? He wants to give you the same attitude of mind towards each other as Christ has towards you. So in two different ways, when we ask the question, is it okay to have people in my life I simply don't like? And I want to be very clear here. Obviously, obviously, we're not asking the question, can I be openly mean to them? I don't like them. Therefore, I feel like it's my right to ridicule them and belittle them in the workplace until they quit in shame. We're not preaching against that. I'm going to assume you know that. If you don't know that, there's a great fourth and fifth grade class right over there that might be on your level. Obviously, we know it's not good to ridicule people, to treat them poorly because we simply don't like them. Hopefully, we are of an elevated morality and sense of character that even when we don't prefer somebody, even when we don't like somebody, we find it within the magnanimity of our generous character and spirit to be nice to them from time to time. We have probably executed that. That's how we get around in society, is we learn to at least be cordial to people, even if we don't prefer them. And we tend to think as Christians that this is an okay model. As long as I'm not a jerk, then I'm fine. But that's not what Romans says. What Romans says is we should have the same mind towards others that Jesus has towards us. That we should accept others as Jesus accepts us. Which is different than if you just don't like somebody, try to be nice to them. No, no, no. We should think of them as Jesus thinks of us. So let me ask you this. How do you think Jesus accepts others? Do you think that Jesus is in heaven? And when some cranky old lady dies, he looks at Paul and he's like, Paul, I can't think of a name that's not offensive right now. So I'll choose one that is. Karen just died. Paul, you're welcome. Thank you for being the foil for that joke. Paul, look at this. Karen just died. And both Jesus and Paul go, oh, geez, this is going to be a handful in heaven. Do you think there are people that pass away that Jesus is like, I was really hoping that they wouldn't accept me because they were going to be Satan's problem. And now there's eternity with this person. I'm going to talk my ear off. Do you think Jesus does this? Don't you think he likes people? Don't you think he likes you? Do you think that when you get to heaven, you'll be like, Jesus, man, that I could be. I've already given the example of Aaron, and we're going to come back to that story and redeem it a little bit. But you think I'm going to get to heaven and be like, Jesus, like, for real, dude. Aaron, he was the worst, right? And you think Jesus is going to be like, I know, thanks for bearing that burden for me, brother. No, no, obviously Jesus likes everybody. And some of my Bible scholars in the room may go, well, hang on, he didn't seem to like the Pharisees very much. And I'll give you that. He was stern with the Pharisees. But we also see a Jesus that when one of them came to him in John chapter 3 named Nicodemus and wanted to talk with him and ask him more questions, and he asked to meet Jesus at night. Why? So that his Pharisee peers wouldn't see him meeting with Jesus and so bring shame upon his good name. He wanted to meet with Jesus in secret, and Jesus knew that. And what did he do? He didn't say, no, I don't care for you. I don't like your kind. You want to talk to me? You talk to me in the middle of the day in front of everybody. No. He said, all right, let's talk. And he had an open, honest, generous conversation with Nicodemus. Well, he didn't seem to like the Pharisees very much. Okay, well, he was stern with them from time to time. But do you not think that Jesus wanted to see them in his kingdom? Do you not think that Jesus knew who they were inside and out and wanted to see them come to faith and use the influence that they had been given to usher other people into that faith? Do you not think he saw the best in them and wanted the best for them? I think it's a really, really difficult argument to make that Jesus simply doesn't care for some people. That Jesus has an attitude towards people of, you know, I really don't like them very much, but I'm going to be nice to them if they're around. I'm going to try to think positively of them, which should really inform the question for us, am I allowed to simply not like someone? Well, all I know is that we're instructed in Scripture to have the same mind towards others that Jesus has towards them. And we're told to accept people as Jesus accepts them. So let me bring this more personal, if we're still having a difficult time with the concept, and ask you this question. How did and does Christ accept you? This is a really important question. Because you're here this morning, it's a Sunday, most of you woke up and showered, you put on decent clothes, you're presenting yourself. This is an environment in which it is imminently easy to be liked. All you have to do is shake the hands of people who look at you. If someone says good morning, you say good morning back. If someone says, how are you doing? You say, good, I hope you are, or good, how are you doing? It's really easy to put on the facade. Just be nice to everybody, you'll leave likable. It's harder with the people you see every day. It's harder at home. And it's harder for the people who know you the best to like you the most. That's why we love to be fully seen and to be fully known. To be fully seen by your spouse and to be fully known by them is this great picture of love, to really know your kids and know what they're capable of and understand all the ugliness in them and go sweep it aside and love them deeply anyways. And for people to offer you that is exceptional love. And it is very rare for someone to know us deeply and yet still like us. That's what makes friends and spouses so deeply important and meaningful in our life. But even those people who know us the best don't know us completely. They don't know every racist thought we've ever had. They don't know every pretension that we hold. They don't know every time we look down on someone else and so elevate ourselves. They don't know what we really think of that person that posts that thing on Facebook. Even the people who know us the best don't know everything that's happening in us all the time. And the reality is that for most of us, we think and feel pretty confident that if they did, they would not still like us. Jesus knows all of those things. And Jesus likes you, accepts you completely. He knows what's worst about you. He's been with you through the Holy Spirit. His presence has been brought into your lowest moment where no one else was and that you never talk about. And Jesus is excited for you to come to heaven with him. He likes you. So I would ask you again, those people in our lives that we don't like, we're told by Scripture to accept them as Christ accepted us. So how did and does Jesus accept you? And I love thinking about this. Jesus accepted you when you accepted him, knowing everything that you would be and become after that, the good and the bad. And he still likes you. He still wants you around. So that's how we are supposed to accept other people. This is difficult, right? And I know that some of us might go extreme with this. Do you mean that Jesus really likes the terrorists from 9-11, Nate? He really likes them? I believe that Jesus loves them. I believe that Jesus was hurt deeply for them. I believe that Jesus saw impressionable young men that were deceived by evil and led to believe things that were fundamentally untrue to a place where their life was defined by hate, which is the exact opposite of what Jesus wanted for them. So I believe that he grieved for them, that he did love them. Many of us in our life have people who have hurt us deeply. Nate, it's easy for you to say that I'm not allowed to not like somebody, but you don't know what my dad did to me. You don't know what my mom was like. You don't know what my ex-husband did. You don't know what my ex-wife did. You don't know how awful my brother was growing up. You don't know that. I have a right to my disdain. I have a right to my dislike. You probably do. You probably do. All I can tell you is that Paul prays that we will learn to accept them as Christ accepts us. All I can tell you is that Paul tells us that we should have the same mind towards them that Jesus has towards us. Now here's, and I want to say this before I move on. I believe those extreme examples are the exception, not the rule. I believe when I asked you to think of somebody in your life that maybe you just don't care for, that for most of you, that answer was not from some place of deep wounding and hurt. For most of you, it was an answer similar to me. I didn't like this guy. He just rubbed me the wrong way. I never did prefer him. But for both examples, how do we find a path towards that generosity and magnanimity of spirit where we can actually find a way to like people that we don't like? Well, I would like to invite you to learn to ask what I think is a very important question. What are their actions telling me they really need? When I see someone acting in a way that I don't like, what are their actions telling me they really need? When I was looking at Aaron and I immediately decided I didn't like him, not Aaron Gibson, our worship pastor, I still don't like him, but Aaron from the example, the youth intern. And I immediately, I decided I didn't like him. Why did I not like him? I didn't like him because he was trying to get approval from kids and that's not where you should get approval, man. That's not the reason to get in here. So you need to get your fragile ego out of here. I didn't like him because he wanted approval and acceptance. Because he wanted to feel like he was enough. He had never felt before in his life like he was enough. And he didn't, And here's the thing. Everybody wants that. Everybody in this room wants that. Everybody in this room might as well tattoo across their chest or across their forehead, am I enough? We all wonder that. So how could I not like somebody for asking the same question that I do? It's just that some of us figure out how to get that question answered in more socially acceptable ways than he did. But if I would have stopped and just said, what do his actions tell me that he needs and wants? I would have very quickly arrived at, Aaron just wants to be enough. And that's not really something worth condemning him for. Maybe I should show him instead of withhold from him. I've seen clips going around recently about people losing their minds in public places. Groups of people losing their minds in restaurants, yelling at waiters, yelling at owners, throwing things in Chipotle, yada, yada, yada. And it's easy to watch that and be like, those people are completely unlikable. And that's the most mild way I can summarize my thoughts in that moment. We have every right to disdain them and their behavior. But if you ask this question, what do their actions show me that they need or want? What their actions show me is that they want to feel respected. They want to feel like they have some sense of control. They want to feel like their needs are valued like everyone else's. And for whatever reason, something's happened in their life to make them think that nobody cares about them. And so rather than sit back and quietly take it, they're going to be vocal about demanding it. Who among us does not want to feel in control from time to time? Who among us doesn't want to be respected? Who among us is happy with taking a backseat to everyone else if that's the paradigm that we feel like we live with? And so when we ask this question, what do their actions tell me that they need? It gets us to this place of empathy and understanding, which kind of paves the way to liking them. And so I want to ask you this question. What would happen if we chose empathy over disdain? What would happen if we chose empathy over disdain? If when we see somebody that, and we go, I don't like them. I don't like people who vote that way. I don't like people who post that way. I don't like people that agree with that, that are of this political party. I don't like people who whine about this or carry on about this. I don't like high maintenance people. I don't like low maintenance people. I don't like tough people. I don't like weak people. Whatever it might be, the people that we don't like. Stop when we feel ourselves not liking someone. I want you to test this out. For some of you, it's going to happen very quickly. You're going to be leaving the aisle and the person in front of you is going to be going slow and you're going to feel rage well up within you. Why are they moving so slowly? Pause. What are their actions tell me that they need? Time, you jerk. That's what they need. They're old and they need time. And you will be too one day and you will need time. So relax. Next time you feel yourself tempted to not like someone and give in to that, pause. What do their actions tell me that they need? And is what they need really that condemnable? With the people that have hurt us deeply, what do their actions tell me that they need? Some of us, I'm sure, and I don't want to speak too lightly about it, but what we know from research and experience, some people grew up with a dad that was violent. What do those actions show you that he needs? He probably needed a good dad too. He probably didn't have that either. He probably needs to be understood. He probably needs somebody to love him enough to sit him down and say, hey man, this is not the way you should be, but he's never had anybody who loved him enough to say something. I'm not trying to excuse away abusive behavior at all. I'm just saying that there is a way to begin a path towards empathy by asking ourselves, what do their actions tell me that they need? And then beginning to understand what motivates the bad behavior, not defining them by the bad behavior. At the end of Aaron's tenure, he finished being an intern, and he wanted to come on as a youth assistant in a full-time capacity. And I wasn't going to let that happen. And so he asked to meet with me to know why we chose not to hire him. And I told my youth pastor to take the meeting. I didn't want to do anything. No, I'm just messing around. I took the meeting. And leading up to that meeting, I thought to myself, you know, I have to love him enough to tell him the truth. I have to respect him enough as a human to tell him the truth. And we met and he said, why can't I move forward at this church? And I said, and I told him, I said, man, here's what I think. I think that you need to take a break from youth ministry because I don't, I don't think that you're really happy with yourself. And I think that you're in this to try to gain the respect of others, but getting the respect of some students is really not going to make you feel okay about yourself. So I think that you need to get involved in a small group of your peers. You need to let God speak to you. You need to pause and consider whether youth ministry is really the career that you need to take or if you're just doing this for selfish reasons. And once you've reconciled with those things, I think you should move forward with whatever path God gives you. But right now, I think you're trying to get into ministry for the wrong reasons and you're going to end up crashing and burning. And he thanked me. And he went on and he, honestly, he followed my advice. He did what I told him I thought he should do. He took some time off, got involved in another church, met a nice girl, decided ultimately to go back to school to get a Bible degree and to get into ministry. But he called me years later and he said, I just want to thank you for that conversation because you were right. And God did have some work to do on me. Now here's what's really important. That story works out like I'm the hero, but I never tell those stories because I'm not. Here's where I failed him because I let my dislike get in the way. I could have had that conversation with him in May. And I could have been a part of helping rehabilitate him, helping him grow through that. And in September, he didn't have to experience the rejection that I imposed on him because I refused to love him enough to tell him the truth about himself. And because I was a coward, and because I didn't love him enough, I was happy to just sit and dislike instead of asking myself, what do his actions tell me that he needs? And then acting according to that empathy rather than disdain. I withheld from him. And the other way I withheld from him, and this is awful, nobody needs my approval. Nobody cares what I think about them. I'm not here to claim that. But if you just think about the dynamic, here's a young 20-something kid, he's 21 years old. I'm at the time 36 or 36. No, I was 34 or 35. And I had, by all measures, accomplished what he wanted to do with his career. I was what he wanted to be. Now, that's just a position. It's not me personally. It's just the position. We understand the dynamics of someone early in their career, seeing someone that's progressed in their career going, I want to learn from that person. Meaning because of my position, realizing that all he wanted was to be told that he's enough, I could have gone to him and I could have said early on, hey dude, Jesus loves you. You are enough. I think you're going to be great. Here's your challenges to what greatness could look like. Here's where your character may be getting in the way of what God wants to do with you. But I believe that if you're willing to be open about that and move on from them, that God can do some powerful things with you. So you stick by me and we're going to tackle this together. How much better does that look than just simply choosing to not like him for justifiable reasons for the five months that he was in my care? What does choosing to not like him win me? What did I prove to him? What did I prove to myself? What benefit is it to us to have people that we've simply reconciled to ourselves? We're not going to like them. None. But here's the benefit if we do. I'm skipping two points in your notes if you're following along. The last thing is the result. Verse 7, complaining about. The result of refusing to dislike someone, even when it's justifiable, but offering them grace and searching for empathy instead and seeking to understand what their actions tell us that they need and loving them for what motivates them, not judging them for their behaviors. The result of that is that people bring praise to God. The result of that, if we can practice that here, is to create an environment where everyone feels loved and everyone feels accepted and everyone feels like they're part of the church and everyone feels like they're welcome here and everyone wants to be a part of what they are. And because they're so accepted here, they will accept other people. The result of that is not just about grace. It's about the kingdom and the community of God. What if God's children would quit seeing it as an option to simply not like people because we can and we don't want to? But what if the kingdom of God took upon itself to see people with grace and with empathy and to understand what lies behind the behaviors and to love the person that has the same motives we do, to like, to be loved, to be known, to be respected, to be cared for? What if we began to see people for that and how we were instead of seeing them as the world was and looking for reasons and excuses to disdain them? How much more attractive and fragrant would our faith be? How much more praise would be brought to God if we would simply quit letting ourselves dislike people for reasons that ultimately don't matter and start making ourselves ask for God's empathy, for God's acceptance of them, for Jesus's mind towards other people that Jesus has towards other people. What if we started becoming people like that? What if the kingdom of God started offering empathy like that? How much more praise would be brought to the God that we all serve? So let's stop not liking people. Let's knock it off. Let's find paths to empathy so that we can accept everyone with the same mind that Jesus does. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for these seniors that have graduated and are moving into a new phase of life. God, I pray specifically that you would be with each of their moms as they worry here for the next several months, probably in a continued way. Give them your peace of spirit as their children go and step into these new phases. Lord, I pray that we would be a people who like folks the way you do. That we would find paths to empathy and understanding so that we might think the best of them. So that we might love them well as you do. God, where there are roadblocks to this, where there's difficulty there, where we just have a person that we just can't get around to liking, I pray that you would help us begin to break down those walls and show them your love and your acceptance and your grace and your goodness. In Jesus' name, amen.

Hey. Thanks for being here on this Friday night. Normally, I say things like, my name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. I usually do that for the benefit of people who are visiting or maybe unfamiliar with Grace, but I highly doubt that there's a large population of those people on a Friday night service. So, hey, Grace, this is fun. I got a text. I went to Gibby, Aaron Gibson, at the beginning of the week, and I said, listen, man, weather doesn't look good for this weekend either, but come heck or high water, me and you are going to get there on Sunday morning, and we're going to at least live stream a sermon. We have to do that. We can't miss two weeks in a row. And he said, yeah, I agree. Even if we have to spend the night at the church, that's what we're going to do. So we said, okay. Then I got a text from Betty Rock back there next to the thermostat. She likes to sit next to the thermostat so she can complain about it, but she never actually touches it and does anything about it. She just is like me. You'd rather complain than actually do something. But she texted me, and she said, how about we do a Friday night service to get ahead of the weather? And I texted her back all the reasons why that was a terrible idea, and that would never work. And then I went to work, and I told the staff about the idea, and they all went, that sounds like a pretty good idea. I'm going to wrap up our series called You'll Be Glad You Did. And as Aaron mentioned in the announcements, the whole idea of it has been Solomon, the wisest man to ever live, and we're going to see more about that this week and why that's the case, wrote the book of Proverbs. Also, I've been getting over a cough this week, so you might have to bear with me. But he wrote the book of Proverbs, and it's proverbial wisdom. It's wisdom passed down to us from the wisest man to ever live, from a very righteous man, from one of the best kings to ever serve the nation of Israel, and from someone that God blessed directly. And so the idea has been if we'll simply listen to the advice that we find in Proverbs and employ that in our lives, that this year if we listen to it and we abide by it, we will be glad that we did. And so I wanted to cap the series off with really a synopsis of Proverbs chapters 2 and 3. Because in Proverbs chapters 2 and 3, Solomon really digs in on wisdom. And I would highly encourage you, if you haven't read them or if you haven't read them in a while, to open up your Bible. You might do it during this sermon if you get bored. I don't care. It'd be better than listening to me. Read Proverbs chapters 2 and 3, where wisdom is almost personified. In chapter 3, it's referred to as feminine, she. And I'm not trying to make the Holy Spirit a woman, but when I read it, it almost reads like the Holy Spirit is embodied or personified by wisdom. And the thrust of those two chapters is essentially whatever you do, whatever you do, whatever you pursue, whatever's important to you, get wisdom. No matter what else is important to you, get wisdom, is really the synopsis of chapters two and three. And so I thought that would be the best place to land the plane as we finished up our series, essentially from Proverbs. Now to get there, I want to share with you something that happens in my marriage and in my family that may happen in yours, may not. And I think I've told you guys this before, but by way of reminder, every time we're driving down the road and the lottery, the Powerball lottery, gets like exorbitantly high to where it starts making like national news. It's at like $356 million. It's at $420 million. It's at $786 million, whatever it is. It starts getting real high, and you see it on the billboard, and we're driving down the road, and we see that number. What do you guys do? You look at your spouse. What would you do if you had that money? How would you spend that? You get $400 million. Uncle Sam gets 50%. What are you going to do with the other 50? And you start talking about what you'd do if you were the lottery winner. Now listen, I've never bought a lottery ticket in my life. Not from some moral high horse, but just from an economic one. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But I do actually want to just take a minute and encourage you guys to buy lottery tickets and tithe on your winnings. This is how we're going to get into that building. All right, so go to the gas stations all around after the service. Take that from the sermon. Especially you kids, go play the lottery. What a mess. It's Friday night, no one's here. This is great. But we start playing that game. What would you do if you had $400 million? And it always, I don't know about y'all, if y'all play this game, but it always starts out for us pretty conservative. I wouldn't do anything crazy. I'd probably just drive the car that I have. You know, I don't need anything extravagant. Well, it does have 120,000 miles on it, so I need to be practical. Maybe a Range Rover. Maybe a, I should probably just sit in a Maybach, right? Like I should just sit in one if I've got $400 million. Like maybe a BMW 740. Maybe that's what I need. You know, and so then it just starts to progress. And it's like, we wouldn't sell the house. We don't need anything extravagant. But maybe a condo in New York City. Maybe we get a little beach house on 30A. Now, you North Carolina folks don't know about 30A. You do, FSU. I see you. 30A is on the Florida Panhandle. It's the road that connects Destin to Panama City. It's the best beaches in the country, all right? They're amazing, and we grew up going there, and now they're too far away, and so we have to take Lily to Emerald Isle, and it's really tragic. So let's get a house there, but then it's like, well, if we're going to get a house there, we've got to be able to get there. So should we start thinking about a private jet? And then I'm going to need a cook. Probably need a personal trainer. This house is not good enough. We need a bigger Raleigh house. And then it just starts escalating. But certainly we've all had that thought process. If I were to win a million dollars, if I were a hundred million dollars, what would I do with it? If I hit the lottery, what would I do? And then when we were little kids, remember we used to play that game, if you rubbed the bottle and the genie came out, what would you wish for? You get three wishes, you can't wish for more wishes. What would you wish for, right? And we've all done that exercise. And we all have, in some ways, different answers and in a lot of ways, very similar answers. And I bring that up because this is a situation that Solomon actually faced himself. If you look in 1 Kings 3, if you look in 1 Kings 3, what you see is that God appeared to Solomon in a dream. And he said to Solomon, ask of me whatever you will and I will grant it to you. Now that's pretty big deal. If God came to you in a dream, if God showed himself to you and said, ask of me whatever you want and I will give it to you, what would you ask for? God, I'd like to be financially secure in such a way that I don't have to think about money for the rest of my life. I don't need to be wealthy. I just don't want to have to ever worry about it. Would it be, God, repair my marriage? Repair my relationship with my children? Would it be make me the best at my job so that I can prosper? Make me rich. Make me powerful. Give me health. Let me live a long life. What would you ask for? Well, here's what Solomon asked for. And this is what qualifies him to write the book of Proverbs and warrants us looking at his wisdom in that book. This is what he requests. In 1 Kings 3, I'm going to read verses 9-12. Hang on just a second. He says this. So God said to him, since you have asked for this and not for long life or wealth for yourself, nor have asked for the death of your enemies, which that's a fun one. I don't think that occurred to any of us that we could wish for someone else to die, but maybe that's on your agenda. I will do what you have asked. I will give a wise, I will give you a wise and discerning heart so that there will never be anyone like you, nor will there ever be. So God goes to Solomon in a dream and he says, ask me anything you want and I'll give it to you. And Solomon's in this predicament because he's a relatively young man and he's just taken over as king and he's got a big plate in front of him. And so he is in this situation in life where he realizes his need for wisdom. He realizes his need for wisdom. And so that's what he asked for. I have this job to do. Make me fit to do it. Make me wise so that I can lead your people. And it says that God was pleased, and we're going to come back to this. It says that God was pleased with this. And the next point is Solomon wished for wisdom. He could have wished for anything, and he chose wisdom. And it says that God was pleased with this. And then he said, because you didn't ask for these other things that would have been more selfish and self-serving, I'm going to grant this to you. And then, oh, by the way, Solomon was the richest king to ever rule Israel. He built more infrastructure, more monuments, more palaces. He built the temple. He built more of Israel than any king ever did. Israel never experienced greater prosperity than it did under the rule of King Solomon. And you can trace it back to the beginning of his rule when he was granted this opportunity from God, ask me whatever you want and I'll give it to you, and he chose to ask for wisdom. And that foundation of wisdom led to the prosperity of Israel throughout his reign. It's like it's a Rosetta Stone for life, or a foundation of life. He could have asked, make me invincible to my enemies. Make us prosper. Give me wealth. But instead he asked for wisdom and then that was the spring from which everything else grew. From this wish for wisdom, we get the book of Proverbs. And like I said, chapters 2 and 3 really serve as kind of a synopsis or a rallying cry for the entire book. In chapter 2, Solomon writes to his listeners, and when I start to read, you're going to see that it starts off with the word, my son. So this is like a letter to his son. And I don't know about you, but whenever I have the opportunity to see those things, there's a book I read recently that I brought up in a sermon before called Notes on Being a Man. And it's a guy that I like, writes a book on manhood. And really, as you begin to read it, you can tell it's really written to his two boys. If you get something out of this, great, but this is written to my two boys. And I love a mom writing to a daughter, a father writing to a son. I love getting to get a glimpse into what a dad thinks is important. As a matter of fact, when I started this job, when I took this job, now nine years ago, my dad wrote me about a six-page letter, notes on being a pastor. And he said, because, I said, why'd you write this down? And he said, because if I told you, you wouldn't listen. He was right. But now I have it, and I've had it for nine years. And I go back to it periodically and reread it. And the wisdom continues. The wisdom persists. It continues to be valuable. So I love when a father will write a letter to his child about here's what you need to understand and here's what's important. And this is what Solomon is doing in Proverbs. And we get to be, we get the benefits of being his offspring when we see this. This is what he says. Listen, please. and cry aloud for understanding. And if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. This is Solomon's... He wasn't dying as he wrote this, but you could consider it his dying words to his son. If you get nothing else, pursue wisdom. Look for it as for silver. Search for it as for hidden treasure. Get wisdom. And he says, if you do this, two things that are remarkable to me. The first thing is you will understand the fear of the Lord. There's another proverb that Solomon wrote that says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Which means until you properly fear God, until you have a proper awe and respect for God, until you put him in his place and by necessity you in your place, you cannot begin to pursue wisdom. People who have themselves on an equal playing field with God or who think God doesn't exist, and so then they are the Lord of their own life. People who put themselves on par with God, whether they believe in him or not, Solomon says, cannot achieve true wisdom. And I agree with that. If we want to pursue wisdom, if we want to be people who are wise, we have to acknowledge that there is a God who exists. We have to acknowledge that the Bible starts out, the first sentence of the Bible, in the beginning God created, which establishes the fundamental relationship for life. God is the creator. We are the creation. He is higher than us. And we cannot pursue wisdom until we acknowledge that hierarchy. And listen, and I've said this before, anytime we have a sin issue, anytime we have a heart issue, anytime our life gets disjointed, anytime things start to go bad for us spiritually, the fundamental reason, no matter what else has happened, the fundamental reason for that is we forgot our place and we put ourselves on par with God. We are not in a place to pursue wisdom. So the first thing he says is if you pursue this, you will begin to know the fear of the Lord, which puts us in a position to pursue wisdom. The second thing he says, and I loved this one, it says, and you will find the knowledge of God. Now you guys, most of you have been here for a while. And you might remember two Januaries ago I did a whole series and a prayer in Ephesians. That's my favorite prayer in the Bible. I have it stenciled, written out and framed on my office wall at home. I'm not trying to brag, but I do have a home office. And in that prayer, Paul says, for this reason, I bow my knees before the Father for whom every family on heaven and on earth is named. And then he goes on to pray for the church in Ephesus. And he doesn't pray for circumstances and he doesn't pray for prosperity and he doesn't pray for health. And the conclusion of the prayer is so that you may be filled with all the fullness of the knowledge of God. And I never pieced it together before. I always thought that was an original thought from Paul, that that's what he was praying, that you would be filled with the fullness of the knowledge of God. And when I pray for you, and when I pray for your children, and when I pray for our church, that's what I pray. Not that things would go well, not that we would prosper, not that we would be healthy, not that we would avoid tragedy, but that whatever happens would conspire to bring us to a deeper knowledge of God. And I always thought that was Paul's thought, but it's not. He's echoing Solomon from Proverbs who says, if you pursue wisdom, then you will be filled with the knowledge of God, which then rebounds and resounds in Ephesians thousands of years later when Paul writes that letter. So that's what happens when we pursue wisdom. As we begin to know the fear of the Lord and we are filled with the knowledge of God. So we are left with chapter 3, kind of the synopsis, the crescendo of his encouragement to pursue wisdom. In chapter 3, he says this, verse 13. Those who find wisdom, those who gain understanding. I love that verse. Her ways are pleasant ways and all her paths are peace. Because those were written about Jen. But the rest is about wisdom. And he makes the point, whatever you do, get wisdom. Prize it. Consider it the most important thing to pursue. And that becomes really clear as you look at the life of Solomon, you look at the writings of Solomon. But even as we reflect on wisdom and we agree with Solomon that we should pursue it, we're left with some questions. First one would just be how do we define wisdom? And this is not going to be groundbreaking for any of you. This is the definition that many of you would probably give as well. But just so we have a working definition and we're on the same page, we're going to define it this way tonight. Wisdom is knowledge applied. Wisdom is knowledge applied. We've all known people who have grown older and not grown up, yeah? People who just because they participate in the relentless march of time does not mean they get smarter. As a matter of fact, I see you smiling. You know somebody who's got dumber. As a matter of fact, sometimes we atrophy because we quit learning and we quit pursuing wisdom. We put our head in the sand or we put our head in an echo chamber and we don't learn anything. And we grow old, but we don't grow up. So wisdom is knowledge applied. It's growing up. It's getting mature. That's what wisdom is. So then we ask, okay, if I need to pursue wisdom, and wisdom is knowledge applied, and biblically speaking, it's biblical knowledge applied. It's growing deeper in the scriptures, learning them well, and then learning how to apply that to our life and how to season our speech with it. Then we ask, okay, if that's what wisdom is, then how do I get it? If I'm supposed to pursue it, how do I pursue wisdom? The first answer is one that I just mentioned. Read the Bible. If we want to be people who are wise, how do we be wise? How do we grow in wisdom? Steep yourself in this. Know this book. Read it. If there's pockets that you've not read before, pursue them. Years ago, I realized I had read through the Minor Prophets, which is the last 12 books of the Old Testament, and they are incredibly boring. But I realized there was a gap of knowledge. I did not know them as well as I knew the rest of Scripture. And so I bought a commentary, and I set myself about going through the commentary and reading through the minor prophets so that I could have a better working understanding of them. That working understanding of the minor prophets has availed me zero so far, but I'm looking forward to when God uses that latent knowledge. But it's there. If you want to grow in wisdom, pursue this book. Read it. Study it. We ought to be Christians. We ought to be reading the Gospels at least once a year. We ought to be reading Scripture every day. If there are areas of this book with which you are unfamiliar, read them. Do it yourself. I had a couple sit with me for some premarital counseling this week, and they articulated the desire to grow spiritually. And I said, okay, if that's what you want to do, how do you want to do that? And they said, small group, serve in church, be consistent in church. And I said, that's great. That's two hours a week. What are you going to do the rest of the week? And I helped them see that what they need to do is learn to feed themselves from God's Word. If you're reliant upon me for 30 minutes a week to teach you scripture, that is a terrible plan. I'm not that good. And I don't have enough time to cover it. You can never miss a week. If that's what you want to do, if that's what we all want to do as a church, we don't want to read the Bible, we just want Nate to teach it to us. All right, listen. Next January, we're going to give it a year. Next January, I'll start in Genesis 1. And I'll go verse by verse. We'll go through the whole Bible together, but here's the deal. You can't miss any weeks, and you can't bail out on a three-year series. You got to come the whole time. All right? You can't get bored. No one's allowed to leave. There's zero attrition during that series. And if you miss a week, you got to listen. See? That's untenable. So if you want wisdom, you got to learn to feed yourself. If there are pockets of this book that you're unfamiliar with, it is on you and you alone to begin to explore them. This is the first way and the most important way we get wisdom. Another way we get wisdom, and this is advice for only some of us. This is advice for Harris. It is not advice for Aaron. Shut up. Shut up. Just listen. This is advice for me. This is not advice for Jen. Just shut your mouth. In conversation, so often, if you're wired like me, I'm in, I'm paying attention, I'm enjoying the conversation, but what you just said triggered a story that I want to tell you now. What you just said made me think of something that I want to mention to you now. So now, rather than listening attentively, I'm just looking at you nodding my head because I get it. I know what you're saying and I'm disinterested now. I'm waiting for you to go like this so that I can open my mouth. If we want to be people who are wise, then we should shut up and listen. Listen in small group. Listen at dinner parties. Listen to your spouse. Listen to your children. Listen and learn. Even if the person you're talking to is not someone you're particularly impressed with for whatever reason. You're probably then talking to me. But even if the person you're talking to is someone that you're not impressed with, you still have something you can learn from them. So be quiet and listen. Be slow to speak. And as James says, slow to become angry. And listen. Shut your mouth and open your ears. This is how we gain wisdom. Another way we gain wisdom is to simply be around wise people. And it's extra important around wise people that we listen to them and that we ask good questions and we listen to their responses and we watch. I can't tell you, I can't tell you one of my great privileges is to get to serve on the elder board. Because when I serve on the elder board, I'm surrounded by spiritually mature, thoughtful, godly men and women. And I interact with them on a very regular basis. And I get to watch how these men and women enter into conflict. How they exchange ideas. I get to listen to how they pray every time we meet. I get to see how they host when we go to homes for dinners on the third Tuesday of the month for our fellowship meeting. I get to watch them do life. And it's a huge privilege for me to get to watch these people who oftentimes have more years under their belt than I do, to watch how they host, to watch how they contradict, to watch how they intervene and how they interject, and then to hear how they pray. There's so much to learn from wise people if we will surround ourselves with them. The last thing I wanted to mention about how to pursue wisdom is a few weeks ago I talked about guarding our heart. And I gave us the image of the cup, which Lily printed off for me, a sticker of her own face to put on my cup. And this is, now I have John on the other side. So feel free to take a look at the end of the service. But I talked about the cup and that when you're jostled, what comes out of you is what you were filled up with. And the thing that I failed to mention in that sermon and that I wish I would have said is sometimes it's about not putting the wrong things in our cup and in our lives. But more than that, it's about putting the right things in our lives. That Philippians verse, Philippians 4, 8, Finally, brothers, whatsoever things are true, good, noble, are of good report, are praiseworthy, think about these things. So if we want to ask how do we get wisdom, we have to ask what are we filling our cup with? What content are we consuming? When you have a drive, are you listening to music? Are you listening to vapid things? Are you listening like me sometimes to just sports radio, which really doesn't matter, or political radio, which also doesn't matter? I actually think those two are the same. I do pay attention a lot to politics, but I equivocate it to just being a sports fan. It's not as bad as being a Browns fan but I equivocate it to being a sports fan where we have our teams and we root for them and we listen to the talking heads talk about what they think our teams are going to do and then our teams do what they do and it has zero to do with me. It's the same. But it's easy to fill our space with that. Just vapid content that doesn't help us or prosper us in any way. What if we just supplemented that with one sermon? What if we supplemented that with just for one car ride, I'm going to listen to some praise music and just focus on God right now? Wouldn't that help us grow in wisdom? And the last one is this. I'm just going to do this one quickly about how to pursue wisdom because I really like to preach from Scripture. I don't like to just give life advice from. Because I don't think any of you guys signed up for that, nor do you need it. But as I thought about pursuing wisdom, something that did occur to me was this. Foster your curious mind. Foster your curious mind. I have an Audible account. I get to download a book a month, which is great. And the books that I download are whatever I'm curious about. This goes down rabbit holes. I got curious about World War I, so I listened to a book called The World Undone by G.J. Meyer on World War I, and it was great. Then I realized that the Ottomans kind of had some influence there, and I didn't know anything about them. Then I listened to a book about the Ottomans. Then I realized I didn't know how Germany was formed. Then I listened to a book that was a military history of the Prussian-speaking people. It was terrible. But that made me curious about the next thing. And I realized, yeah, I go back to the Ottomans. I don't know anything. I don't know anything about medieval knights going in and trying to conquer Jerusalem against Solomon. So let me listen to that. And I just followed it. And every next book was because something spurred some curiosity in me. And I'm not setting myself up as moral exemplar here. I'm just saying that if we want to grow in wisdom and in understanding, then take care of your curious mind. Instead of listening and consuming things that don't help you and that don't matter, maybe supplement that with something you're curious about and begin to learn. But if we want to grow in wisdom like Solomon says we should, then we should employ our curious minds. Now, as I finish, the last question is, why is wisdom so valuable? Why does Solomon prize it like this? Why does he say it's the most important thing? Well, the first reason we see in Kings, in chapter 3, in that passage that I read, wisdom pleases the Lord. Wisdom pleases the Lord. Now, I don't know about you, but Gibby used to pray this prayer when he first started here. He would say, God, let our praise bring a smile across your face. And that's a really wonderful thought. And I don't know how often you think God smiles at you. It is more often than you think it is. But if you're like me, I think it's rare. And I don't really know how to make God smile. I don't really know all the time how to make God proud. But this is a very simple fix for that. You want to please God? You want to make Him proud of you? Pursue wisdom. The pursuit of wisdom in and of itself, of good, godly, biblical wisdom, pleases God. So set yourselves about pursuing it. The other thing that wisdom does is that wisdom brings peace. We see this in the Proverbs 2 passage. Wisdom brings peace. I remember early in my career, in a previous life, I was a teacher. And I would get an email from my boss, a guy named Anthony Knight. And he'd say, hey, I need to see you in my office this afternoon at 3 o'clock. It's like 10 o'clock in the morning. And as soon as I read that email, what's going on in my head? Oh, crud, oh, crud, oh, crud, oh, crud, oh oh crud. I don't want to do this. It's like Nancy Lasavita was the HR person at IBM for a little while. Nobody wanted to get a call. Nobody wanted an email from Nancy. Hey, I need to talk to you this afternoon at 3 o'clock. Oh, geez, oh Pete. I'm more scared of her than anyone in this church. I used to get those emails. I need to see you at 3 o'clock. And then I'd spend the rest of my day fretting about what it could be. Right? Oh gosh, what did I do? Did I say something to a student? Did I not turn in this? What could I have done wrong? And I just would think of all the different ways I was in trouble. And then I'd go see Mr. Knight at three o'clock, go, hey man, you want to see me? And he'd go, yeah, we need someone to run the scoreboard for the basketball game this afternoon, want to see if you're available. Yeah, you got it. What's it pay? 50 bucks? I'm in. Fast forward that now, I still get those emails pretty regularly. Or I'll have people on Sunday morning. Hey, it's time for me and you to get some lunch. Let's email this week. Okay. Jeffy did that to me this week. He didn't want to talk about nothing. But they'll ask me, let's go to lunch. And old Nate would have fretted all week. I'd have gone to gin. Gosh, Amo wants to get lunch with me. What do you think it's about? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe he wants to play the keyboard again. I don't know. Maybe he thinks we need to buy new lights. Maybe he'd like one of the chairs with the armrests on it. I don't know. He's getting up there. It might be about time. I don't know. We talk about it, talk about it, talk about it. What do you think it is? What do you think it is? What do you think it is? Over the years, this little bit of wisdom has taught me not to worry about it. The meeting's never as bad as you think it is. And now, when people ask to go to lunch with me and they don't give me a reason why, I just say, yeah. And we put it on the calendar. And do you know the next time I think about that meeting is when my alert goes off 30 minutes prior to the meeting. And I go, oh, crud, I have to meet with Phil today for lunch. Better get going. Because wisdom has taught me and experience has taught me that whatever they want to talk about is not going to be as bad as I think it is. And even if it is worse, there's nothing I can do about it beforehand. It's going to be okay. Wisdom, experience brings peace. Whatever the unknown is ahead of us, it's going to be okay. It might not be as bad as we think it is. And even if it is, there's nothing I can do right now to handle it. But when we pursue wisdom, we grow in our ability to be peaceful. Last one. Wisdom is so valuable because wisdom engenders trust. Wisdom engenders trust. There are people in your life that when something big happens, when something's going on, and you just need an ear to tell. There are people in your life where you've got this big thing going on in your life. You've got this big thing happening. This thing happened with your spouse, with your wife, or your husband, or this is going on with your kids, or you're facing this, or you're just walking through a time where it's just dark and you're depressed and you're anxious and you don't know what to do. Life feels heavy and it just so happens that you're going to lunch with your friend. Some of our friends are the kinds of friends that we don't share that with because we don't trust them because they'll go tell other people. We don't trust them to carry that well. Some of your friends are the kinds of people that you're so relieved that you're going to see them that day because they're the exact kind of person that you need to talk to because you know that you can trust them. Those people are wise. The people that you can trust are wise. And the question there is, which one of those two friends do you want to be? Do you want to be the kind of person that people don't share things with you because they don't feel like they can trust you? Because that's a sign of immaturity and a lack of wisdom. Or do you want to be the kind of person that can carry your friend's burdens with them because they trust you? So, this whole series, every week, has been different glimpses of different kinds of wisdom. But this week, as we finish, we land on the admonition from Solomon. Whatever you do, get wisdom. And that's what I want to encourage you to pursue as you go.

Good to see everybody. Thank you for coming this morning. I assume that the inflated attendance for a very cold rainy day in which we're planning on snow is because of your deep interest in me preaching on guarding your heart and not the building update. So with that being said, I'm happy to take up the next 30 minutes of your time while you wait for the information that you actually want. Before I do that, some of you will get this joke and some of you will not, but if there's a little context here, I just want to say that the Steelers lost in the playoffs and they lost their head coach. Good. Go Bears! you some context. Mikey introduced himself as a longtime visitor. Here's why that's funny. First of all, Mikey and the ReSARS, they predate me. They've been here longer than me. They've given more blood, sweat, and tears to this place than I have. And we were talking about Discover Grace, and he said, I've never gone to the class. Am I a partner? And I have some people ask me that sometimes. And I told him, I don't care how much you've given, how much you've served, what you've done, or how involved your family is. If you don't listen to me talk about grace for an hour, you are not a partner. You're a visitor. So he introduced himself as a longtime visitor. And I've always said what partner, partner is what partner does. We kind of Forrest Gump it. If you partner with us, because at Grace we say that we have partners, we don't have members. And the real simple reason is because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. So we want us to think of ourselves as partners in the same entity. We're not looking for rights and privileges as members. So that's why we use that terminology. And I've always said partner is what partner does. If you're actually partnering with us, you're coming to small group, you're attending, you're giving, you're serving, you're partnering with us to move grace forward towards wherever we think God wants it to go, then you're a partner. So if you're out there and like the Rezars, you've been coming to the church for longer than me, and you're wondering, am I a partner now? My response to you is, I don't know, do you think you are? And if you say yes, then I agree with you. But if you want to come to Discover Grace, that's just a way for you to familiarize yourself with the church and our background and our systems and what we do. So we'd love to have you, but we're not real uptight about how to become a partner. You do what you like is our philosophy because I do what I like, so it's only fair. This morning we do continue in our series, You'll Be Glad You Did. And the idea is that if we'll listen to the wisdom of Proverbs, who was written by who the Bible says is the wisest man to ever live, King Solomon. If we'll listen to Proverbs and implement them in our lives, we'll be glad that we did. And we've talked about friends. We've talked about being generous. And this morning, I want to talk about this simple concept of guarding our hearts. This comes out of Proverbs chapter 4, verse 23. It's a verse that I would bet that most of the room has heard, but it's this. Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. And so I wanted to take some time this morning to talk about this concept because here's what I think is probably true. Here's what I think is probably true. I think it's probably true that a vast majority of you have heard this concept before. I kind of doubt that there's anyone in the room going, that is new information that I should guard my heart, and out of it everything flows. Maybe there's some, and that's fine, but most of you probably already know this. And so the impetus for me is to go, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know it, right, sure, but let's take some time and focus on it. Because many of us probably learned this when we were children. We probably learned it when we were young, and we've always kind of carried this ethic in our head. We know about it, but maybe we haven't considered it in a while. So I thought it would be worthwhile, as I this series on Proverbs and kind of planned it out, which by the way, I'm now, I'm almost done planning out our next series, which is going to be in Romans. And we're going to move through Romans chapter by chapter. And I'm so excited to do that because I don't know if I've said this from stage or not, but I really, really love preaching through Scripture and talking about it, and I really, really don't love talking about topics like guard your heart. I like the next one better than this one, but I think that the church needs both, and I think that we need to do both, and I think that we need to rest ourselves in this topic today because it's an important one. And here's why it's so important. Whatever flows into our heart flows out of us. Whatever flows into our heart flows out of us. So as we consider this as adults, guard your heart for everything you do flows from it. And we try to just put fresh eyes on it and take 25, 30 minutes to consider it. I want us to focus on the important parts. I want us to think about it as grown-ups. And the reality to me that comes out of this verse is that the reason we guard our heart is because everything else we do flows out of that. Everything we do flows from it. The way that I was taught this principle was when I was a kid, I was taught that you're a cup. And when you get jostled, which jostled is a great word. When you get jostled, whatever has been poured into that cup will spill out. That's the idea. Every morning, I drive Lily to school at NRCA. Lily's my daughter, not just some girl that I drive to school. I drive Lily to school at NRCA. And when you pull in, you have to go all the way around, and there's all these speed bumps. And it's really annoying, but I guess I understand. If I were running an institution where teenagers daily drove, I would have myriad speed bumps as well. So I get it, but I don't love it. And you go over the speed bumps, and the ones that are head-on, just direct, are pretty manageable. But there's some that are on an angle, and those are maniacal because they rock your car in a bunch of different ways. And every morning before we leave, I make a water bottle for Lily, and I fill my cup with ice and water. I have this all the time. So I fill it with ice and water, and it's close to the brim. And we go over the speed bumps, and I now have to, as we go over the speed bumps, I pick up my cup and I hold it like this to allow my arm to adjust for the bumping so that nothing jostles out of the cup, right? But what's going to come out of that cup, if I forget, and sometimes I do, is just water. It's harmless. It just gets on my center console there, and it's fine. It's not that big of a deal. And it helps me think about the way that we get jostled in life when we hit speed bumps, when we get bad news, sometimes when we get good news, when someone frustrates us, when our partner lets us down, when our children annoy us, or even worse, they disappoint us, when we don't get the deal, when we lose the client, when our team loses in overtime, what comes out of the cup when we are jostled? What spills out onto the people around us when something happens to us? Here's what I think. Sometimes, and I'll be honest with you, it's not very often, and you can ask the other people that work with me at Grace. You can ask Gibby. They've worked with me a while. Kyle, our family pastor, has worked with me for about a decade. Aaron's worked with me since I got here. I don't think I've ever snapped at you guys. I don't think I have. I snapped at Gibby one time. He deserved it, though. He had it coming. I don't think I have. Someone's clearing their throat over there as if I've snapped at them. I don't think I did. But we snap at people, right? And it's usually our family. It's usually our kids. The other day, the other day we were getting ready for school and Lily is 10 now and we told her at 7.27, go get your things and put on your shoes. And at 7.37, she was untying her shoes to put them on. And I snapped. And I looked at her at the kitchen counter and I said, put on your shoes. Put them on. And she started doing other stuff. I said, stop that. Put on your shoes. And she, of course, because she's a little me, mouthed back at me. And I said, put on your shoes. Stop what you're doing. Put on your shoes. Put them on. Go. Go. Put on your shoes. Go. And I snapped at her until she was really upset. And she goes and she puts on her shoes. I shouldn't have to ask you three times in ten minutes to put on your shoes, and I think every parent can relate to that. But here's the thing. Me snapping at that and borderline losing my temper says a lot more about me than it does about Lily. Lily's 10. I'm 33. I'm surprised that was as funny as it was. Lily's 10. I'm a grown adult. Whatever was in my cup spilled out on her. That wasn't her fault. And that wasn't the way to handle that. And what I think is, and why I tell that story about myself, is first of all, you're all in glass houses right now. So throw stones if you want to. But second, thank you, Kay. Second, for all of us, when we get jostled and we lose our temper with someone and we lose our patience with someone, I believe it says a lot more about us than it does about them. And what it says about us is it forces us, if we really want to think about it, to look at what have we been filling our cup with. Because I just got rocked. I just got annoyed. What spilled out? And when it's vitriol, when it's anger, when it's frustration, when it's put on your shoes, that tells us a lot more about what we've been consuming than about what's happening in that moment right there. And I'll be honest. I don't know how much space there is for us as followers of Jesus to snap at other people. There's one time in the Gospels when Jesus snaps and it was to turn over the temple table. So there's a place for godly anger and frustration. But I'd be willing to bet that that place is a lot more rare than what our experience is. So with that in mind, when we talk about guard your heart for out of it, everything flows. That's what I'm talking about. When your cup is jostled, what will come out? When you're frustrated, when you're aggravated, when you're in a difficult situation, what comes out of your heart? Is it kindness? Is it frustration? Is it tenderness? Is it anger? Is it empathy? Or is it condescension? What comes out? I think that's important. And so I wanted to talk this morning about three ways really quickly that we can guard our hearts so that when things happen in our life, the right things come out, that we exude the love of God. From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. So when things happen in our life, can we be the kind of people that when our cup is jostled, we pour out grace, we pour out love, we pour out patience, we pour out empathy, we pour out honor, we pour out praise. Can we be those kinds of people? I think that we can. So if we're going to do that, we need to guard our hearts. So there's three ways I want to look at, and there's plenty more than this, but there's three ways I want to look at to guard our hearts so that when things happen in life, the right things come out of us. The first one is the easiest and the most obvious one. We guard content. We guard content. I have never stood up here and told you guys what you should and shouldn't watch. You're grown-ups. If you're saved, you have the Holy Spirit. You watch whatever you want. I just know that there are some shows that I've tried to watch that made me feel, and this is a highly technical term that I learned in seminary, icky. They just made me feel icky. And I just kind of knew, this is not good for my soul. I'm not going to watch this. There are some shows that I've watched that made me feel icky, but they were really good, so I watched them anyways, and I shouldn't have, because they weren't good for my soul. So we should consider what we consume. And I'm not going to give you my standards from a 33-year-old man on what you should do and what you should consume. But what I will say is the content that you do consume matters a lot. And let's be honest about this. There has never been a more consumptive generation of people on the planet than us. Right? Think about it. In the span of human history, who has been able to consume more information than you in a given day? Because we have that stupid germ brick that lives in our pocket that we pull out at stoplights and whenever we get bored and whenever the kids talk too long and we start to scroll. And we can consume. And when the germ brick's not going, the TV's going. And when the TV's not going, we're on the computer. And maybe, maybe, if you're erudite and sophisticated, you pull out a book, something in print from like 1985. Wow. But we are the most consumptive generation that has ever existed on the planet. And most of us consume constantly. And for most of us, our life is filled with noise. And so I would just stop and ask you this morning, not to direct you in one way or another. About what you should or shouldn't do. But I would ask you to consider. What are you consuming? When you pause at the red light. And you grab your phone. What are you looking at? When you have a free moment. And you turn a podcast or a book or songs, what are you listening to? When you have a free moment in the office and you allow yourself to search the internet, what are you looking at? What are you consuming? What are you interested in? And I'm not here to suggest that anything you're consuming is directly nefarious, although some of it is. But what I'm saying is it may be perfectly innocuous content, but is that what you should be consuming? Is that helping you? Is that guarding your heart? Are we looking at the right things? And I remember it was, I don't set myself, I've told a couple stories today about how terrible I am so let me tell you about a good decision that I made. I guess it was about two and a half or three years ago now. It was still called Twitter. Now it's called X. But I just realized that I spent a lot of time just scrolling Twitter, just killing time, scrolling Twitter, seeing what the people were saying about the things. And I realized that everything I saw made me angry. It was inflammatory. Someone's outraged about this. Someone has commentary about this. And as I scrolled, half of the content was designed to just make me angry about a thing. And after doing that enough, I said, you know what? I'm not doing this anymore. And I took it off my phone. And that was two and a half years ago. And it was actually three years ago, because I remember it was February. It was a real tough day. And I haven't missed it at all. So some of the counsel or encouragement to you is just, if it's true that everything we do flows out of our hearts, and if it's true that to prevent things flowing out of our heart that we need to guard it, then it has to also be true that the content that we consume is really actually very important. And so I'm not trying to give you pastoral advice and strictures about how you should organize your life. I'm just encouraging you as adults, what you consume matters a lot. So what are you consuming? What are you watching? Because a lot of us, particularly now, and you're going to think, when I say this, my suspicion is that you're going to think that I'm criticizing whatever side of the political aisle that you're on. You're going to assume that I'm on the other one and I'm telling you that yours is bad. I'm not. But can we acknowledge that a lot of news, not all of it, there's some good stuff, is designed to inflame us, is designed to anger us. And we as Christians, if that comes out of us when our cup is jostled, should consider how engaged we are with those things as well. So we guard our content. Here's another thing we guard. And this one you probably didn't see coming. But we guard empathy. We guard empathy. Years ago, I had a good friend. She's still a good friend. And she was telling me about her son, Bergen, who was 8 to 10 at the time. And she said that Bergen had developed an interest in ornithology, which makes me really disappointed that the farmers are not here today. Jacob would love this because he's a huge bird nerd. And that's what ornithology is. It's bird watchers, for those that don't know. And even my comment there is a tell to the point that I'm intending to make. She said that Bergen loved bird watching. He was really into it, wanted to get the binoculars. He was like reading books and doing all this stuff. And I remember just saying to her, they were homeschooled. And I remember saying to her at the time, I'm so glad that Bergen is homeschooled so that he can invest himself in that hobby. Because if he went to school, he would get made fun of until he quit watching birds. And we might giggle, but that's actually a really sad thing. I think that stinks. The world has a way, the vet is nodding her head, she likes birds too. The world has a way. The vet is nodding her head. She likes birds too. The world has a way of kind of crushing our sincerity out of us, of kind of crushing our optimism out of us. The world has a way of molding you as you grow up and telling you that what you like is not okay. What you like is not cool. What you do is not good. What your hobbies are are nerdy or they're wasteful or they're whatever they are. And the world cruelly has a way of crushing our sincerity out of us. And so as I thought about how do we guard our hearts, I thought it's worth mentioning that the world has a way of crushing our empathy out of us as well. And that as we encounter tragedy, as we encounter hardship, as we encounter trouble, and we see it in other people, because we see it so often, we can begin to become, we can allow our hearts to become calcified against the needs of the world around us. Right? We can let our heart grow hardened so that we no longer care about the people that we interact with day to day. So that we're no longer moved towards the things that should move us. And what we can do is we can allow the world and its pressures exerted on us and on our souls and on our hearts to calcify our hearts in such a way that we no longer have the capacity to care. And I would say that our capacity to care about others is one of the most important things a Christian can do. Jesus himself said, whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. So when we stop caring, and when we are not moved, and when we, listen, this is tough, but I think it's true. When we are not people who are actively involved, actively involved, and I mean that, actively involved in helping the least of these, it may be because our hearts are calcified. And we have not adequately guarded them against the onslaught of apathy that comes from our culture. So one of the ways we guard our hearts is to keep them tender and to make sure that we maintain empathy. The last way that I want to mention this morning, there are more ways again, but the last way I want to mention this morning is that we guard our relationships. If we want to guard our hearts, we guard our relationships. It's funny, I made, I wrote up these notes this week and was already thinking about this topic because I think it's true. And then just yesterday, had lunch with somebody. And the story was, essentially, I've always looked up to my dad. He's let me down lately. And it's really messed me up spiritually. And I've talked to my therapist about it. And I might have to cut him out of my life. I don't know what to do. And because of my multiple degrees in psychology, I knew exactly what to tell him. But I was only able to tell him what you guys would tell him. You need to decide what the appropriate boundaries in your life are for him. You need to decide to what level you're going to give him access to you. You need to decide how much, in plain terms, he's able to hurt you. We need boundaries. Because this is a person that he looked up to spiritually. And that person had let him down. So now, that relationship that he had in his life that really didn't correlate with his spiritual life is all of a sudden impacting his spiritual life in such a way that it's detrimental. So if we're going to guard our hearts, we have to guard our relationships. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time here because, as I joked, I'm not a therapist. But I do know and I have seen that we can have toxic relationships in our life that cause us to spiral in such a way that we lose our sense of spirituality and we begin to lose spiritual health and our hearts are not being guarded because we're making them subject to a person that's not treating them well. And so in some ways, as grown-ups, if we want to guard our hearts, we have to guard our relationships. My larger point, and I'll finish with this, is I would just like to implore you to consider what it means as a grown-up to guard your heart. What are you consuming? Not just content, but what's your environment? How much are you protecting your own empathy? Just consider as grown-ups what's going into your heart, what's going into your soul, And when your cup is jostled, what's coming out? And what do you want to come out? And if what's coming out right now isn't what you want, then how do you fix that? If you'll think about that, I believe you'll be glad you did. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for a church that loves you. Thank you, God, for a church that can laugh. But God, I pray that this morning we would consider what we're consuming. We would consider what we're letting in. We would consider what's helping us and what's not. God, I ask these things in the name of Jesus. Amen. Hang on just a second, band. I got tripped up in my prayer because I forgot this verse that I wanted to share with you, and I'll finish with this. Because to me, it's the most impactful verse I've ever read about what we should consume. Paul finishes his letter to the Philippians after all the encouragement that he gives him with this final exhortation. And I think it's a good way to end this sermon today. Finally, brothers and sisters, this is Philippians 4.8. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about these things. May that be our standard.

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.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is the second part of our series called The Songs We Sing. Last week, we opened up and we did Graves in the Gardens. I gave you kind of a background of worship, and I started to, it's kind of trickled into me some good feedback that you guys are excited about this series, looking forward to it, looking forward to seeing what we've been singing in the Bible, what we will be singing in the Bible. And so I am thrilled to be going through this series with you because like I said, it's one that I've been wanting to do for a while. And last week when I got done preaching and we sang together, I was so encouraged at the voices being lifted up. And this morning we'll have the same opportunity. I'm going to preach about the song that we just sang because it's pulled straight out of Psalm chapter 8. And then we'll sing it again, knowing it better, having a better understanding of what it means in a full-throated, open-hearted way. And then we'll sing some other songs that are really special to us. And then we'll go into our week. So I'm feeling really good about this Sunday. And I just feel like it's worth saying sometimes that I'm so grateful for you. I'm so grateful for my church. I'm so grateful for the love and the community that we experience here, for the handshakes and hugs and laughter and the lobby for the stories of the team coming back from Mexico I'm just grateful for y'all I'm grateful to be here and I'm excited to teach to you out of the book of Psalms this morning now to do a series focused on worship and to not have at least one morning out of the book of Psalms would be sacrilegious. It would be absolutely awful because Psalms is the hymn book of the Old Testament. It is the hymn book of the Hebrew people. It is intended to be sung. A vast majority of the Psalms are intended to be sung. And sometimes there's even instructions about it at the beginning of eight. You don't have to look there yet, but the very first thing it says is to the choir master, according to the Giddeth, nobody knows what that is, a Psalm of David, but they think it's a certain tune to which it's supposed to be sung. So David is even giving this to the choir master. I wrote this to praise our God. Let's sing it to this tune. Let's sing it together. A vast majority of the Psalms were written with the intention of God's body of believers singing them his words back to him, which I think is remarkable. And Psalms is a remarkable book. It sits in the dead center of our Bible. It's the longest book in the Bible with 150 chapters. It's divided into five separate books within the book of Psalms. It has the longest chapter in the Bible in Psalm 119, which comes in at, I believe, 176 verses. It's a super long chapter of the Bible because it's a beautiful Hebrew poem. There's 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and Psalm 119 has 22 stanzas, and each stanza, every line begins with that letter of the alphabet as the psalmist moves through. It's the one thing in the Bible that really makes me want to learn original Hebrew so I could hear that psalm read and sung in the original language in which it was intended because I've got a feeling that it is beautiful. I'll just wait until I get to heaven. I'm not actually going to do the work to learn Hebrew. That seems super hard. The seminary I chose, I chose it so I didn't have to learn original languages, so I'm not about to reverse course now, you know? But it's the longest book with the longest chapter, and it's filled with songs. And they're not all praise songs. They're divided up in different ways depending on who you ask and who's doing the dividing. You can find some people that divide them into five different types of Psalms, some as many as 20 and everything in between. But just a few examples of the types of Psalms that you can find in your Bible as you read through Psalms. And shame on me, I realize I haven't done a series in Psalms in the six and a half years I've been here. Shame on me for that. So I am promising you that coming up, we will do a series in Psalms at some point. But if you want to know some of the divisions of the book of Psalms, the different types that we have, there's Psalms of praise. Obviously, there's royal Psalms, Psalms of lament. And we're actually going to talk about those next week. I'm so grateful that our Bible has Psalms of lament, expressions of sadness and grief. There's what's called imprecatory psalms or psalms that are prayed and sung to seek vengeance over our enemies. David had a lot of reason to sing those. You probably don't. You probably don't have many enemies that you should sing imprecatory songs over, but they're in there. Psalms of enthronement and then psalms of pilgrimage. And I think these psalms of pilgrimage are really interesting. And I want to actually point you towards a book for my people who are readers. There's this book by a pastor named Eugene Peterson. Eugene Peterson is the pastor that faithfully translated the message to make scriptures a little bit more approachable for people who have never encountered them before. I read his biography last year, and I think it was an autobiography, a memoir, and it was one of the more moving books I've read in a long time. I was really, really touched by the heart of Eugene Peterson. And probably his most famous book is a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. And A Long Obedience in the Same Direction actually moves through what's called the Psalms of Ascent, this group of pilgrimage psalms And I've wanted to, that may be the Psalm series that we do. I'm either going to do it as a series as we walk through the book together, or I'm going to do it as like a Wednesday night course where those that want to come and we move through it together. But if you're a reader, I would highly encourage you to go grab or write down or put in your Goodreads, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. But in the book of Psalms, we have all these different categories. We have all these different verses. And one of the things we see that I think is remarkable is that a majority of them are written by David. They're not all written by David. There's some authors that are just referred to as the sons of Asaph. And Asaph was, I believe, the choir master, the worship leader. And then these are his sons that he has passed this responsibility down to. And they've written their own Psalms in there. But one of the remarkable things about the book of Psalms is to see the heart of David just kind of filleted open on the table for you. And I love that God in his goodness includes the Psalms to offset the other stories of David. Because if you read the story of David in 1 and 2 Samuel, you can also see the stories in 1st Kings but more of details of the story are in 1st and 2nd Samuel and if you read the story of David you see this traditionally masculine macho guy who's fighting and killing and he kills Goliath and he fights lions and bears with his bare hands which you know who hasn't and then there's a song about him him. David has killed his tens of thousands. Saul has killed his thousands. It's just like, yeah, spear-throwing, meat-eating dude. And then you open Psalms, and here's a guy that's brokenhearted. Here's a guy that's highly emotional, highly vulnerable, who displays his tears and his lament and his repentance and his hopes and his fears and his deepest prayers for all of time to see. And the juxtaposition of Psalms and 1 and 2 Samuel kind of brings together this vision of what we can be as people and how multifaceted we can be. So I'm grateful that Psalms reads almost like a prayer journal of David at times. But to me, the most remarkable thing about the book of Psalms is that when we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. When we sing the Psalms, we join in the ancient chorus of all the saints. And you can sing the Psalms. Write this down if you want to, if you want something else to listen to. There's this, I don't know, I guess they're just a duet, a duo, I don't know the rules, a band, Shane and Shane. And they have an album called Psalms, where they have set the Psalms to music, and it's one of my favorites. I love it. I've loved it for years and years. You can go find it. It's on Spotify. It's on all the things. And you can sing the Psalms. I would highly recommend it. When we sing the Psalms, understand this, we are joining in to an ancient chorus of all the saints. I spoke last week about how when we worship, when we praise, when we sing out, that we join our brothers and sisters in Christ in unity. It unifies us according to the high priestly prayer of Jesus in John chapter 17. When we sing together, it unifies us in this remarkable way. When we walk in Republican and Democrat, we walk in 80 and 20. We walk in stressed and not stressed, successful and not successful in a season of plenty and a season of need. And we lay all of those things down and we praise our God together and it unifies us. And I've just, I just got to tell you, I shared this with the band and the tech team before the service. But this is just a, just such a good picture of how it unifies us. if I don't say it I might die a little on the inside. So I'm just gonna have to Yesterday I was at the funeral for a friend of mine's wife 40 years old perfectly healthy Went on a girl's trip Heart heart attack, died in the bathroom. No other explanation. Incredibly sad thing. Two kids, sixth grader, third grader. So I drive down, I go to the funeral, and the husband's name, my buddy's name is Jeff. There's about 750 people in the room. And in between speakers, they put up a slideshow of Jodi and her family. And they started playing under that slideshow a song called Gratitude. We've sang it here a couple of times. It's going to be the last song that we sing this morning. They started playing Gratitude. And when that song started, Jeff, the husband who lost his wife a week ago, stood up and raised his hands in worship. And so, if you're at a funeral and the husband of the deceased woman stands up and raises his hands, you stand up and you raise your hands. So 750 people stand up and raise their hands to this song too. And then they spontaneously started singing it. And I'm six hours away from my church family, with my old church family, singing a song with myriad other church families, with our hands raised, choosing to praise in a moment of grief, and it just unifies you in a way that nothing else can. It was a remarkable moment. And when we sing it this morning, we join them and their praises to a God in spite of grief. We join Jeff in our prayers for him. We join the other congregations that sing that too. So when we sing the Psalms, we join into the ancient chorus of all the saints. Do you understand? When we sing in a few minutes, Psalm 8, back to God, we are singing it with David. We are singing it with the generations of David and Solomon and the faithful generations of Jeroboam and Rehoboam. We're singing it with Hezekiah and King Asa. We are singing it with the faithful generations, with the remnant that gets taken to Babylon. We are singing these psalms with Daniel and Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego. We are singing these psalms with the Maccabees who lit the menorah in Roman oppression. We are singing these psalms with the generations that cried out in the 400 years of silence between Malachi and Matthew We are singing these songs with Jesus himself and with the disciples And with the early churches that met in the basements in Rome when we sing the Psalms We are joining with the underground churches in China and in Lebanon and in Istanbul, singing God's songs back to him. One of my favorite quotes about the Psalms is by Charles Spurgeon, and I'll tell you why he deserves to be the one who writes this in a second. Also, I'm just going to compose myself. We've got a long way to go here. This is premature. I can't afford this. I only have one tissue. Jen's laughing at me the hardest, she knows. It's been an emotional weekend. Back off. All right. Spurgeon writes this, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. I love that. The book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. That when we sing Psalms, we are mounted on wings of eagles and we soar in the presence of God. Now let me tell you why Spurgeon has a right to write that sentence and should rightly be pointed out in any sermon on Psalms. If you don't know who Charles Haddon Spurgeon is, he was a preacher. He was loud. He had combed back hair and a beard and a belly, and he suffered from gout, and he liked to drink whiskey. So, just saying, he was called. He was and is called the Prince of Preachers. He holds the world record for preaching to the most people in one space at one time without a microphone and being heard. One time he was preaching in an auditorium. This is in the late 1800s in London. He was preaching in an auditorium, going through what he wanted to say, and some janitor in a hallway that he couldn't see bowed on his knees right there and accepted Jesus listening to Charles go through his sermon. It's an amazing story. The volume of work of Charles Spurgeon is unbelievable. The amount of books that he wrote. You can look up any of his sermons online, and they're long, wordy, lengthy sermons. And it was said of him that people would come from all over the world to hear him preach, and what they would say is, yeah, the sermon's great, but you need to listen to the man pray. He was known all over the world. He wrote tons of books. He ran a seminary out of his church. He wrote books for the seminarians that I have, that I refer to regularly, that still help me and my approach to pastoring and preaching and all the things. But his whole life, he worked on one book that became a three-volume set called The Treasury of David. It's a commentary on the book of Psalms. And he carried it with him wherever he went. He worked on it for decades. He would work on it for a bit. He'd put it back down, he'd pick it back up. You better believe that I've got the treasury of David in my office. And that every time I preach out of a psalm, that's the first place I go. If you're someone who appreciates materials like that, go get it. It's not like super expensive. Find it on Amazon with a cheesy cover. And he writes in the intro to his magnum opus, the book of Psalms instructs us in the use of wings as well as words. It sets us both mounting and singing. The book of Psalms is worthy of our study and it's worthy of our singing. And we ought to acknowledge when we're singing it back to God because when we do, we join into that ancient chorus of all the saints through all the decades. Now this morning, we're going to be in Psalm chapter 8. So if you have a Bible with you, I would encourage you to turn there. And I'm going to say this this morning. I don't try to get you to do a lot of stuff because I want it to matter when I ask you to do something. So I intentionally don't try to put pressure on you to do things. I just want you to be a good Christian adult and do what you want to do and do as the Spirit moves you. But I'm going to encourage us as a church to begin to bring our Bibles to church for Sunday mornings. Some of you like to read through apps. That's fine. Read your app. Bring it. Have your phone out. I'm giving you permission to have your phone out in church. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not scrolling something that you shouldn't be scrolling during a church service. And if you are someone who likes to read the Bible on your phone, that's fine to have it out. Just make sure that the screen is visible to the people next to you, okay? So that they can smack you if you're cheating and you're checking a score or something. But let's be people who bring our Bible to church. Because here's what I want for you. I want you to sit, and I want you to have your Bible open. And when something strikes you, I want you to be able to write a note. When you see a verse that you like, that you want to remember, I want you to be able to highlight it. I want your Bibles to serve you as kind of these spiritual journals where when you flip through them, you see where you've been. You know that God's spoken to you there before. When you go to different places, you have notes on the sides and you have dates and you have prayers so that as you flip through your Bible years from now, you see times when God was faithful. I can't tell you how many passages I have written beside them. What does this mean? God help me understand. And then I'll hear sermon on it, or I'll hear somebody teach about it. I'll read a book on it, and I'll turn to that passage, and I'll go, oh, I think I understand this now. Thank you, God, for your faithfulness. I want to encourage you to bring your Bible to church. Open it up. Make notes about what I'm saying or what God is saying to you. And then let me just tell you this. If things get boring, as they often do, you can start flipping through your Bible like you're source checking me or you're just interested in something. And then you look double spiritual. The people in your row are going to be like, yo, they're cross-referencing Nate. That's, look at, look at them. That's super spiritual. So just bring it, man. We'll probably make you an elder if you start doing that stuff. And you're just doing it because you're bored. It's so many benefits. Let's start bringing our Bibles if we don't already. But right now, what I want you to do is grab the Bible. If you don't have one, grab the one in front of you and let's read Psalm 8 together. It's only nine verses and I thought it would be well worth it to spend some time reading it together this morning. Find Psalm 8. It says this. When I look at your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. Verse 9, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. What a wonderful, declarative psalm of praise. This is the psalm that we sing from. This is the psalm that when I'm done talking, we will sing from again. And as we look through it and we go through it together and see what it has to offer, I think there's such depth of wisdom and goodness here. I love the way that the psalm starts. Verse 1, if you look at it in your Bibles, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name and all the earth. What I love about this, and this is a point that Spurgeon made, not me. What I love about this is the inadequacy of that declaration. This is a psalm that is clearly meant to glorify the majesty of God, that is clearly meant to frame him up among the stars, that is clearly meant to swoop us up and to carry us away into a reverent awe of the majesty of God. This is a big deal psalm. This needs to resound through the generations. And so we would expect some honorifics to go along with the Lord's name, wouldn't we? We would expect some more adjectives to be there. How majestic and all of your grandeur and the worthiness of your ways and whatever else. We would expect it to be this grand entrance as we open this declaration about God. And yet it's not that. It's this humble, oh Lord, our Lord. That's the best David could muster. Oh Lord, our Lord. It feels so inadequate for the moment, but that's why it's so good. Because to start a majestic psalm that way, so humbly, is to confess without even having to say it out loud, my words are inadequate for your greatness, oh God. What else could David say but oh Lord, our Lord? What else is fitting? What honorifics should he put there that would adequately capture who our creator God is? There's nothing worthy enough of writing. So he just humbly puts, oh Lord, our Lord. And so when we sing those words in a few minutes, when we say, oh Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name, we are admitting in that song and in that declaration and with our voices and in our hearts that we are inadequate to adequately title God's glory and goodness. We are inadequate to adequately express and explain and capture who he is. And so we surrender to the simple, humble, oh Lord, our Lord. How majestic is your name. It's such a good beginning of the psalm to start it with humility and with simplicity as we confess through our words and our spirits, our inadequacy to capture who our creator God is. Verse two, we're actually going to look at in a second. That becomes important when we start to think about how Jesus employed this psalm. But verse 3, I love, when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. Psalm 8 proclaims that God has told the story of himself through his creation. The song that we are singing based out of Psalm 8 is called Tell the Story. And it talks about how creation tells the story of God and how we participate in that. When we look at creation, when we look at a sunset or a sunrise, when we're on a plane and we can look out and get that unique view of God's creation and his earth, when we hike and we see beautiful things, when we look into the heavens and we marvel at God, when we get away from the city and we can actually see the stars, when we do those things, the heavens are declaring the glory of God. They're preaching to us about the presence of God. The purpose of creation is to tell the story of the creator. And since you are his creation and you are the only one imbued with a voice and entrusted with a voice, then it is our responsibility to cry out to God in ways that the rest of creation cannot do. It is our responsibility to make sure that the rocks don't have to cry out to our God because we're going to do that because we are the part of his creation that was made to praise him. And so we do it loudly. We do it vigorously. We do it openheartedly. And I'm reminded in verse three, as it points to God's creation, kind of declaring who he is of Romans one, Paul writes about this. Paul in Romans 1 says that the Lord has revealed himself in creation so that no man is without excuse. Through the millennia, men and women and children have looked at God's creation and marveled at the creator. The sun, the moon, and the stars tell the story of our God and who he is. And then we move into verses four and following what could be a little bit of a confusing portion. Because as I read it earlier, you may have picked up on the difference. If you were following along in an NIV, if you're using one of our Bibles this morning, then you're reading an N NIV maybe you pulled up an NIV on your app or that's what you carried in this morning but what you saw is in verse 4 when it says what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him your version says them so the ESV and some other versions say him and your version and some other versions say them. And so the question becomes, why is there a difference there? Why does that matter? Why is that important? Well, the Hebrew word there can be translated either way. And so some translations choose to say them because clearly some of these verses are referring to us, to humankind. I mean, when we read it, especially verse 4, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? That's not talking about Jesus. Who is Jesus that you would care about him, that you are mindful of him? Obviously, it's not talking about Jesus. It's us. Who are we that you would care about us? And to this point, just to bring this home, I do like that verse. I'm going to pause here. We're going to get back to him and them. But I like this thought, who am I that you would care for me? Why do I matter to you? I don't know if you've ever experienced someone singling you out in a way that made you feel special. You're like, why are you paying attention to me? Years ago, a few months before I moved to Raleigh, my pastor growing up died. He had had an aortic aneurysm, survived for a few years, developed an infection, and he passed away. He was very old, though. He was about 62, I think. He was too young. And his church had grown pretty significantly, and they had started other churches. So the people who were there were in the thousands. There was so many people who wanted to pay their respects for Pastor Buddy that they had to have a visitation the night before at the church. And the line was over an hour long to talk to the family. And when I got there, I hadn't been going to that church in years. I worked at another church. I grew up with, I grew up at that church and Buddy has three kids, Gabe, Joy, and Spring. Joy's my age. Gabe's a few years older than me. But Gabe and I, we were buddies growing up. We played Goldeneye together. He was my Goldeneye buddy. I don't know if that resonates with any of you. Like four of you, they're like, yes, Goldeneye buddies. But we weren't like super tight. And I really didn't expect to talk to anybody. I was just showing up because I have a lot of respect for Buddy and I love that family. And before I could get in line, I heard Gabe call my name. And I'm like, cool, I get to skip the line, which I love doing. And I go up to Gabe, and he hugs me, and he says, it's such a funny question. He goes, dude, what are you doing? Like, you got anything going on? I'm like, I'm at your dad's visitation, man. This is what I'm doing. You know, like, I didn't say that, but I said, no, I'm not busy. And he goes, come on. And so he leaves the line, and he takes me back to a hospitality room where there's Zaxby's. I'd love to say it was Chick-fil-A. It wasn't. There's Zaxby's. And he sits down, and he just wants to talk with me. And I just remember thinking, why are you talking with me of all these people why do i why am i the one that gets your time why are you treating me like this and in that case i really do think it was because i knew him when we remember growing up we we were at the church running around together we were the ones running around in in the service after it was over before there was thousands of people going there. And I guess nobody else kind of knew the family like I did. But the whole time I'm sitting there, I just felt such privilege of why in the world do you care about talking to me right now? And I feel like that's what the author of Psalms, David, is describing. God, why do you even notice us? Why are you calling me out in a crowd? Why do we matter to you? That should not be something that's lost on us, that God sees us, that he calls our name, and he says, hey, come here, let's talk. That's a remarkable thing. And so back to the he, him, and them. There are some verses that are very clearly talking about humankind, us. But there are some verses that are very clearly talking about Jesus. Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You gave him dominion over the works of your hand. You have put all things under his feet. Clearly that's talking about Jesus. And so the question becomes in Psalm chapter 8, in verse 5, is the psalmist talking about us or Jesus? Yes. He's talking about both things. He's talking about both us and Christ. Again, because clearly there are some verses here that could not apply to Christ. Who is Christ that you should consider him? That doesn't really work out. He's part of the Trinity. So that has to be for us. But he has not put everything under our feet. He's put everything under Jesus' feet. So clearly that's for Jesus. And I'll tell you how I know that's for Jesus, because Jesus, Paul, and the author of Hebrews also thought that it was for Jesus. If you turn to Hebrews, you'll see, I forget the chapter. I think maybe I wrote it down somewhere. Yeah, chapter 2. The author of Hebrews is comparing Jesus to the angels, saying that he's superior to the angels. To do that, he quotes Psalm 8 and uses it to point back to Jesus. In 1 Corinthians 15, verses 25 through 27, this is one of the times that you could flip and check me if you're bored and you'd look super spiritual. Paul is talking about Jesus and he's telling the people this is who Jesus is. He's the one that Psalm 8 was referring to. He's the Messiah that we are waiting on. The whole earth is in subjection to him. That is who we serve. And then Jesus himself uses this psalm to prove to a group of Pharisees that he's actually Jesus. He uses it to tick them off, which, you know, I'm a fan of. But this is what he says. Matthew 21 verses 15 and 16. I cheated. I had it marked. So I got there extra fast. Jesus says this, well, this isn't Jesus yet, but he'll talk soon. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did and the children crying out in the temple, Hosanna to the son of David, they were indignant. Now they're indignant because for, for someone to declare Hosanna to the Son of David is to declare them the Messiah. It is to declare them God incarnate. And they were not willing to accept that about Jesus. So the children acknowledged who Jesus was before the adults were willing to acknowledge it. They were indignant. Verse 16. And they said to him, Do you hear what these are saying? Like, you need to tell them to be quiet if you have any sense. And Jesus said to them, Yes. Have you never read? Which is hilarious. Have you never read? That's like asking a Tennessee fan if they don't know that they got their tails kicked yesterday. Yes, of course they know that. Of course they do. Have you never read? It's ridiculous. Have you never read? Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise. It is a direct reference to Psalm chapter 8, where Jesus says, yeah, have you not read that Psalm? It's about me. So how can I be sure that Psalm 8 is about us and Jesus? Because Jesus told me. He uses it as a proof text to say, yeah, I am Hosanna, the son of David. And so what this means, what all this means, and I don't want you guys to miss this. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. When we sing Psalm 8, we declare the majesty of our God, our wonder at his love for us, and the glory of our risen Savior. That's what's packed into these nine verses. We declare the majesty of God. Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. We declare God is grand. God is big. God is huge. We declare it along with the churches down through the centuries. We declare glory unto God. We marvel at his wonder for us. Who are we that you should pick us out of a crowd, that you should call us, that you should talk to us, that you should care about us, that you should know us, that you would want my praise. Who am I that I matter to you, God? Why in the world did you send your son for me? So we marvel at God's love as we sing. And then, and then we declared glory for the risen Savior. We shine him in glory, understanding that Psalm 8 is also a messianic psalm that talks about Jesus and declares his glory and puts him in dominion and says the world is under his feet and we are in that world so we are subservient to him. So in this psalm, as we sing it and as we move through it, we declare the glory of God. We wonder at his love for us and we declare the glory of our risen Savior all in those nine verses. And if this all doesn't stir your soul to sing, I can't help but think I must be a terrible pastor. Because as I studied this, as I prepared this morning, as I thought through this, I couldn't wait to sing with you guys. If I were you, I would want me to shut up so I could start singing. That's what I would want right now. And so I'm going to do that right before I do. I just want to show you the words we're about to sing. And I want to show you the verses that they come from. So when we sing this song together, when we, in a few minutes, join the ancient chorus of believers who have been singing this song through the centuries. When we join the churches all over the world who have been singing this song and who might even sing this song or sing from the songs this morning. I want us to know what we're singing. So let's look. The first verse, the first words, O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful your name. That comes directly out of verse 1. Directly out of verse 1. We're singing that right back to God. And then the words right after that in the song are your glory on display. The works of your hands show us who you are. That's verses 2 and 3. Do you see? That's verses two and three when it says the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place. We're singing those words back to God. That's where they're pulled from. On down we see verse three highlighted again where it says, O Lord, our Lord, you light up our world, the sun, moon, and stars. Declare who you are. Declare who you are. And then finally, we see verse 4, and O who am I, unworthy one, that you would give your only son? Who are you to care for me? Amazing love, how can it be? That's where directly out of verse 4, we wonder and marvel at the love that God has for us, that he would notice us and care about us. And then the whole psalm declares the glory of Jesus. Anytime we sing about Jesus, who am I that you would send your only son? That's Jesus. That's who we're singing about. And then we say and we declare, tell the story. As we sing, God use me to tell your story of creation. I would remind you, all of creation was made to tell the story of God and declare praise for him. We're the only part of that creation that was given a voice to praise him. So let's use it together as we close out in these songs together. I'm going to pray and then Aaron and the band's going to come and we're going to sing together. Father, you are worthy of our praise. You are worthy of our adoration. Our words and our praise and our declarations are insufficient for you. They are inadequate for you and who you are. We admit that, God, as we look to sing to you. Lord, would you fill our lungs with praise for you? Would you fill our hearts with your grace and your goodness and your love that we might pour it back out to you? Would what we experience as we sing now not simply be something that makes our Sunday morning better, but will it carry us on a wave of praise into our weeks and maybe wash back up on these shores next week ready to praise again. God, fill our hearts with praise. Fill our hearts with joy. And let us do now, God, what you created us to do, to sing your praises back to you. In Jesus' name, amen.