Sermons tagged with Conviction

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thank you for joining us at Grace. I was late into the service this morning. Anecdotally, I'm just indulging myself. This has nothing to do with anything. I was just happy with the moment. When I was growing up, I got in trouble at church all the time. Me and my best friend, PJ Smith, we got kicked out of every ministry that ever existed at our church because we were troublemakers. And my senior pastor, a guy named Buddy Hoffman, used to, in Sunday night service, back when we encumbered our pastors with having to preach two sermons on one Sunday, he would call me out, Chris, stop talking to Karen, or do I need to get Donna to come down here and sit between you two? Like that kind of stuff in the service. And as a 12-year-old, that's mortifying. And I just remember that as what my pastor did. And I was next door refilling my water and getting ready to come over here. And there was a kid that got a little sideways. And the teacher had to pull him out. And the kid wasn't really listening to the teacher. And so I had to crouch down and get real stern with said kid and say, you're going to get right. And he says, she's not my mom. And I said, yeah, you're right, but she's your teacher. And if you don't listen to her, I'm going to go get your mom. And it was just like, and she said, thanks, Nate. I was like, you're welcome. Also, Carly, it was your, no, I'm just kidding. It was not, it was not, it was not. This morning, we're in our second part of Daniel, where we're going through the first portion of the book, the narrative portion of the book, and looking at these stories and asking what we can learn from them and what they have for us now. This morning, we arrive at the story of the fiery furnace, one of my favorite stories in the Bible, in the Old Testament, and I'm thrilled to arrive at it now. It's a story about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, but years ago, I went to Honduras on a mission trip, and I got to know a man named Mark Searcy, who's a custom home builder in western North Carolina. But in his teenage and 20, in his late teens and 20s, he was a missionary to Haiti and has this missionary background. And he's really southern and really. And one of my favorite humans I've ever met. And he's, he told me that, uh, that I'm not going to tell him what, I'm not going to tell you what he calls, uh, Nebuchadnezzar. I'll tell you if you ask me after the service, I'll tell you, but I'm not going to tell you from here. Uh, he, and he said that Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are the demon names for those boys because their real names were Benadab, Mishael, and Hananiah. Those were their Hebrew names that all meant some sort of praise to God. And they were renamed by the Babylonian government, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, what we know them by. And those are their demon names because those give praise to the Babylonian gods. And I'm not sure how convinced I am of Mark's perspective, but I do think it's interesting that there is, that there have been a dad, Mishael and Hananiah. Those are their God given, the names given by their Jewish parents that give praise to God. And I do think it's good as we remember the story to know their real names. But in the Bible and in the story, they're referred to as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. So we will refer to them as that. And here's the situation. Last week, we talked about the exile and basically Jewish slaves being carried to Babylon to serve in their court and that they took some of the elite, the cream of the crop, young men, and they installed them in the government. They put them through a training process and then they installed them in the government and gave them different roles. And so Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego have been prepared for that, and they've now been installed in their roles, and they've reached the upper echelons of government. And as such, they've made their peers jealous of them. So there are native Babylonians that are now working with them or even under them that have become jealous of their progress and of their success. And that's the environment. And in the midst of this environment, there's an edict that goes out. King Nebuchadnezzar erects a gold statue of himself. And there's an edict that whenever music is played, and in the Bible, this is where in Daniel chapter three, I'm going to look at some verses in a minute. So if you have a Bible and you want to turn there, that's where we are. But it says in the Bible that whenever these instruments, the lyre and the harp and the whatever, and the trumpet and whatever are played, then you should bow and worship the golden image or just bow towards the golden image and worship Nebuchadnezzar, who has now deified himself. And Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego don't agree to this. Whenever the music plays, they don't worship. And I was thinking about this as I was rereading the story and reacquainting myself with it. It's difficult to believe that they would stand in the city center obstinately going like this and saying, we're not going to worship. It's more easy to believe that they would discreetly and respectfully move off to the side and just kind of let everyone else do their thing. I certainly don't know what the situation was, but I seriously doubt they made a big show of not worshiping. I think they just didn't worship. But some of their peers noticed this and told on them. They went to King Nebuchadnezzar and they ratted them out. They told on them. And this is a lesson for all the, everybody, if you're in here and you're under 15, raise your hand. Snitches get stitches. All right. That's a real thing. Don't do this. Don't tell on people. That's for you. They told on them. And they said, hey, whenever the music plays, these people aren't worshiping you. They're not honoring you. And the text says that Nebuchadnezzar was enraged. He was an emotionally volatile man from everything we can tell from the text. Nebuchadnezzar was enraged, and he calls them in. And he's furious at them. And he says, I've heard you guys. I've brought you in. I've supported you. I've trained you. I've elevated you. I've progressed you. I've given you success. I've given you affluence. And as a thank you, you refuse to worship me. He's furious at them. He says, if you don't worship me, I'm going to play the music. I'm going to turn on Spotify. And if you don't worship me, I'm going to burn you in the fiery furnace. That's the threat. So that's the situation and that's where we are. And this is their response to King Nebuchadnezzar. And I think it is a remarkable response. Daniel chapter three, verses 16 through 18. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego replied to him, King Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we. That's the most important phrase in the story. But even if he does not, we want you to know, your majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up. So he brings these young men before him. He's this enraged king surrounded by guards. And he says, if you don't worship me, I'm going to throw you into the furnace. I'm going to burn you alive. And their response is, we do not need to defend ourselves against you in this matter, which is difficult to parse out. And different theologians would say different things, because with this limited story we get from the text, it's difficult to know exactly what their intent is. And so this is a guess. But my guess is that they believe that Nebuchadnezzar knew of their faith. That they believe that he knew, like, hey, we're worshipers of the Hebrew God. We're not worshipers of other gods. We don't need to defend ourselves against you. I don't think it was defiant. I don't think it was, no, no, no, I'm not going to talk about that with you. You don't deserve that. I'm not going to answer that question. It was, it was more of, I believe, you know who we are. You know who we worship. That's not going to change. And that God that we worship is going to protect us. Throw us in there. He'll protect us. And even if he doesn't, we're going to continue to believe in him. And we will not worship you. That's their response. When they responded in that way, Nebuchadnezzar is so angry that he looks at his guards and he says, make the furnace seven times hotter, which is a hilarious command. Because if you're on fire, you're on fire. You know, does it get worse if it's seven times? Like if your arms on fire and then you make it seven times hotter, is that a worse fire on your arm? Like I don't understand that. And I also don't understand in ancient Babylon how you gauge what seven times hotter is. But that's what he says. Make it seven times hotter. And it was so hot that one of the guards that bound them and threw them into the furnace burned up himself because he got too close to the flame, which is a really tough way to go. But that's what happens. And he throws them into the flame. And then he's watching them in the flames, expecting to see them burn up. I don't know if there was like a bulletproof, like double-pane glass that was heatproof that he could see through, or if it was just like an open furnace. I don't know how it worked, but he's looking in and he's seeing them, and he notices something. And this is what the text says, Daniel 3, 24 through 26. Then King Nebuchadnezzar leapt to his feet in amazement and asked his advisors, weren't there three men that were tied up and threw into the fire? They replied, certainly, your majesty. He said, look, I see four men walking around in the fire, unbound and unharmed, and the fourth looks like a son of the gods. Nebuchadnezzar then approached the opening of the blazing furnace there three people in the house, but only are there three people who are unharmed, but there's a fourth. And the text just says he looks like a son of the gods. And here's a thing that I like to do with the Old Testament. We don't know who that was. We don't know who the fourth person was in there with them. It could have been an angel. Some people think it could have been Jesus himself. And here's what I do as a highly trained theologian. Whenever... Shut up. That's great. I'm a very lowly train. I'm not a pastor, theologian. That's crazy. Anyways, just the snicker from the 26 year old was deserved. It was deserved. Whenever we have the opportunity in the Old Testament to put Jesus in a place, we should. So maybe it was an angel. But I think it was Jesus. I think he showed up with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. And he said, I'm with you. You have faith in me. I'm with you. And he protects them from the fiery furnace. You can extrapolate that out however you like. But I think Jesus was there. I think Jesus was there in the form of Melchizedek when Abraham showed up in Salem and gave a tithe to him. For me, it's just cooler to allow Jesus to show up wherever it seems like he does. So who knows who is there? And who knows who wrote Hebrews? But let's make guesses. And I think that was Jesus there in the furnace with them. When Nebuchadnezzar sees this, he calls them out. Come out right away. And the ties that bound their hands were done. They were burned up, but they were unharmed completely by the flames. And his response, if weadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who sent his angel and rescued his servants. They trusted in him and defied the king's command and were willing to give up their lives rather than serve or worship any god except their own god. Therefore, this is important, I decree that the people of any nation or language who say anything against the God of them must be cut to pieces and their houses be turned into piles of rub is, if you honor God, you will get a promotion. He sees what happens. Also, that's false. He sees what happens and he calls them out. And he says, he gives praise to this God that he was moments ago committed to defying. Do you see? And so that's the story. And then God gets the glory. So that's the story of, and that's all the rhyming I'm going to do. That's the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and the fiery furnace. And it's a wonderful story. And typically, when I preach a sermon, I'm really, whether you've noticed it or not, doing my best to try to get us to like one point to think about. I'm trying to drive the ship to this one thing for us to consider. And I'd love to do that with this story, but here's the problem. It's too grand of a story to reduce to one point. I've also been your pastor now for eight years, and this is the first time I've preached on it. I don't see myself getting back to it anytime soon. So instead of just saying one thing, I want to pull out three things from this story that we learned for us to consider this morning. And I would encourage you to weigh them with equal weight and to decide and determine this morning. We don't have the capacity to apply three things to ourselves and do three new things in our lives and all the things. So one of these three things, I think and I hope and I and I pray will connect with you. And I would invite you to just grab onto the one that does. And maybe you'll get to the end of them and be like, is there a fourth one? I don't, none of those mattered, but hopefully one of these three will be something that relates to you. So the first thing we see in this story is simply this. Holiness matters. Holiness matters. It matters in life. It matters to God. It should matter to you. Holiness matters. Last week, this is what we talked about. We talked about Daniel being trained by the Babylonians and being offered this new diet. And with this diet, he was encouraged to eat stuff that was outside the purview of the Jewish laws in which he grew up. And so he said, I'm going to refuse that and choose this vegetarian vegan diet. And let's just see how it goes. So he chose holiness. And when I say holiness, here's what I mean, because this is what the Bible means. The word holy means different and more accurately, it means other. So when we say holy, and when God said, when we say about God, holy, holy, holy, what we are saying is different, different, different, other than us, set aside from us, not the same as us. And so when we say we act with holiness, we pursue holiness, what we're saying is we're pursuing being different. And what we talked about last week is we're pursuing being different from the society in which we find ourselves entrenched. We are not citizens of the United States. We are not citizens of North Carolina. We find ourselves residing here. We are aliens in those places, and we are citizens of heaven. And so our behavior and our standards should be not in line with the given standards of North Carolina or Raleigh or North Raleigh or wherever it is you find yourself. Our standards for ourselves should be in line with what scripture says and who God tells us to be. That's what holiness is. Now, I had lunch with a friend of mine this week. And, excuse me, and he he was saying how does a leaf get up on this stage like all the way in looky there I had lunch with a friend of mine and he was saying that he enjoyed last week's sermon but that he wanted when I got I got to the holy part, to the diet, he wanted to say, what's the diet? Give me the standards. Tell me what to do. He's like, I don't know how everybody feels, but sometimes I like to get kicked in the teeth on Sunday morning. Like, make me feel a little bit bad. Like, ruffle my feathers a little bit and tell me what the standards should be. Tell me what we should watch and what we shouldn't watch. And tell me what we should think and what we shouldn't think. And tell me what practices in my life, like get on to me a little bit. And I said, I'll never do that. I'll never do that. That's not what I'm here to do. Because holiness, this is going to sound odd, is gray. It's different things for different people. I'm never going to get up here and tell you what it looks like to be holy as if I am that. You guys are smart, responsible adults with the gift of the Holy Spirit. Most of you. I believe in your capacity to decide what holiness is for you. I'm not going to sit up here and list standards off by which you should live. I'm going to trust you to establish those for yourself. And here's one of the reasons. I've given this example before. Years ago, I found myself, and I still do, as a big fan of NBA playoff basketball. I hate the regular season. I think the mid-season tournament is one of the dumbest things I've ever encountered in my life. That joke's going to land with 5% of you, but you know who you are. But I would watch the NBA playoffs because I like it. I like sports. I watch all the sports. And I like the playoffs. But the playoffs would keep me up because of the West Coast games until 1, 1.30, 2 o'clock in the morning. And by watching them every night, I was getting up later than I needed to. And sometimes it would cause me to either miss my quiet time, which you've heard me say a hundred times. The most important habit anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in his presence through prayer. You've heard me say that over a hundred times, if you've been here for any length of time and by staying up late and watching those games, it was causing me to wake up late and either have a truncated quiet time or none at all. And so it was impacting me spiritually. So it became unholy for me to stay up watching basketball games. But I'm not going to stand on this stage and tell you it's unholy to watch sports. That's how it's great. You have to determine how your behaviors impact you and how they push you to God or not and what diet is right for you. But here's what I know based on this story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, is that holiness matters. Here's the second thing I know from this story. God is always working for his glory. God is always working for his glory. You see in the story that they get into this scenario where they've been told on. It's a bad scene. And they could have justified their way out of it, couldn't they? They could have said, God, I'm going to bow down to Nebuchadnezzar so I don't die. And so that I can remain in this place and influence in the right way. I mean, if I die, they're just going to replace me with a godless Babylonian. You don't want that to happen. So like, I'm just going to do this. I don't mean it, but I'm going to bow down. They didn't do that. They were in a tough spot. And they had this standard because they chose holiness of I can't bow down to Nebuchadnezzar. And at any point, God could have intervened and saved them. But he waited until the very last minute to save them in the fiery furnace. And so they were in this predicament that was preventable, but God didn't prevent. He allowed his servants to continue to suffer. And what we see at the end of that is that God was working for his glory because what's the result of the story? The result of the story is Nebuchadnezzar declares, no one will ever blaspheme the God of the Hebrew people. No one will ever blaspheme the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. And by allowing them to go through this difficult phase and rescuing them at the very last minute, God made his own name great. Do you see? It was declared throughout Babylon because of that. There's an edict that went out that we will honor this God now. So it's important for us to hear from the story that whatever God is doing, he's doing it to work his own glory. I have a friend who, when he graduated, he got in with an accounting firm. And he began to just work and work diligently and work hard and do what you do in that stage of your career and kind of rise in the ranks and yada, yada, yada. And he ended up making partner with two other folks. And so now he's a partner with two other people, but he feels a sense of injustice because they don't work as hard as he does. They have this kind of mentality that once you make partner, now you have employees to do the work and you get to make the money off of what they do. And he felt like, no, you have to outwork your employees. And then he looked at his partners who he viewed as lazy and they are not working as hard. And this frustrated him and it caused years of frustration. And then eventually what happened was, and he's, by the way, going to church, he's a deacon at his church. He's, he's one of these people and he's getting frustrated with the situation because it feels unjust and it feels unfair. And he's like, God, I'm honoring you. Why are you, why is this happening? And then there's a personal fallout and he actually gets kicked out of the partnership and he has to start from scratch. And so he finds himself in his mid-30s with children starting from scratch and going, God, how is this happening? Why is this happening? This seems unfair. But he starts from scratch and he builds a new company and develops new partners. And you fast forward another 15, 20 years after that, and his firm exists and gives 20 to 30% of their profits to nonprofit organizations building God's kingdom around the globe. And he has people on his payroll whose entire job is to do the finances of nonprofits for free. He had to go through a hard time and be recalibrated. But it was to be recalibrated for God's glory. So that this person could be, so that my friend could be used to bring glory to God in his kingdom in a greater way. Some of us in here may find ourselves going through times that seem hard and seem preventable. God, if you wanted to fix this, you could. God, if you wanted to rescue, you could. God, if you wanted to restore, you could. If you wanted to repair, you could. If you wanted to heal, you could. And maybe he's not. But God doesn't work in days. He works in decades. And he works in centuries. And here's what I know about God based on this story and many others. God is always working for his glory. And he will involve you. In that path. If you stick with him. Like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. So God is always working for his glory. Here's the last thing. And this one. I said consider them with equal weight. But this is my favorite one. And I stole this one from a friend of mine who I hadn't talked to in years. And I actually called him this week and I said, Hey dude, he's a guy, his name's Alan Smith. He's on staff at my last church. He's still there as a campus pastor. And he and I worked together. And I remember him preaching this sermon. This was the first sermon that he preached. It was on Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego when he had a chance to preach at the last church. And I called him this week and I said, dude, I'm preaching that story. And I remember the point you made. And I'm totally stealing it. But I'm going to give you credit. Like just so you know, I'm not going to pretend like this is my idea and my insight. and we had a good catch up and whatever. But this is not from me. This is from Alan. Not that Alan. This is from another Alan. Here's the question that I come out of with this story. And this is the thing I want to leave you with. Do you have, even if, faith? Do you have, even if, faith? I told you those words were the most important words in the story, and I told you that we were going to come back to them. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego said, Nebuchadnezzar, O king, if you throw us in the furnace, our God will protect us. But even if he doesn't, we will still worship him. Do you ever see the power of that? I believe my God can heal my dad. But even if he doesn't, I'm going to worship him. I believe my God can repair this. But even if he doesn't, I'm going to worship him. I believe that my God can make this better. But even if he chooses not to, but even if he doesn't, I will remain faithful. Do you know how hard it is? Many of you have walked through it, and you know what even if faith is. Do you know how hard it is to feel let down by God and say, but even if he lets me down and he doesn't do the thing that I think he's going to do or that I want him to do or that I need him to do or that I'm desperate for him to do or that I'm weeping for him to do, even if he doesn't do it, I will still choose him. That's even if faith. I had a conversation this last week and it made my week, man. I used to be a high school teacher. And Honeymoon is a football coach, Mike Devine. And I got really close with a particular class. And there were some of the kids, some of the guys that I got really close with. So close that I'll tell you this. One of my greatest regrets, this guy's name's Alex Williams, and we went to the lake. I took them to my in-law's lake house. And we were joking about getting tattoos, and I don't have any tattoos. We were joking about getting tattoos, and Alex said, I'll get a matching one with you. And I said, what do you want to get? And we decided that it would be great to get 100% awesome written on our butt cheek. I wish I had that tattoo. Golly, what a miss. That would be great. But I don't. But Alex and I were that kind of close. And in his junior and senior year, Alex's dad was dying of cancer. And I have a vivid memory of bringing in some of the other men and dads from the class into my classroom. And we gathered around Ron. And we prayed for God to heal him. And God did heal him. He just healed him in eternity. He didn't heal him here. And so Alex lost his dad. After losing his dad, his mom, understandably so, kind of went off the rails. And his two elementary age brothers had to move in with Alex at 19 years old. And he found himself as the caretaker for them. He had a hard go. And Alex always loved Jesus, but this was a hard season. And I lost touch with him for a while. I would see him on Facebook. He's got a wife. He's got a young family. He seems to be doing well and be thriving. And I got a Facebook message, which I don't check very often because it was two weeks old. But he reached out to me and he said, hey, I'm doing okay in life. And I want to give to people who need it. How do I do that? And so I said, this is a great conversation to have, dude. Let's talk. And we talked and he said, and this is, you guys will find this funny. Um, and it's sad that it's true. He said, you're the fourth pastor I've talked to. I'm involved in the church. I've talked to three other pastors. Can you guess where they told me to give my money? And he said, I knew you wouldn't do that, so I called you. And I said, 10% of everything we give goes to you. We had a great conversation. We caught up. We shared stories about the time I got too excited as a football coach and punched him in the stomach in the middle of a game. Not because I was mad, because I was pumped up. I was like, let's go get him. And I accidentally hit Alex. Anyways, it was a wonderful conversation. And he's coming to Raleigh. He's doing a bid on our church. He's a general contractor. He might build our church. Who knows if that's what God is orchestrating. But he's going to come here, and when he comes here, I'm going to lay out in front of him six nonprofits that I know of and say, whatever God directs your heart, get involved in these. But these are good people and they're doing good things. And I'm so thrilled to be able to do that. But here's the point of that story. That's even if faith. Isn't it? Even if you don't heal my dad. Even if my mom goes off the rails. Even if I adopt my brothers at the age of 19. Even if I have to go through trials and I can't go to college. I will find a way, and when I do, God, I'm going to honor you. As soon as you give me the means, I'm going to honor you. That's even if faith. So that's the question that I would leave you with today. Do you have even if faith? Let's pray and we'll take communion. Father, thank you so much for this morning. Thank you for this wonderful church and group of people. Thank you for the way that you allow us to love you and one another. Thank you for speaking to us through the stories of the Old Testament and this morning, hopefully, through the story of Ben-Hadad, Mishael, and Hananiah. Thank you for your servants then and your servants now. God, as we move into this time of communion, we just pray that we would reflect and be grateful for the way that you love us, for the way that you're always working for your glory. I pray that we would pursue holiness and that we would, if we don't have it now, progress towards an even-if faith. It's in your Son's name we pray these things. Amen.

You don't even like the pack. What are you talking about? Of course, you're the most obnoxious in the room when your team's not even NC State. For those that don't understand what's happening right now, maybe you're new to the church and this doesn't make any sense to you. I'm a Georgia Tech fan. I grew up in Atlanta. Thank you. Yeah, good. My lone friends in the room. And listen, I will be the first to admit that over the years, I've been the pastor for eight years. I've given a lot of crud to the pack. I've made a lot of jokes. And even my Georgia Tech friends was like, you should open up with a joke at NC State's expense. I'm not even going to repeat the joke because I don't want to make it because it's dishonorable. I lost a bet with John Massey. John, raise your hand. He's the hero of the church. Yeah, there we go. He was going to have to usher in my Georgia Tech sweater this morning, except we lost. And so now I'm preaching in this. And I want you to know that more neutral things were offered to me. And I said, no, I want maximum red. I want a big logo. It needs to be as obnoxious as possible. I want to pay my bets. But that's what I'm doing. Here's the funny part about the bet. My wife wasn't here this morning when I got the options. I was brought some options, and I wanted to choose the most obnoxious. And so I grabbed Michelle, who's doing our announcements this morning morning and is just overall an untrustworthy person and I And I called her out to the lobby and I said before the service started and I said Michelle you need to be my wife this morning Jen's not here. She can't tell me do I look too fat in this and she said you look great and I told Jen I think she was lying to me and she's furthering my humiliation and having to wear this. But to my NC State friends, great game, wonderful atmosphere. We went to the game last night, and congratulations. That was a good win for you guys. This morning, we will continue with Daniel. I feel like stopping to pray, because now we're just like friends at a brewery talking about a football game. So let's do that. Let me just stop to pray to reset our mindset and then we'll dive into Daniel. Let's do that. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for friends and for fun and for football and for sports and all the things that unite us together. But God, we acknowledge that nothing unites us more than you. And so we pray that we would be united in you and in your presence this morning as we enter into the story of your servant, Daniel. In Jesus' name, amen. Okay, I think I can start to preach now. Now, the book of Daniel is one, and I had shared this with you guys several months ago, that one of the things we did, we meet as a staff and we plan our series together and we just kind of go, where do we need to take the church? And I kind of went back through the last five years of what we've covered as a church and noted the areas of the Bible that we had never touched before, the really significant areas of the Bible that we had never touched. And maybe you could even construe that we were negligent in not touching those. And so we just wanted to include those as we moved forward. And one of the places that we hadn't touched since I started here was the book, excuse me, of Daniel. And Daniel is a really impactful, prophetical book in the Old Testament. Now, here's the thing with Daniel. I'm not going to tell you that I'm preaching through the book of Daniel because I'm not. Because Daniel's 12 chapters long. And I see some of you nodding your heads. You know the book of Daniel. The first six chapters of the book of Daniel are what we refer to as narrative. It's a story. This is just a recounting of the events that happened. The last six chapters of Daniel are prophecy. They're eschatological prophecy, which means in reference to the end times. And just between you, me, and the gate post, they're crazy. They're really hard to understand. So here's what I'm going to do is just not talk about them. We'll just let them be confusing together. And if anybody has questions, we can talk about those questions together. But what we wanted to do is focus on the narrative portion of Daniel and ask, what can we learn from Daniel's experience in Babylon? And this is an interesting series because we're going to do this one week in Daniel here and talk about Daniel and his diet in chapter one. And then next week we have a morning of worship that I'm very excited about. I love a morning of worship. And then we'll pick it up with Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, who you know is Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. And then we'll look at Daniel and the lion's den. But we've not done those stories together as a church. And I think that we need to. And then after that, we're going to start our Christmas series, the name of which I do not know yet, but I do know what we'll be covering, which is kind of the songs that we sing. And we'll be looking at Christmas carols and what they actually mean and where they come from some scripture. So I'm very excited about that. So that's where we're going for the rest of the year. This morning, we arrive at Daniel. And so let me give you some context for what's happening at this moment in history, not just for Daniel, but for the nation of Israel. And then we'll look at some passages in Daniel to orient us in the story. Big, big overview. The nation of Israel is brought by Moses and then by Joshua conquering the land of Canaan and they claim it. Then they establish a nation. And after they establish a nation, it's ruled by Joshua and then some judges. And eventually Israel cries out for a king. And God says, I don't want to give you a king. And they said, well, we're going to be a middle school girl, and we're going to hold our breath until our face turns blue, and we're going to demand a king. And then God was like, okay, I'm going to give you one, but you're not going to want it. And then Saul was the first king. And then David, who we know, we know his story, David and Goliath, we know David, was the second king. And then the third king was Solomon. Solomon was the son of David, and he was the wisest man that ever lived. But after Solomon, his two sons, Jeroboam and Rehoboam, took over the kingdom, and there was a civil war and a split. And then from then, the nation of Israel existed as kind of this third world country that never gained international prominence and always struggled financially and spiritually and militaristically and all the ways. Militarily, that's probably the word that we want there. And all the ways, right? And then, eventually, the dominant powerhouse of the time takes over. And so Persia, Babylon, comes and conquers Israel. And when they conquer Israel, one of the things they do is they take the best and the brightest. They take the Ivy League students and they bring them back to, and the NC State students, and they bring them back to Babylon, and they begin to train them for service in the court. And part of the deal for that training is we have developed, Babylon, this is their perspective, we've developed a diet that is going to make you maximally healthy and helpful within the court, and we need you to adopt this diet. The problem with the diet was it went against the dietary restrictions of the Jewish heritage and of the Jewish faith. There were things that Daniel and his friends, Hananiah and Mishael and Azariah, were asked to consume that went against their conscience and their faith. And so they found themselves at this crossroads where they're essentially slaves and they're being asked to consume a diet that goes against their morals. So what do we do? And that's where we pick up the story. I'm going to read you a lot of verses this morning, but I want you not to hear a summary from me. I want you to hear exactly what's happening in the text, and then we will talk about it together. If you have a Bible, while I take a sip of this water, open it to Daniel chapter 1, and we're going to start in verse 8 and go through 15. If you don't have a Bible, it's in the seat back in front of you. Starting in verse eight, here's Daniel's response to the diet he was prescribed. But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way. Now, God had caused the official to show favor and compassion on Daniel, but the official told Daniel, I'm afraid of my lord, the king, who has assigned your food and drink. Why should he see you looking worse than the other men your age the king would then have my head excuse me because of you daniel then said the guard whom the chief official has appointed over daniel hananiah mishael and azariah please test your servants for 10 days give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the Okay, so this is the story of Daniel in Babylon. And we'll pick it up in verse 18 in just a few minutes. But in a brief interlude as we learn the story, and just so we recap that together, because sometimes when people just read passages to us, we kind of lose track. He's been put in this class of young men, my best guess is early to mid-20s to serve in the court in Babylon. And the king, Nebuchadnezzar, has left it to his officials to determine the best diet for these men to serve him well. And they've prescribed that to Daniel. And Daniel has said, please, can we not eat of that diet? Can we eat just vegetables and water? And give us 10 days. And in 10 days, you just tell us how healthy we look. Tell us what our skin looks like. Tell us how vibrant we seem. Tell us about our energy level and our sleep patterns. You watch us and you tell us how healthy we seem. And if we seem healthier, then let us just continue to consume this diet. If we don't, then we'll adopt yours, but just give us a chance. That's the premise of what's happening. Yeah, we understand that. Okay. So then here's after the chief official agrees to that, which was by the way, um, kind of him to do. Because he wasn't like, I could get fined or I could get detention. It was, if this doesn't work, the king will have my head. So it was high stakes. This is the favor that Daniel had built up by being a good guy. But he granted it nonetheless. And this is the story of Daniel entering Babylon is they said here's our standards of diet we would like you to adopt them and Daniel said can you please allow us to maintain our own and the results of that was they were healthier and King Nebuchadnezzar didn't find anyone else that could measure up to their excellence or their health. So the question is, as we read that as a church in 2025, what do we learn from that? And here's where I'll be honest with you in the challenge of the sermon this morning. This sermon, whether you realize it or not, maybe this is new information to you, but some of you, I suspect, already know where we're going with the content, which is Daniel and Babylon were surrounded in an atmosphere with different standards. We have to choose God's standards. What do we do? That's the sermon, and's what you preach. And oftentimes when I encounter passages and I find the cliche or the trodden path on which to go to preach it to you, I try to deviate and choose a new path out of respect for what you've experienced as listeners and churches before. But this morning and for this week, I found it important to just go ahead and tread the trotting. Go ahead and walk the path that has been cut for us because I think it's important and I think it matters. And so what I would have you understand this morning is, like Daniel, we are living in Babylon. Here's what I want you to understand. Daniel was a citizen of Israel. He was a Jewish man. He had Jewish parents. His lineage went back through the decades, maybe the centuries of Israel. And when he was taken to Babylon, he finds himself in a foreign land to which he does not belong, whose customs he does not know, whose rules he does not adhere to. He's an alien, a sojourner, and he doesn't belong there. And here's one of the things that I believe that Christians don't think about enough. I've made this point in previous sermons for previous reasons. But as Christians, we are aliens. We are sojourners. We are not citizens of the United States of America. We are not inhabitants here. We are citizens of heaven. Whether or not you understand this fully, when you decide to become a Christian, which is to faithfully acknowledge that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, and is going to do what he says he's going to do, then you transfer your citizenship from whatever country you were born in into the nation of heaven. And so if you're here this morning and you're a believer, you would call yourself a Christ follower, then what I would say to you is you may by happenstance be a resident of North Carolina. You may by happenstance be a citizen of the United States. You may even be one of those super cool people who are always a little bit pretentious about it that have dual citizenship and you have a British passport. Good for you. But ultimately, when you become a Christian, your citizenship transfers to heaven. You're a citizen of heaven and an alien and sojourner here. And so like Daniel, we are not residents of Babylon. And here's why this matters. Because what we see in the story of Daniel is that the Babylonians had standards that they had established, that they believed in, that they espoused, that they thought were good. And they took those standards and they said, Daniel, Mishael, Hananiah, Azariah, now that you're here, live according to these standards. And Daniel said with all courage, I'm not a citizen of this place. I'm a citizen of Israel. In our vernacular, I'm a citizen of heaven. Those standards are not my standards. And here's the courageous part. Will you give me 10 days to live according to my standards? And if they don't work out better than your standards, I'll adopt yours. But can I live according to mine? And so the very easy lesson here, as we look at the story of Daniel is, if it's true that we live in Babylon, but we are not citizens here, what standards of Babylon that everyone else is adopting, are we tempted to adopt? To fit in, to get along, to go along, to not ruffle feathers. I mean, one easy standard is in Raleigh, I should become an NC State fan. I will not. I will be a Georgia Tech fan. And I don't even like being a Georgia Tech fan. It stinks. I'll tell you that for free. But all kidding aside, our communities, our culture impresses standards upon us from Babylon that are not the standards of heaven, our citizenship. Our culture impresses standards upon us about what's okay to consume, what's okay to watch, what's okay to joke about, what's okay to say, what's okay to participate in. Those standards are presented to us externally from the outside in. And then we're challenged as citizens of heaven to just go ahead and go along to get along, get along to go along, to adopt those standards. But they're different than the standards of heaven. Our culture has different standards for us and for themselves. And I say themselves intentionally to make it separate from our culture as a church. We are not citizens of Babylon. We're citizens of heaven. But what I want you to understand this morning is that Babylon has some standards that we don't have. And let me also say this transparently and honestly to you. This is a hard sermon for me to write. Because I never, ever want to preach in such a way that I am convicting you and asking you to get on my level. It is always, here's my conviction as I interact with this text. If you want to enter into this conviction with me, go ahead. And so I'll be the first to admit to you. I don't get it right all the time with adopting the standards of heaven versus the standards of Babylon. Sometimes the jokes or the language that I'm willing to use on a Wednesday are not exactly what heaven would choose. And I've adopted the standards of Babylon. Sometimes in what I consume is not the standard of heaven, it's the standard of Babylon. And so I stand before you honestly and hopefully humbly saying, if you feel like you haven't mastered this, neither have I. But I've always said to you, let's not soft pedal what the text teaches us. Let's bravely encounter it together and allow conviction where it's deserved. And so what I would tell you this week is, for me, and I know some of you pretty well, so I know you're in this boat too, buddy. For you, maybe we don't do the best job of parsing out the standards of heaven and the standards of Babylon and making the choice of Daniel and choosing the standards of heaven. And so this mourning is intended to be a compulsion towards holiness, towards choosing to be like God. Holiness is defined as other, different, outside of. God is described as holy, holy, holy, because he is other, he is different, he is outside of, he is different than us. And so as citizens of heaven, we are called to be different too. And there are myriad texts I could pull from the New Testament to illustrate this for us. But the one I would highlight for you this morning is 2 Corinthians chapter 7 verse 1, where it says, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and soul, perfecting holiness out of reverence to God. We are called to be holy. We are called to live according to the standards of heaven, not according to the standards of Babylon. And that's what I want us to see this morning, is we are not called to live to the standards of everyone around us all the time. We're called to live to the standards of heaven. And here's a short aside I would say. And I've debated about this because this is a little bit more in your face than I typically like to be. So I'm going to say it over here. I don't know if you remember, but I've set this up in previous sermons as my reckless speculation box where I'm allowed to just say things off the cuff here and you can't get mad at me. Over there is where I'm actually preaching and you can get mad at me for those things, but here you can't get mad, okay? We agree? Great. Here's what I've learned in life. Here's one of the things I've seen. And I don't mean it to be critical. I've just seen it. You take it for what it's worth. The older you get, the more your life contracts. The older you get, typically happens, what I've seen, maybe I'm wrong, but what I've seen is your circle around you gets smaller. And due to that, your circle around you tends to agree with you about everything. And then all of a sudden, you've reached whatever age old is to you, whether it's 45 or 95, and everyone around you agrees with everything you think too, and then you all look at each other and you go, we've nailed it, and everyone else is dumb. When we do that, and we don't take in new information, and we don't learn new things, and we don't have other standards, we adopt the standards of everyone around us and we become subject to Babylon. Okay. Here's the thing about the standards of Babylon that's really, really tricky. On the surface, on the surface, their food is better. On the surface, what Daniel was being offered was meat and probably potatoes and some sort of curry. I don't know. It was Persia. There was something over there that was better than what we have here. It was awesome. And wine. That's what he was being offered. And he said, no thanks. I'd like green beans, Brussels sprouts, and water, please. He said, I don't want any of that. I want just vegetables. And so on the surface, the diet of Babylon is more attractive. And this is something I personally struggle with mightily. Part of my job, and Jen actually makes fun of me for this. Part of my job is to go to lunch with people. I don't even care what we talk about. Let's just go to lunch. You say whatever you need to say, I'm going to enjoy this nice meal. Part of my job is to go to lunch. And I go to lunch once or twice a week. And when I go to lunch, I love food. I love food. I love it. Last week, I scheduled a dinner with somebody at Coquette. Coquette? Coquette? I don't know. Coquette. All right, great. Brasserie. And do you know what I did? Like right away, like as soon as it was scheduled and I got some free time, I got on my phone, I Googled the menu, and I decided what I was going to get. I got the scallions. They were terrible. Don't get the scallions. Scallops. I didn't just get a plate of scallions. That's a great point, Linda. Also, I would just say, objectively, if there is an option for just scallions, don't get those. Not so great. But I like to look forward to the food that I eat. And when I go to a restaurant to meet somebody, I want to get the French dip. If you go to Winston's, they've got an incredible French dip. It's really good. And the fries are good. And you get a side of horseradish because you don't care about your heart or living past 60 and you dip your fries in the horseradish and it's great. But the wise thing to do is to get the blackened chicken salad, which is also very good, but it's still salad. Like it's still what rabbits eat. And I don't want that. I want the French dip. I want the steak frites, right? I want the buffalo chicken wrap with the homemade fries and the blue cheese. That's what I want. And so that is more appealing. But here's what I know. And let me make this point in my notes before I say this next thing, because I think it ties in. Just for the record, God's standards bring us true freedom. God's standards bring us true freedom. So I want to talk to that for a minute. God's standards bring us true freedom. Here's what I know. And I know this experientially. You may not know this and I'm not applying this to anyone, but here's my experience. Is when I, for three months, eat what's most appealing in the moment. I have the French dip or I have the steak frites or I have the buffalo wrap or whatever it is in the moment lunch is better also I need a nap that afternoon and in the future my blood pressure is higher and my heart rate is higher and my health is lower and my energy rate is less and my sleep is worse and my indigestion is more when I make the decision to have the most attractive thing in the moment. And what I also know from the rare times that I've been able to do it is when I make the wise choice about what I'm going to consume, that my energy level is higher, my mental acuity is better, my energy is higher, I feel more capable and healthier. And even, if I can just be honest with you, my skin looks a little better. I don't know who cares about that at all. I just know it's true. So here's my point. Babylon has more attractive options in the moment. But if we choose the wise thing, we're going to be healthier in the long run. If we compromise our morals in the short term, and we consume the show that we really want to watch, or we engage in the conversation that's easiest to engage in, or I would say this too, we engage in political discourse the way that the world does in the moment, it satisfies us in the short term. But I could give you example after example of ways to compromise our heavenly values for the sake of Babylonian values, where in the moment, it's more attractive to indulge in this behavior because it's less attractive to stick to heavenly values. But in the long term, what I want you to see is you will be healthier long term to adhere to heavenly values than you will to Babylonian values. And I don't think that there's much difference in this story about the long-term health of Daniel physically than there is about taking it and applying it to the long-term health of us spiritually. If you want to be healthy spiritually, if you want to be free spiritually, eat the moral salad now so you can have the energy and the health and the longevity later. That's, I think, what we learned from this. And here's the thing, and this is what I said I was going to speak to, God's standards bring us true freedom. I think that we think that if I live according to the standards of heaven and not according to the standards of Babylon, that I'm limiting myself. I can't indulge in that pleasure. I can't experience that thing. I can't do that thing that everybody else around me, all my coworkers, everyone else in my life, they get to do it. Why can't I do it? I should be allowed to do that thing too. And so we think that following heavenly standards limits us and limits our freedom. And so we try to be good soldiers and sign up for that and go, yeah, God, I'm going to live it myself and live a worse, less enjoyable life now because it's the right thing to do and I'm just going to sacrifice for it. And what's actually true is when I spend six months eating French dips, I feel like crud after that. And I don't have the energy. And I don't exercise. And I don't have the joy and the vibrancy of life. And I don't feel as up for wrestling with John, my son. And I don't feel as eager to lay in bed with Lily, putting my nine-year-old daughter down and listening to her talk about her day and the one time during the day where she's willing to share. Because I'm too tired. When I choose unhealth, I'm not as willing to take the phone call from someone at Grace who's going through something. I'm not as willing to make the phone call to someone who's going through something. And so what I find in my life, and you decide if this is true for you, is that when I make short-term decisions to live my life according to the standards of Babylon, rather than according to the standards of heaven, that in the long term I experience less freedom than I would have if I would have chosen heaven in the first place. Does that make sense? And so this story from Daniel that seems simple and innocuous, I believe actually has a lot to teach us. And it's simply this. You're not citizens of here. You're not citizens of the United States. You're not residents of North Carolina. You're citizens of heaven if you're a Christian. And we have different standards for health than our community does. And we think erroneously that choosing those standards offers us less freedom. And what we learn experientially and from the story in Daniel is that the greatest freedom is found under the standards of heaven and pursuing holiness. And that's what your heavenly Father wants for you. So let's pursue those. Let's pray. Dear God, thank you so much for this morning. Thank you for your servant Daniel and everything he means to us and what we can learn from him. Father, I know that there are ways and places in which most of us or all of us choose the standards of the place where we find ourselves versus heaven. And so I pray that we would be people who choose the standard of heaven and we would reject the standards of Babylon. Let us be healthier for it, physically, spiritually, mentally. Let us be better servants and followers as a result of those choices and give us the courage and the foresight to be people who choose your home, our home, over this temporary one. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being a part of our Sunday. Welcome to Grace. If you're joining us online, thank you for doing that. If you're here and it's your first time and I haven't had the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. You're here on the perfect Sunday. It's Hootenanny Sunday. So as soon as the service is over, we're going to clear the chairs out to the wall. We're going to throw down some tables. We've got a huge grill out there to grill some hamburgers and some cheeseburgers and some hot dogs. If yours feels a little bland when you have it, I mean, they are the frozen bricks. Katie McWilliams right there brings her own seasoning in her purse for all of these events. So I'm sure there's plenty to go around. She's not selfish. So just ask her. If you're wondering where is this section of the church, they're around the grill. Like there's 20 dudes just staring at the grill. No one's doing anything, and they won't do anything for another 45 minutes. But they're all out there because that's where men go. It's just like moth to a flame. That's what they're doing. And just as a point of order to my Panthers friends, fans, congratulations. You really gave it to us last week. I was telling somebody I was coaching a soccer game at the end of the Falcons-Panthers game. And for those that don't know, last week I ran my mouth about my Falcons cup because I'm a Falcons fan. And now everyone is in Panthers gear. There was a baby shoved in my face wearing a Panthers onesie. People who have been wearing Panthers t-shirts have forced themselves on me with hugs. Which, this is the Lord's house, alright? We need to be serious about this. But I got, I was coaching a game, and so I wasn't looking at my phone, and the game ended while I was coaching the game. And then I checked my phone after the game, and I had 27 texts from you jerks. One of you, and this one was my favorite, just no words sent me a picture of a Panthers cup. That was it, which is really good. A few weeks ago, we're continuing in our series, Gentle and Lowly, looking at kind of loosely working through the book, Gentle and Lowly, by a guy named Dane Ortlund. And so this is the fourth part of the series, and I'm going to be focused on chapter five, where it talks about Jesus as a high priest. A few weeks ago, I did a wedding, and as normally happens at weddings, I have the same conversation with Uncle So-and-So. Uncle So-and-So, one of the uncles, one of the dads, is going to, at some point or another, about half the time, half the weddings I do, is going to come up to me and say, it's always these questions, it's always in this order. Do you have a church? Yes, I have a church. What's it called? It's called Grace Raleigh. Oh, where is it? It's near Triangle Mall, corner of Capitol and 540. Oh, that's cool. What denomination is it? Every time. Those questions in that order. And so I had this conversation. And he said, what denomination is it? And I got to explain one of my favorite things about grace, which is we are not non-denominational. And I don't know if you know this. We are not non-denominational. We are inter-denominational. And I didn't learn that word until I came to grace. But the people who started it told me what it was, and I think it's beautiful. So I got to explain it to Uncle So-and-So what that means. And what it means is we acknowledge. We're not non-denominational. We don't expect you to. If you grew up in a particular denomination, the gentleman I was talking to was Lutheran. And then when he said Lutheran, I said, okay. He said I was sprinkled as a baby. Does that count? And then he wanted to have the baptism discussion. Just right there. That's what happens in my life. But I was able to explain to him that we're interdenominational, meaning in our church body, we have represented just about every mainline denomination in the United States. We have Lutherans. We certainly have Presbyterians. We have Baptists. We have Pentecostals. We have Catholics. We have people that have converted from Judaism. We have everything represented in this church. And rather than being non-denominational and leaving all of that wonderful heritage at the door when you come in, we say that we are interdenominational, meaning we find beauty and purpose and truth in every segment of God's church. And we believe that people from all kinds of different denominations have something to offer here and that those denominations have beautiful, wonderful things that we should be humble and learn from. We have not cornered the market on truth at grace. And I got to explain that to Uncle So-and-So, and that's one of my favorite things about the church. But because of that, because we're interdenominational and because we have people from all different backgrounds, when we hear the word priest, we think of it totally differently. Many of us think about it in many different ways. This week we're looking at Jesus as our high priest and what that means. But before we can appreciate what that means, we have to appreciate what it is to be a priest. Because if you grew up Catholic, you have a very good idea of what you expect a priest to do and be. If you grew up Jewish, you have an understanding of what a priest is, but it's different than the Catholic view. If you're like me and you grew up Baptist, I only know priests from TV shows and clips and what my very conservative professors would say about the priesthood. I don't have the good working knowledge of what it means to be a priest and why that's important. And so I understand that in this room, if I were to ask 10 of you, what is a priest? What's the role? What do they do? It would, they would be probably similar answers, but probably not the same. And I doubt any of us are succinct about it, which is why I appreciate this quote at the beginning of chapter 5 when Dane explains what a priest is. He says this, and this is how we're going to understand it this morning. Chapter 5 opens like this. I think it's a wonderful description of a priest. And he asserts, and I think this is in part right. I don't think it's the only thrust of the book of Hebrews, but it was written in part to show us what it is to have Jesus as a high priest. And I love that imagery of on in earth, the king is God's representative to the people, but the priest is the people's representative to God. He goes and advocates for us. That's why it's such a big deal that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father advocating for you and I. He is our high priest. And I also love the thought that it is in the shadow of that great priest that all other priests, pastors, ministers, leaders stand. And it is to him that all other priests, pastors, ministers, leaders should point all the time. You should come here and I should point you to Jesus. And lest you think this example is just for me because I'm the only pastor speaking in the room right now. So this is just for me. In 1 Peter chapter 2, Peter acquaints us with this idea called the priesthood of the believers. Meaning if you are a Christian, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, then you are in the priesthood of the believers. You are in the holy priesthood. It is your job to minister to the people around us. So in a sense, if you are saved, you are also in here a priest, which means you stand in the shadow of our great high priest. And it is your job to point back to that great high priest. Now, as I think about Jesus as a priest, I think about what would his demeanor towards us be? If you were the priest, if you were perfect, divine, and you were the priest of all of the Christians on the planet and you represented them, what would your demeanor towards them be? Don't you think you'd be a little disappointed? Don't you think you'd be a little frustrated? Don't you think Jesus has the right to get exasperated with us? We get a hint of this in the Gospels when the disciples offer some dumb answer for a question and Jesus says, how long must I put up with this faithless generation? Just this little glimpse of Jesus getting a little bit worn out with it, fed up with us. And I think to be our high priest and to watch us wallow in the mud and like is depicted in the Bible, we are like dogs that return to our own vomit when we sin. To watch my children do that over and over and over again, wouldn't that be exasperating? Parents, you know this to be true. There's things in my house that are absolutely unnecessary behaviors. One of my children is in a stage where they like to pinch you to get back at you. They pinch their sibling to get back at them. And I have told them, do not pinch your sibling. Don't do that. You don't have to do it. You never have to do it. Don't pinch your sibling. Another one of them likes to put their feet on the other one. Just randomly, just rest my foot on your head. What a jerk move that is. And I've told that child, do not touch your sibling with your feet. Don't do it. Just don't do it. And there's other things that they do that test my patience, but nothing makes me lose my mind when I look over and child A is putting their feet on child B and I'm like, knock it off. Stop. You don't have to do that. They hate it. I hate seeing it. Feet are gross. Never touch me with them. By the way, men over 30, you should never have your toes exposed if you are not directly adjacent to water for any reason. Do not wear flip-flops to dinner, guys. Knock it off. It's gross. Nobody likes it. Anyways, I wasn't planning on saying that. You do what you want with your toesies. But it drives me nuts when they do a thing that I've told them not to do over and over and over again, and it's an easily conquerable behavior. They don't care. And if that drives me nuts, how much more nuts must we drive Jesus as he watches us in the squalor, returning to a defeatable behavior over and over and over again? Wouldn't you, if you were him, just want to slap you on the back of the head and go, knock it off? What are you doing? This is preventable. Stop it. I would expect Jesus's demeanor towards us to be one of exasperation. And yet this is not how he is described by the author of Hebrews. Hebrews 5.2 describes our high priest. I'm going to read one as well. Every high priest is selected from among the people and is appointed to represent the people in matters related to God to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He, this is Jesus, is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness. This Jesus that has every right as our high priest to approach us with exasperation chooses instead to approach us with gentleness, chooses instead to have what's known about him and written about him in the book of Hebrews be that he is our high priest and he is gentle with us because he shares in our weaknesses. He's been tempted like us before. He's a human like us. We talked about this last week, which causes our high priest not to be exasperated, not to be angry, not to be frustrated, not to be fed up, not to be disappointed, but to be gentle with us. And this falls right in line with how Jesus describes himself. I'll remind you, this is the keystone verse for the whole book. Matthew 11, 29, take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble or lowly in only way Jesus describes himself is gentle and lowly. Ortlund's assertion in the book is that there's no other place in the Gospels where Jesus describes himself, where Jesus tells you what he is or what his assessment of himself is or what he wants you to know him for. This is the one place. And what does he choose? Gentle and lowly. And so this morning, we're going to really hone in on that gentleness. We're going to marvel at it. We're going to look at the effect that it has on us and think about how we can be more like Christ and our gentleness as well. But it's miraculous to me that this all-powerful, perfect Jesus who sits at the right hand of the Father, who lived a perfect life and died a perfect death and has watched. Can you imagine the frustration just banging your head against the wall, watching generation after generation after generation of Christians commit the same sins and the same atrocities and the same mistakes and run into the end and stub their toe on the same objects generation after generation? Can you imagine what it would be like to watch you wanting what's best for you and watching you hurt yourself over and over and over again? And yet, despite all of that, despite all that generational sin, despite it spilling down through the centuries and the millennia, Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and his demeanor towards you is gentle and humble. And here's the thing that I want us to catch. If you look back at the verse, it says he is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray. And when you read that at first, it says that Jesus deals gently with those who are ignorant and going astray. And in our Christian brains, many of us have been believers for a long time. And so in our longtime believer brains, more than a few years, we've been walking with Jesus or at least claiming to, trying to, varying degrees of success. We read that verse and I think we flag it. Jesus is gentle towards new and non-believers. He's gentle towards the ignorant who are going wayward, the people who don't know any better. I remember Jesus's prayer. I think of Jesus's prayer on the cross when they're casting lots for his garments and they're torturing him. And Jesus prays, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. They're ignorant in their sin. And so this verse, when he just, on a surface reading, it looks like that he is gentle towards those who are ignorant to their sin and therefore are wayward and wandering away from Jesus. Meaning for us, for mature believers, those of us who've been walking with him for a while, we know better. I bet for many of you, whatever your sins are, they're not ignorant. You know what you're doing. You know the choice you're making. You know you're choosing to harbor a wrong attitude, to commit a wrong action, to say a wrong thing, to withhold the wrong thing, whatever it is. Most of us, once you've been walking with God for a little bit, your sins are no longer ignorant. And so maybe this Jesus isn't gentle with me. But I love what Ortland points out in this chapter of the book. When you get into the sentence, and this is always tricky, and I don't do a lot of translation stuff, and I'm not going to go deep in it now, but it's always tricky to translate Greek into English. Everything's different, right? Well, when you really get into it, what you find is that the author intended to identify two different categories of people. So think of it this way. Jesus deals gently with the ignorant, with those who sin without knowing it. A few days ago, John held up his middle finger at me and said, Dad, what's this? And I said, it's a thing we don't do, buddy. That was ignorant. Typically, you could consider it a sin to hang the bird at your dad. That's not good. But I don't condemn John for that. He didn't know it was in ignorance. And sometimes we do things in ignorance. We hurt people in ignorance. We didn't mean it. We didn't know we did it. And God forgives. Jesus is gentle for us for that in our ignorance. But then there's the wayward and the way that is best read is. And Jesus is also gentle with the wayward, with the ones who are wandering. He's gentle with ignorant sin and he's gentle with intentional sin. Meaning we can say for sure Jesus deals gently with all sinners. Jesus deals gently with all sinners, not just the new believers, not just the non-believers, not just the innocent four-year-old asking a question. He deals gently with the ignorant, and he deals gently with the wayward. So Jesus, our high priest, deals gently with all of us, which is an incredible comfort. And I believe that there is a method to this. I believe there's a method to this because he could be harsh. He could be rough. We deserve it. He has every right to it. And yet, he chooses to be gentle. He chooses to be kind. He chooses to be meek. And I think that there's a reason for this. When I was in high school, I went to a really small private high school. I like to joke, Jen, my wife, she graduated 43rd in her class. There's like 775 people in her class. She was a really, she was an assiduous, diligent student, really committed, worked hard. I used to try to get her to like skip homework and skip class in college and she never would. She was really a straight straight liner and she worked really hard. She got 43rd in her class and I always like to brag that I didn't even try that hard and I got 24th in my class but there was only 25 people in there. But numbers are numbers. I did learn that in school. And so it was this small familial atmosphere and it was kind of fun and I actually liked having the experience of doing school like that. And there was one, it was the first day of school, my 10th grade year, and children in the room, I'm not advocating this kind of behavior, I'm just saying that I did it. It was the first day of school, 10th grade year, and we got a new Spanish teacher. It was our first day of class with her. She's writing her name on the board. I'm going to really try to not say her name. She's writing her name on the board, and we're talking, I guess. I don't know. We're in, like, 10th grade. Of course we're talking we're talking. This is a new teacher's first day of school. Everyone's happy to see everybody, whatever. And something happened, something innocuous. My buddy Clint wouldn't be quiet. And she turned around and within the first 90 seconds of class at a new school, absolutely screamed at him to be quiet and to be respectful. Just let him have it. Like I've never seen a teacher act in my life before or since. And we were all blown away. Now, what effect do you think that had on our class? We like this lady. We're going to behave the best we can for her. Lord, no. It was like, okay, you pick the fight. We're going to finish it. And we gave her heck. I remember one instance in particular, a year or two later, it was either my junior or senior year. She was late to class. And I kind of stood up and I looked at the rest of the folks in the class and said, hey, guys, listen. When she gets back in here, when she turns her back and she's writing on the board, just do what I do. Okay? Just do what I do. And they're like, all right. So she gets in and we're all kind of like looking at each other, you know. And she turns her back to the board. She starts writing. Turns back to the class. Rather, she starts writing. And I just start going like this. That's it. Just like that. And she turns around. And there should have been 25 people doing it, but there was only 23 because Dawn and Marcy were the valedictorian and salutatorian, and they were lame. And I still have not forgiven them for their betrayal. But she turns around, and there's 23 seniors. Just going like this. In unison. And she's kind of, stop, stop it, stop, stop, stop it. So we stop. Then, a few minutes later, she turns around to right, and I start going like this. She turns around. There's 23 kids doing this. Stop it! Stop! Right? Then, a few minutes later, she turns around again. I'm in my desk. I start going like this. She turns around. There's 23 kids going like this. Awesome. And she finally just goes, Nathan! Nathan! Go to the principal's office. I'm like, I'm not doing it. I'm just doing what they're doing. She's like, it's your fault. Go! She was right. So I go to the principal's office, also known as my soccer coach. And he said, what'd you do? And I told him. And he was like, that's pretty funny. Why don't you just stay in my office for the rest of the time? She was so harsh that at no point did that engender any sort of alignment with her. As a matter of fact, her harshness engendered within us resentment and rebellion. If you're going to treat us like this, this is how we're going to act towards you. That harsh treatment does not work. And you know this to be true, parents. When you get harsh, when you verbalize, I call it when you yell over your kid to get their attention. In my house, I'm not applying this to you. You do whatever is right with your kids. But for me, I call that verbal bullying. I know that that can work on my nine-year-old daughter, but when she's 16, I better have a new tactic. I better have something better than that because that's not going to work. She's going to leave and go to her boyfriend's house, which is my nightmare. So I have to figure out how to be calm now because that harsh attitude doesn't work. On the flip side of the Spanish teacher was my English teacher, Mr. Totten. I loved Mr. Totten. I loved him so much that a while back, a couple months ago, I was just, for whatever reason I thought about him, I Googled him. He's still at the church from which the school sprang. He's an elder there. I got to listen to one of his sermons, and it was so good to hear his voice. Now, Mr. Totten was the strictest teacher in the school. He was absolutely stern. He put up with nothing, absolutely nothing. He was straight-laced in that classroom. But when you would get out of line, which I did increasingly less over the years because of how much I loved and respected him, he would call you up to his desk or he would quietly take you into the hallway without embarrassing you. And then he would tell you, you know, you can't do this. That's not how you want to be. That's not the young man you want to be. And I can't, if I love you, I cannot allow you to act like that in my class. And I cannot allow that to go unpunished. So you're going to get some demerits. That's what we got at my school. You're going to get some demerits. I have to do it. Do you understand? Yes, sir. I'm sorry. Go back in. I'm good. He was gentle. He was kind. Had nothing to do with the standards. The standards could be raised because he was gentle with us. And we all respected him and walked in lockstep. Harsh treatment from people engenders rebellion and resentment. Gentle treatment aligns us and inclines us towards the person treating us with that gentleness, particularly when we are aware that we do not deserve it. I believe that among many reasons, I believe that gentleness is just the very nature of Jesus. He has no choice but to act with that gentleness, to act gently towards us. But I also believe that it's something that he does intentionally because he knows that it inclines us to him. Paul says it this way in Romans, or do you show contempt in the hallway and we're going, you're right, I am sorry, that is not who I want to be. I've dishonored you and I've dishonored myself with the choices that I've made and I will make those choices no longer. Thank you. That kind of gentleness inclines us towards Christ. It's his kindness that leads to repentance. And I would say this and then tell you a little bit more about what I mean. Think about this. Aren't you grateful the Lord has dealt with you gently? And doesn't that incline you towards him? Aren't you grateful the Lord has dealt with you gently and doesn't that incline you towards him? Here's what I mean. I don't know if you have any of these moments in your life. I would argue that if you've been paying attention to your life and done some self-reflection, that you have. But I know I've had a few of these moments, and I've never pretended to be perfect as your pastor. I've had a few of these moments, maybe two, three, four times in my life where I was wayward. I had allowed sin in my life. I was intentionally choosing that sin. That sin was driving a wedge between me and Jesus and I was wandering off because I was choosing a sin. I began to hide things in the shadows of my life. And whenever that's happened in my life, whenever I've had something in my life that's causing a separation and is rendering me wayward, there is a necessary light that must shine on the shadows. That stuff always comes to light. It always comes out. It's always something you have to deal with. And when I think about the times in my life when I have things in the shadows and I'm ashamed of them, I don't want anyone to know about them. I don't want anyone to see them. I certainly don't want to have to talk to Jen or my friends or whoever about those things. I'd like to just deal with them privately and not deal with the shame of it. Whenever light has been shined in those places, in the moment, it's so hard. That's a bad day. That's a hard night's sleep. There's a lot of gross that stirs up in that. There's a lot of pain when light hits the shadows for the first time and you're exposed. But as I think back on those times, what I marvel at is the reality that for me, when that has happened, when God has brought the dark things into the light in my life, every single time that's happened, I can tell you, God did it in the most gentle way possible. He did it in the most kind way possible. Yeah, things were brought to light. And it was hard and it stunk and I felt shame. But it could have been a lot worse than it was. It could have been a lot worse. Jesus could have dealt with that in a different way. He could have shed that light in the dark places in a totally different way that would have absolutely humiliated me or cost me something or whatever it is. He could have done it worse. But every time I've felt the kindness of God compelling me towards repentance, every time he and his goodness has brought something in the dark into the light in my life, as I reflect back on it, I realize that he did it in the And what's been in the shadows is brought into the light. And I wonder if it's not true that if you think back on that hard day, that hard season, did God not do that in the most gentle way possible to protect you and the people around you? I bet he did. I bet he did. Because we have a gentle high priest who calls us into the hallway and tells us in private who holds us. And we talked about at the end of Moses, we talked about we have this God that has justice in one hand and a desire for our conviction in one hand and comfort in the other. He holds conviction and comfort and then he embraces us with both of those. This is how our gentle high priest treats us. So we marvel this morning at the gentleness of Jesus, our high priest. Now, here's the question for you. Sometimes I will just end there and say let's marvel at the gentleness of Jesus. But I have a question for you because I think we can press it just a little bit further. If Jesus is characterized by gentleness, shouldn't his followers be as well? If Jesus is characterized by gentleness, shouldn't his followers be as well? We talk at Grace about the sanctification process. The time that elapses between justification and glorification. When we become Christians and when our salvation is made complete because we are in heaven with God forever, we are in glory. The time between, I almost said betwixt for fun, The time between is the sanctification process. Sanctification is to become the process through which we become more like Christ in character. Every single one of you in here who claims Jesus as your Savior, you are in the process, the slow, muddy, troublesome, difficult process of becoming more like Christ in character as God molds you over the years. And if we are going to become more like Christ in character and the way that Jesus is depicted over and over and over again and the only way that he depicts himself is that he is gentle, should we not also be gentle? Should we, church, be characterized by our gentleness? And now let me make this point too. There are some weeks when I preach to y'all, but most weeks I preach to us. Most weeks I'm here. I'm not up there. Do you know how convicting this was this week for me? If you guys just go out into the community and someone asks you about your church, and you say you like your church, and they go, oh yeah, do you like your pastor? You're like, yeah, he's all right. Tell me about your pastor. Let me tell you what I know. It's not coming out of your mouth. Dude is gentle. Like one of the most gentle souls I've ever known. I wouldn't even say it's way down on the list. It's not on the list. All jokes aside, I've been sitting with that all week. Sometimes I'm harsh with people. Sometimes in my house I'm harsh. I lose my patience. But guys, isn't it true that if our Savior defines himself as gentle primarily, that if we want to become more like him in character, that we should be too? And if that's how our Savior depicts himself, is that not what his body, the church, should be known for? Our gentleness in our communities? In different spheres of life? And I'm afraid that that's not what the church is known for right now. Big C Church. And we can't impact Big C Church very much. But we have total control over what this little C Church does. We can begin with gentleness here. And so I have three things for you to think about. If we're going to be gentle people, if this is going to matter to us, if we're going to allow God's kindness to convict us towards seeking to intentionally be more gentle people, three thoughts for you. The first thought is think of gentleness in what I call concentric circles of concern. So think of gentleness to the general public, the cashier, the server, people in traffic, folks that you see out at the ball field, people that you walk past grocery shopping. Think about being gentle to those people. It's probably the easiest to be gentle to those people, if we're being honest. Then with your friends friends and your acquaintances do they know you for being gentle with them do they know you for being kind and for being considerate so we should think about how do we be gentle to our co-workers how do we be gentle to the people we see on a regular basis to the people who know my name and I know theirs how can we be gentle towards like Jesus is gentle? And then where it gets the toughest is how can we be gentle towards our family and our intimate friends and the people that we love the most? Because I'll tell you, if everybody in the general public thinks I'm kind and gentle, if everybody in this room, my outer circle of acquaintances, thinks I'm kind and gentle, but my kids think I'm a jerk, I've failed. Right? I've failed. It's easiest to be nice to the cashier, and then it gets harder and harder. There's one more layer to that, but that'll be the third thought. So the first way to think about gentleness is outside in. And where the rubber meets the road is when you're kind and gentle to your family and the people who you love the most and who also get under your skin the most. Another thing to think about is this. We are gentle both inwardly and outwardly. We are gentle both inwardly and outwardly. It occurs to me that it's possible to treat someone with gentleness, to be kind to someone in the public forum, while inwardly you're dog cussing them. Yeah? You ever done this? You're nice to somebody? No, not you, Tom. I saw you shake your head. I would never blame you for that. We're nice to people. I've been in conversations. I shouldn't tell you this, but I've been in conversations where on the outside I'm being nice and I'm engaging in the conversation. And on the inside, I'm going, wrap it up. Like I got, I lost interest five minutes ago. I can barely hang on. Please hurry. And then I leave and I'm like, I'm not talking to that person again. Like maybe I was gentle on the outside, but on the inside, I gave them a very poor estimation. And we do this, don't we? We're outwardly kind to somebody. I think about my passive-aggressive friends. I think about my conflict-averse friends, where you're going to do whatever you have to do to be nice in the moment, but in your head, you cannot stand this person. And then you go home to your spouse and you complain about them. So if we're going to be truly gentle, we have to do so inwardly and outwardly. And the last thing to think about as we think about being people who are gentle is actually one concentric circle of concern tighter than our family and our friends. It's yourself. I have no doubt that this room is filled with some grade A self-loathers. Some of you are so hard on yourself. Some of you are so mean to yourselves. Some of you have this voice that says awful things about you, that tells you that you can't, and that you shouldn't, and that you won't, and that no one will believe you, and that you're not worth anything. And if you heard someone talk to your friend the way that you talk to yourself, you would never forgive that person for how rude and mean and critical and harsh they were. And yet you talk to yourself like that. Your Savior is gentle with you. His estimation of you is gracious. It's kind. And some of us who refuse to be gentle with ourselves, I believe it hurts the heart of Jesus to know that that's how you're talking about his daughter. That's how you think about his son. Because he did not create you to do that. And he does not want you to do that. So this morning, let's marvel at the fact that we have a high priest who treats us gently. And let's understand that that gentleness inclines us towards him, that we might be more desirous of him and exist in a state of gratitude for about if he is gentle, then we ought to as well. And we ought to be gentle in concentric circles of concern outward in until we get to us and we are generous with ourselves and we allow Jesus to tell us the truth about ourselves, not that voice in our head that lies to us and makes us feel like crud. And let's go from here and let's be people who are gentle. I expect the kindest, most generous teardown of the chairs and standing in line for the hootenanny after this sermon this morning. Everyone's going to be like, no, after you, after you. Let's be a church that's known, as Jesus was, for being gentle. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for this morning. Thank you for the opportunity to celebrate everything that you've done here and what you continue to do here. Thank you for a church that we can call home, where we can love you, where we can be honest and we can be ourselves. Thank you for treating us gently, for inclining us towards you and drawing us in. Thank you, Jesus, for being our high priest and advocating for us. And as we are about to go here and eat, go from here and eat together, God, I just pray that you would bless the food, that you would bless the meal, that there would be good laughter, there would be good fellowship, and that we would see you as the author of the joy that's taking place now and will take place then. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your September Sunday. Happy kickoff day to those who are celebrating. If you're joining us online, wherever you are and whatever you may be doing, we are grateful for that. This morning is our own kickoff of sorts as we kick off our new series called Gentle and Lowly, titled for the book, Gentle and Lowly, that we still have available in the lobby. We got 20 more copies last week, so there's some out there. Those are available for $10 a piece. Just grab some on the honor code. You can drop cash in the acrylic boxes on the way out. You can put them in the baskets if and when they come by. You can send us a money order and I will sign for it. Whatever you want to do for your $10, you feel free. But take a book if you'd like one. We're going to be going through that this fall together. And I have found that the church always thrives. There seems to be kind of a greater pulse. We kind of come alive a little bit when we all have a shared experience, when we're doing some of the same things together. And so this is an opportunity for that. It's how we kind of, you might not know this, but at Grace on staff, for me, as I think about the year, our ministry year starts in September, and then we sprint all the way to Memorial Day, and then we kind of, we have summer extreme, then we take a breath and then we get ready for September again. So I wanted to start our ministry year on the same page together, going through this book. This is a book that the staff has gone through. Kyle, our now family pastor, recommended it to us. We went through it as a staff. It was a very impactful book. We've had a small group go through it and they really loved it. And so I thought it would be good for the whole church to move through this book as well. Now in the book, there's something like 16 chapters or maybe more. And this series is only eight weeks. So clearly I'm not going to cover every chapter. I've chosen the ones that I feel are most relevant to grace, which is by the way, one of my favorite things about being a pastor of a small church is that I feel like we know each other and I know you. So when I go through a book like this, I can pick the chapters that will probably be most relevant to us, which is something that I take. I feel a great privilege in being able to do. But if you want the full experience, then you'll need to read it on your own as we move through. We will move through the chapters chronologically, but I will not hit each one. So I would encourage you to grab that book and be reading it this fall as we go through it. As we begin the series, I want to start with a little thought experiment, okay? And now this is going to require us to activate our calcified, recalcitrant imaginations, okay, that many of you have not used in a long time. I have a four-year-old son. I'm 44. I'm too old to have a four-year-old son, especially one as imaginative as he is. That kid will talk to you for 10 minutes straight, and 85% of it is complete nonsense, untethered to reality. He's got the most active imagination, and I'm bad at imaginative play. I would have been better at 24, but not much better. Okay. I haven't used my imagination since I was three. And then I, then I, then I cut that guy off. It was like, that's useless. That's not practical in the adult world. And I moved forward. Some of us are like that. We haven't imagined anything in a long time, but I want to ask you to dust it off and imagine this with me. okay? Let's pretend, and I know, I just said pretend and you guys are like, you lost me. Let's pretend together that you're going to go see a movie. And this movie you've seen from the trailers is about a creator, a deity that builds a world. And this world, the people or the beings that inhabit it, rebel against him, do not follow his rules, do not care about his presence. Most of them live lives that essentially ignore him. And they turn themselves from him. Now, I know that this is not difficult to know where I'm going. But I do want you to depict that world in your head. There is a deity. He is the main character of the movie. He creates a universe. And the center of that universe is a world. And the people, the things occupying that world are made in his image to glorify him. And yet they don't do that. They turn against him. They rebel against him. They do not care about him. And so to rectify this deity, to rectify this creation back to himself, he sends his son and says, go fix it. He sends his son to this creation and he says, I want you to go get these, get my beings, get my creations rectified back to me, facing me, serving me, and right relationship with me. Go fix what's broken. If you're imagining that with me, it's a movie that we're going to go see, and this character is sent down to creation to rectify creation back to the creator on behalf of the Father. Let me ask you this question. How would he have the right to describe himself? How would he have the right to describe himself? How would that character be able to describe himself? This character comes down, the son of the deity comes down. He says, I'm here to rectify this and to get you facing back towards God, back towards your creator. How would that character have a right to describe himself? Angry? Authoritative? Vindictive? Powerful? Just? He would have the right to be ticked, wouldn't he? He would have the right to bow up and say, you are humans, I am deity. I'm more important than you. I'm a bigger deal than you. If you don't listen to me, I'm going to get you right. Wouldn't he have every right to come down here, to be angry, to go down there, sorry, and be angry and be upset with the inhabitants and get right and say, you better cower in front of me because I'm not a problem that you want to have. And right now you do. If we imagine that movie and we imagine that character, I think it's very easy to imagine how that character might describe himself when asked. The parallel is very simple and very easy, and you guys spotted it as soon as I started the idea. But this is what Jesus does. This is the movie that we live in. God created us. He populated at the center of the universe. He populated this world with people that were made in his own image. And those people have rejected their God. And so God sends his son to rectify the situation and to turn creation back to him. He sends his son Jesus and says, go fix it. And then we ask, how would this person have the right to describe themselves? What would make sense? How would you describe yourself? How would you expect him to describe himself? And this, to me, is the arresting principle of the book Gentle and Lowly. Because according to the author, Dane Ortlund, there is but one place in Scripture where Jesus describes himself. There is but one place where Jesus gives a description of himself. In the Gospels, he's described many, many times, but it's always by his followers. It's always by the people around him. Jesus never goes on about himself. He never describes himself. He's very humble like that. But we have one place where he does. And this to me is the arresting principle of the book. What is the one place in scripture where Jesus describes himself and what does he say about himself given how he has the right to describe himself, which is any way that he wants, given what his attitude, what we would expect it to be if we were watching that movie. Given all of that, Jesus describes himself in one place. How does he do it? Matthew 11, 28 through 30. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. This is the one way that our Savior describes himself. And I memorized this verse as a kid in the King's English. So to me, it's still, come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. For I am gentle and lowly in heart. This is the one descriptor Jesus gives of himself. And it is profound in myriad ways. So this morning, I want us to sit in these words and reflect on what they mean with the goal of launching us into a series in which we will marvel at our unexpected Savior. That's where we want to end today. But where we begin is with the words of Christ when he describes himself. And the first thing he says is, Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. And as I thought about that, this occurred to me. We come to Jesus when we come to Jesus, we are exhausted. Have you ever thought about that? When we in our lives reach a place where we reach out for Christ, where we turn our countenance towards him, where we say, God, I need you. Jesus, I need you. Jesus, I welcome you. Jesus, I'm done with this. Whether it's for the first time, and maybe there's those of you in here who would not yet call yourself a Christian, but you're kicking the tires because spirituality seems important to you right now. And you're not quite sure, and you might not have all the answers, and you might not be totally on board with have all the answers and you might not be totally on board with this church thing and you might not be totally on board with this Bible thing, but you know that you need something. So here you sit in church curious about spirituality. And so maybe for the first time in your life you're considering reaching out to Jesus. Or maybe like most of us, you're here and you've had times in your life when you've reached to Jesus. You've had times in your life when you've forgotten. Times in your life when you held him at arm's reach. Times in your life when you allowed yourself to get too busy and you didn't prioritize him in your life. But something happens to bring you back to him. To cause you to reach out for him, to cause you to recognize your need for him and to be relieved by him. And do you know what we have in common, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, when we reach out to Jesus, do you know what's common about that that I think is remarkable? Every time you do it, you're tired. We reach to Jesus when we are exhausted. I've never known anyone who is crushing it. Their days are good. Their burden is light. Everything's going well. They're in cruise control. Their kids are awesome. Their marriage is happy. Business is good. Everything around me is great. That person doesn't tend to go, you know what I need? Jesus. That person just tends to love the goodness of life. But the people that I see in my life, again, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, who are reaching for Jesus, you know what they have in common? They're tired. Life feels heavy. It feels hard. There's this latent unhappiness or discontent that I can't seem to shake. Every now and again, we'll have a good day and we'll have a good smile and we'll have a good interaction and that feels nice. But then when we just kind of get back to ourselves, we just kind of shrink back in because we're exhausted and we're tired. And so I think, and I don't know this to be sure, I cannot interpret the intentions of Jesus himself, but it would make sense to me that Jesus says, come to me. When he invites people, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. Come to me, those who are exhausted, because I think it's possible that Jesus knows there's no other way that we go to him until we are exhausted, until we have worn ourselves out, forgetting about him and going about our lives however we want. And then there's an emptiness in that that causes us dissatisfaction. And eventually, in that exhaustion, Jesus in his goodness invites us to him. And so I think he says, come to me all you who are exhausted because that's the only way we go. Energized people don't run to him. They think they're fine. And so maybe simply today, if you have been crushing it and you have been cruising, maybe today we don't drop something on the ground and wait for it to break to start asking Jesus to pick up the pieces. Maybe today we go to him before we get tired. Maybe this fall, as we commit to this series, and we commit to going through this together as a church, maybe September isn't just the start of our ministry year here. Maybe it's a renewal of the fervency of your faith. Maybe you are tired. Maybe you are exhausted. Maybe it doesn't feel like summer was long enough, or if you have young kids, it feels like it was way too long. And maybe you are just catapulting into September and all the things and you're already tired. You need a vacation from your vacation. Let this, this verse, Jesus's invitation, be a lighthouse to us, beckoning us in to go to Jesus this fall, to reconnect with Jesus this fall, especially if we are tired, especially if we are burdened. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. If that's you, let's go to Jesus this fall. If we're tired, let's turn to him. He beckons us. But he doesn't stop there. He follows it with this interesting statement. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light, which is an interesting, oh yeah, this is what that means, which is an interesting thought. It's an interesting verbal flourish, right? Come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. It's, we kind of get the connotation. We understand that a yoke, at least I hope you do, if this is new information to you, your school failed you at some point, but a yoke is the thing that goes across the back of the ox so that they can pull the plow or they can pull the cart or whatever it is. It's the thing that goes over the animals so that they can pull it and be used. So he says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And so we kind of understand that imagery on a visceral level already. But here's what you may not know about that word yoke and what it means. In Jesus's time and in the times in Israel prior to, rabbis were the teachers. And I'm not going to go through what it takes to become a rabbi, but there wasn't a lot of them. It was like making the NFL. And the rabbis, they were the religious teachers. They were the ones charged with teaching God's people about God's word. But there was differences in interpretation. And different rabbis would see things differently. One easy example of this is, it's said in scripture that you should remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. You were not to work on the Sabbath day, which for them was Friday night to Saturday night, those 24 hours. And some rabbis looked at that and interpreted very, very strictly and very piously. And they said, if you have sandals that use a nail to fasten the leather to the sole of the sandals, those sandals have metal in them, and you can't wear them because it's requiring more of your body to pick up your foot, and that counts as work. So you cannot wear those sandals on the Sabbath. And other rabbis went, that's absurd, wear whatever you want, right? Those would be our rabbis, right? Nobody in this room is like, I'm pro-nail guy. That's the one I want. There was disagreements. If your donkey falls in a ditch on the Sabbath, can you pull it out or do you have to leave it there until Monday? When you tithe, what do you tithe? When the laws contradict each other, do I lie and protect somebody or do I tell the truth and get them in trouble? When the laws contradict each other and you don't know which way to go, that's what the rabbis were for. And so they had, they each had a way of understanding all understanding and applying and teaching all of the rules and the law and the old Testament. And that way of understanding those things was called their yoke. So when you would follow a rabbi, you would take their yoke upon you and follow the rules their way, which is not very much different than our current day denominations. Some people think that we should sprinkle water on a head of a baby, and that's baptism. Some people think that baptism is you get maximum wet, and it's for professing believers. We have difference of opinion on that. So we started the Presbyterians and the Baptists, right? Methodists have different ways that they interpret things. Lutherans, Pentecostals, we have these different things. And so back to this point, and now we can put it back up there, Laura, yoke equals religion. Yoke equals religion. It's not just an image. It's not just a metaphor. It really does mean religion. Way of thinking about faith. Way of following the rules. Way of living up to the standards of God. And so Jesus says, and this is what makes it remarkable, come to me you who are exhausted for my yoke, my religion, my way of living out your faith is easy, and my burden is light. And here's the way he makes it easy. Jesus does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He says, at one point in his ministry, somebody asked him, what's the greatest commandment? And he asked it back to them, what do you say it is? And the person answers, to love your Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, you have spoken wisely. On these hang the whole law and the prophets. And what Jesus meant in that statement is, if you'll simply love God and love others, you will capture all the Old Testament. You will live out the truth and the rules that are found in the Old Testament law. The 630 something rules that Moses brought down the mountain. If you will simply love God and love others, you will fulfill those things. And then he further simplifies it in the upper room discourse in John 14 through 17. We spent a spring there one time. They're, to me, the greatest collection of chapters in the Bible. It's God's, it's Jesus's final instructions to his disciples. And he says in John 14, this new command I give you, this new command I give you, do you know what it is? Go love others as I have loved you. He drops off the God part. And he says, this one command, you live by this one command, this one rule, this one thing encumbering the yoke. And that's what I'm asking you to do. And it might feel odd that he leaves off the God part, but what Jesus knows is there is no possible way for us to love others sacrificially unless Jesus himself is the one empowering and infusing that love. I cannot love you the way that I'm supposed to love you the way that Jesus loved you. I can't even sniff at it unless I am actively, adamantly, and ferociously loving God first. Then I can love you. That's why Jesus sums it up this way. And he does not encumber us with rules. Because rules are tricky anyways, aren't they? Think about one of the most basic rules. Honor your father and mother in the Lord for this is right. Great. What if your dad's a degenerate? What if he left the family? What if your mom's abusive? What does it look like then to honor them? What if they tell you to do things that are actively wrong? What does it look like to honor them? Maybe you have great parents. What does it look like to honor them when you're eight? And what does it look like to honor them when you're 48? That simple rule, honor your father and mother, gets tricky. And so you know what Jesus says? Let's not worry about the pedantics of that. Let's simply love others as I have loved you. How did he love? Sacrificially. He gave of himself. Always. Always patient. He was always gracious. He was always kind. And in this way, he forces us into relationships. This is why we say at Grace that we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. Because our faith necessarily presses us into relationship with Jesus and then into relationship with others as we are tasked with loving one another as Jesus loves us. So when he says, come to me if you're tired, my yoke is easy and my burden is light, it's not to encumber us with rules. It's not to encumber us with do's and don'ts. It's simply to love your neighbor. We can make a rule that you shouldn't flip somebody off in traffic when they cut you off. We could make that rule. We could write it down. We could agree to it. We could abide by it. We could probably find something in Scripture that would lend itself to this idea that hanging your finger out the window is probably not a great idea in traffic. We could do that rule. But doesn't just love of our neighbor dictate that we would never do that anyways? And in this love, doesn't it make the relationship more genuine? What if every Monday, Jen sent me an email, and she said, this is what I need you to do for me to feel loved this week. And it was just a to-do list. And that was the basis of our marriage. And I did the things, and by Thursday, I'm lovable. I did them all. We good? Yes. She gives me a big hug and a kiss. Yes. Great. Now, here's the thing that she and I both know. I wouldn't do it. I'd want to. I'd really be up for it. I kind of like that policy. That makes things a lot simpler, doesn't it? But that's not how relationships work. So that's not how our relationship with Jesus works. So if we're compelled to go to him, it's not a list of do's and don'ts. It's a relationship that we lean further into with him, and then we lean outward into others. And the love of Jesus is what makes those relationships possible and makes us able to love well. So I would say if we are tired and we're not loving others well, maybe it's because we haven't been fueled by Jesus in a long time, and we should again choose to go to him. Now, that sentence is hugely important for who to know who he's inviting and what he intends for us. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. We go to him for relief. But this is the part where he describes himself. And what's remarkable is he describes himself as gentle and lowly. But it's important to understand Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Do you understand that? He doesn't have to do that. If we go back to the movie and think about what that character might be who comes down from on high to rectify creation, what attitude might he be carrying with him? Again, how would he have the right to describe himself? And we don't actually have to imagine this very much. There's actually an example of this movie in scripture. If we keep turning the pages of Matthew, eventually we'll get to this parable that Jesus tells. And it's a picture of the Old Testament prophets and Israel's reaction to Christ. And he says there was this owner of the vineyard, and he rented it to some workers with the agreement that they would give him an allocated amount of the profits, of the goods goods they would take, they would take some of the harvest. He would take a big portion of the harvest. And so when harvest season came, he sent some representatives, the owner of the vineyard sent some representatives to the workers, three of them. And it said, okay, it's time for us to collect the owner's share of the harvest. And the workers killed one, beat one up and st stoned the other one, and sent the two back to tell the owner, get lost. And so the owner sends some more of his representatives, and they do the same thing. And they tell him to get lost. And so then the owner says, I'm going to send my son. Surely they will respect him and give me my profits. And then when his son shows up, they kill him. Because now we can claim the inheritance for ourselves. This is a picture of the prophets that God sent to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament. They rejected them and they stoned them and they beat them up. And then eventually sending Christ. But again, if you're the son going to these ungrateful workers, what would your attitude towards them be? How might you feel towards them? What might you want to say? I remember I was playing a pickup soccer game in South Africa one time. And my dad and I were playing together. And dad he dad was I think was playing in goal and somebody was coming approaching the goal we're playing indoors and they kicked the ball and they kicked it as hard as they could and it hit my dad right in the face and snapped his snapped him back and it was like point blank it's from like me to Tom and it's indoor and we're all having fun there's's no reason to kick the ball that hard. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I saw red. I like, and I, it couldn't be helped. As soon as play started again, I ran into that guy as hard as I could. And I took him out in front of all the kids and in front of the people that we took there. I was one of the leaders of the trip. He was one of the people that we were ministering to. He was one of the camp leads. I flew 10 days to minister to him out of the overflow of the goodness of my heart. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I didn't care who he was. And after I did it, I was like, well, that's probably not the best way to handle this. How might that son feel going to that vineyard to rectify those people back to his father? Angry, entitled, knowing that he could squash him like a bug if he wanted to. And yet, gentle and lowly in heart. And I don't do this often, but that Greek word heart that's used in the text means center of your person, essence of your being. It is who you are in character to your core. And our Savior, who has every right to be angry. Who has every right to chide us for our betrayal. Who has every right to squash us under his thumb. Who has every right to say, I am here and you better come to me for I am fierce and I am angry and I am powerful and you've got about three seconds to cower before I prove it. Instead, he says, I am gentle and lowly at my core. It is the essence of who I am. And that word gentle is so interesting. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Have you ever experienced the gentleness of God and how he works to turn our hearts towards him? Where there's something in your life that you know doesn't need to be there. You know it's wrong. You know that attitude or that behavior or that pattern is unacceptable to God. You know that. And yet you persist. And God has every right to crack you over the head with a two-by-four, to come running at you and knock you over in the middle of a soccer field. He has every right to just sweep your legs out from under you and force you in your humiliation to see the errors of your ways and begin to walk right. Doesn't he? But he almost never does. Gently, humbly, graciously, he massages the areas of our life as he cradles us and offers us comfort and walks us humbly into a profound submission and conviction of our sins. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Maybe you're experiencing it now, this morning, as you hear Jesus calling you back to him. And maybe it's not some big thing. Your life's not going to blow up. He's not going to hit you with a two-by-four, but maybe this morning he's gently urging you back towards him. Jesus describes himself as gentle, and I don't think that we often enough marvel at how profound and meaningful that is. Because he didn't have to. And then he said, he's lowly in heart. He's humble. And this morning, what I want us to understand is that to be lowly is to be accessible. To be lowly, the way that Jesus is talking about, is to be accessible. And now, imagine, let's go back to the movie. This deity comes down from on high to right the wrongs and to rectify us back to our creator. Do you think you're going to get a face-to-face with that person? Like, do you think you're going to get to talk to them? Who's going to talk to that person? Who's going to talk to that entity that comes down? World leaders? The Pope? Rich people? Let me tell you what I'm sure of. That person comes down tomorrow to rectify the world back to the Creator. He's not taking a meeting with any of you. Years ago, and I still kick myself to it because it was a complete waste of time. Years ago, I emailed a United States Senator. I'm not going to tell you which one, and I'm not going to tell you what about. But I emailed a Senator because there was something happening that concerned me, and I wanted to express it. And here's what I know happened. Some 23-year-old intern read it and went, this is dumb, and deleted it and never told a soul about it. I wrote an email to an unnamed intern is what I did. It was a complete waste of time. We understand accessibility. This person who comes down from heaven is not someone that is accessible to the likes of us, unless, he says, I am lowly and gentle. I am meek. I am accessible. And we learn that he is accessible through his Holy Spirit. And we learn that where two or more are gathered in his name, that Jesus is there also. Jesus' presence is with us now in this room today. He offers that to us. He makes himself accessible. So that when we pray, when I pray in a few minutes, if you pray with me, the Holy Spirit is uttering things too deep for words to God to tell him what I really mean through the heart of my prayers. And Jesus himself is sitting at the right hand of the Father as he offers us his presence and he is interjecting to the Father on our behalf. He is that accessible. So here's what I want us to do this fall. Here's what I want us to do with gentle and lowly. Let us this fall marvel together at this unexpected Savior. Let us just take these eight weeks and read through this book and learn more about who our Jesus is and let us collectively marvel together at this unexpected Savior who comes down and he says, are you tired? Then you're who I'm looking for. Are the rules hard? Let me invite you into relationship. And let me tell you about myself. I am gentle. I don't have to be. But I am gentle at my very core. I am accessible and lowly at my very core. I hold on to none of the rights and privileges that you might impugn upon me. I am the most unexpected of saviors. And so this fall, what I want us to do is marvel at him together. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are. Thank you for your son and how he loves us, how he shows up for us. Jesus, thank you for being gentle when so often that gentleness is not what we deserve. Thank you for being humble and lowly and accessible that we might come to you. Thank you for being an unexpected Savior. Father, thank you for sending him to us. Jesus, thank you for leaving us with your spirit. I pray that we would together marvel at you, Jesus, and who you are, and that we would be more desirous of you with each week that goes by and that for those of us who are tired that we would use this morning as a reminder to run to you and seek rest. Jesus, it's in your name that we ask these things as you advocate for us to the Father. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thank you, all 26 of you, for joining us this summer Sunday. I'm sure there is a cacophony of folks joining us online, so thank you for doing that, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. Before I just dive in, I feel as a pastor that whenever something happens in our world that enters into the national conscience in such a way that a vast majority of us are thinking about it and processing it, that I should probably pause and address it. And so we know, I think, I hope this isn't breaking news to you. If it is, this is a terrible way to find out. But the United States bombed three nuclear facilities in Iran last night. That's a big deal. And it just makes me want to pause and pray before I just dive into the sermon as if nothing's going on. I have no assessment of what's happening. I have no opinion that I will share with you from here of what's happening. But I do have some prayers. The very first thing I thought of because of my recent experience in Istanbul when I got to sit in a circle with Iranian pastors, the very first thing I thought of was my friends and their safety. And some of them are able to flee to the north and out of cities. But I've been told that many of them have moms and family members that are locked into their apartments in Tehran. How terrifying is that? So the first thing I want to pray for is just for the people that would be impacted by the decisions that are being made by other folks. And then I'd like to pray for those other folks that God would give people in control wisdom and put people around them to have wisdom. So if that's alright with you, I'd like to pray for that and then we do the normal, regularly scheduled programming. Let's pray. Father, you have seen all the wars, and you have seen all the suffering, and your heart has been broken as you watch people suffer who had no hand in the violence that was brought to them. And so, God, we lift up the people on both sides who are being harmed and will be harmed by the escalating violence. We pray, Father, that you would bring peace. We pray that the violence would cease, that people would stop losing loved ones, and that you would bring stability to that region. And to that end, God, we just pray for our leaders. We ask that you would give them wisdom, that you would give them depth of insight, that you would surround them with wise counsel, and that your hand would be on the decisions that are made moving forward. We ask these things with a heavy heart, but we ask them in the name of your son. Amen. Hard right turn. I was invited to a Rick Springfield concert a couple of weeks ago. This is actually sincere, and that's how I wanted to start the sermon before I knew that I would be offering a very sincere prayer about a potential war. Yeah, I was texted by a friend who goes to this church, and let's just call him Keith Cathcart, just for the sake of it. And he legitimately invited me to a Rick Springfield. Is that right, Springfield? Steen. Field? Field. Concert. Hard no. Immediately. No, nay chance. No, no, no. I'm not doing that. I couldn't be. You may as well invite me to volunteer with you at the animal shelter. Okay. And if you know me, you know, that's funny because I don't even like dogs, which is weird. I know that's my problem. Here's the, here's another problem I have. I also don't like music. Okay. I don't. I don't want to go to a concert. If the music lasts longer than our worship set, sometimes Gibby, three songs, too many, too many. I can't stay engaged for that many songs. And if it's louder than, if the music is so loud that I can't talk to my friends, it's like, why are we here? I don't want to be in this place. And then it's Rick Springfield. I thought that was an SNL character. I didn't even know he was real. And I couldn't, I didn't know anything. I was like, what does he even sing? And so I think I asked Jen, I did a quick Google search. I asked Jen, and she told me Jesse's Girl. And I was like, right. I do know that one. I have heard it. I will not sing it for you, but I have heard it. Yeah, thank you, Elaine says. You're welcome, pal. Now I'm tempted to do it just to spite you, you know? I'm not willing to humiliate myself in that way. And it was like, oh, yeah, right. Okay, I think I do know who that guy is. And I think that that's how we think of the 10 plagues. We have a loose awareness that there were plagues. We've heard about them our whole life, most of us. Because if you're coming to church in June, you're like a Christian Christian. You know what I mean? Like you're real Christian. So you've heard of the plagues before. But I bet if I asked you, name all 10, I don't think you could do it. I really don't think you could. I think very few people, Mike Harris just led a study on, I should call you up here and make you do this, Mike. I bet he could get a lot. As I was kind of going through, I'm pretty sure I could get eight of them. But I think as I remind you of what the plagues are, that we're going to go, oh, that's right. There was that one too. And so we'll kind of have that moment together. This morning is unusual for me because I'm not going to open the Bible and read directly from Scripture, which is kind of a cardinal rule that I try to never break. It's just that the plagues are in chapters seven through 11 of Exodus. And there's no one like crucial verse that defines the plagues and what they are. But these plagues that I'm going to list are listed there. And I just didn't want to read you every verse of every plague because that's disengaging. So anyways, that's my personal confession. But here are the 10 plagues, okay? The setting is, most of us know, but in case we don't, the children of Israel are enslaved by Egypt. They're under the thumb of Pharaoh. And God appears to Moses in a burning bush and he says, I want you to go back. I want you to leave my people. I want you to go to Pharaoh. And I want you to tell him to let my people go. I would like for you to go tell Pharaoh to release his economy and workforce. That's what he tells him. And so he goes to Pharaoh and he says, let my people go. And Pharaoh says, I'm not going to do that. And he goes, okay, well then God's going to send plagues on your nation. So he sends these plagues. And I've made this point before a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about it. I don't have, there's no indication of the timeframe of these. I don't know if these were one right after the other, like over the course of a month or a couple of weeks, or if they were protracted out over the course of a year or two or more. I really don't know. And I'm not sure there's an indication of it, but this is what God does to get the attention of Pharaoh. First thing he does is he turns the water into blood. The Nile River, as the account records for us, was turned into blood. After that, there was frogs that swarmed Egypt from the Nile. And I happen to know somebody who is unnaturally and deathly terrified of frogs. This would be the worst possible plague for that person. She would rather get boils all over her body than frogs anywhere. So this would be a particularly terrible plague for some. Then there was a plague of lice, then flies, then there was the death of their cattle, then there was a plague of ash falling from the sky, then a plague of hail, then locusts, then darkness, and then we know the last one, the death of the firstborn. I don't know how many of those you would have gotten, but maybe you just went, oh yeah, those are right. But those were the plagues. And with each plague, God is making a request. Will you let my people go now? And Pharaoh says no. And really at its baseline, the request is, are you going to let me win? Are you going to give me my way? And Pharaoh says, no, I'm going to win. And so he stays stubbornly in his stance and digging his heels in. No, God, you are not going to win. I am going to win. Those are the plagues. But here's what you may not know about the plagues that I didn't learn until probably about 10 years ago. So I grew up my whole life knowing about the plagues and knowing that the point of them was to get Pharaoh humbled and broken so he would let God's people go. The whole point of them was for Pharaoh to finally let God win and for God to claim victory. I knew that, but what I didn't know is this. In the plagues, God was systematically dismantling Egyptian allegiance. In the plagues, God was systematically dismantling Egyptian allegiance. And when I say allegiance, I mean allegiance to their gods. Most of us are probably aware that Egyptians worshipped a pantheon of gods. They had a god for everything. For day and for night and for sun and for moon and for war and for peace and for fertility. That God's for everything. And what we may not know about the plagues is that each plague was a systemic and intentional assault on one of the gods of Egypt. To show the Egyptians and to show Pharaoh, I am more powerful than that God. The water, just for your own edification, the water to blood was an attack on Heket, the goddess of fertility. Frogs from the Nile was an attack on Geb, the god of the earth. Lice was Kepri, the god of creation. Flies was Hathor, goddess of love. Death of the cattle was Isis, the goddess of medicine. Ash was the god of nut, who's the god of the sky. Hail was Seth, the god of storms. Locust, Ra, the sun god. Darkness, Pharaoh, who they viewed as a god. And the firstborn is how you transferred your power to the next generation. It was an assault on that God as well. So in the plagues, God is systematically assaulting their gods and their frame of reference. He's doing it intentionally. Last week, we talked about God as I am and how we said, I am all that you need. I am all the gods, all the time. And here, he's meeting that out, pointing out to them, I'm more powerful than that god. Pharaoh, I'm more powerful than that god. Are you going to let me win now? Pharaoh, I'm more powerful than that god. Are you going to let me win now? This is what the plagues are, and when we realize that, that this was a systemic attack on their gods, it's, to me, a much more powerful story. I do, however, think that as Americans, we have a difficult time relating to that story. Because my assumption and perception of most of you in this room is that in our culture, and particularly in what demographics are represented here, we never really made a choice between this God or that God. I would be willing to bet that very few of you here, if anybody in the room right now, has ever considered, do I want to worship the Christian God, or do I want to worship the Muslim God or do I want to worship the Muslim God or maybe Buddhists or maybe I want to be Hindu and worship thousands of those gods. Maybe I want to embrace Judaism and worship God the Father but not God the Son as he's depicted in Christianity. Most of us here have never chosen between gods. The choice we make in our subculture in America is typically God or no God. Right? We choose the Christian God or we don't believe in God. That's kind of a binary choice for us. So it's difficult to relate to a story where there's a pantheon of gods being worshipped and God is showing that he's superior to those gods. Because if we're here and we believe in the Christian God, we just accept it by default and as fact that he would be superior to what we think are made up gods. Right? It kind of doesn't make any sense to even consider it. And so it's hard to relate to the story because we don't really have a pantheon of gods. We don't think we have a pantheon of gods, but we do. We absolutely do. We don't call them gods because we're intellectually dishonest, but we have pillars of our culture. We have things in the American culture that we worship. We pray to the altar of things that are not God the Father, for sure. We pray to the God of career. We might not ever say it out loud, but we orchestrate our life around it. We worship it. We prioritize it. Do we not? We are defined by our careers. It's a trope, and it's an easy thing to point out, but it's also true. When we meet people, within the first three questions, what do you do? Right? And if they're a stay-at-home mom, what's probably typical, I don't know because I'm not a stay-at-home mom, but what I would think would be the response when they say, well, I don't work, I'm a stay-at-home mom, is that now in that conversation, they feel a little less. And then if they say, I'm the CEO of blank, they feel a little bit more, right? And so we value people based on their careers. And then this is how sick I am about it if I don't keep it in check. When you tell me what you do for work, I go, that's wonderful. What do you want to be doing in five years? I want to know what your career goals are immediately. When I was younger, when I was in my 20s, I woke up early every day and I read books so that I could be what I wanted to be in my 30s. Like we get addicted to this and it drives us. And this, I say this room, we're missing like 75% of the church today. So also people watching later, this room is an accomplished room. This room is a room that does care and has cared deeply about careers. And if we don't watch it, what we find is that we pray at the altar of those and we serve them. So sometimes we get caught up in worshiping the God of careers. Let me tell you another one that I want to spend a little bit of time on because I think it's important and we don't talk about it very much. Sports. Nice 49ers shirt, Tom. Sorry. Tom's an elder. He's a great guy. He's also really funny. We pray at the altar of sports. We allow them to be too much. We do. Years ago, I'm a Falcons fan, which is a curse. It's a curse. I don't like it. I don't want to be a Falcons fan. I don't want to be a Georgia Tech fan. I don't want to. I would like to choose other teams, but that's not how sports works, okay? The Falcons are my team. And a few years ago, I was watching them, and every Sunday, I couldn't have anybody around me, and I couldn't speak during the game. I was insufferable to be around and if they lost it ruined my day and Jen finally told me hey it's pretty immature to allow a sports team to impact how you treat your family maybe you should care less is that fair the facsimile thereof? Okay. And I went, she's right. She always is. I'm sure you've picked up on that. And I realized I needed to detach myself from that. I had a friend who at one point in his life, and this is just sick of behavior. This is terrible. He went to 149 straight UGA games, home and away. 149 straight. That's a wild commitment. And God got a hold of him and convicted him. He was like, yeah, I got to stop. And his goal was to get to 200. He's like, I got to stop. I can't do this anymore. Sometimes we make sports too important. I have another point to make here, but as someone who's done funerals and who sits with families and says, tell me about your dad. It always makes me so sad when one of the top three things that they know about their dad is that he liked this team. That's your legacy? Liking a team? Cool. I hope I do more with my life so that when my kids are asked about me, they don't lead with I I like the Falcons, right? So sometimes we make a God out of sports. Now here's the other way we do it. And this is what I really want to say. The culture around sports and in our culture now has gotten so absurd that families begin to worship it without realizing it. Lily played challenge soccer last season. And what that meant is she, we had two practices a week. The practices lasted an hour and a half for nine-year-olds. I was one of the assistant coaches and I thought it was dumb, but it lasted 90 minutes, 20 minutes there, 20 minutes back. We are wrapping two hours plus twice a week into practice. And then there's games on Saturdays and sometimes on Sundays. And then one weekend there's a tournament and you know who you play in the tournament, the other four teams that you've already played three times during the season, who cares? It's dumb. And it takes so much time and so much energy and so much money to make this happen. And that's the lowest level of it. And the truth is, parents who currently have kids of the age to play sports, let me just say this objectively to you. You do not have to be very good at a sport to get on a team that will take your time and your money. Okay? So your kid making challenge soccer isn't a big deal. And then what happens is the coaches and the leagues tell us that we have to do more, more, more. And now that's ruling our families. It's consuming our time, talent, and treasure. And I have seen over the years at my old church and at this church, I have seen families that handle this very well. And we have some great examples here of families whose kids are highly athletic and they are still highly involved. And they prioritize things that we would encourage them to prioritize. So some families handle it very, very well. I have watched it wipe off the map other families where they're engaged in church. They're raising their kids in church. They're serving in whatever capacity they're serving and kids and kids grow up and then they get of age when they start to play sports. And then dad starts to think maybe they're good at sports. And then we commit more time to sports and they come less and less and they volunteer less and less. And I see them less and less. And then here's, let me tell you what happens is I've had, I've talked to so many parents when I was a student pastor and I would be talking to them about their graduating senior. And I've heard this comment so many times in my life, you know, we regret that we didn't spend more time getting them to church and less time playing sports. I have never heard the contrary. It would be a weird thing to say to a pastor, but I've never heard anyone say, I wish we would have focused more on sports and less on church. Before we know it, we're praying at the altar of sports, and that becomes our God. So we should check that. We pray at the altar of wealth. In America, if you have money, you're good. You're a good person. You've been successful. You've made good decisions. You may not be morally good, but you've won the game, right? And so now wealthy people, better, better looking because they have more money for better haircuts. Poor people, worse, worse looking because they cut their own hair, right? This is how we value people and we pray at the altar of wealth. We pray at the altar of comfort. We don't want to get our feathers ruffled. We don't want to get involved. We don't want to feel uncomfortable. We make our life comfortable. We make our life predictable so that we don't have to feel discomfort when we don't want to. And if there are pain points, instead of leaning into that discomfort and trying to figure out why it's there, we just figure out a way to alleviate it and never have to deal with it. So we pray to the God of comfort. I could go on and on and on. My point is, when we look at the 10 plagues and the systematic assault on these gods, at first glance, I think we find it difficult to relate to, but if we'll stop and be thoughtful about it for a little bit, what we'll realize is, no, no, we do have a pantheon of gods. And many of us in different times and in different seasons for different reasons have prayed to those gods rather than our God. And so it made me think, what would it look like if God assaulted our gods? What would it look like if God were going to systematically dismantle the gods that we have in our pantheon? And I thought of this season of my life where he dismantled one of mine. This god still creeps back up. I've got to keep it in check. But he exposed me to it and he dismantled it. In my early years as a pastor, I would have people say nice things to me. And sometimes they would say, you should be a senior pastor. And so people would speak potential into me. You've got a future here. Actually, the funniest thing that's ever happened, this is just an aside, it's just funny, is I preached one time at my last church when I was the, I spoke about 10 times a year, and one of my buddy's dads was there. And I preached, and we got done, and his dad came up to me. His dad came up to me. We called him, his name was Doug, but he had the largest noggin I've ever seen in my life, and so we called him Doug the Head. That was his name. So Doug the Head comes walking up to me, and he goes, man, that was, buddy, that was good. And I said, thank you so much. I appreciate that. And he goes, no, no, no, I'm telling you, I've been in the radio business for 35 years. And I go, okay, great. And he goes, no, listen, you could do that professionally. And I didn't say this, but I thought like, you know, they pay me. That was professionally. Thanks. But people would say nice things and they would speak potential into me. And I'm very sure that many of you have had people speak potential into you about different things in your life and so I carried that sense of responsibility with that potential and I had this question in my head can I actually do it and then you guys were crazy enough to find out to give give me a chance. And it went. In April of 17, there was 85 people in the room. In February of 17, there's 85 people in the room. April, there's 100. By January or by February of 2020, we had two good services. The second one was averaging about 100 people, so we reached like a critical mass. And we were averaging about 335 people a week. Bunch of kids, bunch of new folks, things are going and blowing. We do a campaign. We have more pledged than we even asked for and way more than we thought we would. And this whole time as we're growing, I'm telling people it's not about the growth. God is blessing us. This is good. This is wonderful. Nothing that we're doing is about making the church bigger, yada, yada, yada, all the things you're supposed to say. But internally, if I can just be honest, I did it. I'm somebody. Look at me go. This is all God and a little bit me. And I was proud. I was. And I can admit that now. And I'll admit now that I still struggle with that, but I fight it a lot harder and I'm a lot more honest with myself about it. Then COVID hit. So in February, two services, 335 people. Next time we had a service, it was July. There was 40 people wearing masks. If you were here during that season and you did worship with a mask on your face, it was the worst. It was terrible. You can't hear anybody. There's 35 people in the room. It was the deadest worship ever. It was awful. And I got depressed. I started seeing a therapist because all my self-worth just went out the window. And what I realized was, through conversations with him, I was worshiping at the God of respect, of approval, of accomplishment. I was worshiping at the God of proving myself to myself and to anyone paying attention. And do you know what God did with COVID? He systematically dismantled my God. Now listen, I do not want to give you the impression that I think that God orchestrated a worldwide pandemic so that he could teach a real lesson to a small church pastor in Raleigh. Okay? It's silly when we think that. But what I am saying is that he used that to dismantle my God and my life and build me back up. And here's what happened as a result of that. And as a result of the therapy and the counseling that I went through as I kind of dug and dug and dug and went, why am I worshiping at this God? What is the deal? And here's what it did. Here's the fundamental change it made in how I pastor. And it's more, this is more disclosure than I want to give, but I think it's helpful. And I think some of you can relate. I used to write sermons with the goal, I wouldn't state this, I would never say this out loud to anybody at the time, but I used to write sermons with the goal of being impressive. I wanted to impress you when I preached. When I got here, that's why I wrote sermons. Anything else I said was fluff. Obviously I wanted to serve God in all the things, but somewhere in there, I want to impress you. That's probably my main motivation. And now, my motivation is I want to help you. That's what I think about. Is this helpful? I don't think about being impressive. Not nearly as much. Sometimes I'll get caught in that trap, but not nearly as much. When God dismantled my God, I left that season of my life and I went, man, leading grace and doing my job is not about being impressive with people. It's not about growing the church. It's not about big numbers. It's about being faithful in the small things. It's about honoring people. It's about being humble and being honest and trying your best to help the people that God entrusts to you. And so what I used to do when I finished a sermon is I go and I sit in that chair. And what I used to do if I had a bad sermon, I would be upset. And the core emotion was, gosh, that was not impressive enough. And now if I sit there, and sometimes I do, and I might after this one go, gosh, that wasn't very good. It's my criticism and my response is that wasn't helpful enough. Do you see the difference? Here's my point, and here's why I'm telling you this. When we let God win, we win. When we let God win, we win. Pharaoh refused to let God win. And when he finally did, everybody won. I had a God in my life that I was not aware of. And God began to dismantle it. And it was hard to let go. But when I let God win, the people around me won. I can guess at some of the gods that we have in this room. At some of the things that you pray to. But I don't know what they are specifically for you. But I can tell you that sometimes in life, something bad happens. Maybe not plague worthy, but something hard. Our kid gets injured and can't play that sport for a while. We get laid off. They let our department go. The big client that we have bails and now we have to scramble to make up those sales. We get in debt. We get sick. Our kid's having a hard time. It's in a difficult season. Our relationship or our marriage is on the rocks and we're not sure how to repair it. I'm not saying that every single one of those things is an assault on a God in your life, but I am saying that you should stop and ask if it is. And take from the plagues, God, are you trying to win something here? Are you trying to show me that I have something positioned in my priorities and in my life that is out of whack? Have I been finding my identity in my career and not in you? Have I been finding my identity in my kids and not in you? In my house and not in you? In my wealth, in my status, in my approval and not in you? So when we see the plagues, when we're reminded of them, let's be reminded that this was a systematic assault on the pantheon of Egyptian gods, and that same God will still assault our gods and dismantle them for our sake. Because when God wins, we win. But here's the thing, and I love to point this out. You will never lose an arguing match with God. If you want to argue with God, you win. Congratulations. God will not force his hand on us. He loves us too much to do that. He will not make us do things. But he will give us points in time to reflect and say, there's something wrong here. But when God's trying to win, he'll keep a steady hand on it. But you have to let him. You win every argument you ever get into with God. But when God wins, we win. Let's pray. Father, thank you for being a God who loves us. Thank you for being a God that doesn't force yourself upon us, but that gently pushes us in different ways at different times towards you. Lord, if we have been worshiping at the altar of things that are not you, I pray that you would reveal that to us. I pray that we would see it. And I pray that you would give us a depth of conviction and courage to confess that and to move away from that, God, and to move towards you. God, this morning, it's clear to me that we have a lot of people traveling, and so I just ask that you would keep them safe and that their trips would be enriching. I pray for grace as we enter into the summer. God, would you keep your hand on us and bless us? And God, would you help us be people who let you win? In Jesus' name, amen.