Sermons tagged with Expectation

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

All right, well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. If you're in the back there, that looks pretty crowded. You'd like some more room. We got two completely empty rows right here in the front. Just get up in front of everyone and come sit right here. That's where we make the latecomers sit, so we parade you in front of everyone. This is the first part of our new series called Mark's Jesus, where we're going to be going through the Gospel of Mark for a long time. For about 12 weeks, it's going to carry us all the way until Easter. And so I'm excited to kind of steep in this book together in Mark's Gospel. As we approach the gospel, it begins in a way, at the beginning chapters of the gospel of Mark, there is a story that's ubiquitous in all of the gospels, and they all have this towards the beginning. And it's kind of, in my view, a story about people who had disqualified themselves from a particular service. And we'll talk about why in a minute. But it reminds me of a time when I disqualified myself from something, which was my freshman year of college. You may not know this about me. I got my degree from a small Bible school called Toccoa Falls College that I would not recommend to anyone. That place was boring. I did meet Jen there, though, so that's nice, but we both hated it. But my freshman year, I went to Auburn University. I went there because it was February or March, I think, and I had not taken the SATs or applied to a college yet, and one of my good friends that I played volleyball with every afternoon said, hey, I'm going to Auburn, would you like to be my roommate? And I said, do you have an application? And he goes, yes. I said, will you fill it out for me? He goes, yes. I said, great, send it in. And so then literally two weeks later, I get home from school, and my mom's like, what's this? It's an acceptance letter from Auburn. It was never even on the radar screen so I'm a freshman year I go to Auburn University Auburn does not have an intercollegiate men's soccer team but they did have a club team and for those of you who don't know what a club team is it's it's a glorified intramural team you try out for it and then you go play other schools in the area that also have club soccer teams and so I thought I'd go out for this team because I play, I'm not trying to brag, I played all four years in high school. I was a four-year letterman at Killian Hill Christian School. Now, it didn't matter to me that the entire high school consisted of about 100 students. Roughly 50 of those are boys. Roughly 20 of those have ever touched a soccer ball in their life. And about five of us had, like, played consistently. So that didn't factor in. I thought I was good at soccer. My junior year, we won the state championship. I was the MVP of the state championship game. My senior year, I made All-State. So I go to tryouts at Auburn thinking I'm somebody. Michelle Massey's back there grinning at me because she even played actual Division I soccer and knows the difference, right? She knows what I was about to walk into. She succeeded where I failed miserably. So I go to tryouts the first day and there's like 250 people there. 250 to 300 grown men are there. I had, the most people I'd ever seen at a tryout was like 25 and everybody made it,. The coaches took him because he felt bad for him that's why we got pudgy seventh graders with state championship patches on their arm right now because the coach felt bad for them. So I go to tryouts and I'm looking at my competition. Now when I was a freshman in college this may be hard to believe but I was a hundred and fifty five pounds soaking wet. All right I it's a little, I put on a few since then. I was a skinny little nothing. And I'm looking at these guys that I'm now trying out against and they have like hairy chests and muscles and stuff. And I am out of my depth. And I was just immediately so intimidated. And that was the, that was the day where I realized I wasn't an athlete, right? I had, previous to that day, previous to that tryout, I had always thought I was pretty athletic. And then when I went to that tryout and I watched other athletes actually do athletic things, I realized you're a coordinated white kid. You are not an athlete. And so I did the best I could to go through the tryout, had a good attitude, tried to keep my head up, do the best that I could. But by the end of it, I just realized this ain't it. And so they got us together and they said, hey, listen, we're going to whittle. There's 250 of you. We're going to whittle it down to 50. If you're invited to the tryout tomorrow afternoon, we're going to put your name on a list in the student union. Go to the student building, whatever it is. go there and the Foy Student Union Center and We're gonna post a list of 50 names if your names on the list you're invited to come try out again tomorrow We'll whittle it down to 25 Well, I got up the next day and do you want to know what I did not go do? That's right walk to the Foy Student Union Center to see if my name was on the list I knew pretty good good and well it wasn't. I took myself out of the running for that. I went ahead and told them, you don't fire me, I quit. Before you, even if my name's on the list, I'm not trying to, I don't like your attitude. Like I'm not going. I knew that my name wasn't on that list, not even worth the seven minute walk across campus to figure it out. I completely took myself out of the running. And what we see at the beginning of Mark is something that we see when this happens in the other Gospels, where we have some people who have either been told by themselves or by others, you're not good enough to make the team. You're out of the running. You're disqualified. Now, as we dive into Mark, I would be remiss if I didn't give just a little bit of background on it. I'm not going to do much because not much is required, but every gospel, all four of them, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are written to different audiences. Mark is written to the Romans and it depicts Jesus as a servant. So Mark is the fastest moving gospel in the Bible. It's very quick, very fast paced from task to task to task because Mark is painting Jesus as a servant. That's what he's doing, and he wants to see that this is where we see like he must become greater, I must become less. This is where we see the greatest, whoever is greatest of you must be the servant of all. Those are Mark's words. And I would tell you if you've never read a gospel before, Mark is a great one to start with. It's incredibly, as far as gospels are concerned, action packed. It just goes from event to event to event. He doesn't dally in the inefficient details. But that's the gospel of Mark, and that's where we're going to be. And the series is called Mark's Jesus. This is the Jesus that Mark saw as he heard the stories from Peter. And so in this first chapter of Mark, the other gospels tarry a little bit at the beginning. Matthew and Luke kind of focus on genealogy and the Christmas story and the early years. And then the Gospel of John focuses on the ministry of John the Baptist kind of paving the way for Christ. But Mark jumps right into it. And halfway through the first chapter, Jesus is already calling his 12 disciples. And we have maybe the most famous call here in Mark chapter 1, verses 16 through 20, where Jewish educational system. Because if we don't understand the Jewish educational system, then some of what happens here doesn't make a whole lot of sense, right? Some of what happens here is curious. Have you ever wondered why the disciples just immediately, he's in the boat with his dad. He's doing his job. This is his future. And Jesus says, follow me, I'll make you fishers of men. And he's like, see you dad. And he goes, he leaves his job. We'll talk more about the call of Matthew, the tax collector, but Matthew's collecting taxes when Jesus calls him and he gets up from his career and he follows Jesus immediately. Have you ever wondered why they do that? I think when I was growing up and I was, and I encountered these passages, I just assumed that it was because they know who Jesus is. Jesus is Jesus, and so they want to be around Jesus because they've heard about Jesus and they want to follow Jesus. And that's not true. They didn't know yet that he was the Messiah of the world. They didn't know yet what that meant. So they're not following Jesus because he's Jesus. There's something more at play there. And when I explain to you kind of how the educational and rabbinical and discipleship system work, I think it might make sense to more of us. So I'm going to get in some details a little bit, but this helps us understand the calling of the disciples and then therefore our call so much better. So if you grew up in ancient Israel, if you grew up at the time of Christ, then you would start Jewish elementary school at about five years old. And Jewish elementary school would go from the age of five to 10. Boys and girls would do it together. And in these first five years, you would study the first five books of the Old Testament, what they called the Tanakh. And this was the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. You'd spend the first five years of your education studying those five books, and the goal was to memorize those five books. This is a culture with oral tradition. Memorization is heavy. People aren't writing things down and taking notes. So the idea of memorizing large swaths of text like that is not as anathema to them as it is to us. It was very approachable for them. We've lost that part of our brain a little bit with the ability to write things down all the time. But they would try to memorize the first five books of the Old Testament and become a master of those. Then at the age of 10, you would graduate to what I believe was called Beth Medrash Middle School. From 10 to 11, the girls, the Jewish girls, would learn Deuteronomy. They would focus more in on Deuteronomy for the worship aspects of it, and then they would look at Psalms, and they would look at Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, the wisdom books, because the women in Jewish history at this time carried the bulk of the load for the worship. So they were the ones that led the worship at the beginning in the temple. Now you guys can do what you want to to make jokes about Aaron's profession in your head, all right? I'm too dignified to do that, so I'm just going to let you do it. But that was the women's responsibility early on. And so from 10 to 13, middle school girls focused on that. And at 13, middle school girls graduated. Now help your mama, help your grandmama participate in the gathering, participate in the leading of worship. That was the role. But little boys would study the law and the prophets. So they would study the rest of the Old Testament or the Tanakh, and they would try to become masters of that. Then at 13, they would take a little break and they would go home and they would learn their father's profession. So if your dad was a fisherman, you'd go, you went home and you learned how to fish. If your dad was a tax collector, you'd go do that. If your dad, if your dad was a carpenter, you'd go be a carpenter, right? That's why it's important that we know what Joseph's profession was because that was Jesus's future had he not stayed in the educational system. So you would go and do that. And then around age 15, if you wanted to do more than that, if you wanted to continue your education, you would go find a rabbi that was legally allowed within the church to have disciples. And you would say, can I follow you? Will you be my rabbi? And if that rabbi said yes and accepted you as a student, which was very exclusive and very, very difficult to get into, listen to me, this is not an exaggeration. To become a disciple in ancient Israel at the time of Christ is not dissimilar at all from getting a scholarship to an Ivy League school. It's not dissimilar at all from going to Harvard or Yale or Georgia Tech. It was really like elite. For the new people, NC State stinks and Georgia Tech's the best. That's the basic line of joking that's been present for the duration of my tenure. But it was not dissimilar to getting to go to an Ivy League school. Your future is very bright. And only the best of the best get accepted, get taken on as disciples. And you wouldn't wait for the rabbi to come to you. You went to the rabbi and you would say, can I follow you? And what that question really means is, can I be who you are? Do I have what it takes to do what you do? And the rabbi would decide yes or no, whether or not to take you on as a disciple, as a student. And then from 15 to sometimes as late as 30, which makes sense why Jesus's ministry started at 30, you would train under your rabbi And he would teach you to do what he did. And there was a saying, may you be ever covered in the dust of your rabbi. May you be following so closely behind him on the dusty streets of Israel that his dust is kicked up on you and you are covered in the dust of your rabbi. You're following him to learn to do what he does. Okay? Understanding that, looking back at the text that we read, when Jesus sees Simon, Peter, what are they doing? They're fishing. What does that tell you about where they were in life and what the educational system had told them at some point? Because if at any point you weren't progressing as a student, if you're doing middle school and your teacher's like, nah, you're not really getting it, that's okay. Go home, be a godly fisherman, come to the temple and tithe and serve God in other ways. We're going to let the more elite students serve you in that way. If your rabbi said you're just not getting it, go home at 20 years old, be a godly carpenter. We love you. You're a good person. Serve the Lord in different ways. You're not qualified for this way. So the fact that Peter and James and John are at home with their dads fishing tells us that at some point or another, voices from within or without disqualified them from further education. And make no mistake about it, it's not as if they weren't interested. The ancient Hebrews, ancient Israel, didn't have professional sports. There was no gladiatorial arena. There was no way to make it. There was no way to ascend to the next level of society. There was no way to make your name great. There was no way to get famous. The only path forward to do any of those things, to make something of yourself, to be somebody, was to be a rabbi and hopefully elevate to Pharisee or a member of the Sanhedrin. That was the only way to climb the ladder in ancient Israel. So every little boy wanted to be a disciple one day and wanted to be a rabbi one day. And every father wanted their little boy to be a disciple who becomes a rabbi. That was the almost ubiquitous dream of ancient Israel. And so Peter and James and John fishing with their dad tells us that at some point a voice from within or without told them that they were not qualified to continue in service to God's kingdom in that way. Do you see that? And when I say from within or without, it could have been a voice within, like my voice at Auburn, going, dude, you don't need to go look at that list. You're not making it. Maybe they never went to a rabbi and said, can I follow you? Because they just knew what the answer would be. Or maybe they did go to a few and they kept getting shot down. But for some reason or another, what it tells us is that a voice from within or without had told them that they were not qualified. Somebody told them they weren't talented enough to do this. And then I also think of Matthew and his call. Matthew, who's the author of the first gospel in the New Testament, was a tax collector. Tax collectors were deplorable in ancient Israel. They were deplorable because they were turncoats and they were traders to their people for the sake of their own pocketbook, for the sake of their own greed. Here's how the tax collecting system worked in ancient Israel. Israel is a far-flung province of the Roman Empire, headed up by a likely failed senator named Pilate, because you don't get sent to Israel to be the governor from Rome unless you're terrible at your job and the emperor doesn't like you anymore. It's like being the diplomat to whatever the heck, okay? Go out here. We're going to put you in the wilderness for three years. Pilate's leading ancient Rome. His only, or leading ancient Israel, his only job is to keep the peace and keep the money flowing. That's it. Squelch rebellion, keep the income coming in. How do they make income? They tax the people. They tax the people at a rate that they had never been taxed before in their history. And this rendered many, many, many of the families in Israel as completely impoverished. They are living lives of what we would say is abject poverty. And the way that those taxes got paid is the tax collector, you'd go to the tax collector to pay your taxes, and Rome said it's a 20% tax on all goods and income, and the tax collector would go, oh gosh, looks like it's 22.5% this year. Looks like it's 25% this year. They would just tack on a few extra percentage points to make whatever they could make to get money off of you by being a toy of the empire of Rome. They were turncoats who rejected their people for the sake of their own greed. They were disrespected. They were considered sinful and sinners. They were considered unclean because they handled money all the time. To be a tax collector is to disconnect from your spiritual heritage. It's to choose to live a life that you know disqualifies me from service in God's kingdom. I have put that thought away. I will never think about it again. So Matthew was a person who had chosen a path in life that was completely separate from a religious path and had at some point or another inevitably made the decision due to the cognitive dissonance of the two existing of, I am not going to embrace that religious faithful life anymore. I'm not good enough for it. I cannot do it. I cannot serve it. That is not me. I'm going to make a decision for myself to live greedily and selfishly and indulge in my own sin and in my own desire. That's what he did. So he had chosen a life that anyone around him, including himself, would have said, I am not worthy to be used in the kingdom of God in any way, and I'm good with it. And yet Jesus goes to him and calls him too. Now here's what's remarkable to me about the calling of these disciples. One of the things. Jesus had every right as a rabbi who had achieved an authority that allowed him to call disciples. He had every right to sit back and wait for young men to come to him and ask him if they could follow him. He had every right to stay back and say, hey, I'm a rabbi. Now's the time. If you want to come work for me, let me know. And he doesn't do that. We see him pursuing the disciples. He doesn't wait for Peter to come to him and say, Jesus, may I follow you? He goes to Peter and he says, would you like to follow me? He goes to John and James and says, would you like to follow me? He goes to the tax collector who would never, ever, ever have the audacity to go to Jesus, the rabbi, the son of God and say, can I please follow you? No, he would never have the audacity to do that. His life of sin had disqualified him from approaching Christ. And Christ doesn't wait for him to get over that to invite him. No, he goes to Matthew in his sin, in his deplorable life, in his feeling like crud, and he says, would you follow me? And what do they all do? They all immediately throw down everything and follow Christ. And what we see here is that Jesus has a remarkable pattern of pursuit. Jesus, like his dad, has a remarkable pattern of pursuit. In the Old Testament, God called out to Abraham and told him what to do. He showed himself to Moses in the burning bush and told him what to do. He showed himself to David and told him what to do. He pursued his children in the nation of Israel over and over and over again, generation after generation after generation, despite their rejection, despite their betrayal, despite their refusal to obey him and to follow him and to serve him. He pursues and pursues and pursues. And when that pursuit isn't enough, he sends his son as a personification of divinity to pursue us in human form. It is. That's very good. If you didn't hear that, somebody's phone in the front row, Siri, just to find personification for us in case you didn't know what that was. It's in the back next week. We see Jesus early in his ministry display this pattern of pursuit where he goes to the disciples. He doesn't wait for them to come to him. We see later on when Jesus teaches about the 99 and he says that a good shepherd leaves the 99 and pursues the lost sheep. We see him telling a story of a rich man whose son went off and squandered his money on wild living. And as he came back home, the rich man saw him far off and he went running to him. He pursued him. Our God does not sit back and wait for us to come to him. Jesus says he stands at the door and knocks, waiting for us to let him into our lives. Our Jesus chases after us. He pursues us. He does it gently, but he does it relentlessly. And many of you, I would wager all of you, at one point or another, even at your worst, sometimes especially at your worst, have felt this gentle, relentless pursuit of Christ, have felt Christ whispering to you in the shadows and in the isolation that he still loves you, he still cares about you, he's still coming for you. You've seen how he pursues people in your life. You know experientially how Christ never gives up on you. There is no barrel that has a bottom too far down for Christ to not chase you there. He has an incredible pattern of pursuit. And Jesus continues to pursue us to this day. He continues to pursue you. And what I want you to hear this morning more than anything else is, that invitation that he extends to these disciples that he pursued, Come and follow me. Very, very simple invitation. It's the same one that he extends to you this morning. Come and follow me. Come follow me. Now, here's what's so important to understand about this call and this invitation. The disciples, Peter, James, John, Matthew, Andrew, the rest of them, Thomas, they did not know then at their call, Nathaniel and Philip, they did not know at their call that Jesus was the Messiah and they didn't know what it meant to be the Messiah. The only person on the planet, I believe at this point in history, who knew who Jesus was and what he came to do was marry his mother. I don't think anybody else had an accurate clue what he was doing. So the disciples definitely don't know that he's the Messiah and they don't even really know what the Messiah is. They don't even yet know that he's the son of God. That has not been revealed to them yet. Jesus has not made that public yet. And what we see in the three years of ministry, what we'll see throughout the rest of the gospel of Mark is this progressive revelation and understanding amongst the disciples about who Jesus is. We fast forward a year in and Jesus comes out on the boat and he calms the storm, right? He says, wind and waves be still. And he calms the storm and he goes back down into the hold and he goes to sleep. And what did the disciples say? Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him? The last week of his life, Jesus is walking into the city of Jerusalem and James and John are lagging behind him arguing about who gets to be the vice president and the secretary of defense. They still don't get it. So when Jesus calls them and they receive the call, they were not encumbered with all this sense of belief that we encumber that with. They simply responded to who he was and said, okay, I'll go. They didn't know all there was to know about Jesus. They didn't even fully believe in Jesus yet. But they responded to his invitation and they followed. And the same invitation with the same parameters and expectations around it is extended to us and every generation through the centuries to simply follow Jesus. Here's another thing I love about this invitation from Jesus to follow him. He didn't just give them protection. He gave them purpose. He wasn't just offering them, because when we think about Jesus extending an offer, us follow me and I'll make you fishers and men, come follow me, come let me in, I stand at the door and knock, let me into your life. When we think about responding to the invitation of Christ, I think we typically take that to the moment of salvation. I'm going to respond to the invitation of Christ by letting him into my life and I'm going to become a Christian. That's typically where we go with that. But I would say, first of all, I think that this is a daily response to choose to follow Jesus every day. Second of all, when we reduce following Jesus, that moment of salvation to just now I'm in, now I'm a Christian, and that's it. When we make that the inflection point, we reduce the call of Christ down to mere protection. Protection from hell, eternal separation from God, protection from our sins, I no longer have to pay the penalties for those, protection in taking us to heaven, protection in overcoming sin and death. If we've've lost a loved one who also knows Jesus then we know that one day we get to see them again that when we say goodbye to them on their deathbed it's goodbye for now not goodbye forever so we're offered protection over sin and death and sometimes we reduce the call of Christ down to this offer of protection follow me and I will protect you from your sins and from the judgment of God and from the pains of death. And then one day everything will be perfect in eternity. Just hold on until we get there. But no, he doesn't just offer them protection. He offers them purpose. Because what does he say after he invites them to follow me? Follow me and I will make you fishers of men. Follow me and I will imbue your life with a greater sense of purpose than you've ever had. Follow me, I have things for you to do. Follow me, I believe in you. Follow me, we're going to do great things. And I'm going to equip you for everything that I want you to do. And he imbues us with purpose that he's got plans for us in his kingdom. And just like then when Jesus asked them to follow and said, come and follow me, I'll make you fishers of men. He also tells us vicariously through the Great Commission, the last thing that Jesus instructs the disciples to do, go into all the world and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Don't go into all the world and make converts. Don't go into all the world and offer my protection and that's it. Go into all the world and offer them my protection and my purpose. Make disciples and train them to do what I trained you to do. Go and make people who contribute to the ministry and the kingdom of God. We're all kingdom builders pushing this thing forward. That's how we talk about it around here. So he imbues us with purpose. And the same invitation to the disciples there is the one that he offers us this morning. Jesus is not, when he comes to you and he says, follow me, just follow me, just do what I'm asking you to do. It's not a simple offer of protection. It's an offer to imbue your life with purpose. I'm going to make your life matter in the kingdom of God. I want you to experience what it is to do my work and to love my people. It's a remarkable, remarkable invitation. And even as I articulate those things, I am certain that most of us in this room have already found ways to disqualify ourselves with the voices from within and from without from this call of Jesus. I'm certain that there are plenty of you who are sitting there during this sermon, hopefully thinking along with me, nodding along with me. Yes, believe all that. Yes, he calls us and he equips us. Yes, I agree with that. Yes, Jesus offers that same invitation. Yeah, they were unqualified. I feel unqualified, but I'm not yet sold. This sermon is for other people with more talent. It's for people who are younger than me. It's for people who are more charismatic than me. It's for people who have more potential than me, who are better looking than me, whatever it might be. So yeah, I agree, Nate, with the points that you're making, but that's not really for me. And what I want you to see is that that's your disqualifying voice coming from within or without that's telling you stuff that's not true about yourself. There's got to be a handful of us in here who go, yeah, I'm just a mom. That's what I do. I'm just a mom and my world is so small. God can't possibly have a plan for me to be used in incredible ways to build his kingdom. That's not true. We're told that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. God has a plan for you. God has something he wants to do with your life. He has a way that he wants to use you. He has a load that he wants you to carry joyfully and gleefully as you go through your life doing his work. He's created you for that. The problem, and he invites us this morning just as he invited the disciples to walk in that purpose and in that usefulness. The problem is we continue to have these voices that we believe in our head that tell us that we're not good enough, that we're not smart enough. I'm too old. I just teed off on 18, buddy. Like I'm looking at the sunset. That's a young man's game. Let somebody else do that work. I'm coasting it in, loving my grandkids. That's not for me. Or I'm too young. No one's going to listen to me. Or I don't have enough education. I'm not qualified enough to do this. Or I'm too inconsistent in my walk. Or I feel like Matthew and the choices that I've made in life have utterly you that you're not qualified for service in the kingdom of God do not come from God. They come from the world. They come from you. And they come from the people in your past who, well-meaning or not, damaged you and told you you weren't good enough and that you couldn't do it. I carry myself plenty of wounds from people that I respect a lot who indicated to me directly and indirectly that I would never make it in ministry. You've had people in your life, well-meaning or not, who have indicated to you in different ways, directly and indirectly, that you don't really have a lot to offer the kingdom of God. You've told yourself that so many times that you now can't even sort out the truth of where these voices are coming from. But here's what I want you to understand this morning. We are not qualified for ministry by our talent. We are qualified by our Savior. We are not qualified for service in God's kingdom by the gifts and abilities that we bring to the table. We are qualified by our Savior and by him alone. Do you think for a second there was anybody in Peter's life? If you know what you know about Peter, Peter was ready, fire, aim. That was him. Peter having nothing to say, thus said. He was always the one out in front, sticking his foot in his mouth. Do you think anybody looked at Peter at this point in his life on the banks of the Sea of Galilee outside the city of Capernaum and went, you know what this guy is? This guy's probably going to be like the very first head pastor of this movement that Jesus is about to birth with his perfect life and death. I bet he's going to be the guy. Nobody said that about Peter. Do you think anybody looked at John, who was maybe 10 to 15 years old at the time of his call? Do you think anybody looked at John and went, you know what John's probably going to do? John's probably going to write a gospel that's different and more influential than the others. He's going to write three great letters that are going to be included in the canon and printed for all of time. And he's going to write the apocryphal book in the New Testament that tells us about the end times. And he's going to die a martyr. He's going to be the last of the generation of disciples to die on the island of Patmos, an honorable death. And he's going to be so close to Christ during these next three years that the Savior of the universe is going to refer to him as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Not even John's mom thought that was possible. Nobody thought that was going to happen to the two boys called the sons of thunder, James and John, the sons of Zebedee. Nobody looked at Matthew collecting taxes and thought, you know what? This degenerate, who's totally rejected religion religion and the world and rejected his community and the people around him, he's going to become a disciple that writes one of the four gospels that's read by more people in human history than any other book. That's probably what Matthew's going to do. Nobody, nobody but Jesus looked at those disciples before their call and had any clue or any vision about how he could use them in his kingdom. Nobody but Jesus would have believed the plans that he had for those young men. So who are you to look at Christ and tell him that he can't use you? Nobody but Jesus knows what path you can have from this day forward. Nobody but God has the vision for what your life can be in the years that he is giving to you. Nobody knows what your potential is, least of all you. Our talent does not qualify us for service in God's ministry. Our Savior does. But we're so busy avoiding the walk to the student union because we are certain that our name is not on the list, that we don't even try, and we disqualify ourselves from service in God's kingdom. And I just want to remind you of this, that God alone can cast you aside, and he's promised never to do that. You can't disqualify yourself. Only God can do that. And he's promised to never forsake you. Only God can cast you aside and he will not do that. So quit casting yourself aside. This morning comes down to two simple thoughts. Whose voice are you going to believe about who you are and what God has planned for you? The world's or God's? Because a lot of us have been spending a lot of time listening to the world, believing that God's voice is for other people beside us. And the second one is this. Will you accept that simple invitation that tumbles down through the centuries from our Savior, that is the same now as it was then? Will you accept Christ's invitation to follow him and go where that leads? Let's pray. Father, thank you for being a God who pursues. Thank you for being a God who chases. For a God who believes and equips and calls and qualifies. Lord, I lift up those of us in this room who feel particularly unqualified. Who feel that our poor choices, our bad decisions, our lack of discernible skills, at least according to us, disqualify us from any kind of use in your kingdom. Father, would you help our eyes open to the reality that no one but you knows what your plans are. No one but you knows what you can do with a willing servant who will simply follow you. No one but you knows the potential of use and blessing and life that exists in this room. And so God, I pray that we would follow you. And I pray that we would begin to choose to listen to your voice about who we are and what we can do. And that we would refuse to listen to our own that doesn't tell us the truth. Help us to be followers of you and imbue us with purpose to build your kingdom. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. I'll be right there at those double doors. Please don't hesitate to introduce yourself and teach me your name and give me about three or four weeks and I'll try to remember it. A big thank you to Kyle, our worship pastor, who stepped in for me last week. About 6 a.m. last Sunday morning, I had been up most of the night and texted Gibby, our worship pastor, hey man, I'm not going to make it. And I went back through some sermons and I found one from last January where I talked about community. I knew it was going to be small group Sunday, so I said this will be appropriate. I said just show this one from last January and we'll be fine. And so then I turned on the TV around 10 o'clock just to see how things were going, and I was as surprised as you to see Kyle up here once the bumper video got done. But he did a great job. I'm so grateful for him. It's kind of a rite of passage as a teacher and communicator to find out the morning of that you're actually preaching that day. And so it's a good experience for everybody. But I'm grateful to him. This week, we're going to continue right on in our series. I was going to preach about marriage last week and prayers for our marriage. And we decided to continue in that series. Next week, we're going to do prayers for our finances, and then we're going to get into a series in Mark that's going to carry us all the way through Easter. So I'm very much looking forward to spending an extended amount of time in the Gospel of Mark with you. But this morning, we look at prayers, a prayer for our marriages. And I don't often do sermons on marriage. And I'll be honest with you, the main reason I don't often specifically target marriage in a church service, probably to our detriment. I should probably do it more. But the main reason I don't is just because I know that even though, as I look out, most of us in this room are married. I hope happily so. Most of us are married, but I'm also aware that we have single people in our congregation as well. And some of you are single right now by choice. You'd like to be married one day, but you're not yet, and that's fine. Or you'd like to be married again someday, and you're not right now, and that's okay. Some of you are widows or widowers, and for different reasons and different walks of life, we have single people in our midst. And so in doing a sermon on marriage, I always worry about ostracizing that part of our population, and so I'm sorry for that. So this morning, I'm going to unapologetically focus on marriage and what God's role for marriage is and what our purpose within our marriages are according to Scripture. And so I would say to you, if you're a single person this morning who's listening to me, if you're watching online and you haven't turned it off yet, I would say if you're not married and you want to be, then hang on to this for the kind of marriage that you want and the kind of spouse that you want to find, the kind of spouse that you want to be. If you're not married and you don't want to be, then the best I can do is to say hang on to this so you can advise your married friends or just open up the Bible and start reading it for the next 30 minutes. That'll be great for you too. With that caveat, let's approach this topic of marriage and ask ourselves, what is God's purpose for marriage? And what is our role supposed to be within our marriages? Now, I don't think that there's any passage that addresses God's purpose for marriage and our role within marriage more clearly than Ephesians chapter 5. Really starting, I believe, in verse 21. Yes, verse 21 through the end of the chapter in verse 32. Now, in Ephesians, sorry, Ephesians chapter 5. In Ephesians and in Colossians and in 1 Corinthians, Paul writes about what theologians refer to as the household codes. In Christ, in church, in this new way of life, in this new way of understanding faith, here are the codes by which we should live within our households. Here's how wives and husbands should interact and children and parents should interact. And there's even a portion about slaves and masters and how they should interact. And so he introduces what we refer to as the household codes. And these, we should understand, are revolutionary for the time. Because at this point in history, it's a heavily patriarchal society. And marriage is really a one-way street. Marriage is really about the man. The woman is ancillary to the marriage. She's almost very close to property, if not just out-and-out property. And so it's within that context that these household codes are introduced. And what we see is that they are revolutionary for the time in which they are introduced. But for us this morning, as we look at them, I want us to be thinking, what's God's purpose for marriage? What does God want to see happen in my marriage? And what is my role within that marriage? How does God want to use me to bring about his desired outcome for us and for my spouse? And again, I don't think that this issue is addressed anywhere more clearly than it is in Ephesians chapter 5. So I want to read to you, beginning in verse one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church. For we are members of his body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery. But I am talking about Christ and the church. In the verse 33, however, each one of you must also, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. There's a lot packed in there. We could do a series from those verses. But I want us to see the main priority for marriage, What Paul depicts, we believe through the instruction of God, as the main purpose for marriage, which is to prepare the bride for the bridegroom. Which is for husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who laid himself down for it, that he might prepare it, wash it, so that it might be presented without blemish or spot to God on the day of atonement, on the day of glory, that we might present one another as blameless to God at the end of this life. And so here's what I'm going to do with this passage. And I just want to admit this up front so we all know what I'm doing. I've always tried to teach you like you are intelligent adults who have the Holy Spirit. Most of you are adults. Most of you are intelligent. And if you're saved, you have the Holy Spirit. So I'm going to talk to you that way. I am taking an interpretive and theological license in my application of this passage this morning. This passage on its surface seems to be talking directly to the husbands with the line at the end that says, and wives seek that you respect your husbands. But what I believe about this passage is that there is an implied reciprocity. That if it is my job as a husband to present my wife without blemish or spot, to do what I can to prepare her for heaven, to do what I can to love her towards Christ, then it is likewise the responsibility of my wife to love me towards Jesus. That there is a reciprocital expectation in this passage. I don't even know if reciprocital is a word, but there you go. There's that expectation in this passage, I believe, that both parties would seek to love each other towards Christ. And if you can't go there with me, and you go, listen, man, on the surface, it seems like it's talking to the husbands. That's how I'm going to take it at face value. Okay, that's fine. Then I'm just talking to the husbands today. But by the way, husbands, you don't have to respect your wives because there's no reciprocity in the passage. But that's the license that I'm going to take is that this is for both of us. And if it's for both of us, here's what this passage clearly says is the responsibility of each spouse in a marriage. Okay. This is the purpose of marriage. The purpose of marriage is to sanctify you, to make you more like Christ in character. I'm going to sit more on that in a minute, to make you more like Christ in character, to move you through this spirit, this process of spiritual maturation. And that as such, as the spouse, here's what this passage is teaching us. And we're going to unpack this. You, husbands, you, wives, if you're married, you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's lives. If you're married, this passage teaches us that you are the chief agent of sanctification in your spouse's life. Now, let's stop and talk about this word sanctification, because this is one of those spongy church words that we hear a lot, and you church people probably know that word, you've heard it, but if I were to make you stand up right now and be like, Karen, why don't you stand up and tell us what sanctification means? You'd be like, oh my gosh, I hate you. I've never come back to this church in my whole life, right? Nobody wants to do that right now. But it's a word that shows up again and again in Scripture. It's a word that is referred to again and again in Scripture. And it's a summary word for what happens during our life. So it's important that we understand what sanctification is. It's a very simple definition, and there's no blank for this, but if you want to write it down because it's helpful, you can write this down. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is the process by which we become more like Christ in character. We see throughout Scripture these encouragements that we should be Christ-like, that we should be like Jesus. We pray and we sing, more of you and less of me. More of you, Christ, less of me. If all I ever get is you, that's good enough. I want more of you, less of me. We pray that we would become Christ-like. We pray for our children to become Christ-like. These are all references to what Scripture calls sanctification, the process by which we become more like Christ in character. Sanctification is an unavoidable portion of the salvation process. See, a lot of us think of salvation as this inflection point, this point in time, this moment in time in which we become saved. But scripture actually teaches us that salvation is a process that begins at the point of justification or some would argue predestination and then continues through sanctification until glorification. And here's how I know that I'm right about this. I'm not making it up. That's basically a direct quote of Romans chapter 8 verse 29. We know verse 28. We love that verse. For all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Great. But 29 says, for those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he justified. Those whom he justified, he sanctified. Those whom he sanctified, he glorified. So let's look at that process. Jesus, God, through his spirit, calls us to himself. He calls us with his Holy Spirit. He chisels away at our blind and darkened heart. He softens us to the good news and the mystery of the gospel until one day our soul is in a place where we're willing to accept Christ as our Savior. We repent of who we thought Jesus was. We accept who Jesus says he is, and we step forward in faith. This looks a bunch of different ways and a bunch of different traditions. We pray the believer's prayer or that we pray the sinner's prayer. We ask Jesus into our heart. We confess Jesus as our savior. However it is you want to phrase it, this for many of us is the point of salvation. It's what we think of as the time we got saved, but that's really the justification process. So God, God calls us then at that moment of what we would call our salvation, that's really justification. That's when we accept the blood of Christ as a cover over our sins. And God looks at us and he does not judge us based on our actions. He judges us based on the righteousness of Christ and says that he sees us clothed in the righteousness of Christ. This is Isaiah chapter 1 where he puts his arm around us and he says, Come now, let us reason together, though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. At the point of justification, Jesus, by hanging on the cross, has made our sins as white as snow. He has covered over us with our righteousness. And God in heaven looks down on us and he sees not us, but he sees his Son and we are justified in the court of divine righteousness and made worthy of heaven through the blood of Christ. When we accept that, we are justified. After we are justified, we are sanctified. After we are sanctified, we are glorified. We are glorified when we meet our Father in heaven and our glorified bodies, when we do not need faith anymore because we're looking our Savior in the eye. We are glorified in heaven. So that means that between the time of justification in your life, the moment you became a Christian, to the point of glorification, the moment you meet God in eternity forever. Everything that happens in between that is your sanctification. That God is using day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade to slowly chisel you into someone who is more like him in character, whose heart beats along with him for the things he wants. We are told that if we delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, that walk with God through the process of sanctification, our heart begins to beat with his so that the things that we desire are the things that he desires and he brings those about for the good of us and those who are called according to his purpose. This is the process of sanctification. Spending our entire life growing closer and closer and closer to Jesus. Now this process can be thwarted. It can get short-circuited by sin and by other ailments, by the sin and the weight that so easily entangles, according to Hebrews 12, verse 1. This process can get sidelined. But as Christians, we are perpetually going through the process of sanctification until we enter glorification. This means that in our 70s, our faith and our depths of insight and understanding and our knowledge of right and wrong and good and evil and being filled with the knowledge of God and the maturity with which we walk and the love that we express and the selflessness that we live with and the humility in which we walk should be vastly different than it was in our 30s. Because God has had 40 years to sanctify us and make us more like his son in character. So that in our 70s we ought to walk with so much more wisdom and godliness than we did in our 30s. Not because we can't be godly in our 30s, but just because he's had 40 more years to sanctify us. That's the call of the Christian life. And what Paul is saying about marriage is that your spouse ought to be the chief agent of sanctification in your life. Meaning, your husband or your wife has been placed in your life by God to be the primary tool he uses to chisel away at your rough edges and reveal within you the person that he's always wanted you to become. They are the primary tool that God uses to chisel away the elements of the world that are still a part of you so that your character might emerge as more Christ-like. That is the purpose of marriage. If you are married, God's primary purpose for you in that marriage is to use you as the primary tool that he chooses to make your spouse more like him in character. That is the role of a husband or a wife. And nothing short of it. And here's what I think is interesting about that point. Here's what I think is interesting. I think that if I were to sit down with any of you over coffee who are married. And say, do you consider yourself a good wife? Do you consider yourself a good husband? You would say yes or no. You would say, you know, for the most part, I think I'm pretty good, or gosh, I haven't been doing great lately, or some of you, I hope, would say, yeah, I think I'm nailing it. That's great. Some of you would be like, I'm failing miserably. Okay. Whatever your answer was in how you're doing, good or bad, neutral or not, the next question is the important one. How good are you doing at being a husband? I think I'm doing okay here. I think I've got some things to work on there. I think I can get better. But overall, I think I've been pretty good. Okay. Why? That's the important question. Why do you think you're a good husband? Why do you think you're a bad husband? Why do you think you've been a good wife? What's your criteria? Why do you think you've been a bad wife? I think a lot of us, if we had to make lists, even if we take your marriage out of it, and I were to ask you, what makes a husband a good husband? If I were to ask you, think of somebody that you think has a great marriage, and they're a great husband, and they're a great wife. What makes them great? What are the qualities? I think we would say things like, well, he loves her really well. He's unselfish with her. He's patient with her. They've been married for 40 years. He's faithful to her. She's faithful to him. She's patient with him. She supports him. Or if they're bad, we would say, well, he's selfish. He doesn't see her. He pretends that the yard needs work for eight hours on a Saturday while she deals with three-year-olds. She doesn't support him. She gets on to him all the time. He ignores her. How far down the list, here's the important part. If I were to ask you what makes you or what makes that person a good husband or a good wife? How many items would you list off before you said that man's a good husband because the way that he loves his wife loves her closer to Jesus? That man's a good husband because his wife is an incredible believer because of the way that he's loved her towards him. How many of you, how far down the list would we have to get before you said that woman is a wonderful wife to that man? Because she has been used by God over and over again and she steps into her role of sanctification in his life. And because of her influence in his life, that man is walking more closely with Jesus than he would have without her. How far down our list of good or bad husband or wife criteria do we need to go before we get to the very first criteria laid out by God in Scripture? Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. Present her holy and blameless before the throne. That's tops. That's the number one thing. That's the standard. And yet, so many of us, and listen, well, I'll say this in a second. So many of us have that so far down our list of what a responsible spouse should do that it wouldn't even go mentioned, that we haven't even thought of it. And here's what I want to be really honest with you about, okay? As I prepared this sermon, and I was confronted with this standard from Scripture of what my role as a husband is. I was deeply, deeply convicted. And I'm not saying that hyperbolically. I'm not saying that for show. I'm not saying that like, well, you know, we could all improve a little bit. I could too, so I'm going to act convicted here so you feel safe in your conviction. No. I was deeply convicted and went home and apologized to Jen for not being the husband I was going to preach that I needed to be. I apologized to her because I'm about to come out. I might not be much, but I like to think I have some integrity. And I'm not going to come in here and look you men in the eye and tell you what Scripture calls you to be, knowing good and well I've fallen short of that in my own house. So the first thing I did is I went home. I didn't know she was going to be in the fourth and fifth grade room this morning. That makes this part a lot easier. I thought she was going to be sitting right there. And that if I didn't apologize to her, she was going to be sitting there going, what are you talking about, man? There have been seasons where I have done this by God's grace. There have also been seasons when I have not. And so if you are convicted this morning as I lay out the standard that is set forth in scripture for what marriage is and what a spouse ought to be in that marriage. If that's hard to hear and you feel that you've fallen short, I am the captain of your team, pal. I'm with you. I am not preaching this as if I were on some marital mountaintop and I figured it out and I would like for you to get on my level. I am preaching this here. Saying, hey, this is what scripture calls us to. We've all got to step up together. This is what we're called to. So let's be that. To that end, as I was talking through this with Jen this week, she brought up, yeah, that's good, that makes sense. I like that. If both parties are spiritually engaged, it's a really good and helpful thing to tell the couples of grace. I like it. But what do you tell the spouse who is spiritually engaged, whose spouse is spiritually disengaged? To put a finer point on it, more often than not, what do you tell the women who care about Jesus and would really, really love for their husband to be this for them and are trying desperately to be that for their husband, but they can't get his attention? Now, sometimes it's flipped. Sometimes it's the man who's spiritually engaged and the woman who's spiritually disengaged, but that's the exception in my experience in churches. So what do we tell those people? Well, I would tell you two things. First, sometimes when we're unequally yoked in that way, it's our job, and 1 Corinthians speaks to this, it's our job to quietly, patiently love them towards Christ until the Holy Spirit convicts them and they're able to come home and apologize and then step into who they need to be. Sometimes it's our job to patiently wait and pray and love them towards Jesus when they're not able to love us towards Jesus. And we wait on them to step into what they're supposed to be. The other thing I would say is this. I'm going to quote, I wish Keith Cathcart were here, one of my buddies. Keck, you'll have to tell him to listen to this sermon. Because I'm going to quote Mike Tomlin, the coach of the Steelers, and Keith is going to lose his ever-loving mind. I quoted Tomlin in the sermon. But Coach Tomlin is a coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He's an incredible leader of men. He's an incredible leader. He's one of the all-time greatest coaches. I have a large amount of respect for him, and he's got a lot of these quick little one-liners that are really good. But one of the things I like about what he says about Pittsburgh Steelers football is the standard is the standard. The standard is the standard. The standard in Pittsburgh is Super Bowls. We do not settle for divisional championships, which means, those of you who are not sports inclined, marginal success. We do not settle for marginal success. We are number one or bust. If you don't know what the Super Bowl is, this is America, man. Get with it. Also, go Bills. Yeah, there we go, baby. Mike Thomas says the standard is the standard. Meaning, we have the highest possible standard in our organization. We have the highest standard for what we want to achieve as a team, and we have the highest possible standard for what we expect from each position group and each portion of this team. The standard is the standard, and the standard does not change based on your feelings about your inability to reach it. The standard does not change based on previous performance. The standard does not change based upon how you feel. The standard is the standard. We confront it with honesty and we meet it or don't, but the standard doesn't change. That's how we will approach marriage. The standard is the standard. And the standard is that it is my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus. That's the standard. If you are married, whether you knew it or not when you stood at the altar, what you accepted is this mantle. It is now and forevermore my sacred duty to love my spouse towards Jesus Christ. And here's why it's so important to accept this mantle because people come and go in our lives, man. Jen and I have been together since I was 20 and she was 19. I'm 43. She's 32. I'm just kidding. I'm just not going to tell you her age. I'm 43. We've been together a long time. There have been people, men, in that season, in those years, in those decades, who have come into my life and have been more of a catalyst for change and sanctification in my life than she was at the time. But that flares out. People come and go. And sometimes God in his grace uses them to compel you and to convict you in wonderful ways towards a deeper relationship with him. But day in and day out, year in and year out, she is the presence in my life. She is the one who sees me wake up and go to sleep. She is the one that God has placed there to be used as an agent to change me. And when she does, and when she engages in that, it is so powerful, I can't describe it to you. And that is our sacred duty, to love our spouses towards Jesus. And listen, if you feel like that's too tall an order, if you feel like you haven't done that in a long time and you're not sure if you can do that and you don't know how to do that, what I would say to you is I love you so much and I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but what I would say to you is listen, the standard is the standard. That's your sacred duty. Accept it or don't. But if you do not accept your sacred duty to love your spouse towards Christ and be the chief agent of sanctification in their life, then you are absconding on your commitment as a husband or a wife. And if this brings upon you a deep conviction, good. Sit in it. Your wife and your husband or your husband will benefit from that. React to it. Respond to it. Accept it. Step into it. Your kids will be better off for your conviction and your acceptance of this mantle. You will have a marriage that they look at as worthy of emulation if you will receive this mantle, this standard from Paul. It is our sacred duty to love our spouses towards Jesus. Full stop. That's what we must do. Now, as I wrap up, I want to give you guys just a few practical things to do to keep this standard the standard in your marriage. I want to give you a couple. So we go, okay, I accept this. It is my job to love my spouse towards Christ. I accept that mantle. I want to do that. I'm going to be the chief agent of sanctification in their life that I believe you. I want to do it. Let's go. What do I do? What does that practically look like? This is, I'm going to give you four things. So obviously there's more to do than this. This is not an exhaustive list, but four quick things that you can do in your marriages starting right now, starting today to love your spouse towards Christ. Four quick things. Number one, hold them accountable for accountability. Hold them accountable for accountability. I have never thought it's the best idea for your husband or your wife to be your accountability partner. If you decide that you want to develop a new discipline of waking up every day and praying and reading the Bible, spending time in God's word and spending time in God's presence through prayer, if that's what you want to do, probably don't tell your wife that this is what I'm going to do. And when I don't do it, I would like you to call me out on it because of all the other things that exist in your life that she nagged you about and that you get mad about. Let's not add one more. All right. Similarly, wives don't need husbands hounding them about one more thing that they were supposed to do. All right. So let's, let's let other people hold us accountable for things like that. And let's let our spouses hold us accountable for accountability. I've told you before, and this was actually the sermon that I thought you were going to watch last week. It's okay that you didn't. But in that sermon from last year, I talked about the idea of sacred spaces, having spaces in our life, two or three people at the most who know everything about us, who love you and love Jesus and are given permission to tell you the truth about yourself. I shared with you then that there's two men that I meet with, two men from the church that I meet with pretty much once a month. And the very first thing we ask is, what are you struggling with? What's stopping you from following God as well as you can right now? What's going on in your life? Is there anything that you need to share? And it's an opportunity to be held accountable for anything and everything that may be going on in our life that is keeping us from pursuing Jesus the way we need to do it. Jen needs to hold me accountable to go and meet with them and tell them the truth, but she doesn't need to be my primary accountability agent in that, if that makes sense. But spouses, responsible ones, hold each other accountable for accountability. So a wonderful conversation to have in your car at lunch, tonight when the kids go down, whenever, might be where is your accountability in your life and how can we encourage each other to find that more. The second thing we can do to love our spouse towards Christ and accept this mantle is to take their spiritual temperature. Just take their spiritual temperature. Just know how they're doing. If I were to ask any of you who are married, how's the spiritual health of your wife? How's the spiritual health of your husband? How are they doing? How good of an answer could you give me? How good of an answer would you like to be able to give? If you're going to see yourself as sincerely the chief agent of sanctification in their life as bestowed upon you by God, how good of an answer to that question do you think you need to be able to give? And is it good enough right now? All right, moving quickly. Next thing. Love them sacrificially, not selfishly. Love them selflessly, not selfishly. Often we fall into these habits as married people where we love transactionally. I'm going to love you like this, so you love me like this. A husband might think to himself, I'm going to be on the Saturday. I'm going to be present with the kids on Saturday. I'm going to love by cleaning things I haven't been asked to clean. I'm going to do everything I need to do. I'm going to do all the things that she likes for me to do. I'm going to love her in that way so that maybe later when the kids go down, she can express love in a different way. That's what I'm going to do. And listen, that's a sound strategy. Okay, tried and true. Stick with it. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying there needs to be more to love than that. Loving selfishly is loving with the expectation of reciprocity. I'm going to love in this way, and they're going to love me in this way. But loving selflessly says, no, I'm going to love them because I love them and I want them to see someone that loves them no matter what. We have a quote in our hallway at the top of our stairs from a guy named W.H. Autzen. I have no idea who that is. I've never, ever Googled him a single time. I just really like this quote that I saw at someone else's house, so I had it done for us. And it says, if greater affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me. That's sacrificial selfless love in a marriage. If equal affection cannot be, let the greater love be me. So if it's got to be disproportionate, let it be disproportionate in their favor. And I'll tell you how I've seen this lived out. I have a very good friend whose wife is going through, this is understated, an extremely traumatic time in her life that doesn't have anything to do with him. It's just a really, really difficult time. And because of that, rightly so, she has nothing in her cup left to be the mother that she needs to be to their three children. She has nothing in her cup left to be the wife that she needs to be to him. She has nothing to give. And he is choosing day in and day out to love her, to stay faithful to her, to serve her, to step up and to care for the kids and to love her in that way without expectation of reciprocity, without expecting that she's going to turn around and thank him for that. He's just loving her to get her through this season because he loves her. That's loving sacrificially, not selfishly. Love for love's sake. Last one. This one's so simple. It's so simple. Pray for them and with them. Pray for them and with them. Very simply, I'm not going to belabor this because I don't need to. How can we claim to have accepted the mantle of chief agent of sanctification in the life of our spouse if we can't remember the last time we prayed for them? If we're not praying for them every day? How can the Holy Spirit speak into our hearts and in our minds what they need and where they're at and how to best pray for them if we don't give him space to do that. How can we claim that Jesus is the center of our home, the center of our marriage, and that our marriage is being used to sanctify one another towards Christ if we're not praying with each other with a great degree of regularity? I don't need to belabor this point. You guys know it's right. I know it's right. If we want to love our spouse towards Christ, then we ought to pray for them and with them with a high degree of regularity. Yes? So that's my hope and prayer for you and for your marriages. That you'll accept the standard as the standard. And the standard is you are to be the chief agent of sanctification, of the process of spiritual maturity, becoming more like Christ in character in your spouse's life, and that it is your sacred duty to step into that role. So I'm going to pray for you. I'm going to pray that you would accept that mantle and that you would walk with humility and meekness as you seek to love your spouse towards Jesus. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for who you are and how you love us. God, we thank you for our husbands and our wives. God, I thank you publicly for my wife and the ways that she has faithfully loved me towards you. Help me love her towards you. God, for those of us who walk away convicted, I pray that we would sit in that conviction, that we would accept it, that we would be spurned on by it. And that from today, you would produce in all of us an ardent desire to see our spouse come to know you more. Help the husbands in this room to love their wives sacrificially. To love them well, to pray for them. To lay down their lives for them. Help the wives in this room to love their husbands faithfully and earnestly, believing in them as they pray them and love them towards you. God, be with the marriages in this room. We praise you for the good ones that reflect you. We lift up the hard ones and ask that they would reflect you. And we ask that you would be with us as we go from here. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Michelle Maskin. to be one of the pastors here. And sorry about that. This is the second part or the third part of our series called Ascent, where we're focusing on the 15 Psalms, Psalm 120 to Psalm 134 in the book of Psalms that are meant to be used as your family takes its pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And so these particular 15 Psalms in a book with 150 Psalms are really important and central to life growing up in Israel. And so we thought it would be good to take some time and focus on them for us and see what we can learn from these Psalms of Ascent as we journey towards God ourselves. Last week I talked about repentance. Mikey, those are all online. You can listen to those whenever you'd like. I talked about repentance and how that's always, repentance is always the first step in a journey towards God. This week, I'm looking at Psalm 126 that Michelle just read for us very well about joy. And I picked this because I think I'm the perfect person to give a sermon on joy, right? Like if you guys were out to dinner with some friends who didn't go to Grace and they said, describe, give me three words that you think best describe your pastor. 95% of you in the top three would have joyful somewhere. I'm pretty sure of it, right? There's giggles because I think that there are some misconceptions around joy and what it is. I think sometimes we can think of somebody who's joyful, and it just means that they're exuberant. It just means that they're bubbly and they're happy all the time. But we don't realize that that could be masking a deep anxiety that they're trying to counter with and they're not actually a deeply joyful person. And so I was talking with Jen about this idea, about, Jen is my wife if y'all don't know us, about joy and what it is and how we define it. And I actually saw a clip that helped me think of it a little bit. It was just a quick clip of Jerry Seinfeld on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show. And I showed it to Jen and I showed it to Aaron Winston and to Carly. And it's of Seinfeld and he's talking about vacations and complaining about stuff like he always does. And he goes, but at one point he looks at Jimmy and he goes, I'm very happy. I'm a happy guy. I'm very, I hate everything. And that makes me happy. I'm, I'm perfectly happy hating everything all the time. And I told them like, I feel so seen. This makes, I love this. I'm a very happy guy. I love, and then he goes, he goes, but I do like to complain about things, and that's something I do enjoy. And I was like, yes, this is my guy. So I think joy comes in all shapes and sizes, and I was asking Jen, when you think of someone who's joyful, what do you think? And she actually said Jimmy Fallon, and because he's bubbly and exuberant and yada, yada, yada. And I said, I don't know. I don't think, that's not what I think of. And she said, what do you think of? And I know he's going to hate me for saying this, and I'm very sorry. But I think of Ron Torrance when I think of someone joyful. And if you don't know Ron yet, you will. If you come back three times, he will know your name. I promise you he will. He's got some more years under his belt than me. But whenever I talk to Ron, whether it's during the week or on a Sunday morning, I always leave that conversation a little bit happier and a little bit more encouraged than I was when I entered that conversation. And he exudes for me the type of joy that we want to think about this morning. So as we seek to think about it, understand it, learn about it, we should probably together define it. The problem with defining joy in a sermon on joy is that our definition needs to come from the Bible. It shouldn't come from me. However, when I search the scriptures for a clear definition of joy, the Bible is quiet on that. It's not quiet about the topic of joy, but it is silent on giving us a direct explanation of what it is and how we can best understand it. So instead it just talks about it and it brings it up and it points us to it and it says that God desires it from us and it says that God seeks to make us joyful and shows us the benefits of joy, but it doesn't define it. And so we are left to define it on our own. So I'm going to offer you my best definition of joy. And if you don't agree with me or you think it's somehow incomplete, that's okay. You add your own stuff too. The important part is that we have a common understanding of the foundations of it. So here's how we're going to define joy this morning. Joy is a state of happiness fueled by gratitude. Joy is a state of happiness fueled by gratitude. So it's not a fleeting moment of happiness. This is important. I thought about words like foundational and unimpeachable, but those seem too cumbersome in a clear definition that I wanted you guys to kind of remember a little bit. So it's a state of happiness. It's not an experience of happiness. It's not a brush with happiness or a feeling of happiness. It's a state that we exist in, just kind of this simmering happiness, positivity, joy. And it is fueled, and this is important,'s fueled by gratitude. Joy is always fueled by gratitude. It has to be. When you think about it, when you think about the things that make you joyful, you're thinking of things for which you are grateful. And this psalm maps it out for us very clearly. It shows us, they model for us how we arrive at joy. Those first two verses, I don't know if you paid attention to them when they were being read, but this is what they said. When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion. So there was a time in the past when they were not doing well, where the people were not doing well, where they were living, they were living in poverty, they were living in oppression, and they were scattered. And then God restored their fortunes. He built the nation back up. And now there are joyful people with songs in their hearts. And the other nations around them looked onto them and said, wow, they are really blessed. And so this joy that they're experiencing comes out of abundance. Joy is always the product of abundance. If we want to talk about the joy that we experience from God, it is always the product of abundance. Think about a time in your life in which you've been exceedingly joyful. Think about some of the happiest moments of your life. Think about a season where you were just deeply content and you look back and you go, man, that may be the sweetest season of my life. I don't think of seasons for me as much as I think of moments. I know that for me, anytime I have my arms around both of my kids voluntarily, and we're not wrestling on the bed, anytime I sit there with that long enough, I start to tear up. Because we'll be watching, I'll be watching football and sometimes I'll want to come watch it with me, which really makes me tear up because that's just great. This is the perfect, the absolute perfect two minutes right here. Because I'm watching my favorite thing and I'm hugging my favorite people. And sometimes we're watching TV and one of them will climb up on my lap and then the other one will want to do that too. And I just completely tune out. I check out of whatever's on the television and just kind of sit there. And I just feel so much joy. Why do I feel that? Because I'm existing in this abundance right now. Right? I remember, this is so cheesy, but it's true. Jen plays the piano a little bit, not a lot of it. And don't get any ideas, she'll never ever play it for you, ever. You will never hear her play the piano. But she plays it, and sometimes she'll play the old hymns like Great is Thy Faithfulness, and those are my favorite. And whenever she plays the piano, I always tell her, that's my favorite sound in the world. I love you filling the house with the sound of this piano because I know it brings her peace and joy and I love it too. And I think it was last Christmas. In the lead up to last Christmas, Jen was at the piano and I was standing next to her and she was playing Oh Holy Night. And then she and I just started singing Oh Holy Night. That's my favorite Christmas song. It's my favorite song, just in general. And Lily knew some of the words, so she started singing it too. And it was this moment of abundance. And then here's what I did that makes me a crazy softie, is I spun it forward. Because I think that the house that we're in now, Lord willing, and the creek Don't Rise, is the one that we're going to be in for a long time. And so I think our kids are going to come home from college to this house. And I would anticipate, if God grants it and is good to us in this way, that they might one day bring grandkids into this house, and we might get to celebrate holidays in this house. And our piano is in the dining room. And so I just, for whatever reason, I let myself start to imagine 15, 20 years down the road when the family's coming in and Jen and whatever her weird mama, Mimi nickname is, is playing piano. And the whole family's singing along. And I just started to, like, I started getting emotional. I started to tear up. And Jen's like, what's the matter with you? I was like, I really don't want to tell you because I'm going to sound like a loon. But when we think about the moments of joy in our life and the pockets of joy in our life, I think we can conclude that the joy is always produced by abundance. It's always in moments and in times when we realize we have these amazing blessings in our lives. And it reminds me of a verse that I like to remind you guys of often, one that we have on our wall in the house, John 1 16, where it says, but from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From the fullness of God, from all of his goodness, he bubbles over grace and goodness, and it spills down onto us, and we are happy recipients of this grace and goodness. And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From his fullness, we have all been blessed in ways in which we don't deserve. I love Tom Sartorius, one of our elders and greeters. If you ask him, hey, Tom, how you doing? I guarantee you, better not deserve every time. That's kind of an acknowledgement of this. From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. And so one of the things I would just stop and point out to you is if you're not experiencing joy, if you don't think of yourself as a joyful person, if you don't think of yourself as existing in a state of happiness that is fueled by gratitude, maybe what's happening is we're running short on fuel. And it's not because we don't have enough. It's because we don't notice what we do have. We're like my son John when he goes to the store. Whenever John goes to the store, the Dollar Tree or whatever it is, if he sees animals, little plastic animals in a bin, in a bag, on their own, if he sees animals, he wants the animals. He has to have them. He loves animals, and he wants them. Now this, I've been complimentary of Jen. Jen is a sucker. I never buy that kid animals. 100% of the time, they go to the store. He comes back with another gorilla, and I'm like, what are we doing here? Because he loses his mind if he can't get the animals, and it's easier at the Dollar Tree just to spend $1.25. Go he'd go, here, kid, shut up. Here's a monkey. Now let's keep going. So she does it to keep the peace. I get it. But he's so concerned with this animal that he wants that he forgets that we have literally a whole bookshelf full, like in cubbies, filled with plastic animals that will never see the light of day again until we throw them away. Ever. If any of you just had kids, because we've got a lot of you right now, if you need animals, we got you. I think so often in life, we can move through life like John moves through the Dollar General. And we have a house full of blessings. But we just want the one that we don't have. And I think that if we would just stop and spend some time being grateful for the abundance that we see in our lives, that we would by, be a more joyful people. And so I think in many cases, we might not be experiencing joy because we're just not looking around at the abundance that does exist in our life. And so that's where we should start. And if we're not experiencing joy, we probably want it, right? We probably all want to live a joyful life. I know that this is true because if you ask anybody from any walk of life, no matter their religion, I can at least speak to Western culture, what is your top hope for yourself? And more interestingly, what's your biggest goal for your children? What do you want your children to experience? What do you want you to experience? What do you pray about for your children to experience? Somewhere in the top three, unlike your answer about me being joyful, this is actually legitimate, sometime in the top three, you're going to say happiness. What do you want for your children? I want them to be happy. I want them to be content. What do you want for your future? I want to be happy. I want to be content. The whole world defaults to a pursuit of joy. Every commercial you see tells you, if you buy this product, you will experience a more joyful life. If you vote for this candidate, usually the way it goes is you will experience a less joyful life. Right? We are drugged up. We are counseled up. We are self-helped up. Every facet of our society tells us to pursue this happiness. And here it is sitting right in the Bible where we get this psalm of joy. And we need to realize that joy is fueled by abundance. Joy is given to us by abundance, fueled by gratitude for that abundance. But we ought to be asking the question by now, if I'm not experiencing joy, how do I get it? If it's a little bit more than just looking around at my life and seeing what's there, how do I pursue this joy? How do I pursue this happiness that God offers? I think that there's a great answer for this that Eugene Peterson offers himself. He says in the chapter on joy, he says, joy is the verified, repeated experience of those involved in what God is doing. Joy is the verified, repeated experience of those involved in what God is doing. I want you to do this with me. Think of the most joyful person you know or the most joyful people you know. Think of who would come to mind in your life when you're asked that question. People who seem to exist in a state of happiness that's fueled by gratitude. Once you have them in your mind, let me make two bets about this person. The first thing I bet is true about them is that they have said they have sacrificially served others with their lives they are people who have spent their lives serving others I bet you they are people who have spent their lives getting involved in what God is doing and going where Jesus is growing I bet you the most joyful people that you know whoever it is you're thinking of I bet you that they have a long track record of getting involved where God is involved, of serving Christ and pursuing him and living their life for him. And I would bet that they have personally sacrificed. They've allowed some pain and some pain points to come into their life so that they could serve Christ well, so that they could serve others well. I bet you the most joyful person you know is also a servant of Jesus who sacrifices for others. See, we think that the road to joy, this is what the world would have us believe, that the road to joy is paved in pleasures. That if we just go from pleasure to pleasure, from experience to experience, from good time to good time, from enjoyable thing to enjoyable thing, if we can just stack together enough fun, enough pleasure, enough relaxation, enough good times, enough luxury, enough things, then eventually we'll arrive at joy. And the path to joy is not paved in pleasure, it's paved in sacrifice. Joy is the verified, repeatable experience of those who are involved in the work that the Lord is doing. So for one, that joyful person you're thinking of, I bet that they are a servant of Christ. The other thing I would bet about them is that their life has not been void of tragedy. I'd be willing to bet whoever you're thinking of has walked through some dark days. I'd be willing to bet that whoever you're thinking of has reasons, good reasons in their life to maybe not be joyful all the time, and yet their joy persists. We do not get to joy by pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. That's not the pathway there. The pathway is through Christ. And when we pursue Christ and what he has for us, what we find is that he produces an abundance of joy in us that cannot be touched. I think of it this way. So we do not pursue joy. We said, how do we pursue joy? How do we pursue this abundance that God offers us? We don't. We don't pursue joy. We pursue Christ. We don't pursue joy. We pursue Jesus. This falls in line with this other verse I like to mention that I have on the wall of my office that I think is really applicable here. John 10 10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I've come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says, do you know that I want you to have the best life possible? Do you know that I want you to, to, to, to experience an abundance of joy? Do you know that I want you to experience the overflow of the Father and His goodness? Do you know that I want you to have the best life possible? And I love this verse because if we just decide to trust it, we'll never mess up again. Anytime in our life we mess up, we sin, we develop a bad habit, we make a bad decision, we behave poorly in a situation, we allow something into our life that we know we shouldn't allow into our life, but we keep it there. All we're doing is saying, Jesus, I don't trust you to bring about the best life for me. I'm going to figure this one out on my own. But Jesus tells us, the path to joy is through me. The path to happiness that we want for ourselves and for our children that all of society seeks after every day in every way. The path there is through Jesus. So we do not pursue joy. We pursue Christ. And when we pursue Christ and he blesses us with an abundant life, and we have to be careful about this because I am not talking about financial abundance. I'm talking about the kind of abundance that actually makes you joyful. I'm talking about blessings. I'm talking about your kid coming up to you and giving you a hug when you didn't expect it. I'm talking about a wealth of relationships and friendships that you have in your life that when you think about it, you're just so grateful for. I'm talking about the years of marriage when you've been married 25, 30, 40 years and you look at this person that, gosh, we haven't always gotten along and sometimes I don't know that I would choose you every day, but man, we love each other deeply for what we've walked through. That type of richness. That type of abundance. That's what Jesus offers us. So when we pursue Christ, we can proclaim with the Israelites like they do in Psalm 126, verse 3. I love this proclamation. The Lord has done great things for us. We are filled with joy. The Lord has done great things for us. We are filled with joy. And Eugene Peterson's the message. He translates it. We are a nation of joyful people. We are a joyful nation. And so if we can look around at the abundance that we have in our life and allow that to fuel gratitude within us, then that will fuel joy. And if we can pursue Christ, then by that pursuit of Christ, the byproduct is joy. So the first two things I would say to you today, if you're not experiencing joy in your life, check those two things. How's your gratitude doing? How grateful are you for the abundance that you have in your life? And then how's your pursuit of Christ coming along? Are you devoting your life to him and serving him? Are you getting involved in the things that God is involved in? If you'll do those two things, I promise you God will move you in this inexplicable way towards joy, and you will be able to proclaim with the Israelites that we are a people of joy. Now, here's what I also know about joy. There are some who are in this room, who are listening online, who will listen, who are absolutely not feeling like they're in a season of abundance right now. As a matter of fact, they're feeling like they're in a season of scarcity. And the reality of life is that sometimes life is hard. And sometimes the days are dark. And sometimes it's heavy. And so I know that for some of you, as you listen to me go on and on about joy, you're like, yeah, dude, this ain't for me because that's not what I'm feeling right now. If I had to try to preach this sermon to my wife in the wake of the loss of her father without this last part, she would have scoffed at the whole thing and swept it aside, and I wouldn't blame you if that's what you wanted to do so far. But sometimes life can be heavy, and if that's your season, I understand. This week was a little bit of a heavy week for Jen and I, just in the things that were happening in the lives of the people around us, not in our lives. But in a 24-hour period, we got news that a mama who we had been praying for since she started trying to get pregnant, there were struggles there, and so we joined with them and we prayed with them and we were elated when they were pregnant. We'd been praying the whole time. She went into labor. We were very excited, but a C-section had to get involved. And it was frantic there for a minute a minute and it was scary and I spent some uneasy moments with her mama and daddy in the waiting room of the hospital who were concerned about their baby that was heavy everyone's happy and healthy there then the next morning we learned that a really good friend of ours, someone that we hold dear, was going to need to be hospitalized for psychological issues that have not been experienced before by this individual. It's a scary thing. There's a heavy load on her family. And then just a few minutes after getting off that phone call, we found out that another friend of ours was separated from her husband because her husband let his family down. And she doesn't really know how to walk through this. And then that day, I'm on the phone with my buddy who's in marriage counseling with his wife and they were asked hey his name's Dan it doesn't matter you don't know Dan do you think you could find a path to love for Beth and he said yeah I think I do I think there's a version of her that I really love and I'd like. And she said, Beth, do you think that there's a path to love for Dan? For you to love Dan? And she goes, no. I think that ship sailed years ago. They have four kids. He might be thinking about divorce. She might leave him. Sometimes we have seasons like that. Sometimes we have heavy seasons of pain. And when somebody gets up and starts talking to us over and over again about joy, we're like, yeah, man, not for me. I'm not buying that this morning. So if that's your season, or you know somebody in that season, this psalm actually addresses that. It finishes with this in mind, that we don't all just look around at hyperabundance all the time. Sometimes life is hard. So this is how we pursue joy in moments when we don't think we're having it at all because life is heavy. Verse four, restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the Negev. Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them. I don't know if you picked it up, because I didn't. I just saw it as kind of flowery language and imagery. But Eugene Peterson points out in the chapter this idea that the pain and the sorrow that we're experiencing, the heaviness and the worry that we have, those are seeds. Those are seeds of future joy. And what we're supposed to do, what they pray here in this psalm is, God, when I'm experiencing pain, when I'm experiencing hurt, I'm going to hand my pain over to you. I'm going to trust you with it. I'm going to give you my suffering and my despair and my pain, and I'm going to trust you with it. And I know that one day, eventually, if I trust you with it and I walk towards you, that you will reap for me a great harvest of joy from this seed of pain. And I think it's a beautiful idea that even at our darkest and even at our lowest and even when life is the most difficult, we can take the pain that we're experiencing, we can see it as a seed of future joy that we hand God and say, I don't know how you're going to turn this into joy, but I'm going to trust you to do it here. And we walk as faithful pilgrims on our journey waiting for God to bring about joy. It reminds me of what I do find helpful to say to people who are experiencing great tragedy. The best advice I ever received on how to talk to people who are going through incredible pain was from my pastor growing up. And his advice was, Nathan, don't say anything stupid. Okay? Thank you. What's stupid? Stupid are the empty words that don't really help. Stupid is when we miscarried our first child and somebody meaning well said, I guess God needed another angel. That's dumb. That's not helpful. So we'd be very careful about what we say in those moments. But one thing that I do think is helpful is when someone's hurting very much and they say, this sucks. I don't see how I'll be happy again. I don't see how I'm going to get through this. This hurts so much. I hate this. The one thing I found helpful to say there is to say, yeah, today stinks. Today's the worst. And you're allowed to hurt. And however you respond to this hurt is the right way to respond. No one can tell you what to do here, but here's what I also know. Not every day will feel like today. Not every day will hurt as bad as today. I know right now you can't see a light at the end of the tunnel. You're not even sure if light's going to be there, but one day you'll wake up and you'll see light. And one day you'll wake up and you'll be closer to it. And one day you'll wake up and you'll be in the light again. So let today be what today needs to be. And just know that not every day will be like this one. I think it's the same idea from Psalm 126. You think of your pain and your suffering as seeds of joy to be planted with God and allow him to reap a harvest of joy. So our job in pain and in trial, if we're here today and we're just feeling low, and it's not because we don't have abundance, it's not because we haven't been pursuing crisis because something really cruddy is going on and it's heavy on me and I'm having a hard time finding joy from here. Here's what you do. So your seeds of pain with God and wait expectantly for him to reap a harvest of joy. If you're hurting, sow that seed of pain with God and wait expectantly for him to reap for you a harvest of joy. So this morning, we're talking about a thing that everybody wants. Everybody that you meet, everybody that you see just wants what this is offering. They just want joy. They just want happiness. That's what everybody wants. And so in this psalm, we learn about it. We see about it. We learn how to get it. So here's my encouragement to you. If you are not in a season of pain right now, if life is pretty easy, pretty good, you're in good steady flow, nothing really bad's happening, but you wouldn't call yourself a joyful person, you're not in a state of happiness that's fueled by gratitude, two things for you. Check your gratitude dial. How's that doing? Check your Jesus dial. How much am I pursuing him? And if those are both turned way down, then it's no wonder that you're not experiencing exuberant joy. If you are in pain, plant the seeds of that pain with God and walk daily expecting that one day he will turn that sorrow into wonderful, exuberant joy because we serve a faithful God and he wants that abundant life for you. So my prayer for you is that you would be a joyful people and that together grace can say the Lord has done great things for us and we are filled with joy. Let's pray. Father, we thank you that you want us to experience joy. We thank you that you desire for us to live in abundance that's been poured out by you. God, I pray that you would give us an unshakable, unimpeachable joy out of a sense of gratitude for what you've done for us. God, give us eyes to see the blessings that maybe we miss. Give us ears to hear the good news that maybe sometimes we tune out. And God, for those of us who are hurting, those of us who are in pain, for those around us who hurt, I pray that they would hand that pain over to you, trusting that you would produce from that an unmeasurable joy. And God, I pray that we would be such a joyful people that those that we encounter would mark us for it, would sense it from us, and that through us would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of you simply by the joy that we exude. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

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