Sermons tagged with Family

Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. One of the things I... Welcome and all the things. Thanks for coming online, whatever. One of the things I really like about getting to be the pastor at Grace, one of the pastors at Grace, is just how familial we are. We just feel like a family to me. I don't know how we feel to you, but that's how I feel. And one of the things that reinforced that this morning is we moved, some of y'all will notice that we moved the offering around. So we did the offering a little bit different and we tried to pass it. As we're doing it, two of my friends who I don't want to impugn, so I'll just call them Carter and Liz, looked at me. I turned around. They looked at me, and they're like, this is weird. Why are we doing this? And I had to go around and talk to them. Jen goes, where are you going? I said, just give me a minute. And I go around, and I'm like, listen, one of the things that Gibby and I have noticed about the service is that at the end of the service, once I'm done saying what I'm going to say, and then we sing, when someone comes back up here and goes, y'all sit down for just a minute, the whole room goes, oh, Jesus. Nobody wants to sit down for just a minute. We're done. We're ready to go. So we're trying to figure it out. And so I said, just give us a couple of weeks. Like I'm explaining to them in real time why we're doing this. And once I explained it, they were like, okay, that makes sense. We'll give it a couple of weeks and we'll, we'll let you know. So I look forward to the review, you two anonymous women over there. But that is what, one of the things I love about Grace. Last week, we launched into our series called A Letter to Rome, Painting a Picture. And I told you guys last week, and I mean this, and this has come up in very fun conversation too. There's different people that have different feelings about West Wing, some positive, some negative. But I told you guys last week that this was going to kind of be a West Wing series, meaning episode two is really not going to make as much sense to you as episode one if you haven't seen episode one. So my encouragement remains, and I never do this because I'm certainly not going to tout the values of my own sermons. I'm not going to do that. I'm never going to say, hey, you need to listen to last week. That was great. Like I won't, I've never done that. I won't do that. That feels gross. But what I will say is you do need to listen to last week just so you can keep up with this week if it matters to you. So I hope that you'll carry along. Last week in Romans 1, we kind of established those two things. First, this is going to be a different series where it's going to build week to week. Second, more importantly, the theme of Romans 1, what Paul was driving at, we capture at the end of the chapter. And I'm actually just, I'm just going to read it to you by way of reminder. This is how he ends the chapter because he, he greets them. And then he says, and this is where he spent a lot of time last week. God has revealed himself in nature. So no man is without excuse. God's God's revealed himself in such a way that we can all respond to him. Everybody who's ever lived, even someone who's born in a country where they never hear the name of Jesus before living and dying, even they have been revealed. God has revealed himself to them and they are held responsible for their response to that revelation. In the conclusion of Romans 1, he says this, and this is a tough passage, but this is where he lands the plane, and this is where we ended last week, so it's where I pick up this week. He says in verse 28, furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, this is the people to whom God has revealed himself. So God gave them over to a depraved mind so that they do what ought not be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant, and boastful. They invent ways of doing evil. They disobey their parents, Davis. They have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy, although they know God's righteous decrees that those who do such things deserve death. They not only continue to do these very things, but they also approve of those who practice them. So this is a condemnation of society, essentially saying, and those are harsh words, but essentially saying, we are depraved. We are our own lords. We do what we think we should do. And what I said last week is this was true in 65 AD, around which this letter was written. And it is true now. This remains true of us 2,000 years later. That when left to our own devices, we will rebel from God and reject Him. Now, here's what's important. The Jewish mind responds to this with their heritage. So here's what to know about the letters in the New Testament. To whom are they written? We were talking about this in my Bible study on Tuesday morning, which if you're a girl, you can't come. If you're a dude, you can come. If you're a girl, you could come. It would just be weird. Okay. But 6.30 Tuesday morning, we meet right here. And it's my favorite hour of the week. Besides every minute that I get to spend with Jim. Besides that, that's my favorite hour of the week. And we were talking about Thessalonians, and someone said, to whom is this written? Is this written to Jews or Gentiles? It seems it's written to Gentiles. And something that the New Testament letters have in common, so there's the Pauline epistles, Paul's letters, and the general epistles, the general letters that are not written by Paul, but they're still written to people, they're still written to churches. All of them have in common this fact that was true in the ancient world. Most of the churches, Rome, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Colossae, all of them were founded by Jewish people who, because of the diaspora, they found common community. But then they began to add Gentiles to their church. And so when a letter is written, almost always, and I can't think of any exceptions, it's written first to the Jew and then to the Gentile. It's written first to the Jew, and this is really important to understand. It's written first to the Jew and then to the Gentile, but this brings up one of the fundamental tensions in the New Testament. You cannot understand your Bible without understanding this tension. The fundamental tension of the New Testament is for the Jewish believer to say, okay, we accept Jesus as the fulfillment of the promise to our father Abraham. We don't know all the ramifications of that, but we're open to learning them. I mean, place yourself in 40 AD when there's not 2,000 years of liturgy and history and theology, and you're trying to figure this faith out. What we don't think of enough, I think, as Christians is this is not a new religion. This is a continuation. Where you and I sit is a continuation and a confluence and a completion of what began as the Jewish faith. Now, I would not refer to the faith that Abraham had as Jewish. I would refer to it as faith. So do we have faith. It's the same. And if we read Hebrews, we find that to be absolutely true. And as we read Romans, we will find that to be true as well. But here's what we need to understand. We think of, I believe, as Christians, and Americans probably, we think of the Jews as another religion. They're another faith. The Jews are Mormon, They're Buddhist. They're Hindu. They're Muslim. We're closely tied, but they're different. No, I don't want to get into delineating the details of that, but here's what I want us to understand. What we would call the Christian faith is simply a continuation and completion of that faith that began. And in that faith, here's what we need to understand. In that faith, they had laws. They had traditions. They had things that they did all the time. They had ways that they grew up. They had gender roles. They had responsibilities. They tithed. They had festivals every year. One of the worst series I've ever done at Grace was when I made us go meticulously, you remember, through the festivals of the Jewish calendar. I made us do that one September. If you weren't here then, count your blessings, okay? Because I made us do that every Sunday. What a mistake that was. And at the time I was like, oh, this is so great. Anyways, I'm not going to get into it, but I regret it. But I made us do it. Kristen, what's the score? Overtime? Okay, overtime. Hey, no one else needs to say anything. Y'all shouldn't be checking your phone. It's her responsibility. We delegated this to her. Everybody else, you pay attention. Liz, that's twice. Gosh, I've totally, what was I talking about, Aaron? Juice? Yeah, okay. I got it. Thanks. Would y'all be quiet? I'm trying to start back. Gratia, we're too familial now, okay? Everyone needs to calm down. We need to take this more seriously. No, but here's my point, is they had all of their traditions, and those traditions weren't based on their preferences. They were based on what they believed to be law, what they believed God was preaching to them, what they believed God told them to do. So they're living out their traditions wasn't a matter of this is just how we do it in our family or how we do it in our country or how we do it in our culture. This is what God demands of us. So when they would have these festivals, they did it out of a sense of duty and ought and righteousness. When they had house rules, when they had gender roles, they didn't do it out of a sense of preference. They did it out of a sense of duty and ought and righteousness. And it's really difficult for us to think about this tension because what they were tasked with, and I don't think we can respect this enough, what they were tasked with as Jews was, hey, this whole new influx of people is going to become a part of your faith and you need to figure out how to integrate them. That's a huge tension in the New Testament. But that was what they were facing. There's going to be a whole influx of people into your heritage and your faith and you need to figure out how to integrate them. And what we find a lot in Paul's letters is him addressing this tension where the Jewish people, the Jewish congregation, rightly so, not to their fault, just it makes sense, are going, what do they need to do? What should we require of the Gentiles? They need to be circumcised. That at the the very least, needs to happen. That, which is, if we made that the measure of conversion now, we'd have a lot fewer converts, I think. But that's what they said then. They need to be circumcised. They need to follow our rules. They need to do what we do. And I bring up circumcision because that's what the Jews clung to as proof that they were reconciled to God, which is a fundamental idea in Romans chapter 2. Because the Jewish mind says, yes, everything that you said about humankind in Romans chapter 1 is true. All of that stuff, that hard group of verses that I read, that they have no love, they have no mercy, they slander and all the things that's accusatory of humankind. The Jewish mind goes, yeah, but I'm saved. That would be our words. Yeah, but I'm circumcised. Yeah, but I'm Jewish. Yeah, but I have my heritage. And so what we need to understand is the Jews believed they were reconciled by their heritage. And I'm intentionally using that word reconciled because in Christendom and in Christianity, we tend to use the word saved. I'm saved. Saved to what, from what? I don't think that's the most helpful word. I think the most helpful word is reconciled. Because of my sin, because of my rebellion, I have created a chasm between God and I. And now, if I want to spend eternity in his presence, I have to find out how to reconcile myself to him, how to fix that gap, how to close it, how to make things okay. And God in his goodness, and this is what we'll find in the rest of Romans, said, you can't reconcile yourself. So I'm going to send my son to reconcile you for you. But the Jewish mind says, well, because I'm circumcised, which is to them a sign that you are committed to following the law of God. Which basically says, well, because I'm born Jewish and because I follow the rules, I'm in. That's what's reconciling me to God. And the point of Romans chapter 2 is to tell the Jewish people, no, you're not. It is not circumcision that reconciles you. It's actually this in Romans 2 verse 12. This, I think, in my opinion, although it seems obscure, would be what I would look at as the summary verse of the idea that Paul is trying to communicate in Romans chapter 2, which is this. All who sin apart from the law will perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. Now, I know that feels obscure, but here's the point. The Jewish mind says, because I follow the law, I'm good. I'm reconciled. Everything that God said, everything that Paul said about the condition of humanity doesn't apply to me because I'm reconciled to God because I follow the law. And Paul says, no, you're not. The Gentiles can be held accountable for the law, too. They respond to it in their heart. They follow it just like you do. You just have the blessing of greater knowledge of it, but it's not what saves you. It's not what reconciles you. It's not what brings you back to God. And the point of chapter 2 is to help that Jewish mind reconcile itself with the fact that their heritage does not redeem them. It is their faith. And that's what we have to learn from it too. So let's backtrack a little bit and apply that to our thinking. So the first thing I would do as I'm preaching through, and this is one of the things I'm trying to do in this series, is just do justice to the chapter. One of my favorite verses in this book is this here, and I'll get to it. So he's just, we've just read, remember with me, if you will, the finishing verses of chapter one that I read at the beginning that accuse us greatly of being, theologians would say, totally depraved. Here's what he follows with as he begins chapter two, and we land on a verse that I'm about to use, okay? Thanks. Shut up, you're a hypocrite too. That's what he's saying. Hey, pipe down. You're a hypocrite too. You do these things too. So maybe take it easy. That's what he's saying in these first three verses. And then he follows it with this, and this is the one I love. Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, forbearance, and patience, not realizing that God's kindness is intended to lead you to repentance? Here's why I like that verse. We have this, I think, sometimes picture of God that he sits in heaven and he judges us. And we disappoint him. And he's angry with us. And if we were, sometimes I think about, if I were to see God face to face right now, what would his countenance towards me be? And most often I answer that question with disappointment. Because if you were my God and you watched how I served you, wouldn't you be disappointed in me too? So I just assume that he's disappointed. I don't know what you think God's countenance is towards you. But I think most of us think it's probably negative. He's angry. He's disappointed. He's wrathful. But what's true is that that's not true. He loves us. He loves you. He loves you in this moment as much as is possible for anyone to ever be loved. No matter what you've done, no matter what the state of your repentance is, no matter what you brought in here, God loves you fiercely and absolutely. And so this verse reminds us of that because despite that love, all of us have some repenting to do. Don't we? All of us have something in our lives we need to fix. We need to apologize for. We need to own. We need to be better. We need to turn. Remember, repentance isn't just agreeing. Confession is agreeing with God about our sin. Repentance is to turn and walk away from it, to turn the other direction. All of us have some repenting to do, especially Charlie Healy. I can see you right now. All of us have, which is, you're a Panthers fan. All of us have some repenting to do. But I think that sometimes when we think about repentance, we believe that we need to respond to this God that's angry with us and coalesce to him. And that's really not the way that God has postured himself. We are told it's your kindness that leads us to repentance. And this verse, I told Jen right before I got on stage, I said, hey, I'm going to talk about you a little bit. And she goes, oh gosh, what? And I told her and she was like, okay. Arguing with Jen is like kicking a puppy. You can, don't grow too, I don't kick puppies, Elaine. I'm stubborn. I don't know if that's easy for you to believe, but I am. I'm hard-headed. I like to, I actually, I'm one of these weird people. I was talking with my friend Emil about this this week. I'm one of these odd people that I like conflict. One of the reasons I watch, I love West Wing is because they yell at each other the whole time. And I think to myself, I wish I could work in an environment like that where I didn't have to try to be so nice all the time. I wish I could just give it full throttle. I like conflict. When I come at you, I want you to come back at me. And here's why God blessed me with my wife, because she will never do that. If I go at her, she's like, you're right. I'm sorry. And I'm like, no, no, no, that's not how this is supposed to go. So then what ends up happening when we have disagreements, which are scant, they never happen. And they're very surfacy and they don't matter a lot when they do. But when we have disagreements, also I'm kidding. When we have disagreements, it's her kindness that brings me to repentance. It's the fact that if I just say my piece, she goes, yeah, that makes sense. Okay. And then I'm the one talking more going, no, no, no, that doesn't make sense. I'm actually sorry for this and this and this and this. And then I start to own all of the things that I should own. Then I start to take responsibility for my actions. And it's not because she told me to. It's not because she convinced me to. It's not because she got mad at me and argued with me. It's because she was kind and gracious and good. And in the face of that kindness and that goodness and that grace, my instinct is to go, okay, I'm sorry. Here's what I should do. This is how God's kindness leads us to repentance. I've said before, you will win every argument you ever get into with God. If you want to argue with God, you'll win. He will not insist upon you. You just don't want to win those arguments. You're wrong. He'll be gracious with you, and His kindness will lead you to your own repentance. Does that make sense? It's not God being hard on us that leads us to repent and follow him. It's his kindness and his disposition towards us and his love for us that makes us go, okay, okay, okay, I'm actually sorry. I'll do this different. I'll do this better. So I love that verse because we are reminded that it's God's kindness that leads us to repentance. Now I told you the Romans 2.12, that is, I think, the clarifying verse where it talks about the Jewish mind and what they have to do. But here's why I bring that up and I think it's important for us, is I think it's important for the American church to think about what do we believe reconciles us to God? What are we clinging to? This is actually the big question from Romans chapter two is what are you clinging to? What are you clinging for your reconciliation? As we think about this confrontation that Paul has with the Jewish people, and he says, hey, we're totally depraved. Everyone's sinful. And the Jewish mind goes, well, not me, because I'm a Jew. I follow the law. They cling to their heritage to reconcile them and solve this problem. I wonder about you, American church, when you hear that group of verses at the end of chapter one that talks about the state of humanity, what happens in your mind to excuse yourself from that? What happens in your mind to go, yeah, that's Paul talking about other people, not me. What are you clinging to? Because I heard a pastor named Alistair Begg, who has a Scottish accent, so everything he says sounds smarter and it's not fair, Say one time, if you were to show up at heaven and they were to ask you, why should we let you in? If your answer begins with me or I, then you don't understand. Because let me tell you what you should be leaning on for your reconciliation to God. This. Nothing you've done. It's not a prayer that you prayed when you were six. It's not getting sprinkled or dumped. It's not singing the songs. It's not coming to church. It's not reading your Bible and praying every day. All those things are good. But do you know what puts you in right standing before God? What happened here? And that's it. The conclusion of the story with Alistair Begg, and I'll do it in greater justice later, is he pretends that he's a person going to heaven. And they said, why should we let you in? And he says, I don't know. He just said that I could come. I didn't do anything. He just said I could be here. So I think it's important to stop and understand that the Jewish people looked at their heritage. The American church, we look at our rule following. We look at a prayer that we prayed. We look at things that we say or actions that we do or we lean on ourselves in different ways. But it's important to remember that, no, no, no, just like the Jews, the Jewish people in Rome, sometimes we can lean on things that are not actually reconciling us. And what reconciles us to God is the cross. Here's my last thought today. And then I'll wrap up because it's in chapter two, and I think it's important. At the end of chapter two, there's this statement, and I think it's a profound statement. I'm going to start reading in verse 21 because he's talking to the Jewish people. He says this, you then who teach others, do you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? You who say that people should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law as it is written? This is the point. God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you. This is a hard truth. And here's where it hits home for us. I'm going to do a sermon about this either the week after Easter or I'm going to do a four-part series in September about this point because I think it's important for us. And before I do it, Kristen, we just won. USA. Great. Perfect timing. Thank you, Kristen. Please put away your phone. That statement there, and this is just something for us to think about as church members, as church people. God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you, Paul says. Now, here's where that touches me. The American church, the public opinion of the American church is at an all-time low. People are leaving the church in droves. Kids are growing up in the church and not coming back. We, as a whole scale institution, are failing. And the church is seen as an agent of judgment, of wrath, of harm, not healing and not love. Now, I'm not going to tell you how I think the American church should position itself within our current culture because I think that's tricky. I might tell you later, but not today. But what I will point out is this statement, God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you, speaks to us. Jesus's name is resented amongst the unchurched because of us. Our tendency is to look at people who don't go to church, to look at people who don't have faith, and to blame them and to say, it's your fault. You don't want a Lord. You're not humble enough. You won't follow the rules. You can't get in line. And we kind of blame them for their lack of faith. And what this verse says and what it says to us is, no, no, no. It's our fault. It's the church's fault. And here's why I'm going to linger here for an entire Sunday or a series. Because I think, church, we need to own that. I think we need to own that fault. It is because of the church that Jesus' name is resented amongst the unchurched. It's not their fault, it's ours. So what do we do about it? Here's what I think we can do. I believe this with all my heart. It is what I would admit to you is the primary reason I continue to pastor at Grace. And don't go make more money and have better vacations and a nice mini van. Because I believe that the American church has gotten it wrong. But I also believe that with the people we have here, with the staff we have, excluding me, with the leadership we have, excluding me. We can get it right. And I think that we have an opportunity in this little corner of the kingdom to which God has entrusted us to restore people's faith in Jesus and restore people's faith in church. And I want to do that together. And we do that together by loving people well. And there's so much more to say about that. But I'll leave it there. I think we have a chance at grace to restore people's hope in what church can be and to do things the right way and for it to not be true of us that the Gentiles blaspheme God's name because of us. I think we can lead ourselves in that way. And I hope that we'll be on board with that moving forward. I'm going to talk more about this in the future. So as I finish, let me land the plane on Romans 2, what Paul is getting at, which is we're evil and we're sinful. We need to be reconciled with God. On what are you trusting for your reconciliation? Let me pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your word. Thank you for Romans and what it is. God, we pray that we would be led to repentance by your kindness, that we would trust in that and that we would see that. God, we pray that the Gentiles, that the people who don't know you, that the unchurched would not blaspheme you because of us, that they would not resent the name of your son because of us, but rather they would be drawn to you because of how we love and how we obey and how we repent that your kindness leads us to. Let us be a reflection of your love onto this world and let grace be a church that restores people's belief in what this can be. We pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

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

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

Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. Hey, who yelled that? Hey, Maker. Good morning to you, pal. Good to see you. I'm just going to keep this in my pocket and hope that works. This is Family Jammy Sunday. I love this Sunday. I love how festive everyone is. A couple thoughts about it. First of all, you may look at my good friend Steve Brown over here and think, dude, you're wearing a blazer. That's not very festive. In his defense, this is how he sleeps, okay? Those are his pajamas. He's being very festive today. I also think it's really funny that we got up and we showered and some of us did makeup and hair and everything and then we put pajamas back on. So I think what we should do next year is just all agree that those of us who are going to participate, because we like fun, are going to just go to bed in these pajamas. And however we wake up is how we come to church. Then we'll be a real family together, you know? Before I just dive into the sermon, thank you for coming to Grace. If you're watching online, thank you for watching wherever you are and whatever you may be doing. I want to stop and acknowledge this is our last Sunday together in 2025. And I think it's appropriate to pause and say that. This has been a good year for us. God has blessed us. He's blessed us with new people, with new families. I got a lot of comments. I can't remember if it was last Sunday or Sunday before last. They all blur together to me. Was it last Sunday that we did the kids sing? Was that last Sunday? I got a lot of comments from folks who don't have kids in the kids men that went, holy cow, we have so many kids. Yeah, we do. We have about 50 plus kids per week. It's amazing. God's been really good to us. We were able to announce that we're going to move forward with the building campaign or with actually getting the building out of the ground. We're in the campaign. We've got a little ways to go, but we've hit the gas and we're moving forward. And we hope that two years from now we'll be worshiping in the new building for Christmas. So that's really cool too. But God has been really good to us this year. So before I just finish, before we just finish the year without acknowledging it, would you stop and pray a prayer of gratitude with me and then we'll get into the sermon. Father, thank you so much for who you are and for what you've done. God, we like to say that we think you like this church. We don't know why you like us, but you seem to. And you always take care of us. And you always guide us down the right paths. And you always provide for us in unexpected ways. We thank you for the families that are here, for the leaders that are here, for the servants that are here, for the hearts that are here. And we pray that we would continue to do our best to be good stewards of the people you entrust us with. Thank you for 2025, for the year that it was. Thank you for walking with us through it in the high times and in the lows. And God, as we look forward to this next year, we pray that you would continue to walk with us as we attempt to continue to walk with you. In Jesus' name, amen. This morning in our series, Here We Go A-Wassling, where we're looking at different Christmas songs and finding the meaning within them so that hopefully it can imbue them with greater meaning for us as we sing them, not just this Christmas, but in the Christmases to come. This morning, we arrive at what I believe to be one of the most underrated Christmas songs ever. Now, when I call it this, I know that I run this risk. I may be up here trumpeting my own ignorance, and I'm aware of that. And you may be thinking, well, that's no different than any Sunday, Nate. And that is true, but those other Sundays, I might not be aware that I'm doing it. But this Sunday, I could be doing it because I could say this hymn or this Christmas song, and you'd be like, yeah, no kidding. That's one of my all-time favorites. But I think for many of us, this is not one that we think of a lot, which is Come Thou Long Expected Jesus. Now, I've heard some people mispronounce it, Come Thou Long Expectant Jesus. That's a different song, all right? That's not what we believe. Okay, so it's Come Thou Long Expected Jesus by his people. That's the song. Now, what you may not know about this song is that it was written in 1744 by a man named John Wesley. If you have a Methodist background, then you stand on the shoulders, or it was written by Charles Wesley, rather. You stand on the shoulders, thanks Liz, she's my walking, she's my real-time editor. Just, If there's giggles, I've said something incorrect, and I'll hear about it afterwards. When she walked in today, because I'm going to use it later in the sermon, I just grabbed her and I said, what's the name of the Grinch's dog? And she said, Max. And I'm like, all right, great, thanks. And she kept walking. It was written by Charles Wesley in 1744. John and Charles Wesley started the Methodist denomination, and it is said that over their lifetime, just allow me to be a history nerd for just a second, 9% of you will care about this, but those who do will deeply care. It's said that over their lifetime, they rode over 250,000 miles by horseback through the countrysides of England and the United States, traveling as itinerant preachers. They would go to a church in the morning, they would preach, then they would get on their horse and they would travel to the next town, they would get there and preach. And church just started when they showed up, which would be really nice, because I get here at about 5.45 on Sunday mornings, and if you could just all be here, we could get on with our days afterwards. The church just starts when the pastor shows up, but that's how it worked, and they would preach three, four, five times a Sunday and then make the circuit again, and that's how they spread the good news of Jesus Christ throughout the countryside. They have a really rich history of faith. John was more of the preacher, and Wesley was more of the poet, and he wrote hymns and songs and poems. And this, I believe, is one of his best ones. And it is absolutely dripping with scripture. It is so rich in scripture. It's so rich in scripture that as I've gone through these songs, I've tried to see like, what's the point of the song? Where is it taking us? And you might remember that a couple of years ago, we did a series called The Songs We Sing, where we looked at hymns, not Christmas songs, but hymns that we sing throughout the year. And we said, where are these coming from in Scripture? And generally, they're all coming from the same place, and you can kind of funnel towards the same direction. But as I got to this particular hymn, this particular Christmas song, it was difficult to pick one way to go because it's so replete with spiritual richness. You can tell that the man who wrote this knew his Bible incredibly well, and it drips out of the words. So rather than focusing our attention on one thing, what I want to do is walk through the way that we're going to sing it today, much to the chagrin of some. We're going to sing the first two verses and then a bridge, and we're going to talk about that bridge when we get there. But I want to go through it. I'm going to read through it line by line. Some of the lines are going to come up on the screen, and I want to show you where it comes from in Scripture. So here's what I'll say up front. Every point that I make this morning, every verse that I share, every insight that I have into a particular line may not be the one for you, but I hope that this morning you can grab on to something that will sit with you, that as you sing it, because I'm going to preach to the song. I'm not going to pray at the end of my sermon. The band's going to come up at a certain point. We have a carefully crafted cue. It's going to work perfectly, just like my microphone. And they're going to come up, and I'm going to step down, and we're going to go straight into song. The idea is for me to preach in such a way that we catch something of meaning that imbues this with something that stirs our hearts, and then we stand and we sing and we shout together in full-throated praise of God with a new appreciation of what this song is. So let's dive into it and look at the lyrics of the song. Of course, the first line that won't be on the screen is, Come thou long expected Jesus. That's what it says first. And so I want us to really understand what that is, what that means, why it's there. Come thou long expected Jesus. So let's put ourselves in the mindset of the contemporaries of Joseph and Mary. And someone we'll talk about in a few minutes, a man named Simeon. And John the Baptist. And Elizabeth. Let's put ourselves in the contemporary, in the place of the believers who lived at the same time as Joseph and Mary in the pregnant months and days before the Messiah was born. Now, they were Jews. And if you are a Jewish person, you are descendant from Abraham. And they were clinging to a promise that God made to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12. And if you've been here for any length of time, you've heard me say that you really cannot understand the Bible without having a proper appreciation and understanding of what happens in Genesis 12. A very quick breakdown of the beginning of the Old Testament. The first three chapters is the creation poem. That's how we got here. In the beginning, God created is the first sentence in the Bible, first stanza of the Bible. And that sets up the fundamental relationship for all of eternity. God is the creator and we are the created. God is the creator and we are the creation. And you'll see in those first three chapters, we have what's called the fall of man. And what was man's great sin? It was listening to his wife. But what was the wife's great sin? The wife's great sin and the man's was elevating themselves from creation to know, I want to be Lord like the Creator. I don't want to submit to Him. I want to be like Him. I can know right from wrong, and I can be my own Lord, and I can be my own King. That's the fundamental sin of all mankind. And anything that you have in your life that you might think of as sin or question as sin, the root of it is, nope, God, I'm not going to accept your standards and your lordship. I'm going to make myself lord of my own life. I'm going to put myself on equal playing field with you, on par with you, okay? So that's what the first three chapters address. Then after that, chapters 4 to 11 is what's called the prehistoric narrative. And we have two separate times where God is revealing himself to all of mankind in the exact same way, giving us the chance to respond to him in the exact same way. And one of them ends terribly with the flood in Genesis chapter 6. And then he says, okay, let's try again. Hamshim and Japheth, y'all go populate the earth. Those are the sons of Noah. Y'all go populate the earth. And then that leads to Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel, where they try to build a tower to reach the sky. Why? To be like God. And God says, I've given you your chance to come to me all at once by revealing myself to you all at once. Now the redemptive focus of God goes from the whole world down to one family, one man, Abraham from Ur of the Chaldeans, which we know is the Sumerian dynasty. And God tells Abraham, I want you to go to this place where I will show you. And so he gathers up all of his things and he leaves with his wife Sarai at the time, later to become Sarah. And they go to what we know as Israel, the promised land. And when they get there, this is the important part, God says to Abraham, I'm going to make you a promise. I'm going to enter into a covenant with you. We know it as the Abrahamic covenant. That I'm going to give you this land that you're on right now, Israel, the promised land. God's kept that promise. The Hebrew people have it. And then he said, your descendants are going to be like the sand on the shore and the stars in the sky. God's kept that promise. The Jewish diaspora sprawls throughout the entire globe. And then he said, and one of those descendants is going to bless the whole earth. This is the messianic promise. This is the promise to which the descendants of Abraham cling throughout the Old Testament. And the span of time between Abraham and the birth of Christ, where we pick it up in Matthew, the span of time between Genesis 12 and Matthew chapter 1 is about 2,000 years. So for 2,000 years, granddaddies and dads and grandmas and moms would pass on their faith through oral tradition to their children. And they would take them to the synagogue or to the temple. And the rabbis and the priests would teach their children about this Messiah, amongst other things, about this Messiah who is to come. He's known as the coming one. And there's prophecies about him. And every generation, they wait and they look. And every generation, they hope and they wonder, is Jesus going to come? Is God going to keep his promise? Are they going to send the promise? Is the promised Messiah coming? Is he born yet? Is he here yet? Every generation looks with anticipation for this Jesus. So when we arrive in Matthew chapter 1 and in Luke chapter 2, these famous birth stories, what we have is 2,000 years of patient waiting for the Messiah to arrive. So this opening line, come thou long expected Jesus, that is what it's referring to, is that 2,000 year wait. Now here's where we can relate to this. You don't have to use your imagination to put yourself there. Unless you became a Christian last week, you understand that one of our hopes and one of our expectations is that Jesus is going to come again. Is that the Messiah will come back. And that he will come crashing through the clouds and he will get us. And he will take us to heaven. And there will be a new heaven and a new earth and that we'll be a part of it. So we have the same angst and agony and waiting that later we're going to talk about in Romans chapter 8 that they did in Joseph and Moses and Jerry's time. We'll go with that. In their time. We have that same anticipation and waiting. And do you not think that in those 2,000 years that there were kids that grew up in houses where mom and dad told them Jesus is coming, a Messiah is coming, a Messiah is coming, and that those kids went, I don't think he is. I'm out. Just like in our families that happens. You don't think there's some attrition over time and then some revivals over time in ancient Israel. There were. And there are now. So we don't have to stretch to relate to this line, come thou long expected Jesus, which is where we start. Then after that, I love this line, born to set thy people free from what? From our fears and sins release us Scripture that more adequately, accurately, and completely describes this dynamic than in Romans 6, verses 6-11. So read with me these verses. Here's what Paul's saying there. He's saying that before you knew Jesus, you were like a blind person groping in the dark and you didn't know where to go. Before you knew Jesus, you had no choice but to sin. You were a slave to it. He says in another book that our righteous deeds are as filthy rags if we have no faith. It's this idea that if we don't know Jesus, that even the good things we do are so marred with motives and a rejection of his lordship that they can't be considered righteous. We cannot do righteous things aside from Christ. We have, therefore, no choice but to sin when we are apart from Christ. But what Paul tells us is when we are buried with him in death and raised to walk in newness of life, this picture of baptism that we find in Romans 5 and Romans 6, that we actually walk in this newness of life where we are no longer slaves to sin. And because we know Jesus and because he's cleansed us and because he's sanctifying us, making us more like him in character, we now have the option not to sin. That the good things we do can be in submission to the lordship of God and motivated by the right things and a love for other people because we have Jesus in our hearts and we're no longer a slaves to sin. So the things that we struggle with and that trip us up, the things that we're ashamed of, the things that hold us in shackles, the things that we don't want anybody to know, when Jesus comes, we are no longer a slave to those. So Charles Wesley says, from our sins, release us. That's what he means, we're no longer a slave to sin. But he also says, from our fears. From our fears, release us. And it's covered in that verse too. Any society you go to, anywhere in the world, the greatest fear of everyone in the room is death. Now, Jerry Seinfeld has this great joke where some of you guys know it. I heard some giggles. Where he says that he saw a study recently where the number one fear of people is public speaking. And that just below that was death. And his joke is that means if you go to a funeral, the person speaking would rather be in the coffin than giving the eulogy. That's a funny joke. It's also stupid. No one would rather actually do that. I've given plenty of eulogies. They're not that hard. You just read them. If you're literate and your mouth works, you can give a eulogy. So we all have this fear of death. And we have this fear of death because it seems so final. That when we watch someone we love wither away, and one day they close their eyes and they don't open them again, it feels so final and so done. If there's a tragedy and someone dies suddenly, it feels so final and so complete. But what we know is that those who believe in Christ are saved, and that we're resurrected to heaven, so that when we say goodbye to a loved one, we say goodbye for now, not forever. And that as we face death ourselves, as we grapple with our own mortality, we know that one day we are going to cross that bridge too, but when we do, we say goodbye for now and not forever. I don't know if you've ever had the privilege of watching someone slowly march towards their own death and cross that horizon. But I can think of three people, I will not enumerate them, but I can think of three people in my life that I watched in faith accept the fact that they were going to die in the coming weeks and months and it was unwavering and their joy was completely steady and their smile was constantly there and they were excited to meet their God. Why? Because Jesus has released them from their fears. So we sing that line, born to set thy people free from our fears and sins, release us. We're no longer slaves to sin and we don't have to fear death. That's a wonderful line. Then it says, let us find our rest in thee. That's an allusion to come ye all who are weary and heavy laden for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I am gentle and humble in heart and in me you will find rest. Let us find our rest in you. Then, I love this line and we may not know what this means at first, Israel's strength and consolation. Israel's strength and consolation is found most pointedly in Luke chapter 2, verse 25. This is the famous story of Simeon holding up baby Jesus. I'll read the verse and I'll explain to you what's going on. Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel and the Holy Spirit was on him. Some of you may remember, I've done this sermon twice here, once at another church. And if it were up to me, I would preach this sermon every year on Christmas. I call it the zeal of Simeon. And I think it captures Christmas. And so you walk through all the eras of the Old Testament. Is the Messiah here? Is the Messiah here? Is it Moses? No. Is it David? No. Is it Elijah? No. And you walk through all of these people until you get to Jesus. And Simeon was a devout and righteous man. And he had pledged a vow of silence until he was able to lay eyes on the Messiah. And so Mary brought Jesus to the temple after his birth. And Simeon happened to be there, and he essentially says, I can die now. I'm happy, for I have received the consolation of Israel. Israel's strength and consolation. It always makes me smirk a little bit when I hear people talking about the state of our world and all the tragedies that happen. How can there be a God if there's this many hardships? If there's this much tragedy? And I think, well, it's a fair thought. And that's its own discussion. But if you look at the scope of history, you've got it pretty easy. We're like billionaires complaining that the air conditioning isn't exactly right. Do you know how much harder it was to live in ancient Israel than it is to live in America, in an ancient third-world country without running water or electricity? Do you know how much infant death they dealt with? Do you know what life expectancy was, mid-40s? Do you have any idea how hard it was to go to war every year? Do you have any idea how hard it is to tend your own crops just to feed your own family? No, we have no concept of how hard it was. Israel was a nation of slaves born in Egypt that had to be set free by God in a miraculous way. They went through a series of judges where they were oppressed by surrounding nations and the judges had to beat back the oppression. They went through a series of kings. They had kings for several hundred years and they only had three good ones. They were sunk into civil war. They were ruled by evil men. They got taken over by the Babylonians and by the Persians and carried off into slavery. They spent generations in slavery in Persia and in Babylon wondering if they would ever get back to the promised land that God had promised to them. Parents had to convince their children, God has not forgotten about us, we just have to wait on his timing. It was really hard to be an Israelite. They needed consoling, and they got it in the person of Jesus. Israel's strength and consolation. And I don't want to do the Olympics of suffering. We suffer too, and you suffer too. But if you want to talk to people who had known suffering and needed consolation, it was the people of Israel. But Jesus is our consolation too, and he waits on us as well. He is our strength and our consolation. Then we finish that verse kind of in summary. Hope of all the earth thou art, dear desire of every nation, joy of every longing heart, joy of every heart. And it reminded me of this verse. There's plenty of places we could look at for this particular ethic or idea, but this is where I go. You make known to me the path of life. You fill me with joy in your I learned the verse. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. During this time of year, you'll hear the word Emmanuel more than you hear any other time of year. And many of you know that Emmanuel means God with us. And so in Jesus' presence, we usher it down, and in so doing, we say, bring us your joy. We hope in you, dear desire of every nation, hope of all the earth thou art, and joy of every longing heart. So in him, we find joy. That's why we sing joy to the world. That's why this is such a festive time of year. And so that's how we kind of sum it up. When Jesus comes down, he brings joy with him. And so to sing to him and invite him in is to invite his joy, sometimes in a place where we need it desperately. Now we go to verse two. Born thy people to deliver. We've talked about that. And I love this part. Born a child and yet a king. This takes us to the most famous Christmas verse in scripture. And I believe that this is part of Handel's Messiah. Is that right? Does anybody know? Okay, good. Thank you. Liz knows. Of course she does. Would you like to just write my sermons, please? For to us, a child is born. And by the way, every year I try to get Gibby to do Handel's Messiah because it's amazing and I love it, but it requires a choir and an orchestra and he gets a little lazy, you know? Like he doesn't care very much about the church. He's just getting through it. So at the new church, I haven't told you guys this yet, we're actually going to have an orchestra pit. It's going to be great. I'm kidding, guys. We're not going to do that. We're going to seat 100 less people, but we will have an oboe. The verse says this, For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this. So, Charles condenses that to born a child and yet a king. But when you expand it and you extrapolate it, it very clearly comes out of Isaiah. Unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given. Because then it says, born to reign in us forever. Now thy gracious kingdom bring. Here, I would just point you to Romans chapter 10 verse 9. If you declare with your mouth is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Born to reign in us forever, now thy gracious kingdom bring. I love this part, and this part's a good reminder. Because these two verses here, the first two, are focused on Christmas. And what Christmas is. And welcoming in this baby Jesus. It starts appropriately. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm not there yet, Ms. Lynn. I know, I'm hard to follow. I don't give her any notes or anything. She just has to guess and she does a great job and I do a poor one. We have a lot of joy in this season. We celebrate a lot. And these verses point towards Christmas. They remind us of the coming Messiah. They start the exact right way. Come thou long expected Jesus. And then it tells us of the sentiments of Christmas and what we want to usher in. Born a child and yet a king. Call us to you. Reign in us. Reign through us. Come and claim your kingdom. But these lines remind us of something very important that we tend to overlook. At Christmas, we all have our celebrations, and we should do them, except for wearing a Steeler's hat. Anne Francis, you don't even like the Steelers. Keith, his disease is spreading. I know. I know. We all have our traditions. This week we went to, there's a street in Bedford called Winter Song. And you go and you park. It's awesome. It's absolutely incredible. And we would just walk down it and take it in. It's like it's from a movie. We like to go to this house where there's a radio station tuned to the different things in the front yard. I saw one in Falls River where it said tuned to like 97.3 and they had like four lights out there and I'm like, no thanks, pal. I'll just listen to my own Christmas music. But we have these different traditions and those are wonderful things to do with our families. I remember growing up, I loved Christmas. I loved Christmas. My favorite thing was we would go to my mom's family's house, the Greens, with three E's. You guys can figure out where the E's go. And we would go on Christmas Eve. We'd go in the afternoon. We'd take everybody's presents. Everything would be wrapped. And we'd hang out all afternoon. Mama was in the kitchen bustling. Papa was helping a little bit, but that was Mama's deal. She was getting dinner ready for everybody. And we're running around with everybody. It was my mom. My mom was the oldest of four. We had Uncle Degg, who in the 80s, his nickname was Flash, and his wife Sally called him Flash. Quick story about Flash, he got in a motorcycle accident and had to be rushed to the hospital with a broken leg. To visit him, his wife had to get wheeled in because both of her legs were broken because she was hanging her foot out of the car when she flipped it a few days ago. So that's just a good, fun story about Uncle Deg. Then we had Aunt Lori, and we had Aunt Deanna, and eventually we had Uncle Glenn when she met him. This is a deep cut, but Uncle Glenn and Aunt Deanna were the closest thing to Todd and Margo I've ever met in my life. They were pretty awesome. And then I had my cousins, Kim and Randy and Jeffrey and then my sister Amy and we'd run around all day. And then the next day we'd come back and we were allowed to bring our favorite toy that Santa brought us and we'd go back and we'd spend the whole day at Mama and Papa's again with everybody and it was awesome. But every third year we had to fly down to Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, and have Christmas with my dad's mom and stepdad, and that was the worst. I hated it, and my weird cousins that I didn't really know, I hated going down there, and then I had to pretend to love my family, and I didn't. I still don't, and that's true. I love some of them. Uncle Glenn and Debbie, if you're watching this, I love you. You're one of the ones. They do keep up sometimes. But my favorite tradition was when I was at Mama and Papa's house in the afternoons. Papa would get this little mischievous grin on his face, and he'd get down on his hands and knees, and suddenly he became Max the dog, and I became the Grinch. And we'd sneak from his bedroom to the living room, real low, so nobody could see us, although everybody did. And we'd sneak over to the Christmas tree, and we'd grab up all of Mama's presents, and then we'd scamper, giggling like school children, back into their bedroom and hide them. And then that night, we'd go to open presents, and Mama played her part, made a big fuss, why didn't I get any presents? Where are my presents? She's very upset. We're giggling maniacally. And then we rush back, and we get the presents, because now my Grinch heart has grown ten times, and we give Mama all of her presents, and she opens them last. I loved doing that. And those are good traditions, and we should have those, and I hope that you do too. But let us not forget that Jesus didn't come to give us Christmas traditions. He didn't come to give us an excuse to celebrate and to gorge ourselves on food and to get gifts and to give gifts. He didn't come to give us the Christmas season. What he came to do is rule, and he didn't even come to be the Lord of the universe alone. He came to be the Lord of you. At Christmas, Jesus didn't come to give us an excuse to celebrate. He didn't come to give us traditions. He didn't even come for us to experience joy. He came to be the king of the universe, for the government to be upon his shoulder and provide peace for eternity. But let us not forget that he also came to be the king of you. Remember that fundamental relationship? He came to remind you to set it straight. So let's have our fun at Christmas. But Jesus came to be Lord of your life too. Yeah? Now, we're going to move to the bridge. Before we do, three quick points. First one, we got a little preview. The first two verses in this point us towards Christmas. I noticed this as I went through the song. These two verses, they're backward focused. So we look in the rear view mirror, we remember Christmas, and we put ourselves where it was and what it was, and we remember all that it was. And so we appreciate Christmas. So they point us to Christmas. And what I love about the bridge that we're about to go through that was added on subsequent to in later years by other artists is that this, the end of the song points us to eternity, which is the ultimate point of Christmas. So now we focused on Christmas and what we're about to do in the song is look forward to eternity. And that's the point of Christmas. The point of Christmas now is to remind us this, that Christmas reminds us that God keeps his promises. Christmas reminds us that God keeps his promises. For 2,000 years, for 2,000 years, next week we're going to look at this line in O Holy Night, long lay the world in sin and error pining. For 2,000 years they looked forward to the reception of this Messiah. Then they received him. Now for the last 2,000 years, we anticipate his return. So Christmas every year is a reminder, God kept his promise once after a 2,000 year wait. He'll keep it again. Okay? That's what Christmas is for. Now, I'm tight on time, so I want to go through this quickly. The first several lines, you draw the hearts of shepherds, you draw the hearts of kings. Even as a baby, you were changing everything. You called me to your kingdom before your lips could speak, and even as a baby, you were reaching out for me. Those are wonderful lines, but I want to focus on what follows. Because when we sing it, you're going to feel the song start to build as these lines come up. And you're going to kind of, that's when I want to kind of jump out of my shoes and just really let it go. And here's what we sing. And now we are awaiting the day of your return. See, now we're focused on eternity. Yes, celebrate Christmas. Now we're focused on eternity. It reminded me of these verses. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. So what we have is this great group of verses in Romans chapter 8 that says, we know that all of creation has been groaning for the return of the King, for the return of the Messiah that came and then left and is looking forward to his return. Not only that, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and the redemption of our bodies. We were designed to long for Christ. And so Christmas orients us in Christ's coming and then points us towards his future return. That's what it's for. All of creation groans for that. When every eye will see you as heaven comes to earth. I'm going to go through this one, Lynn. I'm not going to read this one. As heaven comes to earth, this is from Revelation 21, 1 through 4, where it says God will be with his people and his people will be with their God and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. It speaks of this kingdom, this new heaven, and this new earth that we anticipate as we look towards eternity. Until the sky is open, until the trumpet sounds, that's all from Revelation. This is another reason why it's pointing us towards eternity. This whole last stanza is rooted in Revelation. It's looking forward to the second return of Christ. And then this line that feels like a throwaway line, but man, it's such an important one. And I want to rest here for just a second, if you'll indulge me. It says, the bride is getting ready. The bride is getting ready. Revelation 19, 7. Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory, for the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Charles pulls this right out of Scripture. And we're told several times that the church is the bride of Christ. And men, if you have a hard time thinking of yourself as a bride, I heard a pastor say that women have to deal with this all the time. I walk into a room and I say, hey guys, how we doing? And women just have to accept that they're a guy now. Okay? And that in the Bible that they have to just be a part of mankind, not man and womankind. So like, they deal with it a lot. So if your fragile ego has a hard time being a bride, talk to a therapist, all right? We're the bride of Christ. And I'll just say as an aside, when we think about the bride getting ready, it's gotten a little ridiculous, hasn't it? I can remember growing up. Raise your hand if you can remember growing up. Whoever went to a wedding reception in a fellowship hall. Yeah. And what did they have in the fellowship hall? They had dinner mints. They had chalky dinner mints. Thank you, Bill. They had, let's play this game. What else did they have, Bill? Nuts. Yes. Punch, yes, the church ladies did punch, and no one spiked it at Baptist churches. They had the little sandwiches. They had the little cucumber sandwiches. Who eats cucumber sandwiches? Who made that? Or egg salad sandwich or pimento. Yeah, pimento cheese, and you have to say it the right way. It's not pimento. We're not carpetbaggers here. It's pimento cheese, yeah. Sorry, those of you who say it correctly and are carpetbaggers. The whole thing with the dress was like a thousand bucks. And now, holy smokes, it's unbelievably expensive. The social media has ruined not the brides, but their poor fathers who have to pay for this. Do you know, I've done about 150 to 200 weddings in my life. And do you know one of the things I find most absurd about weddings is now most brides make their dad buy silk pajamas for their bridal party. And those pajamas match, right? And what they do is they all wear the pajamas to the venue so they can get ready at the venue. But here's the thing about the pajamas. Did they sleep in them the night before? No. They got up and they put on a little bit of makeup so they can go put on more makeup. Yeah? And then they wear the pajamas, they get in the car and they drive to the venue and then they get ready. They got a hair stylist there and sometimes makeup and whatever or aunt whoever and then they all get ready. And no one sees the pajamas except them. They put them on to ride in the car and then to go take them off and to put on the dress. It's the most, and they've got to cost, every time I see it, I'm like, those have to cost $500. I don't know why we're spending money on these pajamas. But there's so many little things like that. But here's the thing. We might think of the bride as getting ready the day of the wedding. But you better believe that from the day of engagement to the day of commencement, that bride is getting ready. As soon as she says yes, that bride begins to get ready. She begins to make plans. They begin to, they look for a florist. They look for the right officiant. They get a DJ. Are we going to do live music? They go to their dad. What's the budget? And the dad gives them the budget knowing full well they're going to exceed it by 20%. So if he's a shrewd negotiator, he will underscore it, right? They do the florist. They do the catering. What kind of food do we want? We've got to go to a cake tasting. We've got to go do this. We've got to go tour venues. We've got to see when the date's going to be. What are your colors? I don't know because I don't know if I'm getting married in the summer or in the fall. And that matters a lot. Am I going to get married indoor or outdoor? It's all these decisions. And so from the moment of engagement to the moment of commencement, that bride is getting ready. And in this line, as we expect, as we say, come thou long expected Jesus, come and claim your bride. What is our job? To get ready, to pursue holiness, to welcome him, to ask for him to come, to live expectantly, knowing that one day he will come and claim his bride. And so as we sing that line, the bride is getting ready, let it remind you as a church, it is our job to pursue holiness and to pursue our Jesus and to pursue righteousness so that when our Jesus comes, we are ready to receive him. As the bride of Christ, let Christmas remind us to get ready. And then it says this, as it says the bride is getting ready, the very next line is, the church is singing out. And then we go back into the first verse. And so when it says, the church is singing out, guys, let's let it rip. Let's sing with full-throated praise to our God. And we have a chance again to shout to our Lord. Come thou long-expected Jesus, born to set thy people free. From our fears and sins release us. Let us find our rest in thee. Come thou long-expected Jesus. Please stand and let's sing that together like we mean it.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, and I'm very excited for the series. I hope that you guys had a good Thanksgiving. For the Rectors, it's a whirlwind. It's six and a half hours to Atlanta on Monday, five hours to Dothan on Wednesday, six hours to Greenville on Friday, and four and a half hours to Raleigh on Saturday, which is 22 hours of travel. So if you see my children and they look a little bit addled, that's why. But they did great and we had a great time and we saw family and I hope that you did too. But now that we're past that, we have arrived at my favorite time of year at Grace. I love this time of year at grace i i love uh getting to celebrate next week uh as mikey said is uh christmas sweater sunday so i hope you'll bring out your best um i've seen some of yours before and i know they're pretty good so maybe you've upgraded but i hope that we'll all have a good sweater to wear for next week my favorite sunday of the year is fami jammy sunday We'll be like them. Which is more pointedly Amo La Civita every year. I'm looking at you, pal. Let's put something on this year, buddy. But I love this season. I love the Christmas series. I love how fun it is. And for me, obviously, we're celebrating Christmas. We're celebrating what that is. We're celebrating the arrival of Christ. But I also, in my head, as I kind of celebrate the end of the year, I celebrate what God has done at Grace. I celebrate who you are and who we are and God's presence here. I celebrate the people who are committed to this place and who love it so much, and all that God has done. So I think it's a perfect time of year to kind of not only celebrate Christmas and what that means and the arrival of Christ, but to also reflect on what God has done in our church and in our church family and look forward to what He's going to do in the future. To that end, we've got a meeting on December the 14th, immediately following the service to update everybody on the building, where we're at, and exactly what it's going to take to get us where we believe we need to go. And I think we're a lot closer than people suspect. So I'm optimistic for that meeting and I'm hopeful that you'll make it a priority to be there. I also know that that's on the same Sunday that we're doing the kids caroling. So there's going to be grandparents and stuff like that here. So to the young families, I would encourage you maybe bring two cars that day and one party can stay behind and attend the meeting and then the rest can go out to eat with grandma and grandpa and then you can can catch up later, because let's be honest, that lunch is overrated, and you probably just want to be here. Anyways. This series, here we go, is it, was, Wassailing, here we go, Wassailing. As Aaron mentioned, it was either Aaron or Mikey, I don't pay much attention. A few years ago, either last fall or fall before last, we did a series called The Songs We Sing. And we looked at the songs that we sing as a church, some of the hymns and praise choruses that we do, and we found them in the Bible. And we said, let's kind of imbue them with more meaning by looking at these songs. And it's a Christmas series that I've always wanted to do. And so this year we're going to do that. We're going to look at a Christmas carol each week and look at how it's imbued with meaning through scripture. We're going to climax this on Christmas Eve, looking at the greatest song that's ever been written, in my opinion, Oh Holy Night. And so I'm very excited to do that, but we've got some good songs along the way. And we have a song that we're focused on this morning that if you were paying attention to the video, you already know what it is. Or if you've looked through the notes to try to see what the fill in the blanks are, you already know what it is. But I'm not going to tell you yet if you haven't done either of those things. The first thing I'm going to do is make the opening point. This is the least expected opening point that I'm going to put on the screen in the history of Grace Raleigh, okay? A few weeks ago, I had a point that said something like, faith is like a Brazilian steakhouse. And Carly, who I send the notes to, who puts them on the bulletin, emailed me back and she said, I can't wait to see what this is about. And then I sent her this week's notes and she said, I never thought you would top Brazilian steakhouse, but I'm about to. Here's the first point of the sermon. Be like Keith Cathcart. Yeah. Where's Keith? Hey, buddy. Don't let him go, Keck. Be like Keith Cathcart. Here's my second point. Sort of. Okay. Now that we're clear. Now listen, before I just dump on him for the rest of the sermon, let's be clear. Keith is a really good friend of mine. I love Keith. I have a policy in my house. I do not pay money to a handyman of any kind until I've gotten permission from Keith. When there is something wrong in my house, I call him and I say, I think I need to call somebody to come fix this. And he will often say to me, if you call somebody to fix that, I will not be your friend anymore. I cannot respect you as a man. Keith has stood on the safe confines of my deck while I was up on my roof with FaceTiming him, showing him some flashing underneath some shingles and he helped me repair it. And we did, we fixed the leak. Did we not? Yeah, we did. So he's a good buddy. He's also the greatest evangelist I've ever met in my life. And this is true. Keith evangelizes like no one I've ever met. He espouses his beliefs more zealously and more effectively than any Christian I've ever known. The problem is he's an evangelist for the Steelers, not Jesus. Although I'm sure he does evangelize for Jesus from time to time. He's an incredibly effective evangelist for the Steelers. As a matter of fact, to prove it to you, I texted him earlier in the week. And I said, hey, I'm not going to tell you why. I just need you to text me pictures of people you've converted to Steelers fans. I just need three or four pictures. Dude sent me 20. 20 pictures. And he said, this is just the beginning. He got so excited about it. He's going down to Mexico to celebrate Christmas, to do a Christmas celebration with our ministry partners there. And he printed up terrible towels that say Feliz Navidad. And he's going to hand them out to 200 children and get them to wave them at once. And he told me it's going to be the greatest moment of my life. Just so you don't think I'm making this up, I wanted to share with you some of the people that Keith has evangelized for the Steelers. So let's take a look, Lynn. This is a young man at our church. He did not grow up in Pittsburgh. He does not care about the Steelers, but now he does. His mom made the mistake of going to Mexico with Keith and the rest of the team. They didn't just go to Mexico together, let's be clear. Sorry, Miel. There was like a whole group of people. They all went together. That's funny. He converted him. This is Patrick. Patrick did not, he's wearing, I don't know, Patrick, are you in the service this morning? Yeah, there he is. He's wearing that jersey. I didn't even tell him to. He didn't even know that this was happening. He's caught the virus, okay? Keith gave him that jersey. He's so proud of himself. Look at that dumb grin on Keith's face. Look at him. He's evangelizing for the Steelers. What's the next one? Is this Chucky? Oh, no. This is a guy. This is a random dude from Home Depot. That's who that is. That is Casey. Casey. Thank you, Keck. Keck is also in Steelers gear. Did you purchase that gear, Keck? Or did Keith? He puts on his hat. Yes, that's a random guy from Home Depot that is now a Steelers fan because of Keith. Who's the next one? Chucky. Chucky is the foreman in Mexico. Now this, I'll give Keith some credit as much as it pains me. Keith has been going to Mexico for darn near 20 years. And he met Chucky when Chucky was in seventh grade and was a volunteer working to get a home for his family. And he has gone through the years and he is now the foreman of the work crews for Faith Ministry, the ministry with which we partner. Every year, Keith goes down and he spends time with Chucky. And every year, he gives Chucky more Steelers crap. He has gotten birth announcements, wedding announcements, engagement announcements. That is like a surrogate son to Keith, and that's a very special person to us here at Grace. So I don't want to make light of it, but also, look at that. He's got all kinds of Steeler stuff. Can I tell you this? He even got me. Here I am. I went, too. I figured if I was gonna be in Pittsburgh, I needed to look the part, so I shaved down to a mustache, which I would say looks awesome. And here's the worst part. Do we have it, Aaron? He got my children. He got them too. But do you know what I did with those towels? Last time we had the hootenanny and we had the grill, the Blackstone needs a towel to clean up the grease I use those just so we know all right that's enough of that Keith is the most effective evangelist I've ever met in my life he loves the Steelers he wants everyone else to love the Steelers and he and it's a point of pride and joy when other people love his team too. And it's harmless and it's fun. But he, as I was thinking about the song this morning, he embodies this song better than anyone I've ever met, which is this, Go Tell It on the Mountain. We know this Christmas carol. Go tell it on the mountain. Go proclaim it. Here's the chorus of the carol. Let's look at it together. Go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere. Go tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is born. I love this carol. I thought it was the right place to begin the series. I don't know how you guys do it in your house, but at our house, after Halloween, the first weekend after Halloween, we decorate for Christmas. I know that's crazy. I know. But here's what Jen and I say. There's nothing wrong with a little extra Christmas in the house. We love our living room with lights and a tree and the ambiance. And during the year, we got our TV up on the mantle, you know, like you're supposed to do in 2025. And then bracketing the TV, we have these potted plants that are fake that have like different like plumes coming out of them like you're supposed to. But at Christmas, they're reindeers, and it's cooler. And then instead of just this naked mantle, there's garland with lights on it. And so it's just festive. And then we turn on the gas fire that emits zero heat whatsoever. And it's more cozy in there. So in our house, we decorate for Christmas the first weekend after Halloween and the first school day after Halloween we get in the car and Lily will say, Daddy, can we listen to Christmas carols now? And we do. On the way to school we listen to Christmas carols. We've got a playlist. We've added to it over the years. She has her favorites. I have mine. If you haven't listened to Barbara Streisand's version of Jingle Bells, it's the best in the whole wide world and I love it. I highly recommend. But one of my favorite songs that we listen to in the car together is Go Tell It on the Mountain. It's fun. It's festive. It's energetic. And it really gets across the point of the season. This idea of go be an evangelist. Here's what Keith does for the Steelers. As he goes and he tells it on the mountain. Over the hills and everywhere. Everywhere he goes, he's going to tell you about the Steelers. He's going to give you a terrible towel. He's going to give you a jersey that you don't want, that your children are going to wear, and now your host. But he's going to go and he's going to tell. And that's what this song is about. Go tell it on the mountain. Go tell people about Jesus. And this is a fundamental part of our faith that we don't talk about often enough. I'll be the first person to admit that I'm bad at evangelism. I don't do it as often as I should. And before I get into the sermon too far, making a crude analogy that's clumsy, it's far easier to evangelize for your team than it is to evangelize for your Savior. Because there's not a bunch of social emotional baggage wrapped up in your team. Keith doesn't go tell people that they should root for the Steelers and then get the response, I've tried to root for the Steelers before, but the fans of the Steelers are hypocrites and they hurt me. I've tried to root for the Steelers before, but I have existential reasons to believe that the Steelers don't exist. I've tried to root for the Steelers before, but I have this and this and this reason why I just can't do that anymore. You tell someone to root for the Steelers, and they're like, no, I like the Falcons, and you're like, I'm so sorry for you and your life, but I understand. But you tell someone to convert to your Savior, and it becomes a lot more complicated and a lot more deep. And so it's a clumsy comparison. And the point of the story isn't to guilt Keith into sharing Jesus with the same zeal that he shares the Steelers. Although, Keith, maybe. But it's a clumsy comparison if you want to make it one-to-one. Nevertheless, evangelism and going and telling it on the mountain is a fundamental part of what it is to be a Christian. And here's how I know that this is true. I don't know if you've ever thought about the disciples in this way, but I have a cousin. I was just with him over his cousin-in-law, actually. He's an OBGYN, and he had to go through a ton of school to get to practice as a doctor. And the last part of school that you do when you're pursuing the medical field is residency. You go and you follow actual doctors who are licensed. And you that's what the disciples were doing. The disciples were in residency with Jesus. They were being trained by him. They were being prepared for ministry. And this is not the point of the sermon, but just by way of thought exercise, I doubt that you've ever considered, why didn't Jesus, if what Jesus came to do is come and live a perfect life and die a perfect death, why didn't he die on the cross when he was 21? Why didn't he die when he was 18? Why didn't he die when he was 30? Why didn't he just come down here, live a sinless life, die a perfect death, and be our perfect sacrifice, which is what we believe that he was and is? I'll tell you why. Because he wanted to spend the last years of his life training young men in residency to take over the church. To do what he did. And so that's what the disciples were doing. They were in residency learning how to lead what would be known as the church. Because the church didn't exist as an idea before Jesus implanted it into the minds and the practices of the disciples. And when he left, he said, now go and spread the good news to the corners of the earth, to all the nations. Go to the ends of the earth and tell them who I am, baptizing people in my name. Go make disciples in Jerusalem and Judea and all of the ends of the earth. The reason that Jesus didn't just live and die was to train the disciples. You understand? And fundamental to that training was evangelism. It was so fundamental that 30 years after the death of Christ, when Mark and Luke, and Mark wrote the gospel on behalf of Peter, and Luke wrote the gospel to, oh, blessed Theophilus, to explain to this man named Theophilus what was going on, and then to explain to humans for the rest of time what was going on. It was so important to them that they included this story in Mark chapter 6 and in Luke chapter 9. Two of the disciples thought that this part of their training was so important that it needed to be recounted. In Mark chapter 6 and Luke chapter 9, you can look it up if you want to. I'm not going to read the verses. Jesus sent out the disciples two by two. He said, go in pairs, go into the surrounding towns, cast out demons and heal, and tell them the good news of the gospel. Tell them who I am. Tell them what I've done. Tell them what I'm going to do. And we often, those of us who know our Bible, associate that with the end of the story, which is if they don't receive you, shake the dust of that town off of your sandals as you go, which is to say, like, I don't want to have anything to do with you anymore and go. And we like that because that way, if evangelism doesn't work, we don't have to feel bad and whatever. But the point of that story, the point of that recounting, the reason that it's included in the gospels, the reason that Peter and Mark and Luke felt compelled to include that in their narrative and in their recounting of their experience with the Messiah is to say the point is we were told to go and tell other people about Jesus. We were told to go and evangelize. And so it is unavoidable that part of our Christian experience is to tell people about the Jesus that we love. Now listen, I want to be really clear here. If you're new to the faith, if you're questioning the faith, if you're here kicking the tires to see if faith is for you, I'm not preaching to you this morning. This is not for you. I don't want you to feel an ounce of responsibility for the things that I'm about to say. I just would invite you to soak it in and know that this is what we're about. But if you're a Christian, if you're not kicking the tires, if God is your Father and Jesus is your Savior, if you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, and is going to do what he says he's going to do, then this is for you. And this should compel us. A fundamental part of your life, of your faith, is evangelism. Is to tell people about your Jesus. And I know that this makes us deeply uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable. It's an uncomfortable conversation. But that does not negate the fact that it is a biblical imperative, that it was a course requirement for the residency of the disciples, and it is an expectation that Jesus himself places on you to go tell it on the mountain, to go tell it everywhere, to go tell people about the Jesus that you love. And in our culture and in our context, go tell people why you still love him. Go tell people why you stayed in church and they left. Go tell people why you've come back to church after wandering for a while. Go tell people what Jesus has done for you. Go tell people about the sense of peace that he's given you. Christians, go tell people about the sense of worth that he's given your soul. Christians, go tell people about the purpose that he's given you in the waning years of your life. I know many of us are at the point of our life where we're thinking, we're not thinking about a cruel, we're thinking about legacy. What do we leave behind? Go tell people what you want to leave behind and why. Go tell people what you want to build in your building years and why. If you're young, go tell people what you want to do with your life. And why? Go tell people how you want to raise your kids and what you want them to do. And why? Go tell people about your Jesus and why you're sticking with it and why you're still doing it and why you still have faith and why you still bother to get up on a Sunday morning and to do your makeup and to do your hair and to tuck in your shirt and to blouse your sweatshirt, which is something I just learned this morning. Go tell people why you bother to do that instead of sleep in. And don't just keep it to yourself as this personal private thing that's my business and not their business and I don't want to offend anyone. No. Go tell it. Go tell people what Jesus has done for you. If you serve in the community, tell people why you do. If you're kind to someone at the office that other people are not kind to, tell people why you're kind to them. If you pray for your grandchildren, tell people what you hope for your grandchildren and what you pray for them. I think in 2025, this idea of evangelism, it used to be when I was growing up in the 80s, evangelism was like, go tell people the good news. Go tell people about this Jesus. They may have never heard of him before. He forgives their sins. And he omits their shame. He erases it. And he's conquered sin and death so that we don't have to be afraid of him. So that we don't have to be afraid of it. Go tell them the good news. Go tell them that Jesus exists. And it was this idea that you could sit down with a person and be like, let me tell you about the person in this Bible that the whole Bible is about. It's about Jesus. Let me tell you about him and how he erases all of your guilt and shame for all of your life and accepts you for who you are and makes a passage into heaven for you for eternity. And then the idea was that they would hear that and be like, my gosh, I've never heard that before. That's incredible news. I'd like to be a Christian. Is that true now? The people in your life that you know who either don't believe in Jesus or are not actively engaged in faith, they have a reason. They have a reason. And it's a good one. I don't know what it is, but it's a good reason. The people that you know in your life who are atheists, when I was coming up, do you know what I was taught? Atheists are dumb. And if you'll just do a couple easy arguments with them, you'll win, and they'll convert immediately. Have you guys found that to be true? The atheists in your life probably, some of them are dumb, just like some of you are dumb. But most of them are pretty smart. And some of you are pretty smart. Begrudgingly. Evangelism is different in 2025. But I think an interesting way to engage the conversation is to say, here's why I'm still doing what I'm doing. Here's why I'm still here. Serving my God, praising my Jesus, worshiping my Lord. And I think that's an interesting place to start the conversation. But the larger point is, we can't get around the fact that evangelism is an essential part of Christian life. And I bring that up because Christmas is the perfect time to go tell it. Christmas is the perfect time to go tell it. Our whole world rallies around this holiday, right? Our whole world commercializes this holiday. This is when all the holiday stuff starts. This is when they start telling you to buy presents. This is when Lexus every year comes out with the most ridiculous ad campaign I've ever seen with a red bow on a $75,000 SUV as a Christmas present. Listen, I've often said I don't believe in reincarnation, but if it's true, I want to come back as a member of a family that gives away Lexuses at Christmas. And if any of you are giving Lexuses as Christmas gifts, consider the building campaign. It could help. Our whole culture rallies around this holiday. We commercialize it and we make it about gifts and all the things and family and decorations and lights and we celebrate. But Christians, we hold the truth of it. I am not going to say that Jesus is the reason for this season. I will not preach that. Although he is. We hold the truth of what this season is about. It's about Jesus. It's about his arrival. When I preach on Christmas Eve, it's going to be the phrase, long lay the world in sin and error pining until he appeared and the soul felt its worth. Oh, that's the most compelling line ever written. That's what Christmas is about. It gives us a sense of worth and purpose and hope and joy. And we know that better than anyone around us who doesn't love Jesus and who isn't spiritually engaged. So Christmas is the easiest and best time of year to go tell it. And let me tell you an easy way, the easiest possible way to go tell it and to evangelize your friends. This is going to sound self-serving, but I'm going to explain it. The easiest, I can't think of an easier invite than a Christmas Eve service. Can you? How easy is it? I've got some friends. I'm not setting myself up as moral exemplar. I'm a terrible evangelist. But one thing I have done in my life is Lily was a part of a soccer team for years. My daughter Lily, she's nine. She'll be 10 in January, which is nuts. And I coach. I have a soccer background and I coach. And I got to be friends with the coach and her husband, Heidi and Trey, and their daughters, Josie and Hannah. And Lily decided to quit. And I was like, I like this community. I'm going to keep coaching. And I'm also convicted that I asked you guys to volunteer. This is an organization that runs on volunteers. And so you guys give up an extra day to volunteer here. And I get paid to be here. And I don't volunteer anywhere else. So I thought maybe I should practice what I preach and volunteer somewhere. So I coach. So I kept going. And people are like, you're just a creepy guy coaching nine-year-old girls, and your daughter's not on the team. I'm like, yeah, it's cool. Don't worry about it. But I volunteered, and I enjoy that relationship with them. And there's another coach on the team, a guy named Vishal, who's from Pakistan. And I enjoy him too. And I've developed a relationship with him such that I told him when I get back from Thanksgiving, he actually said, let's get drinks or let's get wings or something like that. And so I'm going to go out and spend some time with what we call Coach V. And I was actually in the lead up to this, I realized I need to invite Heidi and Trey to the Christmas Eve service. And here's why this is such an easy invite. They're people of faith, but they don't go to a church. It's marginal for them. But they probably want to celebrate Christmas Eve somewhere with their family. There's a chance they want to go to church somewhere. So why not just invite them to Grace? And it's actually funny, we've joked about them coming to Grace and they said, we kind of like you being our friend and not our pastor. And I'm like, I kind of like you being my friend and not someone who comes to my church. It's nice. But I bet you have people in your life where it would be a really easy invite to just say, hey, I don't know if you're going to celebrate Christmas Eve anywhere. I don't know if you're part of a church right now, but you can come to my church. And at that service, can we show them that we take our Jesus very seriously and we don't take ourselves very seriously at all? Can we model for them what church can be? Can we show them who our Jesus is? Can we use that service to go and tell it? And now here, this is very important to me. I'm not preaching this sermon to get you to invite people to Christmas Eve, okay? I don't care, and I don't think you understand how true this is. I don't care how many people come to the Christmas Eve service. I'm gonna have a good Christmas with my family either way. I'm not trying to get butts in seats I never have. I've never, ever, and some of you know you've been here for all eight years, stood up here and tried to compel you to invite people to grace for the sake of grace. I've never done that. And I never will. But it does occur to me, invite them to Summit's Christmas Eve service if you think I'm full of it. I don't care. Go to a Christmas Eve service with your neighbors. That's not the point here. I'm not trying to fill up our services. But what I am presenting to you is the easiest of opportunities. Is it easier to invite your neighbor, your coworker, a family on your kid's ball team, an associate, whatever? Is it easier to go, hey, I don't know if you wanted to celebrate Christmas Eve in a church but if you do come to mine it's gonna be pretty okay and here's how I know it's gonna be pretty okay the sermons like 12 minutes that day and then it's all songs all right so we know we're in good hands Aaron's got it is it easier to invite them to that or in March? Hey, do you want to come to church with me on Sunday? Yikes. That's a tougher one. I hope you will. I'm just saying, I'm just acknowledging what we all know. So it's never been easier to go tell it than it is this Christmas season. So I hope that you'll consider that as a way to kind of open the door to conversation with some people that you care about. And I hope that maybe you'll leave her thinking about who can I invite to the Christmas Eve service. And again, if you think this is remotely self-serving, take them to Summit. I couldn't care less. I would, I would, listen, I would rather you invite people to Summit's Christmas Eve service and go with them and let them experience church there than I would you come by yourself having never invited anyone. Okay? But if you want to bring them here and let us show them what it's like to worship Jesus together and celebrate who he is, what a wonderful introduction into church. There's never been an easier time or season to go tell it. Now, I don't just want us to go tell it this season. I want us to continue to do it. So three very quick ways because I just realized it's 1056 and I'm going to move very quickly through these. Three very easy ways to be an evangelist. Okay? First, this sounds cheesy but it's true. Wear it. Wear it. Keith, did you wear a hat this morning? Yeah. What is it? Nah. Keck, you, listen, you don't have to spend more than 15 minutes with Keith to know that he's a Steelers fan. All right? Huh? Always. Always. That's right. It's on his car. If you go to his house, it's all over his dumb basement. Well, I don't even think he has a dumb basement anymore. He has like an apartment because he's building a house. But it's all over his stupid apartment. It's on his clothes. It's where he wears it. You go to his office, it's all over the place. It's everywhere. If you experience Keith, you experience the Steelers. And it reminds me of this verse in 2 Corinthians 2, verse 14, that says, We are led in triumphal procession by Christ, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. I love that verse because it's this idea that passively from us wafts this knowledge of God passively from, from Keith, unfortunately wafts this love of the Steelers. You just, it just is infectious. He just does. And what if we love Jesus in such a way? What if we wore it? And this is, this is so funny. I wrote this point before I knew I'd be wearing a gray sweatshirt that we're currently selling this morning. We're not commercializing this. I'm not making any money off of it. Actually, I get 5% of every sweatshirt. So please. Wear your gray stuff to the gym. Wear it to the soccer field. Put it in your office. So that when people come in your office, they know this person loves Jesus. Put it in your home. Put verses on your walls so that when they come over to your house, when your neighbors come over, they know passively this person loves Jesus. This family loves Jesus. This home is oriented around Jesus. Make it so that wherever people go in your life, when they encounter you, whether it's in your car with what you're listening to, with what you're wearing to different things, and I'm not actually saying that you should wear a grace logo every day to work. That would be ridiculous. But I think you get my point. Put it out there that if you know me, you know I love my Jesus. Regardless of church, wear it. Make it visible so that people passively know who you are allied to. Second is live it. Live it. In Matthew 5, 16, we find one of the most challenging verses in Scripture which which says, Let your light shine before men so that they might see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven. This is more than passive. This is if someone were to follow you through your day, just by seeing you move in and out of conversation and people, they would see that you are so different, that you are so other, that you are so holy, that they would want to know more about you and glorify your Father who is in heaven. If you want to be an evangelist, spread the good news of Jesus and what he's done for you. Live that out. Be kind to the cashier. Be patient in traffic. Be considerate of the co-worker that no one else likes. Be even-handed in your dealings. Have character in your deals. Be honest in your negotiations. Do not backstab your co-workers. Be forthright even when it's hard. Tell the truth even when it's inconvenient. Be loving to your spouse even when they're being a jerk. And they deserve to be clapped back at. You can talk to Jen about how to do that if you need some examples. Do not yell unnecessarily at your children. Do not lose your temper. Be people of a meek countenance and kind such that others see your good work and so glorify your Father who is in heaven. Live it out. The last way we evangelize is to love it. Do you know why Keith tells everyone about the Steelers? Because he loves the Steelers. And when you love them, it brings him joy. It's a maniacal, twisted joy that's harming to humanity. Nevertheless, it's what compels him. And here's what I would say to you as a challenge. If you find yourself convicted because you're not someone who evangelizes for your Jesus, maybe, maybe it's a love issue. I don't know what to say. I don't know how to soften it. Maybe if you found yourself loving him more, you would tell other people about him more. I know the reason that my buddy tells people about the team he loves is because he loves them so much that it brings him joy when you love them too. And if we don't love Jesus so much that it brings us joy to see other people begin to love him too, then maybe we don't love him enough. And if we want to be evangelists, instead of looking out, what we need to do is look in and ask the Father to cultivate a love for him and what he's done in our hearts, so much so that we are so compelled to go and tell it. So I'm going to invite up Aaron and pray. And we're going to sing Go Tell It on the mountain together. And we're going to mean it. Yeah? Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for Keith, I guess. Thank you for a Jesus who loves us so well, loves us so much. I pray that we would be so compelled by that love that we would go and tell other people about it. God, there's no easier time of year to spread the good news of your glory to our friends and to the people that we care about so much. So I pray that you would give us the wisdom and the insight and the courage to do just that. And that this season we would invite, we would compel, we would introduce, we would be courageous, and we would engage in conversations that maybe we're fearful of, but we know that we are so compelled by our love for you and our love for them that we want to see them love you. Help us to do that, Father. In Jesus' name, amen.