Sermons tagged with Fear

Yo, it's not September yet. What are you all doing here? We're supposed to have more space than this in the middle of August. It's good to see everybody. Thank you so much for coming. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service, only because now is inconvenient. But just a couple of things behind the scenes I feel like I need to tell you. Rob, our bass player, walked by me and he said, go get him, pal. And I said, well, that's very nice. And then I was setting up up here and our worship leader, Aaron, tapped me on the shoulder, which is not typical. Normally he doesn't speak to me because my mental fragility is such that I can't handle it before a sermon. But he tapped me on the shoulder and I leaned back and he said, hey, just do good. And I, thanks buddy. Thanks for that. So we will do our best. This morning we are continuing in our series on the life of Moses. Last week, I kind of paused in the narrative because it had brought us to this place where the presence of God rested on Mount Sinai, and I felt like it was really important for us to also pause. There's this word in Psalms that we learn, this Hebrew word called shalom, and shalom just means kind of a holy pause. And I felt like it was important last week to just kind of take a shalom and pause on this part of the narrative that causes us to fear God, which is a good thing. And we focus on the fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom. But the reason that the presence of God rested on Mount Sinai was to give the law to his people. So what happens is the presence of God, and this is in Exodus chapter 19, and I'll just tell you this up front, okay? I want you to understand this, and I want to acknowledge this for you. I'm not going to read verses this week. This is, I hate to say this, this is just here for show this week. I'm not going to open it and read to you, all right? And I feel badly about that. But I'm resting in the fact that what I'm talking to you about is in Exodus 19. And I'm resting in the fact that I'm going to refer to passages in Romans and Galatians and Acts and John and Matthew so that we are. This is going to be a biblical sermon, but I just, there was nothing that I found in my preparation that zeroed in on what I wanted to say enough that I felt like it was worth sharing. So we will be in scripture this week, but I'm not going to open it. And I know that I'm not doing that, but hopefully we'll get to the end of the sermon and you'll think, yeah, that counts as a sermon. That's the goal. But this week it's Exodus 19. And in Exodus 19, we get the law. And when I say the law, we often think of the Ten Commandments. And if you're to open your Bible and read it, I think a lot of us understand what was happening when Moses received the Ten Commandments. But we tend to think, I believe, that Moses got these two tablets of stone and God etched onto them the Ten Commandments and he walked down the mountain with those tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments on them. And that is true. But what we might not pick up from the story, at least I didn't for decades of being a believer, is that all the other laws were etched on those tablets too. There's 630 something laws in Old Testament law, in the Old Testament for the Hebrew person. And so when God gave the law, it wasn't just 10 commandments. It was 10 commandments and the other 6 hundred and twenty. OK, that's what was on the tablets. And so when Moses comes back down the mountain, he has the law in his hands and he's sharing it with the Hebrew people. And here's what I think is really interesting about this point in history. And I'm going to take some liberties here. But I wonder, why did God give the law to his people at this time? And I don't know if you've ever thought about that. But let me kind of help you with that process. When God created Adam and Eve, he made one law. He said, do whatever you want. Don't eat from the fruit of that tree. That's the only rule. Do whatever you want. Go nuts. Do whatever you want. Don't eat of the fruit of that tree. That was it. That was the only law. And then they broke it because they wanted to be like God. They forgot to fear the Lord. God could have at that point said, okay, you screwed up. Now there's sin. Now the fall has happened. Let me give you the rules. Let me tell you what you need to do to be right with me. You messed up. Let me give you the rules. He didn't do that. Have you ever noticed that? He didn't do that. He just said, now you're going to have to work for your food. Life's going to be a little bit more difficult. Things between you and I will never be the same. But he didn't give him the rules. Then, a little while later, he hit reset on the entire earth by flooding it. And he allowed Noah and Ham, Shem and Japheth and their wives to be the new Adam and Eve that repopulated the earth. And the reason that he did it is because he looked across the earth and he said, this is evil and no one follows me. And I'm, I'm, I'm saddened that I've created this. And so he hit the reset button. When he hit the reset button, did he then give Noah the rules? No. He could have. He didn't. He could have said, listen, I gave you guys a chance. You messed it up. So moving forward, here are the rules for following me. He didn't do that. Then there was the Tower of Babel. After he dispersed the nations and gave them different languages, could he have also given them the rules? Yes, he could have. Did he? No. Then, a while later, I know that this is hard for you guys because you haven't thought about this before, but I've thought about this for years. Then a while later, he calls Abraham from the land of Ur of the Chaldeans, the Sumerian dynasty. And he says, hey, Abraham, I know this is going to sound weird. I want you to pick up everything that you own and I want you to move and I'm going to show you where you're going to move as you get there. It would be like you selling your house, packing a U-Haul, and just driving in the general direction of Utah, trusting God to show you where to go. That's what he did for Abraham. And when he did that, and when in Genesis 12, he made his promises to Abraham, I'm going to bless you with people and with blessing, and one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth. And your descendants will be like the stars in the sky. This is God we know now in retrospect, founding the nation of Israel. It's the very foundation of this people that God has chosen to love and center out amongst all of humankind. He starts it with Abraham. And he could have, at that point, said, by the way, Abraham, here are the rules. But he didn't. He could have said with his son Isaac, here are the rules. He could have said with his grandson Jacob, who was then later named Israel, by the way, as the father of this nation, I am founding on your faith. Here are the rules. And he never did it. He never did it. He waited for some reason until Moses was leading his people through the desert to finally give them the rules. So I think it's a really interesting question to wonder, God, why did you wait that long? Why now? Why here? And all I can say about that is this. In the past, I have paused a sermon and I've moved over here. And I've said, some of you will remember, Jeffy does, I heard him laugh. Some of you will remember, this is my reckless speculation box. When I'm here, I'm speaking to you from what I believe to be the authority of Scripture. And I would I would tell you candidly, it's my best understanding of what Scripture is. It's not the authority of Nate or the authority of God. It's just when I read it, this is how I understand it. And I'm sharing that with you. OK, but when I step over here. I'm reckless, man. They're like, this is just what I think. This is just what I suppose. This is not here. Here, I feel like I have some authority. Here, I'm just being an honest adult with you and saying this is what I think, but I can't back this up with paperwork. Do we understand the difference? Here, when I answer the question, why does God wait so long to give the law? What I actually believe in my core is that he gave it begrudgingly. I do not think he wanted to. And I think we have an example of this when he gives Moses divorce laws. And he says, I don't really want to give you divorce laws because I don't want this to be a part of your life. But practically speaking, I see the necessity of it. So here are some ramifications and some parameters for that practice. I believe that God gave the law begrudgingly. And here's why I believe this. And this is where I'll step back here. Because I do think that there's some scriptural authority for this. All God ever wanted was for us to trust him. All God ever wanted was for us to trust him and obey him. Why didn't he give Adam the law? Because he didn't want to. Because all he asked of Adam is just obey me. Just trust me. Just let me be the creator and you be the creation. Just obey me. Just trust me. Why didn't he give Noah the law? Because just trust me. Just obey me. Scholars believe Job predates Noah and all the others as well. Why didn't he give Job the law? Because just trust me. Just obey me. Why didn't he give it to Moses? Why didn't he give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob? Because I believe with all my heart that all God has ever wanted from us is to just trust him and obey him. But for some reason, the Hebrew people found that to be difficult. And for some reason, we found it to be difficult. And two separate times, God allowed the human experiment to exist with this impetus of trusting and obeying him. And it ended in the flood and it ended in the Tower of Babel. And then it came to his Hebrew people and he said, in my opinion, fine, here. Here's the law. And the law says, you want a path to my approval? Here it is. That's what the law says. When Moses comes down the mountain in Exodus 19 and he's got the tablets there, what God is saying is, do you want a path to salvation? To heaven? To eternity? To right standing before me? Is that what you want? Here. This is it. Follow the law. Go ahead. You want to know what the rules are? Here are the rules. And he gives them 630 rules. This is the path to be right with me. I've asked you over and over and over again, and here's what's so important, I think, for us. We feel this pull in our own lives, right? Just trust me. Just obey me. You don't have to all the way understand me. Just trust. We feel that pull, right? But God says, okay, you want law. This is the path. I've asked you to trust me. You've decided not to do that. You need to know the rules. Here are the rules. Here's the thing about the rules. And here's the thing about the law. And this is why I would be honest with you and tell you that this morning's sermon was really difficult to write because I've often said that the most difficult thing in preparing a sermon is deciding what not to say. And this morning, there's so much to say about the law and its import and how much it matters across the span of Scripture. I do not think you can overstate the importance of the law and its impact on the rest of faith and on what it was to be a New Testament Christian and even on how we understand our faith. If you want to be a Christian at all, with any knowledge of the Bible, with any knowledge of how your faith works, you've got to understand the importance of the law. I actually think it works this way. This is going to sound ludicrous. I believe in my email to the staff when I sent them my notes. I said, these seem unhinged, but just go with me. And even as I ran through them this morning, Zach, who's doing our slides, said, you're going to have to explain this one a little bit. And I said, yeah, I know. Okay, but here you go. The law equals Luke Skywalker's genealogy. Deal with it. I'm not even going to explain that. I'm just going to go on to the next point. No, here's the thing, and I've thought this a long time, and this is probably an outdated analogy, but I hope that it can hold up. I grew up, I was born in 1981. That makes some of you feel very young and others feel very old. I don't care. I was born in 1981. I was actually talking to a friend of mine this week. This is Jermaine to nothing, but I was talking to a friend of mine this week that I worked for when I was 19 and I think he was 22 and we were doing the same ministry together. And we both kind of had this realization at the same time, like we're the old dogs now, like we're both in our mid forties. We've been doing this for 25 years. We can't, we're not, we're not young anymore, which means frankly, I should be better at this than I am, but you know, here we are. I've thought for a long time, when I was growing up, Luke Skywalker and Star Wars hit me just in the exact right spot. He was a hero growing up. Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Leia, they shaped my childhood. And if you don't know who they are and you don't understand this, I'm sorry for you. Do some work because it's worth it. In Star Wars, there's three movies. There's the first one, which is just called Star Wars. There's other movies that they've made since then with like J.J. Abrams. Who cares? Jar Jar Binks, get out of here. Nobody cares about those. Thank you, Jeff. The good ones. We're getting really close to an amen. I feel one coming. Maybe this service. Maybe so. That's right. I've never gotten an amen in the history of preaching at Grace, but if I denounce Jar Jar Binks and get one, that would be actually super funny. Sorry, I'm down the road really far on this Star Wars thing. There's three movies. It's Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, and then Return of the Jedi, right? And at the end of Empire Strikes Back, at the very end of the movie, Luke Skywalker is like hanging off of this Death Star thing and he's having a confrontation with Darth Vader. And Darth Vader says the most famous line in movies, which is actually misquoted and not famous. We all quote it as, Luke, I am your father. That is not the line. The line is, no, I am your father. And if you have not watched Star Wars and the first two and a half hours of The Empire Strikes Back, when Darth Vader says, no, I am your father, it doesn't mean anything to you. But if you have, it means everything. And so I've often thought that trying to understand our faith by beginning in the New Testament and not understanding the Old Testament and the law is like trying to appreciate the impact of the greatest line in cinematic history without having watched the first two movies. Do you understand your Bible? The first two thirds of it are the Old Testament. When we start in the New Testament and our understanding of faith, we cheapen and shortchange our ability to understand that faith. And that an understanding of the import of the law is fundamental to it. Do you understand that the book of Galatians, the whole book, is about how to reconcile the law? And that if you don't understand what the law is, you can't possibly understand the book of Galatians? Do you understand that literally half of the book of Acts is an exercise in the New Testament church trying to figure out how to wrestle the law to the ground and what to expect of the Gentile converts into their Jewish faith. Do you understand that you can't understand Romans oratory and revolutionary the ministry of Jesus was if you do not understand the law? And so this morning, as we arrive at Exodus 19, and I think about myself as your pastor, and I have a responsibility to make sure we understand the import of the law. Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts. Because it's a big deal. It's important in how we understand scripture. And here's the greatest trick of the law. This one's pretty good. And this is another one that you're going to be like, dude, what are you doing? But just hear me out. The law sees dead people. A lot of you, I know, like to fill out your notes before I do the blanks. And I've decided a long time ago, I don't care. I'm not going to try to trick you. I'm not really thinking about that. I don't think anybody had this. I think I got you on this one. The law sees dead people. In 1999, here's another. At least it's not the 80s. I moved 20 years forward. In 1999, there was this movie. Gosh, I forget the name of it now. I even looked it up this morning, so I wouldn't. What was it? Sixth Sense. Thank you. Guy I don't know on the first row helping me out on his very first visit. Thank you very much, buddy. That's great. Come back any time. Sixth Sense. It had Bruce Willis. And there was this kid who plays the main character. And Sixth Sense stands out, and we all know it. We know what it is. Because it's like the greatest switcheroo in cinematic history. It's really amazing that at the beginning of the movie, they tell you that Bruce Willis is dead. And you are watching it in real time and you're like, no, he's not. He seems to be talking. He's fine. And you don't process it. And then at the end of the movie, so they've done this whole movie. And the kid who I think is Haley Jo Osmond, I think that's who plays him, thank you, I knew Liz Roberg would know that, that's why I looked over there, says that iconic line, I see dead people. And you realize, the last two hours of my life, I've misunderstood what was going on. And you realize Bruce Willis really did die at the beginning of the movie. And he's been playing a ghost this whole time. And when you watch Sixth Sense, I'm sorry a little bit if this is a spoiler alert. It's also been 25 years, so you make your choices. But when you watch that movie fresh and you realize at the end what you've actually been watching for two hours, it's kind of this moment where you go, oh my goodness, I didn't understand that. And it kind of blows your mind a little bit. That's what the law is. Because when God gave the law to his people, it was, if you want to be right with me, here's what you have to do. If you want a path to heaven. Here's the path. And so we took it for millennia to be the path. And the Hebrew people organized a religion around it. Saying we're going to be the best followers of this law that has ever been. And we're going to help everyone. When you break the law, here's what you do to restore yourself. And then you return yourself to trying to follow the law. Here's what we do. And they built a whole faith around that premise. If you want to be right with me, here's how you be right with me. And then Jesus comes along and he does the greatest switcheroo in history. And he shows us that the law sees dead people. And Jesus comes along and he says this about the law. You've heard it said that a man should not commit adultery. But I say to you that if you have looked at a woman with lust in your heart, you are guilty of that sin. And let's be very clear about this. I'm not making a joke right now. That makes every man in this room an adulterer. Okay? That's the law. Yeah, have you passed the test of not having actual intercourse with another person's wife? Great. But let me redefine this in such a way that you really understand the heart of the law. If you've left it after someone else, you're guilty. Whoa. That's a different standard. Jesus said, you've heard it said that you shouldn't kill someone else. You shouldn't murder. But I say to you that if you have hate in your heart for a brother, you are guilty of that sin. Which makes a portion of this room murderers. And so he comes and he doesn't. And I want to be very clear about this. Jesus does not redefine the law. He simply correctly defines it. And he shows us in his definition our inability to follow it. And what we find in Jesus's discussion of the law is that the whole law, and we find this in Galatians and we find this in Romans and we find this in Acts and we find this in Corinthians. This is everywhere, replete throughout the New Testament, that the entire point of the law is to show you that you can't follow it. That's the whole point. You think it's to show you how to be right before God, and really the point of it is to show you your inadequacy before God and your need for that. That's the law. The law sees dead people. It's not here to make a pathway for you to get right with God. The law exists so that you will know that you are incapable of following that pathway and will claim your need for Jesus who came and lived a perfect life and followed that law perfectly for you and died a perfect death to make a bridge to a God that you would never have access to if he did not come and perfectly fulfill that law for you. That's the point of the law. Jesus fulfilled the law and earned God's approval for you. The point of the law, friends, is to remind us of our need for Jesus. The point of God's standards is to show us that we can't meet them. The point of the cross is to remind us of the necessity of it. So when we arrive at this text in Exodus chapter 19, and we see the law brought down the mountain by Moses. And we understand it as a momentous occasion in the history of the Hebrew people and even in our faith. And we see that law as God providing a pathway to approval from him. Please understand that it is momentous. It does echo throughout the millennia. It is incredibly important. But it's incredibly important because its intent has always been to show you that you can't keep it. Its intent has always been to show you your inadequacy and your reliance on the perfect life and death of Jesus. And that the entire point of the law throughout all of history is to orient your gaze towards the cross and not towards yourself and your ability to obey rules. It's to surrender before God and say, I am not capable of that. I need this. That's the whole point. So please, church, when we think about the law, let's see it for what it is. Let's appreciate its import. But let us always, always allow it to direct our gaze towards the necessity of the cross and grow our spirit of gratitude for it. Yes? Let's pray. Father, you're good to us. We are so very sorry for inadequately following you. We're sorry for the ways that we let ourselves down as we think we're letting you down. We're so grateful for the grace that you show us in those moments. God, I pray that we would see this momentous occasion in Exodus as one that echoes throughout the centuries, but as one that is intended to point us towards you and towards your grace and towards your goodness and towards your mercy and towards your sacrifice. May the law forever point us towards the cross. May the law forever make us grateful of our Savior. And may the law forever make us grateful of what you did to make a path to be with you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. If you're watching online, wherever you are, whatever you may be doing, thank you for your presence there and here. It is with some excitement that I get back into the pulpit this weekend. The elders several years ago made a decision that I would get a stay from preaching in the month of July, and our staff carries the torch. And I don't know about you guys, but I thought Aaron and Aaron and Kyle each preached the best sermon I've ever heard them preach, and I thought that they carried the torch well in July. So I'm very grateful to have such a deep bench here at the church that can serve us in those weeks. And then Doug Bergeson preached last week, and he did fine. But I'm very grateful that we have those voices in our church, and I'm very grateful for when we get to hear from other voices. I'm also grateful that I get to continue on this morning in our series in the life of Moses. We took a brief break last week for Ministry Partner Sunday, but this week we're jumping back into Moses and we're going to carry Moses through the end of the month into Labor Day weekend. And then the second weekend in September, we're going to begin a new series called Gentle and Lowly. I will tell you more about that. There's going to be a book. We're all going to read it together. If you'd like to, I think it's really going to bring us together as a church. I'm very excited for that series. But before that, we have this, where we are continuing to look at the life of Moses and how God used him to lead his people out of Egypt and eventually into the promised land and establish this new nation. As we look at the portion of the story on which I want to focus this morning, I want us to attempt to shed a mindset and adopt a new one that may be best illustrated by my daughter this past week. This last week, I had an opportunity to go on a cruise. My parents are cruise people. They like cruises. Some people are cruise people. You're weird. Some people are not cruise people, okay? But we went on a cruise, and as part of this cruise, it was a really wonderful experience. My sister and her three girls and her husband came along as well. It was one big family, and it was a really, really great experience. The last full day we were there, we docked at Royal Caribbean's private island called Coco Cay. Perfect day at Coco Cay. Except it rained the whole time. So our joke was, it's a pretty okay day at Coco Cay. Coco Cay is home to, there's this Daredevil's Tower. And off this tower in the middle of the island spit five different water slides. The apex is Daredevil's Peak, which is the tallest water slide in North America. And Lily did it. My nine-year-old daughter chose it, and she did it, and I was so proud of her. There is nothing that that has to do anything at all with my sermon. I'm just proud of Lily for choosing to do Daredevil's Peak because I did it and I was, you know, you cross your feet and your arms like this and I'm like wiping off my eyes because I'm trying to save my contacts so I don't have to walk around in a fog for the rest of the day. And I'm giggling to myself thinking, and I said out loud, holy crap, this is fast. Holy crap, this is fast. But she did it. Great. Here's why I bring that up. Because on your way up the stairs, there's different slides that you can do. And the very lowest is like some sort of racers. The idea is that you start each one at the same time and you see who gets to the bottom first, which spoiler alert, it's whoever's fattest. That's who gets to the bottom first. That's how that works. I won a lot of races this week. And there's like this burgundy-ish slide that's enclosed, and then there's a yellow slide that's open, and you kind of like slosh on the sides of it. And as we were going up the stairs, Lily said, Daddy, we're going to do this later, but don't do the yellow slide. And I said, why, baby? And she goes, because I think I saw on YouTube that people fly out of it. They just fly like right off the sides and they just, just careen into Daredevil's Peak, right? And this was a legitimate concern of hers, that Daddy, please don't do this slide because you might fly out of it and die. There's, there's legitimate danger at the top of the slide. And I just remember thinking, sweetie, you don't know how liability works. There is no one on the planet that is more incented to make sure that no one flies off this slide than Royal Caribbean. They're insured for this. That's not going to happen. You could find someone who weighs 450 pounds, put them in a speed suit, grease them up, and they're still not flying out of that slide. Okay? No one's flying out of that slide, but I thought what a quaint, wonderful thing it is to be nine and to believe that you are in such peril at the top of this slide that you may not make it to the bottom. When's the last time you had that kind of wonder and naivety in your life? When it was a possibility to do a water slide and it end fatally. Of course we're not scared of that. Of course I know that I'm not going to fly out of it. Of course I know it's perfectly safe. Of course I was never scared at any point to do any of these slides because they're insured by American companies, which means you're not going to die on them. But Lily didn't know that. She still has this nine-year-old sense of wonder where danger is possible on water slides. And there is something about life that chips away at our wonder, isn't there? There's about life we're becoming an adult means that we don't awe at things anymore it means that we don't wonder at things anymore it means that we instantly explain things away and if we can't instantly explain it away we know that there is a way to explain it away. We just need to acquaint ourselves with it. And it makes me sad that I can't stand at the top of a water slide with a sense of trepidation in my heart. I was trepidatious about keeping my breakfast down before I did Daredevil's Peak. It turns a lot, and I thought I might get sick. But at no point was I scared for my life. At no point did I think something catastrophic was going to happen, but what must it be like to be nine again and to be fully convinced that Dad shouldn't do the yellow slide because it may not be safe. Grownups, we've lost that sense of wonder. We've lost our ability to marvel. And we very readily explain things away. But I bring that up and I acquaint us with that mindset of the wondrous child because I believe that the passage that we are going to read today stirs up within us that wonder if we will let it. As I read through Exodus, getting ready for this series, and I arrived at this passage, I'm going to be in Exodus chapter 19, verses 16 through the end of the chapter, through 25. And I read this passage. It kind of had this profound impact on me. On the trip, like you do, I read a book. When you go on vacation, you read a book. And so I was reading a book, and this book, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, is particularly profound. And there was one chapter where it ended with this old man knowing that his children were tricking him into retirement and that he was going to go into retirement and die, and he was content with this choice. And he asked his eldest child to keep his knowledge of that away from his other kids. Let them go on thinking they're tricking me. And the way that it was written was so profound that it felt like I would cheapen the book and the thought if I simply turned the page and continued to read. So after I read that portion of the book, I read it again, and then I shut the book, and I put it on the nightstand, and I turned off the light, and I just ruminated in it. Because there are some portions of some stories that get cheapened when you continue on without reflecting on them. And I think this morning, in Exodus chapter 19, we arrive at one of those moments. That if we just continue to charge ahead, reading the life of Moses, we miss the profundity that is bound within these words. If we do not reflect on it. Further, not only do I want us to reflect on it this morning, but I want us to do our very best to reflect on it with the wonder of a naive nine-year-old. I want us to do our best to marvel at these words, to put ourselves in this situation, and to allow the words to sweep us up and to respect what is happening in this portion of the story. God is about to give the Ten Commandments to the Hebrew people. And next week we will look at the law and the commandments and we will talk about why they're so important and so meaningful and how they are the fulcrum on which a huge portion of the Bible rests in teeters. We'll look at that next week. And it would be tempting to get to this part of the story, get to Mount Sinai in the presence of God and just move right into the law because that's the headliner from this part of the book. That's the headliner from this part of the story. But I don't just want to rush headlong into the law and miss how profound the precursor is to that deliverance of the law. The Hebrew people have been wandering through the desert by this point for some time. Months, years, decades. And they come to this mountain called Mount Sinai. And clouds and smoke come to rest over the mountain. And God tells Moses to tell the people this is now a holy place. Do not let anyone touch the mountain. If anyone touches the mountain, they are to be stoned or run through with arrows. This is holy ground. Can you imagine being an ancient Hebrew person, having escaped from Egypt, watched God part the waters and then collapse them in on the Egyptian army and the top 600 chariot drivers in their country. Demolish the army and make you safe. And every day you wake up and you pick up manna on the ground and you feed your family and God provides for you every day. Can you imagine what it would be like? And then, and you're led by a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. And then one day you're in front of this mountain and cloud and smoke comes to rest on the mountain and you are told this is holy ground. You cannot touch it. And you're not American. You don't understand science. You don't have all the learning that you have. You cannot explain this away. The only thing to explain it away is this is miraculous and that is from God. And you marvel at it and you awe at it because you have not, your wonder has not been chipped away at by your education and by your experience. And then on the third day, this is what transpires. And this is where I think it's worth taking a holy pause to reflect on what's happening in the narrative. I'm going to read you more verses than I normally do. I simply think that they're all important. And so read said to the Lord, The people cannot come up from Mount Sinai because you warned us yourself. Put limits around the mountain and set it apart as holy. The Lord replied, Go down and bring Aaron up with you, but the priests and the people must not force their way through to come up to the Lord, or he will break out against them. So Moses went down to the people and told them. I know that this may seem obscure to point out on a Sunday morning, but to me it's not obscure at all. To me, it's halting. It's poignant. It's important. God brings his very presence down to the top of the mountain. He has not brought his presence anywhere since the Garden of Eden. But he brings it down here now. And for three days before he brought his presence, there was smoke and fire and clouds covering this holy ground. And then he descends onto it himself and he calls to Moses, come and speak to me. And before he gives Moses the law, which is the reason that he came, he just simply says to Moses, go and tell them, don't come here. This is holy. This is sacred. And I know that it's so hard for us to do, and our American 21st century minds that are so smart, and so educated, and so smug. But can we not envision what it must have been like to marvel at this mountain where it says smoke is lifting from it like a furnace because the presence of God is on it? And there is this man that we revere and he is leading us named Moses. And he's called to the top of it. And he comes down with a message for us. Our imaginations are too atrophied to appreciate this. This point would be better made in the second and third grade room than it is here. Because we're too smart for this. We're too developed for this. We've lost our sense of wonder. We know water slides are safe. And so we read passages like this, and I'm afraid that we miss it. And we go, what's the point? This is the point. Do you see how awful and terrifying God is? Do you see how big He is? Do you see how marvelous He is? Do you see how awesome, in the very sense of the word, that He is. Do you see how awesome in the very sense of the word that he is? And so I think if we just read this and we go, yeah, yeah, get to the commandments, we cheapen the narrative and we miss what's happening here. Because what's happening here reminds me of one of my favorite Proverbs, Proverbs chapter nine, verse 10, where it simply says at the beginning, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This passage personifies, exemplifies, illustrates that point better than any other passage I know outside of the book of Revelation, where it just grabs you and it shakes you and it makes you pay attention to who our God is and how big he is. How fearful must we have been if we were there? If we can imagine what it must have been like to be in the desert and to watch this mountain shake violently and to see smoke rising off of it and to know that our God that we worship, that we just sang to, is present there. How much would that stir us? And how much fear would we have of who that awesome God is and what he must be capable of? It is something that we have lost in 21st century church. But to me, it illustrates and personifies that passage in Proverbs that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And many of us have probably heard that passage before, have heard that idiom before. Even if we didn't know it was from Proverbs, we've heard that phrase, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And what we tend to do is we try to defang it by making fear mean reverence and awe. It doesn't really mean afraid. It means that we just revere God. And I want to be very clear about this this morning. No, no, no. Fear means being afraid. When we were doing the water slides, back to this well, when we were doing the water slides, about halfway up the tower, there was these slides called dueling demons. And at the top of them, there was a capsule. It was clear plastic and it would open hydraulically. And you would step into the capsule and it it would close, and there's water running down your back, and your feet are crossed, and your hands are here. And at some point or another, the sadistic slide worker is going to press the button, and the bottom's going to drop out. Okay? That was the ride. And it was super fun. I was laughing the whole time. It was great. Lily said she wanted to do it. She had said she wasn't going to do it. But she said she wanted to try dueling demons with her cousin Charlotte. And I was like, great, babe. And so we get up there. We wait in line. And it's her turn. And she goes, and I want to watch her in the capsule. And the thing opens like a coffin, you know. And then, and she took one step into it and paused and like looked around. And I was getting ready. I knew she was going to turn and look at me. And I was getting ready to like, babe, you got it. You can do this. You're all right. You know, like I was going to talk her into it. But when she turned and looked at me, the color had left her face. And she just went. And I just, all toughness left. Baby, come here. Come here. You don't have to do it. Walk down by yourself in shame, but you don't have to do it. You don't have to do this. I'm still going to do it. I'll see you at the bottom. I'm not going to miss my opportunity to duel the demon. But when I saw her, I knew she was afraid. She was scared. There's no talking her into this. Fear of the Lord means being afraid. We don't soft pedal it with reverence first. We are actually afraid of him and what he can do. We actually tremble at his might. I don't know if you read it, if you caught it in the narrative, but it's said that the whole camp trembled. The tough, grizzled old men. The women who have seen everything and endured more. The whole camp tremb idea that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, let us not soft pedal it first into reverence. Let us understand first that it is an actual sense of fear where the color leaves our face and we understand what it is that our God is capable of. And we don't talk about this a lot, particularly not in American churches, but he can smite us. He can put his thumb on us and end it. You know your mom used to say, I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it? God actually means it. We should be fearful of God. That's where our relationship with him should start. And when we skip that step, I think we shortchange ourselves. I actually have thought about it this way for years. And I don't know if this will resonate with you or not, but for me, the way that our progressive understanding of who God is isn't very dissimilar from my progressive understanding of who my father is. I was born in the 80s, and when you're born in the 80s, your parents hit you. They spanked you, okay? That's what you got. I got spanked when I was growing up. We don't do it now. If we do it now, we don't talk about it. But I will say that there are times when my children act in such a way, and I think this is why we invented spanking. You have no fear, and you need a knot jerked in your tail. My dad didn't just spank me. And one of the biggest mistakes I made was when I was eight years old, my mom broke the wooden spoon on me and I laughed at her. It was belt after that, from then on out. And if I had anything in my life to do over again, I would strongly consider going back to eight years old and crying and pretending like that hurt. Because the belt was the worst. Not only did we get spanked with the belt, but my dad had a couple of moves perfected that I can't even do to this day. I called it the no-look slap and grab, but when we were in the car, I'd be in the back seat, and if me and my sister got sideways, dad could, without looking, without breaking eye contact with the road, reach back and slap. He had some sort of radar to know where my left thigh was. He could reach back and slap it and grab it and squeeze it. So now I'm dealing with the sting of hitting my leg. And then he squeezes it and he has these fulcrum grips on my leg. I'm in incredible pain. I have no idea what words he's saying or what words I'm using. I'm just trying to get this done with, right? And then he had this other move where he would grab my arm and twist it and just kind of jam my shoulder into itself and walk me across a room. And I'm going like this. It was easier to be a parent in the 80s, I think. But when I was little, I was scared of my dad. For better or worse, maybe I need to work this out in therapy. For better or worse, I was scared of him. I didn't get sideways because I didn't want to get hurt. I watched my mouth because I didn't want the no-look slapping grab. I didn't want to get spanked. I was scared, and so that kept me in line. But eventually, somewhere in middle school, I realized, defects is a thing. He's not going to hurt me that bad. He really is not going to do anything. Or I can report him. I got a leg up. But by that time in my life, I just wanted to make him proud of me. I didn't obey him because I was scared of getting the belt. I obeyed him because I wanted to make him proud. And then at some point in my life, I realized that he was proud of me, that he was proud to call me his son. And my mom was proud to call me her son. And then the knowledge of their pride in me made me love them all the more. And so fear begat reverence, begat a desire to make them proud. The fact that I knew that they were proud of me begat this deep love for them, that they loved and accepted me for who I was no matter what and it was unconditional and I don't think it works very differently with our Heavenly Father but we can't just jump straight to love we have to experience fear and from that fear a desire to make our Heavenly Father proud and from that desire realize that he is proud of us that that He does love us as much as He ever will. And then from that comes this unconditional, reciprocal, grateful love from us towards our Heavenly Father. But it has to start with fear. That's why it says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And I think that that gets a bad rap, this idea of fearing our God. Why would our God want us to be afraid of him? Why would he ask that of us? Because in the 21st century church, in American church, we skip fear and we go straight to the cross. We skip fear and we go right to Christmas and right to Easter. I am forgiven because he was forsaken. I'm accepted. He was condemned. And we get to move right to God. We get to move right into God's presence. We never experience the fear of him. It's like growing up with your grandfather when all he ever wants to do is spoil you. But you forget that your dad has to discipline you. We forget that. And we skip straight to love. And we forget to fear our God. We forget scenes like this in Exodus 19 where we should be awestruck by him and wonder and marvel at his largesse and at his might and at his wrath and at his vengeance and at his anger. Those don't make us comfortable, so we move on from them. But I believe that we cheapen our relationship with our Father God when we are not aware of them. So why does God insist that fear is the beginning of wisdom? And how can that be a good thing? A few points to this end. First of all, fear appreciates grace and mercy. Fear helps us appreciate grace and mercy. Here's what I mean. Back to the well of the cruise this week by way of illustration. This was a, my parents were saying, a once-in-a-lifetime trip for our family. My parents are big cruisers. They like to do it, and so they wanted to bring Amy and I, Amy's my sister, and our families along. And so we did the whole thing. And it was really nice, and Dad did it right. And we got to stay in a suite. And that's pretty, I'm not trying to brag, I'm just telling you that we stayed in a suite. It is pretty awesome. There was a curtain dividing our king-size bed from the height of bed, so that was fancy. And we had our own balcony and a chair that you could read on and watch the ocean, which was really, really cool. We had, there was a private suite lounge that your key card got you access to, and from 4.30 to 8, there's free Cokes, so it was awesome. We would go there every day and get Cokes before dinner because at dinner, if you wanted a Coke, they would upcharge you like $5.50 or something. So we'd go get a free Coke and then take that to dinner. But it was like a really nice experience. And at one point, we had told each of Jen and I each did a cruise when we were teenagers with our families. And at one point Lily said, uh, mommy and daddy, when you did cruises before, did you stay in rooms like this? And it was like, no, no, we stayed in an interior room that was tiny. It was like a cave and it was damp. And you had to shuffle sideways to get into bed because there's no space. And you slept sweaty against your sibling. That's what you did. All right. That was traveling when we were growing up. Because when we were growing up, we didn't have grandparents that had been moderately successful. So mom and dad had to foot the bill for vacations. Jen, growing up, went to vacation in Seaside Beach every year before Seaside Beach was bougie and awesome, back when it was just run down like all the beaches in North Carolina. I hate North Carolina beaches. And your barbecue sauce. I'm just throwing that out there. Yeah, I know. They got a house that was a few blocks off of the beach that somehow or another through the Southern Baptist Church relationship network, Jen's dad found this older lady, and he would come down. He was pretty handy. And in exchange for doing a certain amount of projects, his family could stay in the basement a few blocks off of the beach. So she grew up vacationing by trading handiwork for a location that was a bike ride away from the beach. And Lily's staying in a suite with free Cokes in the afternoon and a private dining room going, isn't this how everyone travels? And it's like, no, no, this is not how, this is not how rectors travel. Somebody gave us a courtside seats one time to an NC state game. And we were sitting, Lily and I were on the floor sitting behind the television announcer booth and they were turning around and interacting with her during the commercial breaks. And at one point in the game, I grabbed her and I said, Lily, do you see up there in the shadows the seats against the wall that are really high up and you can barely see? And she goes, yes. And I said, those are rector seats. Okay? These are not. Do not get used to this. But it was just funny to me, Daddy, did you stay in rooms like this when you were a kid? No. No, I didn't have rich grandparents. I stayed with the poor. I stayed in poor people rooms. And we went on one. And it was a treat. But she doesn't understand that. And that's something to work out. Something that Jen and I have to navigate. But to her, what we just did is normal. That's what we're used to. But because I stayed in the dank cabin cave when I was a kid, I can have a deeper appreciation for the sweet. Because it was like Lord of the Flies and I had to fight for one glass of water amongst a bunch of overweight people trying to get to the same trough when I was 16. I can appreciate access to water all I want on a ship. She can't appreciate that. She doesn't have that perspective. And my point is, New Testament Christians are a lot more like her than they are like the Old Testament Christians. New Testament Christians don't know what it is to fear God because we meet Jesus right away. We meet someone who describes himself as gentle and lowly. We don't know what it is to suffer. We don't know what it is to be fearful of God. We've never sat at the base of the mountain and watched it violently shake while we tremble with our friends at the might of our God because we go straight to the cross. We go straight to Christmas and we go straight to Easter and we see Jesus meek and mild. We are the rich billionaire trust fund babies of history born into this soft world where we never have to fear God. And so we read passages like this and they're foreign to us because that's not our God because our God comes meek and mild and, and he loves me, and he died for me, and he accepts me, and I call him Abba Father, and he calls me up into his lap. We forget the awful God that comes before that. We forget the fear-inspiring God that comes before that, and we end up acting like spoiled brats towards our God because we forget to fear him. So fear appreciates grace and mercy. When I have grappled with the reality that not only do I deserve a punishment for my sin and for my disloyalty to God, but that he is also highly capable of meeting that out and has chosen not to, and instead has chosen to show me grace and mercy in the form of his son and watched him die for my betrayal to him. It is only then when we swim in those waters and acquaint ourselves with that reality that we can properly appreciate grace and mercy. But we're so quick to jump to grace and mercy. And we figuratively ask our parents, has it always been like this? Did you travel like this when you were a kid? Because we're spoiled. And so I think that fear is good because it refocuses us on our gratitude for grace and mercy. And it shows us how important those things are. Fear is good because fear reminds us of our place. It reminds us of our place. When we say the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and we say this is actually a good thing. Why? Because it reminds us of our place. Jen pointed this out to me this week. Do you understand that the original sin in the Garden of Eden was essentially choosing to not be afraid of God anymore? It was losing this fear of God. The story goes that the serpent whispered into the ear of Eve. There was one tree. There was only one rule. God said, do whatever you want. Just don't eat fruit off of this one tree. And the serpent appears to Eve and speaks into her ear and says, do you know that God actually doesn't want you to eat of that tree? Because if you do, you'll know the difference between good and evil and you'll be like him. He's just trying to hold you down. He doesn't want you to be like he is and So what happened in the language of what we're talking about this morning is he whispered in Eve's ear You don't have to be afraid of him You can do what you want You don't have to fear God you are like him and so the original sin Was have to fear God. You are like him. And so the original sin was refusing to fear God at the beginning of wisdom. Do you see that? And I love the way that the Bible starts out, and this is why I say that fear helps us keep our place. The very first sentence of the Bible, do you know what it is? In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And I'm firmly convinced that it does not begin that way just because that's where the story starts. I'm firmly convinced that the Bible begins that way because it sets up from the very first sentence, the essential relationship in all creation. I am the creator, you are the created. All sin in our life is when we do this and we put ourselves on level with our creator. Anytime we sin, anytime we do anything that displeases God, all we've done is we've said, yeah, you're the creator, but I think I'm equal to you. So I'm not going to follow your rules. I'm going to follow mine. Everything in life that is messed up begins with a fundamental disjointment of this relationship where he says he is the creator and we are the creation and we go, nope, I'm not scared of you. This was the original sin of Eve. When the serpent whispered in her ear, you don't have to be afraid of him anymore. You are like him. And so she lost the fear of the Lord. So the fear of God keeps us in our place. It reminds us that he is all-powerful creator, and we are subservient creation. When Job got upset with God in that book, and he confronts him in Job 38, God's response is, hey Job, you forgot your place. So when we have fear of God, when we read Exodus 19 and we allow that to take us back to our nine-year-old selves and tremble at the might of our God, it also reminds us to keep our place. Last good thing I'll say about fear and why God insists on it is that fear makes knowledge a privilege. It makes knowledge of God a privilege. We presume that we should know who God is. We presume that we have a right to him. We presume that he should share himself with us. But that is not the case. Do you understand the miracle of the condescension of God? Do you understand what that is? Here is a figure that for the first time in history, since the garden of Eden descends onto a mountain, it burns with smoke. It shakes violently. It makes everyone around him tremble. And thousands of years later, he condescends by sending his son and our frail form to be with us, to sit in the muck and the mire. The miracle of God's condescension to us, to be one of us, to live as us, to be tempted as us, to love as us, and then to die as us for us. We start with Christmas and we start with Easter, so we take it for granted. But put yourself in the shoes of the people surrounding that mountain and imagine that thousands of years later, this being that's shaking the foundations of the earth and is causing fear and everyone that I know is going to send his son in human form to live the life of a pauper, to love me perfectly, to die perfectly, and to pave a way for me to get to know that cloud, Testament Christian mindset that grew up thinking that they always vacation in suites. That grows up thinking that God could never possibly be upset with me. He loves me. I'm forgiven. I'm concerned for the spoiled Christians that don't take time to understand what it means to fear their God and how mighty and awesome he is. I'm concerned for the church as life chips away at our wonder and we're no longer scared of water slides because we can explain it all away. And I just thought it was worth it this morning to try my best. And I don't mean this in any disrespectful way. But to try my best to grab your face and make you look at the might and the wonder and the awe of your God. For once, before we skip to Easter and we skip to Christmas. Look how wonderful and terrifying and miraculous he is. And let's be grateful that he uses that for us, not against us. That he chooses to love us. That he chooses to save us, that he chooses to condescend to be a part of us. We cannot read Exodus and see God descend on Mount Sinai and not pause and acknowledge that we are spoiled spiritual brats that do not often enough reflect on the awe-inspiring wonder, might, and wrath of God. And so this morning, let us do that. And may we always see ourselves at the foot of the mountain. And in so doing, come to appreciate all the things we love about our Heavenly Father all the more. Because I think so often we skip to the things we love about our God and we forget this foundation of fear that is the very beginning of wisdom that deepens our appreciation for him. So may we this morning together sit at the base of the mountain and tremble. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for what you chose to do with the Israelites in descending upon Mount Sinai. God, I'm not sure why you chose to reveal yourself in that way. I'm not even sure we've handled it the way it needs to be handled this morning, but I know, God, it gives me pause. I know, Father, it makes me wonder at you. And I hope that just a little bit of that wonder was communicated. And I hope that we are moved by it. I hope that we will not be so inoculated by your love that we forget your wrath. God, give us a deep appreciation for that so that we may approach you with more gratitude. So that we might marvel at the fact that you love us, that you know us, that you care about us, and that you're proud of us. God, help us more and more to see ourselves at the foot of that mountain, marveling at who and what you are. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. Welcome to Grace. It's a good thing we turned out all the lights so you couldn't see that transition up here. You had no clue I was on the stage until the lights came back on. Just believe that. It's fine. Hey, if you are new, if you're visiting, my name is Aaron. I get to serve as one of the pastors out here, and honestly, I'm so blessed to serve as one of the pastors out here. If you're watching at home, online, thank you for tuning in. So glad that you all decided to join us today. As Sarah said a little bit earlier, at the beginning of the summer, we jumped into a series called Moses. And essentially all we're doing is we're going through the book of Exodus and we're looking at the journey of Moses and the Israelites as God rescued them from slavery to the Egyptians and is leading them towards the promised land. And so we're just, we're taking some of the stories, honestly, most of it's a lot chapter by chapter, and we're seeing exactly what we can learn from this. And I'm very excited to be sharing with you today. Nate, thank you so much for allowing me to teach. He didn't take the day off. He is still here. You don't recognize him because you see more of his face than usual. I don't know if I like it, but it's there. I'm just kidding. You look lovely, man. Keep it going. But hey, so I want to jump in today. I want to start off with, honestly, just a little bit of vulnerability. I want to put myself out there against my better judgment, mostly because of you, if I'm being honest, Chris. But I'm going to be vulnerable, throw myself out there, okay? I'm not a big fan of spiders actually I don't like spiders at all I believe that in the creation God allowed Satan to create two things one was spiders the other was Walmart like both of those things just avoid with everything you can and actually like I used to be a lot worse than I am now I used to be terrified of spiders to the point that I could even kill him I you where it started. I was sub-10 years old and my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to watch Arachnophobia. So if you need some good parenting advice, just let your kids watch a horror movie and just see how it scars them for the rest of their life. And then it got to the point where I couldn't even kill them because I remember I was at work one time and there was a big fat spider crawling across the ground so I stepped on it. I didn't realize that it was a pregnant spider. And so, yeah, yeah, you've experienced it before. They don't just die. Thousands of little spiders are like, this ain't for me. I don't like it. I don't like it. So Tamara then became the resident spider killer in our home. I can remember. Don't judge me. It's justified, but I can remember one time driving down the road. We were in Georgia at this point in time. We had somewhere to go. I don't quite remember what we had to do or what we were headed to, but I know a spider crawled across the dashboard. And what popped in my head was one of two things are going to happen. I'm going to wreck and kill us both, or the spider is going to crawl across the vent. It's going to blow in my face and eat me alive. So both of those things are very realistic. Both of them could have happened. So I knew it had to die, so I did the thing you have to do. I pulled over on the side of the road, got out of the car, and I said, Tamara, I'm not getting back in the car until you kill the spider. She's like, no, we're going to be late. You've got to get in the car. I hear what you're saying. I just don't see me doing that. I need you to kill the spider. And then she's like, fine, okay. So we had to wait for it to reemerge from the blower that's going to blow in my face and all that stuff. So she grabbed a paper towel, killed the spider. She's like, okay, fine, it's dead. Let's go. I was like, well, I hear you. But I kind of need evidence. I need you to show me the spider is dead. Because you may not have squished it hard enough. Maybe it's still running around. We need to see evidence. Then I need you to dangle it out the window so it's no longer in the car. Just in case it decides to resurrect and come to attack us then because you made it mad for trying to kill it. Because if that doesn't happen, we're staying where we are. We're not going to go anywhere else. Like you can drive. Just come back and pick me up after you kill the spider. Right? Like I think we've all had those moments before where we face something that's deeply uncomfortable. And it's like, yeah, I don't see me doing that. This isn't for me. Right? But if you've been following Jesus for very long, isn't it true? And wouldn't you say that you have those encounters a little bit more often? Like we all have next steps. One of our traits, you can read it on the lobby in the back, is that we are step takers. Every person in here has a next step in front of them. God has moving you to something. God is asking you to do something, whether it's something he wants to do in you or something he wants to do through you. And doesn't it seem like we often come to this place where God asks us to do something, and it's like, well, God, I hear you. I don't see me doing that. I don't see me taking the step that you're asking me to take. Like there's just too much uncertainty on the other side of that. I don't quite know how this is all going to play out. I need a little bit of evidence. The problem that we kind of run into when it comes to these being step takers is that we oftentimes confuse or we oftentimes mistake comfort for confirmation. I'm not talking about comfort like the AC seats, right? Like those should should be. Instead of EV vehicles like where your car shuts off automatically at the red light. That needs to be. The AC ventilated seats needs to be the thing that they mandate for all cars from this point forward. Because they're lovely. That's comfortable. But that's not the comfort I'm talking about. The comfort that I'm talking about is comfort in your security. Hey, God. I want to take this step, but you've got to give me a little bit more evidence that I'm going to be okay when I do. Hey, God, I hear you that you want me to go in this direction. You want me to do this thing, but honestly, I'm just not sure that's for me. I don't think I have the skill set for that. You've got the wrong guy. You've got the wrong person. You're barking up the wrong tree, God. listen, I want to go and I want to do the thing that you're asking me to do, but the thing that you're asking me to do, I just don't see it happen because I'm uncomfortable with this. God, I want to know it's you asking me to move in this direction, but I just, we chase this feeling of comfort and we let that be our confirmation that we need to step in a particular direction, that we need to do the thing that God is asking us to do, or even if it is God asking us to do it. We oftentimes let comfort be our confirmation, and the scary thing about chasing comfort is not necessarily what it leads you to. Although we've all probably experienced moments of pursuing comfort that have led us to doing things that haven't been good for our life. But the scary part about this is what it keeps you from. Like, do you know, listen for a second. Like, do you know you were created with a purpose, regardless where you are in your faith journey, regardless if you believe or not believe. I understand that. But you were created, you were specifically wired, because God wants to do something through you that would blow your mind. Like, I love how Paul says it in Ephesians. He says, hey, God is working in you to do something through you to impact the world around you that would absolutely stun you. You have no clue what's on the other side of that step. You have no clue what's on the other side of stepping in and leaning into that discomfort to experience God in ways you haven't experienced him before. And here's what's sad about it. Like, I've experienced this, right? What's sad and scary about these moments is you want to take the step. Like, I don't know what it is for you. Maybe it's initiating reconciliation with a relationship, a spouse or a friend or a child or a relative or something like that. Maybe it's taking a step in your job, maybe to leave a job, maybe to start a new job. Maybe it's to do something in ministry. Maybe it's to get involved with one of our mission teams. Maybe it's to go to Mexico, whatever it may be for you, I have no clue. But on the other side of that decision is this, God, I need a little bit more evidence that things are going to work out the way that I'm hoping they're going to work out. So how do you do it? How do you step in? How do you lean in to the discomfort? How do we keep that from preventing us from fulfilling and walking into the person and the life that God has created us to live? That's what we're going to talk about today. If you have your Bibles, you can turn to Exodus 17. That's where we're going to be camped out. I'm going to jump over to James at one point, but we'll come right back to Exodus. If you don't have your Bibles, we're going to put it on this fancy digital Bible in the sky, but let's jump in. The Israelites, like I said, we started from where Moses was confirmed as leader. God kind of called him, and he goes, and they rescued the Israelites. We are less than six weeks away from the Red Sea, where the Egyptian army was chasing them. They got pinned up against the Red Sea. The Red Sea split. They walked through. And it's even less time than that from what Nate talked about last week with the manna and the quail. Well, God just made bread appear from nowhere to excess. So they take the next step in the journey. And this is where we are in 17.1. The whole Israelite community set out from the desert of sin. Just a quick aside. That's not sin. Oftentimes when we read scripture like this, we try to make it say something that it doesn't say. It's not talking about, hey, oh, look, they're leaving sin. That's not it. It's a place, the desert of sin. And it says, traveling from place to place, as the Lord commanded, they camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. So they quarreled with Moses and said, give us water to drink. Moses replied, why do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the Lord to the test? But the people were thirsty for water there, and they grumbled against Moses. They said, why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and our livestock die of thirst? Then Moses cried out to the Lord. I love this. I love this prayer. Moses cried out to the Lord. What am I to do with these people? Look at these people you gave me. What am I supposed to do with them? He said that Moses cried to the Lord. What am I supposed to do with these people? By the way, when our staff gathers, like this is our prayer oftentimes. What are we supposed to do with their heathens? Again, talking about you, Chris. But what are we supposed to do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me. I don't know what the Hebrew word is for, hey, Moses, you about to catch these hands? But I'm sure he heard it quite a bit in that manner. Like they were fed up. Like they were done. And what's incredible about this, the journey that they had experienced and they reached their breaking point. Like the word quarreled. Some of your versions, depending on what you read, it may say complain. But this is another level. Like they had reached another level of discomfort. They had stepped into a situation like, you know, we can't do this anymore. The word, this is the first time that it's been used because they were checked out. They had experienced a fatigue and a failure of their faith just because they were tired. And Moses even responded in a different way. Like when they came to him, Moses was now fearing for his life. He's like, no, no, no, this is out of hand, God. I understand you're leading us somewhere. I understand you're taking us on a journey, but I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation right now, Lord. These people are about to kill me. Everyone was checked. They had gotten to this place. If you had been here for many of the sermons throughout this series, you'd begin to notice this pattern emerge. They take a step, they're obedient, they encounter a challenge. They take a step, they're obedient, they encounter an impossible situation. They take a step, they're obedient, they're going where God is asking them to go. And now, there's no hope. The word test that is used. It was interesting to me because you see places throughout Scripture where it says, hey, test the Lord, right? Like we're invited to test God's will, to see, hey, is this really, you see Gideon do that? Gideon tells him, hey, I want you to go to the heroes. Okay, make the fleece wet. Like he's just asking, God, I want to make sure this is you telling me, but that's not what's happening right now with the Israelites. The Israelites aren't testing God's will. They're questioning his character. They believe one of two things to be true. They say, God, you brought us here and you abandoned us. And or you brought us here to kill us, you and Moses. And they were done. I've done everything you've asked me to do. I've taken the steps you've asked me to take. I've done the ridiculous things that you've asked me to do. And yeah, we've had some great experiences, God. But look, I did it and now I'm here. This is what happens when what you experience doesn't match what you expect. And now it's very easy for us to look at this and kind of throw rocks at them, right? Like, man, you guys, how could you possibly question? Like, you were just fed. You had more manna than you could possibly ask for. Like, you saw the seas split and then swallow the Egyptian army. Like, you saw the Nile turn to blood. You saw all of the places. Like, how could you possibly doubt that God is here with you, that God is working with you, that God is willing to take care of you. They had reached their breaking point, and they began to crave the comforts of familiarity. And this isn't just a Christian thing. Like psychologists and mental health professionals tell us that the majority of people choose to stay in the familiar versus venturing into the unknown. Even if the familiar is unhealthy, even if the familiar is a place they know they don't need to be, even if what's on the other side of the step is something that they crave, they choose to stay in what they know because of the uncertainty, because of the risk of what could be. And this is what was going on with the Israelites. They began to crave. Like, listen, listen, I know life with Pharaoh was hard. I know we were slaves. I know that things weren't good. But you know what? We didn't have to wonder when we were going to eat or what we were going to eat. We didn't have to worry what we were going to drink. We didn't have to worry where we were going to sleep. Like, I missed the comfort of just knowing. So God, like all of their confirmation that God was with them, that God is faithful, that God is good, completely went out the window because their comfort was rattled. Some of you know some of my story. I grew up in the church. My father was a pastor, and I remember one season in particular. It just got really bad. I remember going to church one Sunday morning, and when my father got up to start preaching, every single thing that he would say, from the hello, so glad you guys are here, you heard this echo from the crowd, and there was a guy who began just mocking him. Every single thing that he said, he would begin mocking. My dad knew something was about to go off. Not yet. It's a little bit early. Sorry. That's on me. But hey, way to pay attention. But he began mocking. I was going to let you come. I just didn't want you to stand up there for 30 minutes. Sorry. All right, let's start over. I've got to go back to the beginning. Hey, guys, welcome to Grace. I'm so glad that you're here. No, I'm kidding. But I remember when that started to happen. My dad knew something was about to go on. And so he asked me to stand up, and we just lived right down the road. He said, hey, son, I want you to go home. I was maybe 12, 13 years old. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to church today. This is great. But he sent me home, and what I found out later on is that the guy and his family were upset with my father because he was going to allow someone to become a member of the church who had been divorced and remarried. They didn't think that was okay. And so him and his family were pretty prominent in that church, and on that day when my dad asked me to leave, they ended up gathering around him like a schoolyard bully threatening to fight him. And what my family did in that point, maybe within a month, two months, I didn't sign up for this. God, this isn't what you told me I should expect. I don't want to do this anymore. Have you ever been there? The church has done a pretty horrible job, if we can be honest, about talking about the grittiness and the challenge and difficulty of faith. And because of that, the expectation of ease has crept its way into Christianity. God, it's not supposed to be this hard. God, I understand that you're good. I understand that you're faithful, but this? I didn't sign up for this. I don't want anything to do with it. There's a book called The Nuns. It's not talking about the little Catholic black hat ladies. It's talking about a group of people who sociologists and researchers studied for a little bit. On the census, it's the people who mark non-affiliated when it comes to like the religion portion. Hey, are you affiliated with the? No, no affiliation. So they're calling them the nuns. And what they found is there's this age range between about 30 to 50 to 55 years old who are marking not affiliated, want nothing to do with church, have no desire to go. It's just not a part of their life. But that wasn't always the case. They actually grew up, a large portion of the people grew up in the church. And they were painted this picture of what it means to follow Jesus. That when they began living their life, when they stepped into the real world, when they started experiencing the challenges, it wasn't what they were told. And they were told when they were a kid, hey, listen, just give your life to Jesus. Everything's going to be great. You'll get the promotion. You'll have money issues. Your spouse is going to be great. Your kids are going to stop throwing shoes at each other on the way to church. All you got to do is just follow Jesus and everything changes. You'll have the house, you'll have the yard, all the dreams that you want. It's right there for you. But when they experience something different, say, God, this isn't what I expected. I'm a little uncomfortable being here and I just don't, I don't think this is for me. Because clearly I'm either believing wrong or it's just not real. Like I'm not sure about this whole faith thing anymore. The only problem with that, man, you don't see that anywhere in the Bible. Anywhere throughout scripture, you don't see this promise of perfection or this promise of a great, easy life. You actually see the opposite. You see Jesus tell his disciples, hey, listen, the things that you're seeing me do, man, the things you're seeing me experience, it's going to be harder for you. You see John the Baptist, who was the, he ushered in Jesus, like he was the one who was the first one. This, this is the guy, this is the guy that the Old Testament promised, who's going to fix all the stuff, this is the guy, and he ends up in jail, he's like, well, this isn't what I expected, and he asked some of his disciples to go and just check, hey, make sure he's really the guy, because this is supposed to be different, like I'm not supposed to be dealing with the thing that I'm dealing with right now. Is he really the guy? Like, have you ever been there? I love what James teaches us. Jesus' brother writes a letter to the Israelites. And in James 1, it says this. It says, consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds. What? James, I don't think you know how trials work, my man. Like that experience of joy, no, no, no, no, no. Because in your trial, when your faith is tested, it produces perseverance. There's purpose in that difficulty. There's purpose. And don't lean away. Don't let the discomfort, don't let the uncertainty push you away from what's on the other side of leaning in to the uncomfortable step, of leaning in to the place that God asks you to go. Because when you do that, when perseverance finishes its work, it does so that your faith may be mature and your faith may be complete. James says, listen, you're going to face moments that you didn't expect. You don't have to let discomfort push you away from what's on the other side because those moments are necessary in your faith journey. What James is teaching us in this moment is that it's impossible. It's not possible to grow your faith beyond your certainty. That's the next slide. I'll move through those verses, Laura. You can jump ahead. It's not possible to grow your faith beyond your certainty. When you shape your life and surround your day-to-day, when you're living in a moment where you don't have any questions, where you don't have any worries, where you don't have any doubts, where you don't have any fears, where you have no reason to call on God and lean and depend on God and who he is and his provision, no faith is necessary. We have to exercise our faith in order to see it grow. And what James is saying, don't run from these moments. Don't run from these places. Because if you lean in, like the step that God has asked you, if you just lean into that, just take the step, what you will see is you will see God show up. You will see God be faithful. You will see God in ways you never expected and you have never experienced before. And the result of that is a greater dependency, is a stronger faith, is a deeper faith, is a more unshakable faith. And James says, just, you can, you can just lean in, like lean into those moments. Now it's really important that you hear this. So, how does Nate do it whenever he says, is it do like this, and then I think he goes down like this? Like, it's really important that you hear this, right? I love you, man. But no, it's very important that you hear this. Because it's easy to confuse. Every bad thing that's happening in your life isn't a result of God leading you to that place. It's important to remember that we live in a broken world where sin exists, evil is present, and sometimes the pain, the challenge, the discomfort that you're feeling is a result of someone else's sin against you. But the beautiful part about what James is saying, the context in which James is writing this letter, he's writing it to Israelites who are being persecuted for their faith. They're being persecuted. Someone else is evil. What James is telling us in this moment is God's goodness and God's plans aren't only possible when he orchestrates it. God doesn't have to lead you to the place of discomfort for him to do something incredible. God is able to work and move and do in all things, in all situations. He's not limited to his own plans. And James says, so regardless what it is, regardless what season you're facing, you can lean in. And for our context, what we're talking about today, the step that's ahead of you, James says you can lean in. Because what's on the other side of that? It may take a while. But what's on the other side of that is a deeper dependency. And you have never been so secure in the steps that you're going to take than when you have a deep dependency on who God is and his provision for you. If faith is a gift from God, seizes of doubt and uncertainty are the box in which they're wrapped in. You don't have to run away from it. But how do you do it? I think God understands the human struggle. Like I said, you don't see throughout the Bible anywhere where it says, hey, listen, get it together. It's easier than this. Just believe. Which is why I think God didn't respond to the Israelites in this moment with rebuke. He didn't slap them across the head. He actually, Moses, he says, what am I supposed to do with these people? In 17, verse 7, it says this. I'm sorry, verse 5. So Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel. And he called the place Massa and Meribah. Because the Israelites quarreled and because they tested the Lord, saying, is the Lord among us or not? I do think it's interesting that the remedy that God offered to Moses to move forward was another ridiculous task. Hey, grab the staff and go hit that rock and water's going to come out of it. God, that's not what rocks do. I don't think you understand that, but he did it. He took these steps, he struck the rock, and God provided for their needs. Just like us on this side of the story looking in, like, yeah, yeah, we knew that was going to happen. We know how the story goes. But it just serves as a reminder for us that, like, God's not calling you to a place where he's going to watch you fail. There's not a timeline on that. Like, the step he's asking you to take, like, it's as good as what you believe it could be, why he's leading you to that place. But I love that it's just not, like I said, you don't see throughout the scripture. I'm not convinced that, I'm not convinced that God asks us to have blind faith. Like I don't see Jesus just getting so mad because the disciples that are following him just don't believe. What I see him rebuke and correct is, hey, do you still not believe? Like, do you still not trust that I am right here with you after all that you've seen? And I think that's why God instructed Moses to grab the staff. The staff has made a lot of appearances throughout the journey so far, throughout the book of Exodus. And actually, it's going to be here for the remainder of the Old Testament, because it was put in the Ark of the Covenant, along with a couple of other things, with the manna from last week's message, and then the stone tablets, which are coming up in a couple weeks from the Ten Commandments. But also you had the staff that was in there. The staff represented more than just a wooden stick. It represented more than just stability. It was a representation of God's faithfulness in the past. The staff was what God used to convince Moses the direction he needed to go, that he was the one that he was going to be leading. The staff is what God used to convince Pharaoh that God was legit. And you better listen, man. Let his people go, right? The staff is what God used to turn the blood, the Nile River into blood. The staff is what God used to show, hey, listen, watch my faithfulness. The Red Sea splits and you find your escape. The staff is what God used throughout so much of their story. The staff represented. Do you remember? Do you remember what I did? Do you remember that previous step that you stepped into that you were uncertain about? And do you remember my faithfulness? So after my family and I walked away from the church, I had no thought of God. It wasn't a consideration at all. And I don't know any other way to say that. I just lived my life. There was never anything that made me think, I need to do something different here. Until I was about 19 years old, I had a car accident that should have killed me. And it was a miraculous moment that I didn't. But God reintroduced himself to my life. And I remember in my faith journey, I got to this point. I was like, okay, God, listen, I just want to serve you. I just want to do something. I want to go to the place that you're asking me to go. I hope it's music. I was a mediocre at best musician. Maybe still am. Don't laugh at that. But I was a mediocre at best musician. I hope it's music, God. But I'll legitimately do whatever you want me to do. I'll legitimately, I'll clean the toilet. I just want to serve you, Lord. And I remember I called some friends and I had them pray for me. Hey, listen, I'm searching for what God wants me to do, and I just need to know what direction to go. I need to know what step to take in my life. And I remember at this point in time, I was a night owner at a hotel. I was an assistant basketball coach for a high school, and I was going to school full time. I legitimately got maybe four hours of sleep a day during basketball season. It was even less than that with practices and all that. And the four hours, four to five hours, it was just so intermittent. But I remember after talking to a friend in Florida, man, there was like a two-week stretch where I legitimately could sleep no more than about an hour a day. Because have you ever had something on your mind so much that it keeps you awake? Like that's a real thing. And there was something, every time I laid my head down to go to sleep, there was a musical riff, there was a guitar, a chord progression. There was, that I had, it was just so eating away at me that I had to get up and go play the guitar. There was some lyrics that I was writing down or something was just something with music. It was so heavy on my mind that it legitimately kept me awake at night. And I remember getting out of the shower one day to get ready to go to the hotel for work, and I saw my phone had a missed call, and it was a voicemail. It was actually the guy that prayed with me in Florida. And I remember the moment, I had no clue what his voicemail said, but I remember the moment that I heard his voice. I remembered one of the lines from the prayer two weeks ago. And he said, hey God, put it on Aaron's mind. So much. What do you want him to do if he loses sleep at night? And I, man, oh, this is it. Like, this is evidence. Like, now I know where to go. I know what to do. I know God is with me. I know God has called me. I know God has chosen me to be a part of something. Like, I'm just so excited. And so I started that journey. And in the journey of being a pastor, in the journey of leading worship, I can't tell you how many times insecurity sets in. It says, you're not the guy. You're not the one. You're not good enough for this. Who are you that people are going to follow you or listen to you? And I'm not saying this because I need accolades or I need you to give me kudos. That's not the point. But what I have in my life, the gift by the grace of God, has given me a staff that I can cling to when my faith begins to slip. So, let me ask you a question. What's the step God keeps putting in front of you? What's the thing he's asking you to do for your marriage, for your family, for your ministry, for your life? What is the step that has caused you to pump the brakes? Because it's a little uncertain. Second question. What's your staff? And don't answer that too quickly. Spend some time thinking, where have you experienced the greatness and goodness of God in a way that it cannot be taken away from you? Where have you experienced the greatness and goodness of God that you can cling to it and let it be a motivator? No, no, no, no, no. I can lean in. I can go and I can do the things that God is asking me to do, not because of me, because I serve a faithful God. He will not leave me. Just step. Take your staff and go. Let's say a prayer. God, thank you so much. God, I thank you for man, I'm just struck by by your grace and your willingness and your desire to use us in ways that we could never imagine. God, I'm so grateful that for each and every person in here, regardless where they are in their faith journey, or if they're not stepping into faith, or they don't really know if they believe, God, I thank you that you thought of them, and you have a plan for them. And I just ask, God, that you would, just by the graciousness and the gentleness of your Holy Spirit, you would come alongside of us, God, and you would remind us that you would do for us what you did for Moses in this moment when he was terrified, when he had no clue what to do, when he thought he was about to die. You reminded him, hey, you remember the thing? You're not asking us to believe blindly, but you're asking us to cling to the faithfulness we've experienced, God, and we can all, all go back to the cross. In the text that Paul tells us, that if God is for us, who can be against us? And the evidence of this is the cross of Christ, that you, God, wouldn't even spare your own son for our lives. Thank you for that, God. We ask for clarity. We ask for wisdom. We ask for hope. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. I'm Erin. I do get the privilege of being one of your pastors. And as my daughter just said a second ago, an all-purpose pastor. I just found that one as a funny little whatever. So thanks, Zoe. I appreciate that. And I appreciate everyone being in the building today. I know how easy it is when you hear that Nate isn't preaching to just say that you're going to sleep in that day. I get it, and it's okay. So thank you for coming and giving me someone to speak to. I do appreciate that. And a little, for those of you guys that don't know, Nate is on his way to Istanbul, Turkey. He's going to participate for the next week in helping to train up some Iranian pastors so that they can go and preach the gospel. So he's excited and thrilled. And I just spoke with Jen and the update is, is he's in the air. He's left Germany and he's next stop is Istanbul. So keep him in your prayers as we kind of move forward this week. That would be appreciated. So I wanted to start our morning this morning with a question. And my question to you is, what are you afraid of? And I got to thinking about people's fears. I know what some of mine are. And I decided to do just a little research and see exactly what other people were afraid of. And so I Googled it. And that does count as research. Don't judge. It counts. But I Googled it, and it's amazing how many top ten lists you can find when you Google things. So a couple of ones in no particular order that popped up was aerophobia, which is the fear of flying. And I know there's probably somebody in this room that is kind of up in that category. There was also acrophobia, which is the fear of heights. I fall squarely in that category. You can ask my family. They have lots of stories of me in heights. And none of them are pretty, I promise. There was also arachnophobia. And I know this one is quite a few of y'all because they made a movie about this. It's the fear of spiders. I have an aunt who, strong woman, nurse, nothing bothered her, but a spider could send her screaming in a pass down the road. It was bad. And then there was another one called glossophobia, but it's the fear of public speaking, which, as you can, that one's not one of mine. I know it happens to be a lot of other people's. I've had conversations, and people have told me that they'd rather die than actually stand up in front of a group of people. And so, guess what? Death and dying is also up there on that list. And so are snakes. I may fall in that category too. So there's all of these different fears out there, things that people are afraid of. And this will all make sense in a minute, but you're going to see where my brain goes sometimes. So I was like, what is a fear? What, what, what is a fear? So I looked that one up too. I love Google by the way. Um, and Webster's dictionary defines a fear as a strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger. So basically it is some sort of physical response to keep, it helps to keep us safe. It's a way that we're wired that helps to keep us safe okay so that makes a lot of sense but then I got to thinking to my fear of heights is not something that keeps me up at night I don't think your fear of spiders is what wakes you up at 3 a.m. questioning all the things. Am I right? Yeah, probably so. But does that mean that it's not a fear? No. The things that are keeping us up in the middle of the night are things like fear of failure or fear of loneliness or fear of change or inadequacy or judgment or rejection and I think the list could go on and on and you have yours, whatever it may be. These are still real fears, but these fears are caused by a belief system. Something that we've heard, felt, or otherwise. It's not a reaction to danger. It's coming from someplace internal. So how do you combat these fears then? I know how to combat fear of heights, right? I just don't go anywhere where it's tall. That's easy. You can stay away from spiders. Those are easy things that you can avoid. But how do you combat the things that are waking you up at 3 a.m.? What do you do? Again, I googled it. What's the opposite of fears? It's something called faith. The definition of faith is a complete trust or confidence in someone or something. And the writers and Hebrews actually state that having faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance of what we do not see. And that sounds like a really spectacular place to live. Confident in what I hope for, assured in what I do not see, and I wish I could stand before you and tell you that's exactly where I live my life. But I'd be lying. And you know, that's kind of looked down upon in church. So I'll be completely honest. I wish I had that faith every single day. But you know, I'm just like everybody else. I struggle with all these things that happen in my head. I'm a people pleaser. So lo and behold, I'm always afraid. Have I made somebody mad? Or are they judging me? Or am I truly equipped to do what it is that I do? And so the thing about that, though, is that those fears and those things that swirl around in my head, they don't discount the faith that I do have. Because the thing to remember here is, is that when you're afraid, you can still have faith. Because faith isn't the absence of fear, but it's trusting God in the face of it. So your faith is not going to happen without fear. Because what we're called to do then is to not allow this fear to take over, but to learn to trust and lean in to God. And in doing so, our faith starts to become bigger than our fears. So today I want to jump into Mark 5. So I am going backwards from where Nate was. It's just the way I do things. I can't follow along in his pattern. I have to do it my way, right? So I'm going to jump over to Mark chapter 5. We're going to start in verse 21 through 24. I'm going to read those to you, but if you want to grab your Bibles, you guys can follow along. I'm going to do a great deal of probably summarizing as we continue through, just because this is actually a long passage. So 5, 21 through 24, and a great crowd followed him and thronged about him. So here we meet Jairus, who is a ruler in the synagogue. An important point to kind of make here is that this doesn't mean he's a religious leader. He's not exactly a Pharisee or Sadducee. What he is is probably equivalent to one of our elders. He actively takes place in what happens inside of the synagogue. He helps to take care of the building. He's going to be well established in his community. He'll be well thought of in his community and respected. And here he stands with a daughter who is dying. The word that's used here is death is imminent. Like this isn't a long, drawn out process. She's probably got hours to live is what it's referring to here. And so he is coming to Jesus at this moment in his life. And I think back to what are the fears that he had before he took those steps. What fears were going through his brain like what goes through ours. And you can only imagine as a leader in the community. He's possibly fearing loss of status in the community. Or fearing the fact that he's going to lose respect. The other one too is that currently the religious community was not too keen on Jesus, right? They're still not sure who he is at this point. He's out teaching, he's out healing, he's out doing all of the things. He's drawing large crowds everywhere he goes. People aren't quite sure who he is, but the religious community had taken note, and they weren't real happy with him. And so for Jairus to step out, there's a risk, right, of him losing his status completely inside of the religious community. But he does it anyway, right? And Jesus' response to him, which I absolutely love, is he doesn't say a word. Jairus is at his feet and he says, come heal my daughter. And all Jesus does is follow Jairus to his house. Doesn't call him out. Doesn't make a big deal out of it. Just follows him. And so they head off to his house. And if we continue on in scripture, and I'm not going to read this, this is part of the areas where I'm going to kind of summarize things. We meet, they, as they're headed in this large crowd of people on their way to Jairus' house, they come across a woman who is physically ill. She has, scripture states that she's been bleeding for 12 years. She has spent all of her money and all of her resources trying to find a cure. Very unsuccessful. And at this point in time, she's actually worse off than what she was when it started. So she's going to be physically weak. She is an outcast in her community. But she has a belief in her head that if she can only get to Jesus and if she can only touch his garment, she just knows that he can heal her. But what does it take for her to get to him? Because can you imagine what's going through her brain? First of all, she's physically weak. So there has to be this fear of what happens if I don't make it? What happens if I can't get to him through all of these people? I'm going to be like this for the rest of my life. Like my last shot at healing. There's also, I said before, she's an outcast. The thing here is that Jewish ceremonial law stated that she was unclean because she had been bleeding. And by being unclean, that meant that anything or anyone that she touched, she made unclean also. And then there's a whole litany of things that must be done to make that person or that thing clean again. So people avoided her. She had no contacts. She was not allowed in the synagogue at all. We don't know, according to scripture, if she even had a family. But if she did have a family, she would not have been with them. She would have been secluded from them. So I can't even imagine how this woman felt. There was no human touch for 12 years. No one looking at her and making contacts for fear of them becoming unclean. So she makes a choice and she chooses to go to Jesus. Both Jairus and this woman's example to us are huge. That when life gets hard, we can either give in to our fears or we can step forward in faith. Both these people in the midst of places of desperation, places of being like their life was just super hard. They made a conscious choice to choose faith over fear. And I promise you, and I know this in my life, sometimes it's easier to give in to the fear. It's just easier. Because when life's hard, those voices in the head get louder and louder, and sometimes it's just easier to give into that. The step of faith is the hard part, but it's in that hard that we grow and that our faith continues to grow as well. 20, 25 years ago, there was a leadership team inside of a large church in Raleigh. A very large, successful church in Raleigh. There was a lot of things happening inside of this church at this period of time. It was successful, yes, but internally there was stuff going on. Stuff with the denomination people weren't sure There were some decisions that were being made by the large denomination that the leadership team was unsure of There's lots of prayer happening and so on and so forth there was a decision that eventually was made after much prayer except that the leadership team was going to step away from the church and start their own church. They had fears, as you can only imagine. It's a large church in a large area, well-known, well-respected, and here is a group that says, we're going to leave. So there's a chance for loss of reputation. They also know that there's a chance that there's going to be some hurt that happens as they make this decision to pull away. There's lots of places of fear. They also are walking away from a steady paycheck in a way that they're taking care of their families. But they stepped out. They did it. And then they got together, they prayed, they did all their things. They found a little outdoor pavilion to hold a first worship service to see what would happen. And lo and behold, they got there that morning, they set up their little PA system, they put out some chairs, and they waited. And God did his thing. Because over the hill came car after car after car. And all of a sudden, all of the chairs are full. And the next thing you know is there's a full hill of people sitting in the grass. And I was one of them. And I had my husband, my sweet husband was with me. And Zach was there as well as a two-month-old and a car carrier. And we And so just like Jairus and just like the woman, they followed Jesus. They didn't give in, and they kept moving forward. And just like what happened with Grace, the same thing happens with Jairus and with this woman. And Jesus' response to their faith is immeasurably more than they could have ever asked or imagined. Because in the story of the woman, she now reaches out and she touches Jesus' cloak and she is immediately healed, but Jesus isn't done with her. He knows that she's physically healed. Her bleeding has stopped and she's now physically healed, but he knows she's not healed mentally or physically or mentally or emotionally yet. And that's where he has to take her. So in the middle of this crowd that's pushing all around him, he stops and he says, who touched my garments? Okay. There's a lot of people touching your garments, Jesus. Lots of people. But that wasn't for anybody but that woman. And so many times I've read that passage and I kind of, in my head, I heard Jesus like it was an accusation. Like he kind of wheeled around and was like, who touched me? But really, it was the opposite. It was him reaching out with an invitation. He's like, who touched my garments? He's calling to her to come to him, not to embarrass her, but to continue her healing. And that's what she does. She comes forward. She comes forward in fear and in trembling, and she falls at Jesus's feet. And scripture tells us that she tells the whole truth. This is her whole story. She lays out the good, the bad, the ugly, all of the things from the last 12 years, all of the things that she tried to do to fix herself and was very unsuccessful. All of her pain, all of her suffering, all of it, she laid at his feet. When was the last time any of us laid it all at Jesus's feet? When was the last time we followed her example with whatever our circumstance, whatever it is that has us, and we just laid it at his feet and said, this is my story. This is where I am. This is what hurts. This is where I'm mad. This is where I don't understand. This is what I've tried to do on my own. And hey, I'm sorry. When was the last time any of us took the time to do that? When did we actually give it all up? And you can see here the example that Jesus gives and how he's going to respond because he looks at her and he says, daughter. It's such a term of endearment. And he tells her, your face has healed you. Go in peace and be free of this disease. So those words right there and this interaction with Jesus, what he's now officially done is not only did he heal her physically, but by calling her out, he just healed her in her social status. He just said to everybody that's standing around, she's clean. She can come back to you. So after 12 years, she can now, if she had a family, she can go back to her family. She can go back to the synagogue. She's now reunited with her community. And lastly, I think this is an example to Jairus. Because so often God uses our circumstances and our stories to encourage others. Because remember at this point in time, Jairus is still here. He's not mentioned right now, but he's still here. He's standing there. Jesus has led him to this spot and then stopped it. And can you imagine Jairus at this moment? You have a child who's on the verge of death. You were on your way with your healer. You knew she was about to be healed. And all of a sudden it stops while the healer goes off to take care of somebody else. What goes on in my head is Jairus is like pacing. Like he's got to be like, wait, hey Jesus, like what about me? Don't forgive me. My daughter's the one that's dying. I know she's sick. Well, you can come back. We gotta go. Like, time is urgent here. We need to go. And he's wringing his hands and he's pacing and he's doing all of the things. And yet Jesus is still focused straight in on this woman. And the wait. Jesus, you brought me here and now you're going to make me wait. I don't understand. And so what do we do in these waiting moments? When we know Jesus has brought us to this place, I'm here because you brought me here. Why am I sitting and spinning? And what's happening? Where are you in this moment? And so if we go back to grace, I can say that in hindsight, it's 2020. Remember that? This was a long time ago, but I can look back on what happened with grace and say, in our waiting, it was not our finest hour. The church itself, after that first meeting, took off. It was thriving. We had a building. We had thriving ministries. We were well-known and respected inside of the community. I think at the height of all things, there were five services a weekend. We actually had to take over more space because we were like outgrowing the space that we were in. And it was a lot of space. Let's just say that. There was a lot happening inside of the life of the church. It was fantastic. But somewhere in there, there's a but, right? There's always a but. Because somewhere in there, we, I don't know, we started to lose some focus, maybe. Maybe we got a little too big for our britches. I'm not sure. But our leadership started, and this is my opinion here, but I felt like there was a place of leadership making decisions out of fear and not out of faith, which will guide a church and it will guide all of us in not the best path. And as we continue to have these decisions being made and things happening, we had turnovers in leadership. We had turnovers in staff. We had members that were, and they were members back then. We had members that were leaving. We had, and of course, as members leave, finances shrink. We still had all of this property and all of these bills to pay and money is not quite what it used to be. So there was a whole lot of fear that came into our world and we became so much more focused on our circumstances and how to fix our circumstances. We got to a point where we lost another senior pastor. We were drowning in debt. The staff, by this point in time, I'm on staff. The staff was mentally and physically and in some instances spiritually just exhausted from trying to hold it all together. And I promise you there were some Sundays that we just didn't know if we had it in us to do another Sunday. And that also was another Sunday not only physically, but did we have the money to have the lights on? And so as I look back on it now and I look back in these moments of the wait, right? We were waiting on God's plan for grace. We were waiting to see what God was calling us into because he had led us there. There is no doubt in my mind that we were right where we were supposed to be. But it also felt at this moment like he wasn't there anymore. And we acted like that. We acted like that out of that place of fear. But the thing is, thankfully, we serve a very faithful and loving God. He hadn't abandoned us to ourselves. And just if you check back into where Jairus is and this feeling like he's been abandoned. Lord, you brought me here. I don't know why we're still here. And while he's standing there, his worst fear is imagined. A messenger from his house arrives and he looks at Jairus and says, your daughter has died. And the next words out of his mouth are, basically, don't bother the teacher anymore. Because remember, he had come to Jesus to heal his child. Well, your child is now passed away. There's no healing needed. So release him, come home. And this is where I say, Jesus doesn't abandon us in those moments of our waiting in those moments of our worst fears ever. And I imagine what happened next. And this is how I pictured it, and you all may picture it different, but this is me, is that Jesus looked at Jairus and he took Jairus' face in his hands and he said to him, do not be afraid, just believe. And at that moment, I also read that and went, excuse me, that's easier said than done. But remember, Jairus has just witnessed this miraculous healing of this woman. He's just witnessed all that Jesus did after he physically healed her. And he came somehow knowing that Jesus could do something for him, right? So somewhere in his head, he knows that Jesus is his answer. And all Jesus says to him is choose me. That's all you have to do is choose me. Because you get to choose who you listen to. You get to choose if you listen to fear and doubt or if you listen to Jesus. It's your choice. It's our choice. And I promise you, every time I step up on this stage, I have to choose Jesus in order to drown out all the voices in my head. No judgment on that one, please. But there's a lot, there's a lot in my head that tells me, you know, things like you're not equipped. You don't have anything to say that these people want to hear. Who do you think you are that says that you can get up there and stand and speak? Like those are the voices. Those are the things that are in my head. But I have Jesus take my little face too. And he says, don't be afraid. Just believe. Choose me. And in this story with Jairus, that's exactly what he did. He didn't listen. He chose Jesus. They turned and they went to his house. And as in the end of the story, you can read it for yourself, but they go to his house and his daughter has died. But Jesus says, nah, she's asleep. Come on inside. Takes takes the parents in takes a couple of disciples and he grabs hold of the daughter's hands and he tells her to arise and to walk and guess what that's exactly what she did she stood up she walked Jairus came to Jesus to heal his daughter. And in the end though, his faith was tested. He was pushed into those extra hard places that said, you got to wait a minute to get your healing. You got to hold on with me and choose me. Don't listen to the other stuff because guess what? I've got you and I'm going to make this right. And lo and behold, by choosing Jesus, that's exactly what happened. Because if he had listened to the faith and his fear and his doubt, and he had just gone home, he would have lost his daughter. But instead, she's very much alive. So choose me. You come to this place where your worst fear is realized. And so somewhere right around 2016, 2017, Grace Community Church was at that place. We were at our worst moment. We had, yeah, we were in a bad place. Let's just put it that way. And I would say we were limping along, but, and I'm going to put the but in here, because again, there's a switch. What was left of Grace Community Church in 2017 was a core group of people who loved each other, who loved Jesus and who loved this little church. That's what was here still. And because of that and because of their want and desire, you begin to see us come out of the wait and you begin to see where, hey, Jesus has been with us the whole time, but where he starts to make his move. Because in 2017, I believe too, we had been pruned. We have our core group of people. We had surrendered it all. We were no longer the big cool church on the block. We were just this little peeled back tiny church who, mind you, was selling off stuff all the time. We were, that's where we were. We were in a bad place, but we gave it up. We quit trying to fix it. We quit being afraid all the time. And somewhere in there, something happened. We were gifted this building as much as we all have things to say about this building currently. In 2017, this building, oh, it was beautiful because it took our expenses and cut them dramatically. We could now focus on getting ourselves out of this horrible debt that we were in. Now, we still don't have a lead pastor at this point in time. And so our leadership teams, our elders are coming together saying it's probably time that we find somebody to lead this little pack of ragamuffins, for lack of a better word. And so the search begins. Now, the other thing just to mention is for an experienced lead pastor, we did not have a pretty resume and we didn't look really good. It's not someplace that they were just clawing to become a part of. So we had to step out in faith and take a chance. And that's what we did. Because remember, we're coming from a place of faith and not fear. And we hired a 36-year-old associate pastor who had zero experience leading a church. And his name is Nate, by the way. But the thing was, is that Jesus knew that Nate was the person for this church. And so he put him in place. And from that point in time on, we continued to walk this path of faith. You watched as our teams got healthier. You watched as we were no longer Grace Community Church and we became Grace Raleigh. We began to find our identity and who it was that God was calling us to be as a community, as a body, and then who we are to be to those around us in our community. You began to see the health. Our partners are all here and part of what it is that's happening inside of Grace. And guess what? These decisions are being made now. We have no more debt. We've actually purchased land. We've gone ahead and we've designed a future building. We have asked you as partners to come alongside us and where we believe that it is that God is leading us in our next step of obedience. And that's to build this building. And I stand before you today and I honestly believe that we as a church stand in our Jairus moment. That moment where God is looking at us and holding us by the face and saying, do not be afraid, just believe. This is the path that I have called Grace Community, Grace Community, sorry. This is the path I have called Grace Raleigh to take. Step out in faith with me. I've got you. And so I ask, what are you as the partners of grace believing for our sweet little church? Are you believing that our next step of obedience is to build this building? And if you truly believe that that is your next step of obedience, what are you doing to walk in it? And so as we close this morning, I will also say to you too, what fears do you have that keep you from all that God has for you? What is it that holds you back from realizing what it is that he has in store for you, the plan that he has as you take your next step of obedience? What do you need to lay at his feet? And what do you need to do to clear your brain, your mind of the fears and the doubts and choose him? Will you pray with me? Lord Jesus, thank you. Thank you for these examples of people who trust you, who love you, who choose you. Thank you for the example that they give us of doing it scared. Those next steps of obedience are not easy. The next steps of obedience are scary. But we know that you've got us. If you brought us here, you're going to walk with us through it. So thank you for loving us. Thank you for being faithful to us. And thank you for loving this little church that you call Grace Raleigh. And Lord, we love you. And it's in your name we pray. Amen.

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