Sermons tagged with Goodness

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

I was going to say it's an enormous privilege to be here and speak this morning. However, now that the cat's out of the bag and you realize that this entire morning is about service and missions, those of you who know me, when you saw me walk up here, might have immediately thought to yourselves, huh, he's an odd choice to speak this morning. He's never struck me as one of those super sweet, unselfish, salt-to-the-earth, missions-type people, always concerned about others, rarely thinking of themselves, always busy, busy, busy collecting things in the foyer, taking people meals, building habitat for humanity homes. On the contrary, whenever I've dealt with the guy, he's always seemed pretty self-absorbed. Now, if you did have these thoughts, I'm not going to ask for a show of hands. I don't blame you. Sadly, I'm not any of those things. Yet, strange as it may seem, I'm not that odd a messenger at all. First though, let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for all these people. Thank you for this morning. Just help me and use this morning to shake and stir our hearts as you see fit. And again, thank you for the extravagant lengths you went to to make it possible for us to be yours and it's in Jesus name we pray amen to begin let's look at four passages from Scripture which I'll read and we will come back to them Matthew the first ones Matthew 6 19 through 21 do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal Verse 21. There your heart will be also. The second is from Psalm 34. Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man or woman who takes refuge in him. And then from Isaiah 58. Is not this the type of fasting I have chosen? To loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke. To set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter when you see the naked to clothe him and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn and your healing will quickly appear. I'm going to have to raise this because I keep losing my place. Then your righteousness will go before you and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call and the Lord will answer. You will cry for help and he will say, here I am. If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness and your night will become like the noon day. And finally, from 1 Timothy, command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant and put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way, they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age so that they may take hold of life that is truly life. Those are all beautiful, profound passages which we will come back to. But first, I'm going to make an assertion, which I don't think is particularly controversial, although you might. Most Christians, certainly including me, don't follow Christ with all our hearts because we aren't completely convinced that it leads to the richest, most satisfying, and joy-filled life. I'll repeat that. Most Christians, including me, don't follow Christ with all our hearts because we aren't completely convinced that it leads to the richest, most satisfying, and joy-filled life. Let me explain. Raised in a conservative Midwestern Bible church, my earliest conceptions of faith could be summed up with one verse, John 3, 16. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. That was really good news to me, but also indelibly etched upon my young mind was its corollary, that having accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior, I was supposed to be as good as possible from now on. And as I understood it, being good meant doing a bunch of things I didn't really want to do, as well as not doing a bunch of things that I wouldn't mind doing and that other kids had no problem doing. This sense that the Christian life was largely one of deprivation and opportunity costs only became more pronounced as I grew older. This all simmered on a low boil until I got to college in the mid-1970s, which is when the levies gave way, and I wandered far off the reservation for the next dozen years or so. Billy Joel had a hit song at the time, Only the Good Die Young, whose lyrics perhaps best captured my mindset. They showed you a statue and told you to pray. They built you a temple and locked you away, but they never told you the price that you pay for the things that you might have done. Only the good die young. They say there's a heaven for those who will wait. Some say it's better, but I say it ain't. I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. Sinners are much more fun, and only the good die young. But as edgy and rebellious as I might have thought myself, I was not breaking any new ground. In fact, the notion I was wrestling with, that God wants to put us in a straight jacket and walk the straight and narrow and denying ourselves of otherwise good things, goes all the way back to the original sin in the Garden of Eden. It's exactly the approach taken by the serpent, the devil himself, when he tempted Adam and Eve. The serpent preyed upon Eve by suggesting that God, in fact, did not want the very best for her, but was holding something back, something potentially good, and that the boundary God had set for humankind, not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not a loving one established for our own protection and well-being, but was oppressive and a constraint on our own pursuit of happiness and fulfillment. This idea that God doesn't want the absolute best for us was a lie back in the garden, it was a lie when I was in college, and it's still a lie today. Nevertheless, a nagging doubt was planted in Eve's mind about God's goodness and gracious intentions, one that she was unable to shake. Convinced that she might know better, Eve and Adam opted to trust in their own judgment and their own understanding of what was good for them, what was bad, what was in their best interest, and what was not. In other words, they wanted to decide for themselves what made the most sense. And that's exactly what they did, as has every human being since. The legacy of Satan's first lie to humankind, the one I fell for in my late teens, still echoes and reverberates today, even among the most genuine and faithful followers of Christ. Perhaps the most subtle yet insidious form of this lie manifests itself in this pervasive view among believers that being a Christian requires us to be utterly and completely selfless in all we do, always placing the interests of others above our own. As with most effective and pernicious lies, there's a lot of truth embedded in it. After all, self-giving love is the fundamental tenet of Jesus' entire mission and ministry. And we, as his followers, are repeatedly called to imitate his example by denying ourselves, taking up our crosses, losing our lives to save them. Whoever wants to be first must be last and the servant of all, and on and on. But the genius of this lie and why it's still such an effective tactic in Satan's efforts to mess with us and keep us from experiencing the fullness of life in Christ is that it's only a half-truth telling only half the story. It focuses entirely on the unselfish part of the Christian experience and the self-sacrificing love we're to show others, but entirely avoids any mention of what following and becoming more like Christ might offer to us in this life and beyond. Let's be honest. For me, at least, it paints a grim picture of the life of faith, a long, slow slog in which I, against all odds, must risk my teeth and persevere, hanging on to the very end, give, give, give, and no take until finally, exhausted and spent, I'm rewarded in heaven when I die. I would bet for most of us, at a minimum, it results in an attitude toward mission and service derived more out of a sense of obligation, a must-do or a should-do, rather than of an opportunity, privilege, and joy. It makes the Christian life just not that appealing or motivating, which is its whole point. It's a lie designed to diminish, undersell, and underwhelm. And the lie is in what it omits, how it does not reflect the full testimony of scripture, which is actually brimming with all sorts of lavish promises of the good that will accrue to us if we seek it with all our hearts. We are consistently encouraged to relentlessly follow Christ and be more like him precisely because it is in our own best selfish interest. So in truth, and perhaps surprisingly, despite all the teachings in scripture about self-sacrificial love, the reality is that most of us are not selfish enough, not self-serving enough, not self-interested enough to seek all that a life in Christ has to offer. Rather, because we aren't completely convinced that it leads to the richest, most satisfying, and joy-filled life, we remain trapped in the land of the lukewarm and the half-hearted. This is by no means a new insight. In his sermon entitled The Weight of Glory, delivered at Oxford University in 1941, the author, scholar, and theologian C.S. Lewis stated the following, and I quote, The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ, and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea, we are far too easily pleased. End quote. Unquote. End quote. Unquote. What's the expression? End of quote. End of quote. It's locked in now. But a tragic consequence of our fallen nature is that it's left us with a constricted and impoverished view of God's goodness and what he desires for us, both in this life and beyond. Our field of vision is far too narrow and our view way too small. We are, as C.S. Lewis described, playing in filthy, muddy puddles, thinking it's great, when all the while there's a gorgeous Caribbean beach vacation just waiting for us. This maligned and diseased view of God's goodness so profoundly limits our imaginations as to what life following Christ could be like that it tempers our pursuit of him, making it so much easier and more likely that we get sidetracked and lured away. By so completely underestimating the joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment that a life wholeheartedly following Christ offers, we make trusting in our own judgment much more appealing and tempting by comparison. And that, of course, leads us to prioritize other things. So, if that's all true, where does it leave us? If the real surprise is not that we expect too much from this life, but settle for so little. If our struggle to take God's extravagant promises of truly abundant life at face value leads us to never pursuing or experiencing those promises to the full. What is the remedy? What are we to do? How do we overcome our constrained view of God's goodness enough to want to go all in on following Christ? How do we move all our chips, or at least more of them, to the center of the table? We need help. Thankfully, God, in his remarkable love, grace, mercy, and wisdom, does not leave us to our own devices. It comes to our rescue, once again, with what I'm going to call a secret formula. Although it's not very secret, just overlooked and underutilized. Since the advent of the smartphone, I've become somewhat of a sucker for shortcuts and secret formulas. Always intrigued when someone touts a quick and supposedly effective way to become smarter, healthier, financially more secure, better looking, a better spouse, a better parent, a better gardener, etc. Because I am a sucker, my phone is now bombarded unceasingly with tempting prompts carefully curated just for me. For example, I recently discovered the one fruit I should eat every day. It's the kiwi. The three thoughts truly happy people think each day. The five must-have perennials for any southern garden. The seven behaviors to say goodbye to if you want your kids to appreciate you as they get older, to name a few. But the one hook that never fails to grab my attention, drawing me like a moth to flame, is belly fat. Or more precisely, any sight purporting to know how to lose one's belly fat. That is my holy grail. And as I refuse to consider any changes to my heating, eating, or drinking habits, I'm basically just left with exercise. Downloaded on my phone, I would show you, but it's too small, is the app Lose Your Belly Fat, a six-pack in 30 days. Let me tell you something. If not completely false, this app is certainly misleading. And I've even become a bit disillusioned. Now well into my fourth year, roughly... Seriously, roughly 1,200 days in, not 30 days, 1,200 days, there is no six-pack to be seen, not even the faint glimmer of one on the far-off horizon. But unlike my app, there's no false or misleading advertising with God's secret formula, which is revealed in those three short verses from the book of Matthew that we read earlier. treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal for where your treasure is there your heart will be also we are called to follow Christ and become more like him so that's what we try to do but if you're anything like me it is a struggle not only are we hamstrung with a maligned and far too small view of God's goodness, which makes it that much easier to want to trust in our own judgment, as we've discussed, there is also the problem that it's hard to make yourself feel something that you don't. As the great country singer Bonnie Raitt lamented in her song, I Can't Make You Love Me, she observes, because I can't make you love me if you don't. You can't make your heart feel something it won't. Absolutely one of the most gorgeous, honest, and sad songs ever written. It acknowledges a fundamental truth about the human condition. It's hard to genuinely make yourself more loving, more forgiving, more tolerant, more generous, more kind. I've been a Christian a long time, and Christlike is not the self-description that first comes to my mind. Knucklehead, yes. Christlike, not so much. But in these three verses in Matthew, Jesus cuts straight to the chase by essentially saying, you're doing it all wrong. Of course you can't make yourself feel a certain way. You can't manufacture that on your own. But I'll tell you what you can do. You can start moving your treasure. That's the ticket to becoming more like me and having a heart like mine. We worship a God of great mystery, one who is far beyond our full comprehension. But that does not mean we are somehow mysterious to him. Having conceived of us, created us, and imbued us with life, he knows exactly what makes us tick, which is why Matthew 6.21 is so powerful and potentially life-changing. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The beauty and the power of it, the secret formula part of it, is that you don't have to feel a certain way to begin. You just begin moving your treasure, never mind how you feel about it, or if you're ready. The feelings will ultimately take care of themselves. When we start spending our time, our energy, our financial resources on the things that God thinks are most important, as night follows day, our hearts will follow. And that means so will our priorities, our passions, our hopes, and our joy. When we take steps to invest our treasure in more lasting and eternal things, we inevitably become more like Christ as we increasingly view things as he does and care about the things he cares about. We also begin to remedy and rehabilitate our fallen nature's view of God's goodness by experiencing it firsthand. Perhaps Psalm 34.8 captures this dynamic best. Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man or woman who takes refuge in him. By moving our treasure, even in small ways, we place ourselves in a position to taste and see God's goodness, which in turn helps us to take another step. Ideally, our time on earth becomes a lifelong journey of tasting and seeing that the Lord is good, transforming our hearts along the way to become more like Christ, caring for what he cares most about. And when we do put ourselves out there, tasting and seeing the Lord's goodness, we begin to grasp how the inherent contradictions of scripture's lavish promises, that on the one hand, we are to love sacrificially and be the servant of all, yet on the other hand, that very posture is the best thing that could possibly happen to us, can both be true at once. And the more we move our treasure, the more we taste and see God's goodness, the more we experience this paradoxical truth that giving of oneself leads to life. Far from being all give and no take, the promises contained in such sweeping passages as found in Isaiah 58 become more credible and real to us. Is not this the type of fasting I have chosen? To loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke? To set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter? When you see the naked, to clothe him and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood. Then your light will break forth like the dawn and your healing will quickly appear. Then your righteousness will go before you and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call and the Lord will answer. You will cry for help and he will say, here I am. If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness and your night will become like the noonday. In closing, God, in his love, grace, and wisdom, offers each of us the life and eternity-changing privilege to transform our human hearts and begin to experience life to the full. Moving our treasure surely looks a bit different for each of us. What I do know is that it's a process incomparably worthwhile embracing and that there is no better time than the present. As we most resemble our Savior. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way, they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age so that they may take hold of life that is truly life. Let's take hold of life that is truly life. Thanks so much for listening.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor, one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us this morning. If you're joining us online, we're so glad you're doing that, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. And I'm excited for this morning. And I know this section of the church here, that your general mentality is, yeah, the good part's over, so let's go, buddy. I'll try, okay? I'll try. I've got a lot to cover. I've got to see how adroitly I can move through all of the points and the stories in Moses' life, but we're going to drive to one large point today that I want us to see. This is the first Sunday in our summer-long series on the life of Moses. I think, what's it called? The Life and Journey of Moses. Wonderful. I tell the graphics department, which is Aaron and Carly, that this is what I'm going to preach about, and then they come up with the titles. So I never know what the series is called. We're going to spend 14 weeks in the life of Moses. And the reason we're going to do this is last year, I sat down with the staff and I wrote out all the books of the Bible and all the major characters of the Bible. And then we looked at the last five years worth of series and said, what are the gaps? What are the things that we haven't spent time on that we need to spend time on? And one of the most glaring ones was the life of Moses. And because of how impactful it is and how important it is in scripture. So this morning, rather than settling in on any particular instance in the life of Moses, I want to look at a bunch of them because I believe that they elicit a question. And just for the record, just so we know, Owen won the baptism contest. He did. He nailed it. That was great. I want us to move, we're going to do an overview of the life of Moses, move through and just kind of hit on different instances because Moses' life, more than any other life in the Bible, in my belief, more than any other account in the Bible, elicits a question more than any other story, more than any other person, more than any other life. You could say that Joseph is close, Moses' predecessor. You could say that David is close, but I don't think there's any other life in the Bible that elicits this question this much and kind of defines the story of Moses, which is simply this. God, what are you doing? God, what are you doing? What's going on right now? As we go through the life of Moses, you'll see this pop up again and again. God, I don't understand what you're doing right now. And in this way, I believe we can all relate to Moses because we have all at times asked that question, God, what are you doing? What's going on? I don't understand. When something's going wrong with our children and we don't know how to fix it, God, what are you doing? When someone gets sick and they aren't healed and we love them so much and they're so young, God, what are you doing? When there's big instances that happen, the big calamitous things that happen over and over again, it seems in the news, when wars happen, we say, God, this is not how I would do this. Like, God, what are you doing? When we're trying really hard to be parents and have a baby and we can't, God, what are you doing? And then when you miscarry a baby, God, what are you doing? And so I think many of us, if not all of us, have had a moment and probably a lot more than that in our life where we ask the fundamental question of the life of Moses, God, what are you doing? So what I want to do this morning is show you what I'm talking about. Show you these different instances where Moses or the nation or the people around Moses couldn't help but throw up their hands and say, God, why is this happening? What are you doing? What is going on? And we start it right out of the gate. If you have notes, you just have a list of scriptures on that note. So you can kind of see where I'm going to go. There's not a lot of blanks to fill in this morning, but you'll have the references and you can scratch the instances next to them if you want to, because I'm going to go through these and then I'm going to show you kind of what I believe is the point of all of these things. But right out of the gate, we see this verse, these verses in Exodus chapter 2, verses 3 and 4. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. So here's the context of this mama putting a baby in a basket and floating that basket down the river. The Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham, somewhere between, scholars think it's somewhere between 200 and 400 years earlier, settled into Egypt. Because Joseph, one of the sons of Israel, Jacob, who was to become Israel, Abraham's grandson, ended up moving down to Egypt. It's a whole big thing, but he got in a position of big power. And because of his power and because of famine in the land, his family, his brothers, who would become the 12 tribes of Israel, moved down there too and settled in the land of Goshen, which is part of the land of Egypt. Then you fast forward. You turn the page from Genesis, which tells that story, among some others, but spends most of his time there. You turn the page from Genesis, and you get to Exodus. And in Exodus, what's going on is those Israelites have been there for generations. And the pharaohs that were favorable to them have gone, and there's new pharaohs. And now they're so numerous that the pharaoh at the time is worried that they would become so strong that they would be able to overtake the Egyptians and escape, and they wouldn't have their workforce anymore. So he tells the midwives, the Egyptian nurses that help with deliveries, if a woman has a girl, let the girl live. If the woman has a boy, take the boy's life to cut the male population of the Hebrew people. Well, Moses' mom was able to have him before the midwives got there. And so she was then hiding him, loving him, weaning him, caring for him. And eventually he started making too much noise as kids are wont to do. It did not take my kids three months to make too much noise, I'll tell you that. Eventually he started making too much noise and she realizes they're gonna find out about him and to come take him from me, and they're going to kill him. So the only thing she could do to save his life is put that baby in a basket and float that basket down the river. Just as an aside, I've preached a whole sermon about this on Mother's Day because I think that's what parenthood is. At the end of the day, you put your child in the basket, and you float it down the river, and you trust it to God, right? So she does that. And I can't help but think and be rather certain that during that season and during that time, with this is the kind of the real picture of it, not the personification of it, but a microcosm of it is, God, what are you doing right now? Why are you letting them kill our sons? God, why do I have to float my son down a river? So even Moses's life before he's even cognitive of what's happening around him starts with this question, God, what are you doing? Then we fast forward and we go to Exodus 2, 23 and 25. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. Preceding this verse, in the second half of chapter 2, is the account of the time that Moses came out of, I assume, the palace and was moving through the city, and he saw two Egyptian guards beating some Hebrew people. And he was inflamed with anger, and he went to protect them, and he ended up murdering these two guards. And this was seen by other people. And they reported him to the Egyptian guards. So now there's a price on his head and they're trying to actively arrest and kill Moses. So Moses has to flee. And he ends up fleeing to a place called Midian which was far enough away for him to not have to worry about the law anymore trying to get him. And he falls in with a guy named Jethro who has seven daughters. He marries one of the daughters, Zipporah, and he becomes a shepherd for 40 years. He's in the desert. Far away from the life that he had built and from the people that he knew. He had to flee. And at the end of this fleeing, the people cry out to God, what are you doing? What's going on with this slavery? And I can't help but wonder, this is speculation, you go here with me if you want to, but I can't help but wonder if they thought we had one voice in the palace that could advocate for us that Pharaoh might be sympathetic towards, and now he's just made a mistake and he's gone out into the wilderness. God, what are we doing? Who's going to save us? This is too much. This is too oppressive. And it says God heard their groanings and remembered his covenant with Abraham. Then very quickly in the narrative, we move to the next big scene in Moses's life, which is Moses and the burning bush. That's in Exodus three and four, two of, I think the best chapters in the Old Testament. And I'm not going to belabor this story because we're going to spend the next two weeks in that story. But Moses is in the desert. He's a shepherd. He's tending to his sheep. And he looks over and there's a bush that's on fire and it's not diminishing. And so he wanders over to check it out and the fire says to him, you're on holy ground, take off your shoes. And he's like, oh, this is God. And God says to him, I want you to go to Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the known universe, and tell him to let his free workforce go. That's what he says. I want you to go to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go. And so they have a back and forth. And we're going to get into this back and forth next week with Moses' five excuses that I think are pretty great. But the one that I think is most interesting and kind of most indicative of his struggle is in chapter 4, verse 10, where it says, Moses said to the Lord, pardon your servant, Lord.. And Moses says, but why me? I'm not eloquent. I never have been. I'm not silver-tongued. And beyond that, I just spent 40 years talking to sheep in the desert every day. And when he says I'm slow of speech and tongue, there are some Hebrew scholars that believe that that is indicative of a speech impediment, that he could have possibly had a stutter or something that would cause him to speak slowly and unevenly. He was not the man to go have political negotiations with the most powerful leader on the planet. So he says, why me, God? I'm slow of speech and of tongue. And God's response, if you read on, is, I will be adequate for you. I don't need you to be adequate. I will be adequate for you, so go. But it's like, then the question, and in the five excuses, God, what are you doing? You've got the wrong guy. Who's sending me? Well, I am sending you. Who should I say sent me? And God says, I'm not going to tell you my name. Why? What are you doing? He says, no one's going to trust me. And he said, I'll make them. Why? What are you doing? Every excuse is, God, what are you doing? But he goes faithfully, and he goes to Pharaoh, and he says, let my people go. And Pharaoh says, no chance. And then we have the famous ten plagues, right? The frogs and the locusts and the blood and the boils and all the things. We have the famous 10 plagues. And now we don't know how long of a period of time the plagues cover. Was there one a day for 10 days? Was there one a week for 10 weeks? It could have been months or maybe even years. There's not a lot of information to tell us what the span of time was during the plagues. But you've got to think that by the time they got to the 10th one, the growing question in everyone's brain was, God, what are you doing? These plagues ain't working, man. Pharaoh's not budging. God, what are you doing? And then the last one is, hey, I'm going to send the angel of death over the camp. And everyone who doesn't do a certain thing is going to lose their firstborn son. We see this in chapter 11, verse 1. Now the Lord said to Moses, I will bring one more plague on Pharaoh and on Egypt. After that, he will let you go from here. One is, hey, the plagues aren't really working. So like what's going on, God? What's happening right now? And then the other one is, hey, what I want you to do for this particular plague to save your firstborn son is I wanted you to take the blood of a lamb, of a splatless lamb, and I want you to paint it on the doorposts of your house. And when the angel of death sees that perfect blood on the doorposts of your house, he will pass over, which is where we get the holiday Passover, he will pass over your house and move on to the next one. And I can't help but think that as Phil Leverett as the dad is out there the afternoon before Passover with the fresh blood from the lamb that he probably borrowed from Cam, that he's taking the blood of the lamb and putting it on his doorpost and saying, God, what are we doing? This doesn't make any sense. But okay, if this is what I have to do. The angel of death comes. There was great weeping and wailing in Egypt that night. The cry was great. And sure enough, Pharaoh drives them out. Says, okay, get out of here. You're a curse on our nation. Get lost. And here's a funny little detail from this story that I don't know if I'll be able to point out again. But all the housekeepers, all the women in Israel who were housekeepers of the rich Egyptian social class or whatever, they knew that they were going to be leaving the next day. So on their last day at work, they pilfered the Egyptians. And the Bible says, and so they plundered them. They took all their gold and all their silver. They just grabbed it all, put it in their dresses, and went home. And so they had some extra nickels on the trip to Israel. And I think that's funny. So they leave. They're driven out. They're in the desert. They've made their escape. And then they get pinned up against the banks of the Red Sea. And they cry out again. As Pharaoh approaches in chapter 14, verse 10, as Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, was it because there was no graves? I love this sarcasm. Was it because there was no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? So they're on the banks of the Red Sea. They have a choice to drown or to be slaughtered by Pharaoh's encroaching army. And they're bearing down on them. And they cry out and they look at Moses and they say, what are you doing? God, what are you doing? Did you bring us here because there's not enough graves in Egypt. Is that why you did this? Is that why you did all the plagues and all the things so that you could bring us here to die? What in the world, God, this doesn't make any sense. God, what are you doing? And then we know that God parts the Red Sea. They run through and the army is crushed, but they don't know that. So they're saying, what's going on? They're groaning. Why did you bring us here to die? It doesn't make any sense. But they get through. And they go. And then they're in the desert. And as they're in the desert, they're hungry. Because there's not much to eat. And there are, scholars will tell you that there were probably between 200,000 and 500,000 people moving through the desert. That's a logistic nightmare to feed. And so they're hungry. And they're calling out to God. And I can just imagine being a father watching my children be hungry every day, not sure if I was going to be able to get them food. And watching my wife sacrifice her food for them. I can only imagine how angry I would be. And how sad I would be. And how my sentiment would be, God, what are you doing? Why did you bring us out into the desert to starve? And so they cried out to God. And they complained to Moses and Aaron, and this in the cloud. The Lord said to Moses, I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them at twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I and the Lord your God. This is the genesis of manna, something that we probably have heard of before. And he says, tonight I'm going to let you eat quail. It's going to be a feast. But here's the deal. Don't get any more than you can eat. It's like when you take your kid to a buffet. Only get what you know you can eat. And their eyes get real big and you've got to try to figure it out. Only get what you know you can eat. Thank you for laughing at that joke. And then he said, the next morning there's going to be bread. But same rules apply. Don't store it. Don't be greedy. Only get what you need for that day. And so the next morning they wake up and there's these white flakes on the ground and they're like, what in the world is this? And they call it, and that's what manna means. What is it? And Moses says, that's the bread that the Lord has provided. God, what are you doing? We're hungry and we're starving. And why is it this weird bread that we can only take just enough of for the day? What's the harm in stockpiling bread? This doesn't make any sense, God. Why? What are you doing? Then they near the end of their journey in the desert. They're on the banks of the Jordan River. They're looking across the Jordan River at the promised land where Abraham lived and where Israel and his sons migrated from down into Egypt. And now, hundreds of years later, they've returned to claim their promised land. This is the land of milk and honey. The problem is there are now other peoples and tribes that occupy that land. And so Moses and Aaron collected 12 spies and sent them across the Jordan River. And they said, go scout the place out. Let's go figure out what we're dealing with and figure out how to conquer this territory because they knew they were going to have to conquer it. They couldn't just go to them and be like, hey, listen, there's been a big mistake. This is actually ours. So that's not going to work. So they're going to have to war over it. So they send the spies, and then the spies come back with this report in Numbers chapter 13, verses 26 through 29. They came back to Moses and Aaron and the whole Israelite community at Kadesh in the desert of Paran. There they reported to them and the whole assembly and showed them the fruit of the land. They gave Moses this account. We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey. Here's its fruit. But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites live in Negev, the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites live in the hill country, and the Canaanites live near the sea and along the Jordan. I just want to say, I dare any of you guys to read those words out loud like that. I had to practice this morning. Thank you, Lord. One of the things that's interesting there is if you read below in the text, the sons of Anak were known to be descendants of giants. And so they were much larger men than the Hebrew people were. And so they come back and they go, yeah, that's the land of milk and honey. Here's the fruit. It's pretty amazing. God was right. He did a good job picking a good plot of land. The problem is there's powerful armies and powerful fortified cities and we can't go. God, what are you doing? Why did you bring us here to a promised land that we're supposed to take over that we've been journeying through the desert waiting on for 40 years now. And we can't even occupy the land because we don't have the strength to do it. God, what are you doing? Now, here's what I want to do. I'm going to go back through them very quickly. All of those instances where they said, God, what are you doing? And I'm going to tell you based on scripture, what God was doing. I'm going to tell you what I think he was up to, because I want us to see a much larger point. You go back to the very first instance of his mom floating that basket down the river. God, what are you doing? Well, I'll tell you what he's doing. He knows that Moses is going to be the first leader of his people that has to install civics and laws and leadership and war and generalizing and trade and negotiations. And there is nobody in the Hebrew community that has ever had any experience at that at all. So what does he do? He takes the future leader and he plants him right in the middle of the palace of the most powerful person in the world and gives him access to the greatest education in the world and gives him access to all the kinds of conversations that country leadership is going to require of him that he would have never had access to if he had stayed amongst the Hebrew people. So he was, God sent him to the palace, I believe with my whole heart, to be trained in a unique way that nobody else could. Then after he gets trained, okay, I'm ready, he murders two people and he gets sent out to the desert. And he stays in the desert for 40 years. God, what are you doing? You trained me up. I have to have a larger purpose than this. Moses doesn't know what he's been trained for yet, but I'm sure that he had an idea of his life that wasn't to flee everything that I know and the opulence of the palace and all the conveniences of life that I experience as this privileged kind of Egyptian Hebrew person. God, why am I here? Well, Moses had to be humbled. This happens over and over again in scripture. God calls Paul. Paul goes to the wilderness for seven years. God calls David to be king. David's on the run for 20 years being humbled. He calls Joseph to be the leader under the Egyptian people. Joseph is a prisoner for 20 years. It happens over and over and over again. And all of those times are instances of God humbling and shaping the character of the person that he intends to use, shaving off the rough edges. Clearly Moses was a hothead. He murdered two dudes. Clearly he didn't have the patience and the grace and the diplomacy to be a leader of a nation. And so God sent him to the desert to be molded and shaped and humbled. Then he calls Moses. And Moses says, you got the wrong guy. What are you doing? I stutter. And God says, hey, listen, you need to learn to depend on my adequacy, not your inadequacy. You're right. You are inadequate for the task. You are not the obvious choice. But I'm choosing you because, and you need to know right now, there's going to be a lot more instances where you're going to be inadequate for the task. And you're going to have to trust on my adequacy. He's teaching Moses to trust him. Then he goes to Pharaoh. And he says, let my people go. And Pharaoh says, no. And then they have the plaguesagues and we go, what is going on with this? God, they're not working. And the last one works. And it's, they had to be saying, God, why this plague? This is pretty rough. This is pretty brutal. And why are you having me paint the blood of a lamb on a doorpost? I'll tell you why. Because if you were to go home right now and you were to take, let's just say Bayer, not like blood and, or DuPont, whatever your choice is, I don't care. And you took that and you were just painting a strip of it on the doorpost. You'd put it in the middle and you'd put it on the sides at about shoulder height. That's the perfect blood of a lamb in the shape of a cross. And by that blood, I will protect your firstborn son. Because God knows 4,000 years later, his firstborn son is going to hang on the cross and shed the blood of a perfect lamb. And by that blood, our firstborn sons are saved and all people are saved for all of time. It's a picture of what God is going to do there. He frees the people. They're at the banks of the Red Sea. God, what are you doing? Did you bring us out here to die? Are there not enough graves in Egypt? He parks the Red Sea. He runs them through it. He knew that Pharaoh and his anger and his frustration and his haste would trudge through the middle of the Red Sea too. And then he collapses the waters on the most powerful army in the world, ending the existential threat to his people. And they get through and they're hungry. Why did you bring us here if you're not going to feed us? So he says, I'm going to give you bread, but you can only take enough for each day. You can't be greedy with it. Why? Because Jesus is the bread of life. And 4,000 years later, he's going to come and live a perfect life and die a perfect death. And he's going to be sufficient for us. He's going to be all we need. We will never hunger or thirst again. Manna is a picture of Jesus and an assurance of God's provision for his people. And that's what he wants us to learn from it. Finally, they're at the banks of the Jordan River. They're about to approach the promised land. And they check it out. They can't do it. Ten of the spies said, no go. But Joshua and Caleb were men of faith. And they said, if this is where God wants us to go, we can. And they led the armies through Canaan under the power of God, conquering their way all the way through what we know of as Israel. And they settled in the promised land. And it's a picture of our promised land where we will ultimately go after our life's journey. And it is impossible for us to get there on their own, but through the power and the provision of God, he's made a way for all of us to enter that promised land. Do you understand that every instance in the life of Moses and what happens with the Hebrew people is an opportunity for God to show his sovereignty and his goodness. Here's what I want you to see from that. This one thing, this one assurance that I want us to keep locked in as we go through this series. God knew what he was doing then and he knows what he's doing now. God knew in every instance when they said, God, what are you doing? God knew. He rarely explained himself, but God knew. And he knew then what he was going to do, and he knows now what he's going to do. He knew their story when they didn't. And they said, God, why are you writing it this way? And he just thought, one day you'll see. You all have things in your life where you go, God, what are you doing? Why is this happening? And let me just tell you, God knows now why it's happening. And you might know later. But God knows now. We don't know. These wonderful kids that we baptize and these great families, we don't know where they're going to go. But God does. So there's going to be hardships in their life, and they're going to cause us to cry as parents and grandparents. And we're going to go, God, what are you doing? He knows now what he's doing. He knows then and he knows right now. So my hope as we go through this life of Moses, which puts on marvelous display the assuring and comforting sovereignty of God. My hope is that as we go through it, we'll see over and over again that God knew what was going on. God knew what he needed, and he's not just thinking generationally, he's thinking millennially. I don't know what's happening in your life. I don't know what stories he will write with you, but God does, and the story of Moses helps us to see that we can trust him. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your sovereignty. Thank you for our ability to rest in it if we would so choose. Thank you for the way that you weave the story of Moses and the Israelites and how you looked after them as a heavenly father in a way that you look after us. God, for those of us who are in the middle of a situation where we don't know what you're doing, would you remind us that you do and that we can trust you? God, we thank you for this morning. We thank you for these amazing baptisms and the pictures that they are and the families that they represent and the prayers that culminate in them. We pray over those children that you would write an incredible story with them. And we are so grateful that you already know what it is. In Jesus' name, 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.

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