Sermons tagged with Idols

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

Good morning. How are you guys doing today? Hey, if you are new or if you are visiting, my name is Aaron, and I get the privilege to serve as your worship pastor out here, and I can't tell you how glad I am that you're here today. If you are watching online, I'm half as glad that you're watching just because you're not present, and you're probably stealing your PJs, so it doesn't really count. But no, so, so glad that you guys decided to join us. Nate, thank you so much, man, for allowing me to share what's been on my heart over this last week or so. Well, we'll see. We'll see. Let's see. Let's pray and go home. Hey, so if you're just joining us, I've missed over the last couple of weeks, we've been in a series called Frequently Asked Questions, or FAQs if you're an efficient person. And what we did is several months ago, we sent out a request from our small groups. Hey, give us some questions. If you could ask the church anything. If you had any questions that went unanswered. Maybe you grew up in church. There was just some confusion surrounding this. What questions would you ask? And so that's what we've been doing is we're taking some of these topics, some of these questions that were presented, and we're talking about them with you guys. If you guys wish you would have had input, then you should be in a small group. It's just another good reason for that. And so today, what we're talking about is why does an all-powerful God need our worship? And it's a great question. And again, as your worship pastor is one I'm extremely excited to talk about. There is a little bit of a weight to this, though, because as a worship pastor, if I don't do a good job in explaining to us why we need to worship, I may not be a worship pastor tomorrow. So there's a lot more than the next 30 minutes riding on this, all right? So I'm going to do my best to get us there. But it's a fantastic question. Just because the question itself presents this contradiction that we have to wrestle to the ground. Why does an all-powerful God need? Like from the beginning of your Bible, the first words in your Bible talk about how God is the creator of all things. He is all-powerful and in need of nothing. Yet we see throughout scriptures that he wants and needs our worship. It even goes so far to say is he is jealous for our worship? He commands our worship. It just sounds icky, right? I mean, because I remember writing through this sermon, I wrote down that line. Why does God command our worship? It just, there's something about that that feels off. So why? What's the purpose of that? And before we get too far into this, I have to make sure that we're on the same page with what we're talking about when we say worship. It's one of those things that seem to have gotten lost in translation. Some of you remember, because you remind me of it often, when I was trying to impress my wife by speaking Spanish, and I just wanted to tell her that I want to go to Five Guys. And instead, I said, I want five men. That's not what I meant. Like, I said the exact words, but it didn't mean the same thing, right? And so that's happened with worship in our life. Like, we tend to reduce worship down to the acts. Stop laughing. It's not that funny. I'm trying to preach. Nate said I have to do good. I may not have a job tomorrow, and you're distracting me by making fun of me. I hear it. No, but we have a tendency to reduce worship down to singing. Maybe you include in it the acts or the spiritual disciplines, right? Like you'll include praying, reading your Bible, quiet time, going to church. And those are certainly acts of worship. They're certainly involved in worship, but they're actions that come from a deeper form of worship that we read about throughout the New Testament. The word that's predominantly used to describe worship in the New Testament is proskuneo. And it literally means to kiss towards. And it's used to convey this idea and this image of bowing down to surrendering to the will of. It's the same thing that would happen. That's the word that would be used as if you entered a king's court and you bowed before. You would be surrendering to the will of. You would put your hope in. It's so much more than just singing. The worship we're talking about, the worship that God is jealous for, the worship that God asks for from us is a surrendering of our will. A surrendering to his will. It's what we center our lives around. It's what we center our lives around because it promises something that fulfills us. It's the thing that we center our hope and our dependency on. That's the worship we're talking about today. But even that, you have to dig in just a little bit. Why does it matter to God if he's the center of anything? Why does he have to be the center of my world? I mean, we know people like that, right? If you're married, ladies, your husband, when he's sick, is very needy. He has to be the center of attention. And what do we do? Like, it's exhausting. We attribute to people like that that we try to avoid. We say, they're really needy and they need a lot of attention. Maybe we use the words controlling. We say, hey, I just don't want to. They don't care very much about anybody else. They're pretty self-absorbed. And those are uncomfortable questions to sit with. Like how is God any different than that? So that's what we're going to talk about today. Paul addresses this exact question to the people in Athens. He's going on one of his many missionary journeys, and he comes into the town of Athens. And Athens, I haven't been there, but just from the things that I've read about, it would have been an absolutely incredible city to visit because of the architecture. It was just stunning, and the art that existed. I had a chance to go to Paris several years ago and went to the Louvre and got to go into the area that had all the ancient Greek statues and just all of that. Some of them were gold. Some were made of marble, silver, yet stone that they were used of. And those lined the streets in Athens. It would have been an incredible sight. But Acts 17 verse 16 tells us that when Paul walked into Athens, he was greatly distressed. Like some versions of your Bible will say, his spirit was shaken. It just, he was rattled to the core. Because for the Athenians, like they weren't just statues, they weren't just works of art, they weren't just pretty things to look at, but they were, they represented gods. Gods and goddesses. And that it was affectionately known as the city of idols, idols. Like I've heard it said that if you were to go to ancient Athens, that it was easier to run into a god than it was a person. I've heard it, I saw one source that said there were over 30,000 statues and idols that were throughout the city in Athens. And Paul was just rattled by this. He was rattled by seeing all of these objects of worship. And so what he started to do was just tell people about Jesus. He started to proclaim the good news. And some of the philosophers and the Stoics in the area, they said, hey, we want to know about this God you're telling about. Clearly, we're open to all kinds of forms of religion. We have them all over the place. Tell us about your God. I need to know a little bit more detail in here. And so what Paul ends up telling them is as he's talking about their God, he does talk that God wants our worship. But what he points out to them is that God wants our worship because he wants something for us, not from us. When God commands our worship, it's because he sees a need that he's trying to fill. And this is what he says to him in Acts 17 in verse 22. Paul then stood up in the meeting and said, people of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with the inscription to an unknown God. So you were ignorant of the very things that you worship. And this is what I'm going to proclaim to you. So it wouldn't be a Paul type approach without some kind of dig in there. Like, I don't know what kind of man tries to persuade somebody. Hey, you're just a little ignorant. That's all. That seems like a rough way to start. But Paul is typically a very upfront, very direct, very kind of pull no punches type of preacher, right? Like he's very quick to rebuke. He's very quick to just say what you're doing wrong, but he doesn't seem to take that approach here. The very first thing that he does is he acknowledges, hey, man, I see how religious you are. I see the high esteem that you hold your objects of worship, and I see how much they influence and impact your life because all of the gods, all of the gods represented something that they would want. And so the Athenians' life was shaped around pleasing the gods. You would see festivals thrown. You would see them being marched down the street. You would see songs being sung about them. You would see altars. You would see incense burning. Like all of these different, like they just held in such high regard. And what Paul comments on is, hey, listen, I see that you want deeply. And I see that you hold in a high place all of your objects of worship. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. And what they were doing is they were shaping their lives around the promises of these idols, of these objects of worship. They were trying deeply to not offend them. You don't want to get on their bad side. You don't want to do the things that are going to make them not bless you. You also want to do the things that they're going to provide in their pursuit of comfort, in their pursuit of pleasure, in their pursuit of fulfillment and meaning. Their lives were shaped by the gods they trusted. Now, for us, it's hard to relate to something like that because we don't really worship objects like that in the western part of the world, right? Like if I walked into your house, I wouldn't see you rub baby Buddha's belly for good luck. That's just not a thing that we do. We don't bow to Athena. We don't bow to Apollos. And honestly, that's the thing that makes it a little bit more difficult to point out the things that we worship. The things that I was talking about earlier, the things that we surrender our will to. But we don't bow to the will of Athena. But we do have a tendency to bow at the altar of success and status. We don't go out of our way to please Apollos or Zeus. But we will shape our lives around the pursuit of power and influence. And here's the thing. This is what makes these so tricky, is they're not bad things. Like they're good things. Comfort is a good thing. It just makes a crummy God. And this is what Paul is pointing out to them. Hey, you have these desires. You're looking for these things to find fulfillment. You're looking for these things in your life that you feel like are going to offer you value and offer you worth. But look at what's shaping you. Like I love the way that Augustine talks about this. He says that it's a matter of disordered love. Like, it's not that we love the wrong things. We love the right things, but in the wrong order. Because whatever's at the top of the list, like, that's what has the steering wheel. That's what determines our steps. That's what determines who we become. That's what we are placing all of our hope in. And whatever's at the top of the list, it will cause us to make sacrifices, even for things on our list that's just a little bit lower. And so Paul, when he walks into Athens and he sees them so heavily invested in pursuing something, it's not a matter of if we worship. It's a matter of what. It's a matter of who we worship. And this is what Paul is pointing out to the people in Athens. And this is what he says. In verse 24, it says, and this is what I'm going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he's the Lord of heaven and earth, and he does not live in temples built by human hands, and he is not served by human hands as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. So right there, Paul immediately answers our question, right? That God's not in need. And I can kind of see this picture of Paul standing around looking at the statues. And what he's telling the Athenians is that God is the only one worthy of your worship because he's the only one who can carry the weight of your worship. Like I kind of have this picture of him standing around and he's looking at the statues, maybe surrounded by some of the idols while he's talking to the people. And he says, like this, like you created this. Like this wouldn't exist if it weren't for you. Like you gave this thing shape and it's the thing that you're going to trust to shape your life. Like you legitimately have to dust your gods. What kind of God is that to trust with your life? What kind of God is it? He has no power. And so what Paul is doing, the way he, I think he approaches the topic the way that he does, not with a firm slap, but it's just this empathetic, no, no, no, I understand you have a longing for something. You have a longing for fulfillment. You have a longing for purpose. You were born with an understanding and an awareness of your needs. That need creates pursuit in your life. What you were pursuing to give you that value, man, it's powerless. It wouldn't exist. Like it was created by you. And he contrasts that with God. But look at the God that I serve. Let me tell you about him. He's the creator of heaven. He's the creator of earth. In him, he is the guy who we actually get our breath from. He gives life. Like, he wasn't created. He is the giver of life. He doesn't need you to build him a house. Like, he exists everywhere. He was there before the foundation of the world. And what Paul points out is that, no, God doesn't need anything. But he says it in such a way that compels them to offer their worship, to direct their worship to the only one who can actually satisfy, the only one who can actually do something, the only one who can actually give them purpose, who can give them fulfillment, who can give them satisfaction in the things that they pursue. I don't know what it may be for you. I don't know what it is that has kind of crept in and we have placed our hope in and has grabbed a hold of our heart. Like to find that you can ask questions like, okay, what is it that you feel like I only have value and I only have worth if fill in the blank? And if this thing is taken away from me, like the bottom falls out. And what Paul is pointing to is like, man, aren't you tired? Aren't you exhausted and perpetually disappointed? Like what you're pursuing is a good thing, but where you're going, the direction you're moving forward to try to grab it, like it's, are you not constantly let down at the empty promises of the things you lift and raise to the position of God. I love Timothy Keller. He calls them counterfeit gods. They're full of promises. And so we devote our life to them. They become the center of our pursuit. The way we treat people is impacted by the highest desire. The sacrifices we make are chosen by the highest desire. And I don't know, have you ever been on the other side of that journey? To where something is so heavily pursued, and then maybe you grab it, but you look at who you became to get there. And it wasn't worth it. It left you wanting. It left you needing. Like you thought it was going to provide the satisfaction. You thought the promotion, you thought the raise, you thought the job was going to give you everything. You thought, okay, I'm going to, all I need is this. And then once it arrives, like it arrives, it feels like you're running this race with a moving finish line. You just never can quite get there. And what Paul says to the Athenians, no, no, God doesn't need your worship to give him value. That's like saying that a waterfall is benefited by you pouring a glass of water in it. Like it's the appropriate place. But it does nothing for the water. That's actually the source of the water. And this is Paul's argument. He's, hey, would you, it almost reads more like an invitation than it does a rebuke. Like, are you not exhausted? Like, your pursuit of the career, has it cost you to sacrifice relationship with family? Like, your pursuit of image management, has it cost you to be overbearing and just focusing on the behavior of others? And just, like, is it costing you more than what it's promising to give? That's the question that Paul is putting in front of him. And I love, I love how he finishes that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him. He is not far from any one of us, for in him we live, and in him we move, and in him we have our beings. As some of your own poets have said, we are his offspring. Like, so what Paul is pointing out, hey, you were created with an awareness for more. You were created with an awareness that you need something greater. You were created with an awareness for more. You were created with an awareness that you need something greater. You were created to pursue more. You were created with an awareness of your limitations. And just that causes us to move towards something. It causes us to yearn and long for something. And what Paul says is all of the things that you've elevated to the status of God, all of these statues, all of these things, hey, you weren't created for them. You will never find, you will never find the satisfaction that you're longing for. You will never find the purpose that you're hoping for. You will never find you being the person you desire to be by elevating these gods to a position in your life that causes you to bow to their will. You were created for God. You were created by God, for God, to be loved by God, and to find fulfillment in God. It's not that all of these other things don't matter. But it's that you're not dependent upon them. You aren't dependent on them for survival, or you aren't dependent, like if they were taken away, you're like, no, that's okay. That's okay. God's in control. I trust him with my life. I trust him with my tomorrow. I trust him with my right now. I am going to continue to offer him my praise. I am going to continue to allow him to be the center of my world. I'm going to continue to allow him to be the one that I place all of my focus on. This is Paul's argument. And what he's telling the people of Athens, and I think he would tell, how he would answer this question. The question that we started out with is God doesn't command our worship because he's controlling. He does it because he's loving. Like I think about this story that we talked about it maybe, I think, in the last series, Mark's Jesus. And in Mark 10, you see this, you may remember, you see this picture and this story of the rich young ruler who goes to Jesus. And he goes to Jesus and he's asking him, hey, listen, I really want, I want to follow you. I want to serve you. I want, I legitimately want to inherit the kingdom of heaven like it's promised. I want to live that life. What do I need to do? And I love the text where it says Jesus looks at him and he loved him. And what he told him is the thing that has a grip on his heart. He said, listen, as long as that's number one, it's never going to let you live the life that you desire because that's what's shaping you. And what's heartbreaking about that story is it says the guy walked away like money had such a grip on his heart. It says he walked away grieving because he just couldn't let go of what he worshiped the most. He couldn't trust God the way that Jesus was asking him to trust him because of the promise that wealth provided. Like I said, I don't know what it may be for you. It's hard to identify. Because with the Athenians, it was a transactional type of worship. It was all external. I'll do this for you, and you do this for me. But for us, it's something that happens internally. It's something that grabs our heart. And it's disguised as good, because it is good. It's just not a worthy God. I can tell you, there was a few years ago in my life, I don't remember exactly what the situation was, but I know control started to get really, really big. Like there was anxiety that was brewing in my life, and I felt like I needed more control over everything. And so I remember reading through the scriptures, and I came to the text where Jesus, just before he started his ministry, he spent 40 days in the wilderness. He spent 40 days and what stood out to me is he spent 40 days before he began, he spent 40 days in the place where he had to depend on God. He had to be in a place in the desert where he depended on God and as he came out of that, he lived the life that he lived. And so what struck me is like, man, is that what happened in my life? Have I gotten to the place where my dependency on God has fallen below my dependency on something else? And so I did this. It was more of a, it was just a little spiritually intentional journey. That's why I went out backpacking. I don't know anything about backpacking. Never backpacked, but I did it by myself. The only thing I knew is don't come across people because I don't trust them in bear's bite. Like that's the extent. And if you don't eat, you'll starve. So I went with about a 60 pound bag on my back. But it was all with the intention, I need to put myself in a place where I depend on God. Because when I find myself depending more deeply on God, I find freedom. So what Paul is inviting the Athenians to do, hey, rest. He's inviting them to place their trust, their hope, and center their life around God. He's inviting them to a deeper dependency on God. Maybe as we're starting to talk about the things that are idols, it's popped in your mind. Maybe there's something right about that. Yeah, yeah, no, image management's definitely something. Oh, yeah. What's funny is even religiosity can become how holy I look, how good I seem to people. Doing the right things, like that can become something we depend on. Family can become like they can't carry the weight of our worship. Your family, your spouse, your husband, your kids. Listen to me, listen to me. They cannot carry the weight of providing fulfillment, purpose, and meaning in your life. They weren't designed for that. Your work, it can't provide meaning and purpose and fulfillment and value in your life. Because if it's gone, so is everything that came with it. And Paul's invitation is, hey, aren't you exhausted? Depend on God. And so what we're going to do, in one second, I'm going to invite you to stand and just sing this song. And you've heard me say before that our songs, our songs are important. But our songs, when we come together, they're simply prayers put to a melody. Sometimes they're prayers that are saying, hey, God, you're awesome. God, you're great. And oftentimes they're also prayers that say, hey, God, I need you in this area of my life. And there's this line that I want us to focus on in this next song. It simply says, God, I depend on you. I depend on you. And listen, just to make sure that I still have a job tomorrow, singing is important, okay? You got to do it. You got to do it. Otherwise, you got to hire me. But well, and here's the other sad point behind it. If you don't like singing, like I know we got some folks who just wait for the second half of the service, like whenever the message is there and the good stuff happens, you just kind of hang out in the hall. Listen to me. You're going to hate heaven, right? You know what you're going to do? You're going to be singing the entire time. You will be miserable. Because there's no way, there's no lobby outside. That's outside the gate. You don't want to be there, get you behind inside and sing. Like, it's worth it. But I'm going to invite you to stand and just make this your prayer. Maybe it's something. God, I just, I have a hard time shaking this object of worship, this misplaced worship in my life, Lord, and I want to depend on you. Can you help me? Will you help me depend on you? So let me pray for us, and then let's see. Father, thank you so much. I thank you, Lord, for your love, for your faithfulness and for your kindness. God, I thank you for planting in us an awareness of our need for something greater. God, I just ask for you to help. Help us to keep you the center, not meaning that we don't pursue other things, not meaning that other things aren't important to us, but we place them in their appropriate order. And we allow you to shape our life. We allow you to determine who we become. And God, we don't worship you because we get something from you. We worship you because you're worthy. We worship you because you're holy. We worship you because you are the only one who is worthy of our worship. We thank you. We need you. 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.

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

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this June Sunday. You guys have packed it out. I thought for a second that you guys were excited about church in June, which is wonderful. But what I've realized is inflation has hit all of us. We're too poor for vacations. So it's going to be a great summer for church. Before I get started, as one of the pastors, I get the opportunity to meet with folks who are new to the church sometimes. And this week I had the opportunity to grab brunch with a couple that's been visiting for a couple of weeks. And they shared with me that on their very first, they were going to look at a bunch of churches, but on their very first visit with Grace, that they struck up a conversation with another couple in the lobby that approached them. And that conversation went so well that they just invited them to lunch. So on their very first visit at Grace, they got invited to lunch and made friends. And I thought that was fantastic. So just sharing that with you, let's be that kind of church, Grace. Now there's a couple of people here for the first time and they're like, but don't, don't be that kind this week. All right. We don't, we would like to go to our own lunch. I'm sure it makes sense in the conversation, but when good things happen, I like to share them with you guys. Last week, we launched into this series called Idols and we looked at kind of how much more given to idolatry in our life we are than we might think we are or might have thought we were. And we talked about this idea that idols can't bear the weight of our worship. And I spent a lot of time saying we shouldn't idolize our children, our families, our spouses, and our communities, different things like that. And I just want to be clear. I meant to say this last week and I didn't say it and I should have. I just forgot. Those are good priorities. It's good to prioritize family and spouse and marriage and even career. That's fine to do that. But they make terrible gods because they can't carry the weight of our worship. And then at the end, I kind of told you what the rest of the series was going to be about. I had somebody tell me before the service started this morning, she was like, I caught up online. I was serving in children's last week and you got to the end about the four source idols, the four invisible idols. And once I listened to that, I did not want to hear the rest of the series. It's like, I was tracking with you on the other ones. Those are fine. I got those in check. And then I talked about the four source idols of power, control, approval, and comfort. And she was like, no thanks. Don't need to hear that. It's going to be too convicting. But it's this idea that there are surface idols. We idolize money. We idolize success. We idolize friends. We idolize whatever. But that idolizing is fueled by a source idol of one of those four things I just mentioned. So we're going to spend the next four weeks, including this week, looking at those different source idols, how they show up in our lives, and what we can do to invite the Holy Spirit into our life to make some space to root those idols out. Five or six years ago, I went with Jen, my wife, to Washington, D.C. with some friends of ours, Heath and Ashley. They flew into Raleigh, and then we drove up together. It was a really great trip. We stayed in an Airbnb. The first night we were there, we looked out the window, and there's this little bar-pub situation going on across the street. And so we said, let's just go over there. It'll be simple. It looks fine. So we walk over there. It was crowded. There was a little bit of a wait. And so I find one of the servers, and I say, hey, how long is the wait, and can we put our name in? And he says, oh, no, we don't do that. It's just first come, first serve. I said, like, free for all? Just, like, grab a table when someone gets up? And he goes, yep. All right. And I found out later it was trivia night. So it was a busy night. So we're kind of standing there waiting for something to pop open. And I excuse myself. I'm going to walk back to the restaurant. I'm going to go use the restroom. In the restroom. Not just in the back of the restaurant. So I'm going'm walking through and I look over and there's this high top table party of three and they're starting to get up there's four seats at the table I'm like perfect so I say are you guys about to get up and they go yeah and I said I'm running to the restroom would you mind waiting when I come back y'all get up we'll take your table and they go that's fine so that's what I did I come back and they see me and they start to get up. As they start to get up, I can see two dudes from either corner of the bar start to center in on this table. Right. So as that guy's, as the dad is getting up, I'm like, thanks very much. And I'll just kind of sit down like there's stuff still on it. They're putting on their jackets. They get their stuff. They move. These two dudes come to my table. And one of them, right off the bat, aggressively says, you can't sit there. That's not your table. That's our table. And I didn't like that. I didn't like that. And so I looked at him, and I said, that's funny, because it looks looks like my table because I'm sitting here. And he said, we've been here. I've watched you walk in. We've been here 30 minutes longer than you waiting for a table. This was the next table up. The right thing to do is to get up and give us this table. So get up. And I said, I don't think so, man. And I'm kind of motioning at my party to come sit down like for in a million years Jen's walking into that situation because I'm trying to tough guy this thing these two dudes are way bigger than me if this goes down it's not going to go well for me and then as I'm doing that they're still giving me lip then the server comes over and he starts clearing off the table. And the guy that was being aggressive says, hey, tell this, words I can't say in church. He said, tell this guy that this is our table. He needs to get up. And the guy said, I don't really get involved with that. Just kind of backs away. He was like, you boys got to figure this out. So he keeps at me. And I said, listen, man, I can acknowledge that you were here before me. I can acknowledge that you probably deserve this table more than I do. And I'll be happy to give it to you if you ask me nicely and say, please. And he said, excuse me and threatened me one more time. And I said, all you got to do is be a nice guy and say, please, and I'll give you this table. And finally, his buddy goes, dude, just say please. And he goes, he goes, all right, would you, would you mind giving us this table, please? And I said, sure, that'd be great. Here you go. Happy to give it to you. Walked off. Jen's shaking her head. Now, now listen, if you listen to that story and your internal monologue was, God, I don't really know if that's how a pastor should be acting. That's kind of, probably should have just had the grace in the moment to get over being slightly offended and let that person have the seat and maybe, you know, like be a grown up. If that's your internal monologue, that there was a better way to handle that, you're right. There was. And I agree with you. I do think, I can admit that story is funny. I am not proud of it. I wished I would have handled it differently. I do not think anyone is listening to that thinking, and through Nate would spread the fragrance of the knowledge of Christ in that particular instance. If you listen to that story and you loved it, and you were like, yeah, tell them, don't move, make them say please, make them pay you for the table. If you're thinking about what you would have done in that situation and you would have been equally upset, you need to pay attention this morning as we explore the idol of power in our lives. This idol of power, I told you last week I had to admit that it was mine. I didn't want to admit it. Because it sounds like you want to be in charge of everything all the time. And that's really not what it is. That's part of what it is. But what it's really about is we just don't want to be told what to do. Just don't tell me what to do. If you know anything about me, you know I do not want to be told what to do. Karen Lotta got me a mug. I drink out of it at least once a week that says, I was going to do that. And then you told me to. All right. If that's you, then like me, you struggle with the idolatry of power, of being in charge, of being the guy, of being respected. It doesn't mean you have to be the boss everywhere you go, but there's certain pockets in certain places where you're just not going to put up with it. And here's how you can really tell if power is the idol with which you struggle deeply. The manifesting sin of power is anger. The manifesting sin of power is being angry, is having these flashes of anger that cause you to do and say things that you wish you could take back. I acted that way in that restaurant in D.C. because I was made angry, because he had the guts to tell me what to do. And until he acknowledged who had the power, I was not going to back down. It was immature and gross, but that's what was happening there. The besetting sin of power is to be someone who is angry whenever that power and that license and that freedom is threatened. And anger, we know, is a terrible thing to have festering in our lives. If you are someone who struggles like I do with being more angry than we should be sometimes, then you know experientially and intuitively that what James says about anger in chapter one of his book, I believe verse 16, is true. When James says about anger in chapter one of his book, I believe verse 16 is true. When James says, my dear brothers and sisters, take note of this. Everyone, oh 19, everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. And then in the next verse, he tells you why. Because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Now listen, most of you in this room, because I know you, I know that you've been Christians for a while. And so a lot of the big sins, the big stuff that we shouldn't do, you've got that in check, and that's good. But for some of you in the room, maybe even most of us, if I were to ask you, what moments in the last month or two do you wish you could get back? What moments in the last year or two or decade do you wish you could have back and redo them and get again and do them right? If I were to ask you that question and you go to those moments that you wish you had back, I'd be willing to bet that for most of us, what flashed in those moments was anger that we didn't handle well. For most of us, what happened in that was we became angry and then we acted out in a way that we wish we could go take back and have a more level head about. I know that that's the case for me. And see, here's the thing about anger, and this is why we're told to avoid it at all costs. Because unchecked anger will unravel your life. Unchecked anger that you are not dealing with. Listen to me, if you are a person who is prone to anger, who just snaps, and you'll snap at your kids, you'll snap at your co- coworkers, you'll snap at your spouse, you'll snap at the guy driving down the road, and you'll stop singing a praise song to cuss at that person. If that's you, you deal with anger. And I know because I am one, and I have to keep a check on this. But let me tell you something. If you deal with anger in your life, unchecked anger that we don't allow the Holy Spirit to root out of our life will absolutely cause our lives to unravel. How many of us know a dude, it's almost always a dude, who has a power idol that manifests itself in anger? And because that anger is always brimming under the surface, his kids have distanced themselves from him. His wife has distanced herself from him. His coworkers or his employees do not trust him. And sometimes that unravels into alcoholism to mitigate the anger. Sometimes that unravels into divorce or separation. How many of us can tell a story of a life that unraveled because there was unchecked anger there? So if this is us, if this is our besetting sin, we need to listen and pay attention. I think there is no better example of an angry life unraveling in Scripture than that of King Saul. So if you have a Bible, I want to encourage you to open to 1 Samuel 18. We're going to be in 1 Samuel 18, 19, 22, and 28. We're going to hit some highlights here. So if you have a Bible, be flipping with me so as I give a little bit of context, you can see that context as well. If you're a note taker, there is a point in your notes before the verses start. I'm just going to move that point down below the verses. So we'll get to it. We'll jump back and fill that out. Don't freak out. But let's look at the life of Saul. Now Saul is one of the most tragic figures in the Bible, I think. Because Saul was the first king of Israel. He was anointed by God through the prophet Samuel. And he had the whole world at his feet. If you really think about it, it should be the star of Saul flying over Israel now. It's not. It's David. It could have been the throne of Saul that Jesus would ascend to. It's not. It's David's. Because Saul's life unraveled. And I would contend with you that it unraveled because of anger produced by his idolizing power. So we pick up the story in chapter 18. Chapter 17 is David slaying Goliath. Then the story kind of picks up and people have started to really like David. He's coming to national prominence. And Saul one day hears this song. Saul has slayed his thousands. David has slayed his tens of thousands. It's always a joke. I'm sure in Hebrew it flows better than that. But that was the song. And this really angered Saul. And here's his reaction and he hurled it saying to himself I'll pin David to the wall, but David eluded him twice Saul was afraid of David. What else could he take but my kingdom? This is my kingdom. This is my identity. I'm in charge here. That's disrespectful to me. This is mine, mine, mine. David is not going to come tell me what to do in my kingdom. I will not give up this rule. I have to protect my power. You see? And so he tries in a fit of rage to kill David. Doesn't work. David eludes him twice. And then he does what kings have done for millennia. He kind of exiles him for a period of time. Leaders of countries have been doing this for centuries. Someone upsets them. Someone in their court is causing too much trouble or noise. You're now the ambassador of Croatia. Go have fun. Get away from court. You're now going to lead these troops in this far-flung territory where we will forget about you. Go. And so his anger caused him to exile David to remove the problem. Well, the problem was David kept having success. And so we see the next highlight in chapter 19, verses 9 and 10. Saul has decided by now he's going to kill David. Jonathan, Saul's son, the heir apparent, is very good friends with David and talks Saul out of trying to kill David. David's a good man, don't kill him. And Saul says, I promise that I won't. But then this happens in verse 9 when David comes back. But an evil spirit from the Lord 20, you see that Saul becomes determined to kill David. Now it's a cold-blooded plot to kill him. It's not in the heat of the moment. It's not just, I'm so mad right now. It's no, no, no. I am going to end this threat to my reign and to my power. And so he begins to pursue David through the wilderness. In chapter 20, what we see is that Jonathan and David have worked out this scheme where Jonathan's going to give David an indication, you have to flee. My father is dead set on killing you. And so David flees and he goes. And in this fleeing, Saul spends the rest of his adult life pursuing David. We're talking about a 10, 15, 20 year period of time where Saul's rage and anger is fueling his life. He is on a singular quest to kill David. It's like one of those dumb movies with Liam Neeson where something bad happens to his family, and the rest of the movie is just rage-filled revenge. He said, this is bad and actually happened. So he's chasing David all through the countryside. And at one point, David goes into this temple, and the priest at the temple helps David and his men, feeds him with the bread that was supposed to be given to God, but it was okay in that instance. I won't get into why. And then he gives David Goliath's sword, and they move on. Well, Saul is hot on the trail of David, and he goes in there, and he finds out that this priest has been helping him. And you can imagine how he responds in chapter 22 verses 16 and 17. But the king said, you will surely die Ahimelech, you and your whole family. Ahimelech was the head priest in this particular temple. Then the king ordered the guards at his side, turn and kill the priests of the Lord because they too have sided with David. They knew he was fleeing, yet they did not tell me. If you keep reading, what you see is that the king's officials didn't want to have anything to do with that. They did not want to kill these defenseless priests. So Saul turns to someone who would, apparently, Doeg the Edomite. If you're pregnant, you're looking for a boy name, Doeg. Great. Doeg, I don't know, kills in cold blood 85 priests at the word and the bidding of Saul. His rage has now spilled over where he's killing 85 innocent men because they sided with his enemy. And we can see his life spiraling towards unraveling. And then in 28, we have one of the most curious conversations in scripture where Saul goes to see the witch of Endor, a medium, and somehow or another has a conversation with the soul of Samuel. Now, what I'd like to do is spend the next 12 minutes explaining to you exactly what happened and that I understand it. I'm kidding. I have no idea. I don't understand this chapter. I don't know how we talk to mediums and how he's talking to the soul of Samuel. But this is what happens. And's this powerful king. He goes to see a witch, and he's laying prostrate on the ground with nothing left in him, so much so that his men worry about him and have to carry him out. The next day, he dies on the battlefield along with his sons, just like Samuel said he would. It is a picture of a life completely unraveled because he allowed his anger to exist in him unchecked. And what I want you to see from the story of Saul that we can relate to is when power is our idol. Being the king of our kingdom becomes our identity. When power is our idol, when you will respect my authority, you will respect who I am, you will not tell me what to do. When power is our idol, we take on the identity as the king of our small kingdom or the queen of our small kingdom. And so when someone comes into your workplace and they threaten your expertise, they question you. They think you don't know what you're doing. No, no, this is my kingdom, and now we're mad because you're threatening me. When someone's hired and you think they're going to take your position, and so you become adversarial with them, that's you being the king of your kingdom. If you run a business, you have employees, and one of them gets out of line with you and you take personal offense at that. It could be you just being angry because you're the king of your own kingdom. And we see and saw what he was really mad about was David was threatening his identity. He was threatening who he thought he was. And when you have a power idol, when people question you in your kingdom, that really makes you mad. Let me tell you how I know this is true. This has been something for me and parenthood that's become so important. So parents, if you're in the thick of it right now, if you have children in your home, I'm speaking specifically to you. I would like to share with you something I've learned about my anger and frustration towards my children. There are times when your children say disrespectful things to you. Things that you don't deserve. They say things in anger. They flash hot. They lash out. They disrespect. In southern terms, they show their tail. And let me just tell you, when my kids get mouthy with me and start saying stuff that I would never say to my parents, I get real hot, real fast. I start to do the, hey, uh-uh. You will not talk to me that way in my house. What does that even mean? In my house. Oh, tough guy. It's the banks, dude. For like 27 more years. To come off it. But I flash hot. And I get mad. And I put them back in line. And I think back to my childhood. Because in our house, we don't spank. Maybe I'll regret that choice. But we don't do that. We just try to go about things in other ways. But growing up, they did not share that policy. And if I said some of the stuff that my kids say to me, to my dad, my tail would have been worn out. My dad was the, he was, he perfected the slap and grab in the four seat car. The no look, slap and grab right on my thigh, slap it, squeeze it as hard as you could. I'm writhing in pain. And you know what I did? I shut up, is what I did. It's masterful. But here's what I would ask you, parents. When your kid says something disrespectful to you, bosses, when your employees say something disrespectful to you, and you get hot, you get angry. What's fueling that anger? Is what's fueling that, because for me, when Lily says something to me that she shouldn't say, and I get hot, I'm not angry because, oh, baby girl, I just want you to grow up to be better than that and manage your emotions, and I've told you this so many times, and I really want to help you manage your big emotions. I know you have big feelings, but you've got to learn to manage those. And it's fueling my anger because I'm just so frustrated with watching you trip over yourself like this and you don't have to do that anymore and there's a better way. Is that what's fueling my anger? No. What's fueling my anger is you better get right because I'm the boss here. You're not. My voice is louder than yours. You want to find out? I'll make it. Parents, how hypocritical is it of us to yell at our children for not managing their emotions well? What the heck are you doing? You verbal bully. That's what I do. When anger flashes like that, it's really helpful to stop and go, where is this coming from? Am I angry because I want them to do better or am I angry because I've been disrespected in my kingdom? And if it's the second, grow up. Get over it. Give grace. Let them have the table. When you're an employer and an employee says something to you that you don't care for, are you upset because they had the audacity to question your authority at work? Probably so. And that's not good. That's us protecting our kingdom. When your spouse asks you a question and you flash hot at them, a lot of times it's because they're questioning us and we don't care for it in our kingdom. And so if that's you, if this is something that you struggle with, if anger is a part of who you are, what do we do? How do we allow the Holy Spirit to begin to remove this idol of power in our life? I think it's as we can't just say, hey, just stop being mad. That's not going to help. So what do we need to do? How do we think about things? I think we think about it like this. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. You don't have to be the king of any kingdom. Just let Jesus be the king of the kingdom. Just acknowledge it's not yours anyways. You don't have one, and you're never dead. And when you die, poof, it's gone. His kingdom exists for all eternity. Just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom and you gleefully serve Jesus. You humbly serve Jesus. Can you imagine? Imagine the different story that is written with Saul's life if he simply would have done that. Let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. And understood, Israel's not mine. It doesn't belong to me. It didn't belong to me when I was born. It will not belong to me when I die. And if Jesus wants to give his kingdom over to another person, fine. It's his. I'm here to serve. And what's remarkable about that is that was the attitude of his son. There's a part in the narrative where Saul says, don't you know he's going to take the kingdom from you? And Jonathan's essentially like, I think that's great. David's a great guy. He's going to make a good king. That's awesome. Can you imagine how much different the story is that is written with the life of Saul if he simply would have let Jesus be the king of Jesus' kingdom. Moms and dads, especially dads, you're not the kings of your house. Jesus is. Let him be the king of it. Your authority doesn't need to go unquestioned all the time. It's not your job to keep everybody in line. It's your job to point everybody to Christ. And when we respond, dads, in anger that's unwarranted, then the only way that's left to point our children to Christ after that is to go humbly apologize for not pointing them to Christ in the first place. Try to do better the next time. Bosses. Where you work, your department, your company, that's not your kingdom. That's Jesus's. You let him worry about that stuff. You're his servant there. If we would simply let Jesus be the king of his own kingdom and acknowledge that it's not ours, how much different will you handle the disrespect of your children? How much differently, how much more grace will you give your spouse? How much more grace will you give your coworkers, your employees, your boss, if you'll just acknowledge this isn't mine anyways? I think if we can bring ourselves back to this thought, just let Jesus be the king of his kingdom. That we can allow the Holy Spirit to begin to slowly chip away and show us where we hold these idols of power in our life that are manifesting themselves in unchecked anger. So I would encourage my angry brothers and sisters, the ones of you who really liked that opening story, let anger be a warning light that flashes in your life. And when it happens, take a step back and ask yourself, am I angry because Jesus' kingdom has been threatened or am I angry because mine has? And then remind yourself, I just need to let Jesus sit on his own throne and I'm gleefully here to serve him. Let's pray. Father, give us open eyes, minds, and hearts. Let us see how these different idols and really sources of sin work their way into and manifest themselves in our lives. Help us see ourselves as you see us, as broken, sinful, but yet loved and clothed in your righteousness and value. Help us understand, God, that our power is pretty useless when we don't have a kingdom we're worried about protecting. And God, remind us as we go through our days and our weeks and our months that all we need to do instead of trying to protect our kingdom and our identity is to find our identity in you and to simply let you sit on your own throne. God, I pray that we would do that and I pray that for those of us who are prone to become angry, God, I pray that we would know that, we would acknowledge that, we would take steps to keep that in check so that you might bring about in us the righteous life that you do desire. In Jesus' name, amen.