Sermons tagged with Innkeeper

Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service is over. I echo the gratitude of Kyle for our decorating squad that made this look like maybe the best looking stage we've ever had. And please take advantage of the photo booth out there if you are one who likes photo booths. Welcome to our December series. I'm very excited about it. We've had this planned for a while. I'm looking forward to what I get to share with you over the course of the next month. And if you guys are going to be singing like that in December, I'm going to shorten the sermons and we're going to add in more songs because that was fantastic. This year, the Christmas series is called Twas the Night. We are looking at the story of Christmas, the classic story of Christmas. We'll spend every week in a different portion of Luke chapter 2. So if you have a Bible this morning, as I've been encouraging you to bring them and go through the sermons with me. Please go ahead and open those up to Luke chapter 2. If you don't have a Bible, it's in the seat back in front of you. But we're going to be spending the next four Sundays in Luke chapter 2 and looking at the Christmas story from the perspective of different people involved in the story. This morning, we're going to look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the innkeeper and from one of my favorite people in the story, Simeon. And you'll see why when we get there. But in the story, Luke chapter two, where the Christmas story is, and just so you know, that's like the traditional, like peanutsanuts Christmas, that's where it comes from, Luke 2. That's the classic Christmas passage. So that's why we're going to be there for these next four weeks. In the passage, the innkeeper is mentioned kind of indirectly. We don't get words from, we presume him could be her. I don't want to be misogynistic in who I think owns inns in ancient, but hunches is probably a guy and Mary and Joseph are traveling to Jerusalem for a religious festival. They have to go. The law says they have to go. It's for a census and Jerusalem. I don't know if you've thought about this. Why the heck would you Jerusalem is three days journey fromareth, averaging about eight to 10 hours a day on foot. We presume that Mary was on a donkey if they could afford such luxuries. She's clearly very pregnant because she pops when she gets there. Okay. So like she is on the verge of pregnant or giving birth. She's very, very pregnant. That's a different thing. And you got to imagine it's stressful. Y'all grow up. And then this might be the first clip of me that blows up on YouTube. Good job. It's nice for everyone to have goals. Anyways, they're going to Jerusalem. It's eight to 10 hours a day on foot. It's got to be very stressful. They don't know where they're going to stay. They probably don't have a lot of means. And so they get there and they're scrambling for a room. They're scrambling for a place to stay. They go to the innkeeper. The innkeeper famously says there's no room in the inn. And then he makes space for them in a manger. And I can't imagine the stress of Joseph as he's trying to arrange all this stuff and get everything squared away. But the inn keeper doesn't make room for them. He says, we have some room for you in the manger, which whenever we think of manger, and this is just for my own personal fun, I do this year and Jen my wife hates it when I do I like to ruin different elements of people's Christmas traditions when we look at the nativity scene and it's the stable with like the Spanish moss coming down that's probably not accurate it could be accurate but it probably isn't it was probably inside of a shallow cave in a cliffside or a hillside there in Bethlehem. Probably wasn't a nice stable. But anyways, I digress. He lets them stay in the manger. And the innkeeper, the Christmas story doesn't have too many villains. The innkeeper is about the closest thing to a villain we have besides, of course, Herod, who comes at the end of the Christmas story. And he's the villain because he doesn't make room for Jesus. But I would say two things, one later, but one thing right here to support him. He did make room for Jesus. It's just that the innkeeper offered Jesus the margins. He offered him the margins. I'm not going to kick anybody out of the room for you. I'm not going to make some space. I'm not going to invite you into my own house. I'm not going to divide up one of the rooms. I'm not going to talk to the other innkeepers and see what we can do. I'll give you a space that's very convenient for me. The innkeeper invites Jesus into the margins. And this is wild because what he should have done this is the Messiah Emmanuel God with us his people have been waiting for him for thousands of years they've been pining for him and praying for him and passed down a desire for Jesus generation after generation each generation has carried the torch of hope waiting for the Messiah to arrive the prophecies go all the way back to Genesis 12 and Abraham, and they know the prophecies. The innkeeper, whether he fully believes them or not, has grown up in an environment and in a culture so saturated with these prophecies that he knows it. And the Messiah is coming, and he has arrived. What he should have done is gone to the VIP suite and flung the door open and said, hey, buddy, go kick rocks. Get out of here. Go hit the bricks. You're out. Messiah's here. Emmanuel has arrived. He gets the suite, and we're going to kick in the continental breakfast with an omelet bar because Jesus is here. But that's not what he does. He doesn't disrupt anything. He doesn't make his life more difficult. He says, here, here's a margin for you to slide into. And in this way, I feel like a lot of us, all of us at points, can relate to the innkeeper. When Jesus shows up, when he offers himself, when he asks to be led into our heart, when he asks to be Lord of our life, when he gives us an opportunity to serve, when he asks us for a bit of devotion. When he asks us to set our alarm early to spend time with him. When he asks us for the next step of obedience and faithfulness with him. When he asks us to just trust him and his standards over ourselves and our standards. I think so often when Jesus shows up in our life, we, like the innkeeper, simply offer him the margins. Jesus, I'm going to fit you into places where I don't have to adjust anything. I'll pray to you, but I'm going to do it before meals when other people are around so I can appear pious and holy. But you and I know that's the only time I've prayed in the last three days. Yeah, I'll give you car rides for worship, Jesus. But only when the podcast I normally listen to or the music I normally like has gone stale. Yeah, Jesus, I'll go to church. But I'll go to church when I'm in town and it's convenient and my things didn't happen in my Saturday that makes it prohibitive for me to get up on Sunday. I'll give you those Sundays, God, but I'm not going to like rush back from the beach to fellowship with my church. I'm going to give you the margins. I'll give occasionally to a compelling thing, but I'm not going to make it uncomfortable for myself and give regularly in a habitual way because of the generosity that you teach me. I'll forgive people when it doesn't hurt me, but if I'm really mad, then I'm sorry, Jesus, you can't have that forgiveness for them. I think in so many ways, so many small aspects, when Jesus shows up in our life and asks to be invited in, we give him the margins where it's easiest, where it's the least inconvenient. When what we should do, what we should do when Jesus shows up and he asks for parts of our life, he asks to be let into our life, he asks for our obedience and our trust and our worship and our devotion and our love and our affection. When he asks for those things, what we should do is thunder into our VIP suite and kick out whatever's currently ruling and be like, go pound sand, buddy. Jesus is here. Emmanuel, God with us. The guy who died on the cross for me and then rose again on the third day and is coming back to get me and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. That guy's here, so you are out. That's what we should do. And so I think it begs the question, and I know that the phrasing here is ridiculous, but you'll understand the question. What is in your VIP suite? Who or what is in the most important rooms in your life? Who's occupying the space that Jesus deserves, but we're not willing to kick them or it out? What is holding you back from inviting Jesus not into the margins of your life, but in every bit of your life. Who is in your VIP suite? Now, if you're like me, you have a bunch of those. It's difficult to pinpoint one thing, a person, or affection that I have in my life that is the sole thing keeping Jesus from occupying all of my life. But if I had to guess what one of yours was, I bet in the top three for everyone in this room is comfort. Isn't it, North Raleigh? We're pretty comfortable people. We have things like we like them. We've organized our life like we like it. We've organized our faith like we like it. We've organized our politics like we like it. We've organized our priorities like we like it. We've put our money in the places that we like. We are a comfortable people. And when Jesus begins to poke at our comfort, I think we tend to say, sorry, buddy, room's full. I have a manger, if you're interested. The couch in my bonus room is surprisingly sleepable, Jesus. You're going to love it in there. But you're not getting in the master bedroom. I think comfort is one of our predominant idols. Comfort in how we think. When Jesus, the teachings of Jesus, the message of the Bible, when God starts to challenge the way that we think, some of the traditional norms that we've clung to to make things make sense, we kind of push back on that and be like, I'm not really open to new information, Jesus thinks. I need you to fit where I've put you. When Jesus' message starts to run up against our politics and our philosophies, sometimes we stop listening to Jesus in favor of what we always thought, and we say, there's no room for you there, Jesus. Sorry, I need you to fit into this box. When he starts asking for our finances, when he starts asking for our priorities, for our schedule, when he starts asking for our forgiveness, when he starts asking for the way that we do business, when he starts asking for transparency and honesty and vulnerability, when he starts asking us to be a good friend to someone who's hurting and it makes us uncomfortable. I think so often we choose comfort over obedience. And so I think that for many of us, comfort is what sits in that space of highest value in our life. And we'll make room for Jesus. We'll just do it like the innkeeper and tuck him away in the bonus room. And this is important because when we juxtapose the innkeeper's reception of Jesus with that of Simeon. We see a totally different story. And I didn't bring you here this morning to beat you up about being the innkeeper because I'm talking to myself. That's me. That's what I do. If you do that too, join me in my conviction. If you don't do that, do that. Pray for the rest of us heathens in the room. But for those of us who do, let's look at, learn from, and be humbled by the response of Simeon in Luke chapter 2. Now, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about Simeon. But most of what we need to know is actually in this passage. So if you have a Bible, look at Luke chapter 2. I'm going to begin in verse 25 and read through verse 32. Luke writes this. Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel. And the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. And he came in the Spirit into the temple. And when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him according to the custom of the law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, listen to this, Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of the innkeeper. The innkeeper says, oh, Jesus is here. Let me see where I can conveniently fit you. Simeon's response, I would sum up this way. I have seen Jesus. Nothing else matters. I have seen Jesus. Nothing else matters. I can die happy. I don't care about anything else. Simeon doesn't clean out the VIP room. He cleans out the entire hotel, the whole inn, done. Everybody kick rocks. Jesus is coming in. He gets all the omelets. He gets all the things. He's here. He ushers him right in. He says, I've seen Jesus. Literally nothing else matters. The difference between his response and the innkeeper's response is mind-blowing. And we learn why Simeon has this response in the text. All the clues are there. It says he was righteous and devout. He was committed to God. He was committed to prayer. He was committed to the pursuit of Jesus. And I love the phrase that Luke includes in there to describe what Simeon had been praying for. Did you catch it? He had been praying for the consolation of Israel. That's such a good phrase and descriptor of who Jesus was, particularly to the ancient Hebrew mind. He was the consolation of Israel. See, I mentioned earlier that the innkeeper had grown up in a culture that was so steeped in religious understanding that he knew how far back the generational prophecies went about the Messiah that was going to arrive. And Simeon knew that too. And I have a whole sermon that I do just on the zeal of Simeon. I've actually done it twice here at Grace. And we look at how Simeon was the torch keeper. He was the torch bearer for his generation, waiting and looking and watching and wanting for the Messiah. And how that wait goes all the way back to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, where God promises that one of the descendants of Abraham will come and will bless the whole earth. And then the Old Testament is a story of waiting for that Messiah, of watching for him. And the generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they watched. Is he here? Is it going to be one of these grandsons of Abraham? Is the Messiah come? No, he's not come. And then Moses comes around. Is it Moses? And they watch Moses lead God's people and bring them out of slavery and bring down the Ten Commandments and be God's spokesperson to his people. Is it Moses? Is he going to save us? No, it's not Moses. And then they go through the judges. Is it one of the judges? No. Is it one of the kings? Certainly it's David. No. But God renews his promise and renews their hope in 2 Samuel chapter 7. And then they watch the kings and hope maybe it's one of the kings that will rescue us. No, it's not one of the kings. But every generation after finding that no continues to pass forward the torch from grandfather to grandson to carry the torch of hope into the next generation waiting and watching and longing for the Messiah. And then they go into exile in Babylon and Assyria, and they cling to this torch of hope. And then they begin to wander back and reconstruct and rebuild Israel, and they cling to hope. And then they enter this period where God doesn't speak called the 400 years of silence, and they cling to hope. And then somewhere, some Jewish father or grandfather has a grandson named Simeon, and they start to tell them about the hope that they carried through the generations that one day they will see the Messiah. And Simeon commits to prayer. Father, let me see him. Father, let me see him. Father, bring your Christ. Bring your Messiah. Bring the consolation of Israel, the hope of all the generations. Simeon is now the torchbearer. And in that ardent praying and in that searching, God answers his prayers. And he says, I promise you that you will not pass away before you hold the Christ. So when he finally sees Jesus, it says that his parents brought Jesus in and Simeon went and scooped up the baby. I don't know what was said, hopefully words, hopefully he didn't just rip an eight-day-old infant out of Mary's arms, but he just went and he took that baby. And he prayed over that baby. And then he said, I can die now, God, because he's held that baby. And then if you keep reading, he blesses Mary and Joseph and tells them what they have, confirms for them what the angels have said. He was so ready to meet Jesus that when he finally did, he flung everything out and he said, I've met Jesus. Nothing else matters. And so this is where it's probably worthwhile to point out that the innkeeper does get a really bum rap. Because truth be told, the innkeeper didn't know that was Jesus. It was just a young couple. They needed space. I don't have any. And so him not making room for them isn't maybe as egregious of a sin as it would seem. But it's a helpful vehicle for us to understand the contrast. And we know who Jesus is. We've heard of him. We've been told of him. And so if we really want to look at the difference between how Jesus was received by the innkeeper and how he was received by Simeon, then I think that we have to conclude that our response to Jesus is proportional to our awareness of him. Our response to Jesus when he shows up, when he arrives in an opportunity of service, when he arrives in someone bringing us a hug when we need it, when he arrives an opportunity to be that hug when someone else needs it, when he arrives in conviction, when he arrives in asking for our affection, when he arrives in asking for our devotion, when Jesus arrives in our life. When he speaks into our life. Our response to that voice of Christ, I believe, is directly proportional to our general awareness of him. What we have in Simeon is someone who had prayerfully sought him out his entire life. He had devoted his life to pursuing Christ. Let me see him. Let me see him. Let me see him. And it's not lost on me. And I think this is so important. Do you understand that besides Mary Magdalene, Mary, his mother, maybe Joseph and John the Baptist, that the only other person in Jesus's life to acknowledge who he was and what he really came to do before he died on the cross was Simeon. Everybody else in Jesus's life, when they met him, they said, you can't be the guy. You're not the Messiah. You didn't come how we expected you to come. You're not saying the things we expect you to say. You're not being who we expect you to be. You're not performing the miracles we expect you to perform. You're not a king like we expected you to be the king. So you're not the Messiah. We reject you. Simeon was a man of such faith, such piety, such devotion, such closeness to God. He didn't need Jesus to say a word or do a thing. He recognized him when he saw him. And he said, I can die happy. That kind of awareness, that kind of recognition of who Jesus is only comes through prayer, only comes through devotion, only comes through an earnest desire to see him and to know him and to be exposed to him. I believe that Simeon saw who Jesus was because God heard his prayers. God saw his devotion. He was pleading with the Lord, let me see him, let me see him, let me see him. And God answered those prayers and gave him a unique vision and a unique reception of Jesus despite no one else in his life knowing who he was. And two of the people who knew who Jesus was had to be told by an angel before he got there. Simeon knew. How did Simeon know? Because he lived a life of devotion and pursuit of Jesus. Because he carried the torch that was passed to him by the previous generations. And he made it his ardent desire to know him, to see him, and to recognize him. And I believe that our ability to respond to Jesus with the zeal of Simeon operates in direct proportion to our desire for that Jesus, to our awareness of him. There's no reason in the world the innkeeper couldn't have been on the same page and been like Simeon, devout and devoted and righteous and prayerful. He simply wasn't. And so when Jesus showed up, he kicked him to a cave. Simeon says, I can die happy, nothing else matters. When I started developing the sermon, I thought the question that we would be driving to and that I would pose to you at the end was, am I the innkeeper or am I Simeon? In my life, the way that I respond to Jesus, am I and have I been more like the innkeeper making space for him in the margins or am I and have I been more like Simeon celebrating him, anticipating him, praying for him, praying to see him and receive him with an open-hearted humility? Am I more like the innkeeper or am I more like Simeon? But as I got into the sermon and it started to kind of, sometimes the sermon will write itself if you just pull the thread the right way. As it started to kind of write itself, I realized that question, that's not the right question. So if you take notes, do that. Cross out the question. That's a stupid question. That's a stupid question because no one in here is going, I'm Simeon. I've done it. No more zeal than me. And the reality of it is, the people in the room who are the most like Simeon are the ones who feel the most like the innkeeper right now because that's how spiritual humility and maturity works. Isn't that right, Jen? No, I'm just messing around. That's a silly question. Because of course we would all answer, yeah, I tend to be more like the innkeeper. Yeah, I tend to just kind of make room for him in the comfortable margins. Instead of taking the steps of obedience that he wants from me. I tend to just kind of passively celebrate him instead of enthusiastically welcoming him. And when we see the zeal of Simeon, and I don't think we can overstate it, his ability to see the Messiah for who he was because of his open-handed humility and his approach to God. That we all know we need to be more like Simeon. So the real question then becomes, and the one that I would leave you with is this, how can I dethrone comfort and pursue Jesus in order to receive him with the zeal of Simeon? That's a better question for you to ask yourself. How can I first, how can I dethrone comfort? What are the things that Jesus is asking me for that I can finally kick out of the VIP suite and put him in there? Is it waking up 30 minutes earlier? Is he asking for your mornings? Here's a hint. Yes. He wants our mornings. Does he want our car rides? Yeah. Does he want our runs and our workouts? Yeah. Does he want our relationships with our coworkers? He does. Does he want us to be a more loving spouse? Yes. Does he want us to be more patient parent? Yeah. Does he want us to remember the grace that he offers us and so offer that to others? Yes. We know what Jesus asks of us. What comfort do we need to dethrone? Not being as accepted by the people in our life that matter to us. Taking steps of obedience and we're not sure where they lead. Allowing ourselves to rethink things even though that makes it scary for us. What comfort is impeding our pursuit of Christ? And then, once we figure out what comfort is there that is prohibiting Jesus from occupying the space he needs to occupy, how can we pursue Jesus? Really pursue him. Really ardently pray for him. So that when we see him, and when he calls for things and asks for things, we receive that and offer that as zealously as Simeon does. We pray for him every day. That's easy. Every morning, Jesus, if you arrive today, help me see you. If you arrive in an opportunity to serve, let me see it. If you arrive in a person who needs you, let me see it. If someone arrives in my life who's you've sent to encourage me, let me see it. We had a situation in our house recently where we were discouraged and we were discouraged about a couple of different things. And we had this talk about it at night. And the very next day, every single thing that we said that was discouraging, God addressed in a gracious way and gave us joy in that area of our life. So at the end of the day, we looked at each other and we said, let's not miss Jesus here because he showed up today and he showed us, I care about this and I care about this and I care about this and I care about you. So ask God, God, help me see you when you show up. Help me obey you when you ask. Help me celebrate you this season. Help me not get so headlong into plans and parties and gifts and decorations that I miss you this season. Jesus, help me see you. Make every day a pursuit of him. And we'll start to become more like Simeon than the innkeeper. And if we do that, if we'll pursue Jesus like Simeon this Christmas, I can promise you, you will have a far more rich Christmas. You will see little things that matter every day. Your spirit will be blessed every day. You will notice people to pray for and be a blessing to them every day. When we see the gifts and the movement of Jesus all through the season, and we see them because we've asked our God to open our eyes to those things. So as we go into December and we usher in all the things, let us have the zeal and the pursuit of Simeon and make space for Jesus in our lives wherever he wants to stay. Let's pray. Jesus, we love you. And God, we sing a song sometimes. It says our affection and our devotion we pour out at the feet of Jesus. Lord, I pray that that would be true. That we would love you and love you well. Father, where we are choosing comfort over obedience, would you show us? Would we see it? Would we care? And would we invite you in? Lord, attune our hearts and our eyes and our minds and our ears to see you, to hear you, to recognize you when you show up in our lives. Not just this Christmas season, God, but moving forward. And would we ultimately be a people who receive you and celebrate you like your servant Simeon. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this incredibly gross, hot Sunday. I heard somebody say it's like walking around in warm soup outside. I think that's pretty appropriate. I think we're going to take out the lounge areas next week and make more space for y'all. So we're getting the message. You're coming back to church, so this is great. These lounge areas are penalties for not coming in the summertime, so now we'll get back to normal. We've been moving through a series called 27 that we're going to do this summer and next summer where we're doing an overview of the 27 books in the New Testament to kind of give you an idea of where we're going for the rest of this summer and where we're going to pick up next summer. For the rest of the summer, I'm just going to go through the general epistles, the general letters that are largely in the back half or entirely in the back half of the New Testament. We're going to do Hebrews this morning. Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, did a phenomenal job covering James for us in July. So if you want to catch that one, you can go back and take a look at it. And then we're going to do 1 and 2 Peter together, 1, 2, 3 John together. Because I don't want to do three sermons out of 1, 2, 3 John that all say like, hey, if you love God, obey him. That's the message of 1, 2, 3 John. And then we're going to do Jude Labor Day Sunday. We decided that we would save the most overlooked book of the Bible for the most overlooked Sunday of the calendar. So that's going to be very appropriate when we do Jude and you guys watch online while Aaron and I work. But this morning we're going to focus on Hebrews. And deciding how to approach Hebrews and how to give you guys an overview of Hebrews was a little tricky because Hebrews is such an incredible book with so many good things and so many good themes. The overriding theme of Hebrews is to exalt Christ. The overriding point of Hebrews is to hold Christ up as superior to everything, the only thing worthy of our devotion and our affection, the only thing worthy of our lives. That's what the book of Hebrews does, and it focuses us on Christ, which is appropriate because we preached Acts last week. Well, I preached. You guys listened and did a great job at listening. I preached Acts last week, and we talked about how it's the Holy Spirit's job to focus us on Jesus, past, present, and future. And so once again, we're just going to enter into this theme in the text where the whole goal of it is to focus us on Christ. And so my prayer for us is that that's what this will do for us this morning. In an effort to exalt Christ, the author of Hebrews, who we're not sure who it is, the author of Hebrews starts out his book this way. Hebrews 1, 1 through 3. Long ago at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he had spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purifications for sins, he sat down at the right some of the most sweeping prose about our Savior that we'll find in the Bible. The only other place that compares is probably found in Colossians, which Aaron covered. Aaron, our worship pastor, covered last month as well. So from the very beginning, he exalts Jesus. He is the image of God. He is the exact imprint of his nature. He upholds the universe with his majesty, the sweeping picture of Christ. And then the author goes on to kind of build this case for the superiority of Christ. And the book is called Hebrews because it's written to the Jewish diaspora all throughout Asia Minor. As here, I know that you have a Jewish background. Let me help you understand your new faith by helping you understand your new savior. And he goes to great lengths to explain to them why Jesus is superior. And he does this through four major comparisons. He compares Jesus to Moses. He compares Jesus to the angels. He says Jesus is superior to the high priests. And he says that Jesus is a superior sacrifice. And he goes through and he tells them why Jesus is superior to those things. Now, to the Jewish mind in the first century A.D., all of those comparisons would carry a great deal of heft. They would matter. The Jewish mind would immediately know what that meant, would immediately be taken aback by the boldness of the author of Hebrews, and feel the weight of the comparison that they were being asked to make. But for us in the 21st century in America, those things don't resonate with us like they did with the first century Hebrew mind. We know, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in two decades, you probably already know that we're of the opinion that Jesus is a bigger deal than Moses. Like, we got that one down. You know that already. You know that we think that Jesus is superior to angels. No one's getting confused and worshiping angels. Aaron's never gotten a request for a praise song for angels. Like, we've never gotten a Gabriel praise song request. So we know that. Nobody has any misgivings about me being superior to Jesus. We know Jesus is the superior priest. We know he's the superior priest to everyone that's ever lived. And that's a really hard concept for us to hold on to, I think, when we see it in Hebrews that he's the great high priest. That's a difficult one for us because most of us in this room have never really even had a priest. Most of us in this room have had pastors. And pastors are different than priests, take on a different role than priests, have historically been viewed differently than priests. So that's a tough one for us. And then the sacrifice, none of us in this room have ever performed a sacrifice. If you have, I'd love to talk with you about what led you to do that in your life. I'd like to hear that story. I don't know if I want to commit to a full lunch because you're crazy, but maybe just out there, you just tell me about that time with the goat, okay? But these things are difficult for us to relate to. They don't hit us the same way. So a lot of my thoughts and energy this week went into helping us understand why these are such weighty comparisons, why they are so persuasive, and most importantly, why they're still important to us today in 21st century America so that the book and the message of Hebrews can be just as impactful for us as it was for first century Jews. So I think, as we think about the overview of Hebrews, the most interesting question is, why did those comparisons matter to me today? Why are they important to me today? So we're going to look at them and we're going to ask, why does it matter that Jesus is superior to these things? So the first one that we see, I'm doing kind of a combo platter and you'll see why, but Jesus is superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message is greater than theirs. In your notes, I can't remember if I put it there or not, but there should, it'd be helpful to write above these three points and be bracketed by the text. Jesus is superior because, superior to blank because. So that's, that's the question that we're answering. He's superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message are greater than theirs. Okay. Here's why I kind of combined those two. We probably all know, the Jewish mind certainly knew, that God's law came from Moses. God brought the law down off of Mount Sinai and presented it to the people. Now we often think that just the Ten Commandments were written on those tablets, but those tablets were covered front and back. So we don't know what all was on there, but most certainly more laws. And if you read through the books of Moses, the first five in the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, you'll get somewhere around 620 some odd laws depending on which rabbi or scholar you're talking to. And so those were the laws of Moses. And those were the laws around which their religion was framed. Those are the laws around which their culture was built, around which their entire life was formed by following those laws well. And Hebrews is earth shattering to them because it says, hey, Jesus's law is superior to Moses's law. You can cast Moses's law aside. It doesn't mean there's not some good ideas in there. The one about like not committing adultery, we should probably carry that principle forward. But those laws are done. It's now Jesus's new law that he gives us in John. Jesus tells us that in these two things are summed up all of the law and the prophets. Everything that Moses or the prophets ever wrote or writings that's ascribed to them can be summed up in loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself. Jesus tells us that early in his ministry. But then at the end of his ministry, he's sitting around with the disciples and he says, this new command I give you, there's this new thing I want you to do. I'm going to add to the, I'm going to sweep away those commands. I'm going to give you this new command. Follow this. I want you to love your neighbor. I want you to love others as I have loved you. It's this new command that Jesus gives. And so that command is superior to all of the commands that came from Moses in the Old Testament. It's also superior to all the commands that come after that. His message is superior. This is what it means with the angels really quickly. According to Jewish tradition, it was the angels that took the tablets from God and delivered them to Moses as God's holy and anointed messengers. So what we're seeing in these two comparisons is Jesus' message is greater than any message that's come before or will come since, and his law is the greatest law, superior to all other laws, and it's the only one worth following. This is incredibly important for us because we live in a culture and we are people who are incredibly vulnerable to the insidious slide towards legalism. We are incredibly vulnerable to reducing our faith to a list of do's and don'ts. Okay, I know I'm supposed to love my neighbor as myself. Like, I get that. But is it a sin if I do blank? I hate that question. Is it a sin if I do this? Is it a sin if I watch this? Is it a sin if I go there? Is it a sin if I have this? That's an immature question. It's almost irrelevant. Is it a sin? And we even do it in the early stages of our faith. Am I in or am I out? When I die, am I going to burn forever or dance in the streets? Which one is it? I just want to make sure I'm praying the right prayer so I don't burn forever. That seems like a bummer. So I'm going to believe in this. Am I in or am I out? Is there an unforgivable sin? Is there something that if I do it, I'm going to lose my salvation and then I'm out? And we try to make it about the rules. We enter into Christianity kind of asking the leader, like whoever's in charge here, can I just have my personnel handbook? I just need to know when my vacation days are. I need to know how many Sundays I can miss in a year and still be like, good. You know? I don't want to have to feel that out. We want our policy handbook. And when we make that our faith, we pervert it and distort it into things that it ought not be and was never intended to be. When we try to make the Bible basic instructions before leaving earth, have you heard that? If you haven't heard it, sorry, because it's stupid. And I just told you it, now you know. We try to make it God's handbook for life. There's a rule for everything, we just got to find it. And when you do that, the people who know the rules the best and appear to follow them the best are the spiritually mature ones. Meanwhile, the people over there who don't follow what we think are the rules super well are actually getting busy loving other people as Christ loved them. But we don't value them because we value the rules. So it's important to let Hebrews remind us that Jesus' law is superior to the laws that we add to his law. Because we love to say yes and. We love to turn Christianity into an improv class. Yes, that's true, and this. Yes, to be a believer, what does God ask of you? That you would love other people as Jesus loved you. Yes. And also you shouldn't watch shows that are rated MA on Netflix. You should not do that. Yes. And you should love other people as Jesus loved you. And you shouldn't say cuss words. Because we got together in a room at some point, and we decided that these words that are spelled this way are bad. And you can't say them. And they're very offensive. And they offend the very heart of God. Jesus didn't make that law. We do yes and, and we start to build other rules that are requisite for our faith. And at the end of that is legalism. And some of y'all grew up in legalism. I know my parents grew up in legalism. My mom went to a church outside of Atlanta where you couldn't, if you're a girl, you were not allowed to wear skirts above the knees. They all had to be to the knees or below. And if they weren't, you're a sinner. You couldn't go, you weren't even allowed to go to the movie theater. If you're going to see a Disney movie, you cannot, you cannot go to the theater. You were not, your family was not allowed to own a deck of cards because with those cards, you might gamble and offend the sensibilities of God. And what happens when we do that is people like my mom who grow up in that, when they grew up in that, in their adolescence, they're riddled with all this guilt of things that they're supposed to do and shame for not being able to do them. And that shame isn't coming from Jesus because you've offended his law. That shame is coming from rickety old deacons because you offended their sensibilities. And it's not right. We should always choose love over law because that's what Jesus asked us to do. And here's what can happen when we do that. At the last church I worked at, there was a policy, and some of you are familiar with policies like these. They're particularly prominent in the South. There was a policy that you could not consume alcohol in public. You had to privately foster your own alcoholism. You couldn't consume it in public. You can have it in your house. You can have it with trusted friends. But you can't consume it in public and you can't be seen purchasing it by someone from the church. It's absurd policy. Be all in or all out. Just say don't drink it. That's way less hypocritical than drive to DeKalb County to get it and then drive back. So one day, I'm cutting my grass. I'm relatively new to the neighborhood. And when I finish up, my neighbor, Luis, comes out. He says, hey man, hot day. I said, yeah, it's hot. He goes, you want to have a beer with me? Now that's against the rules. I'm not allowed to have a beer with Luis because I don't want to, I'm not going to get into it. According to the rules, this is bad. But he's my neighbor and we know what do you want to have a beer with me means. He's showing me hospitality. He wants to talk to me. He wants to get to know me and I need to love him. And it's not very loving of me to be like, I'll be right back. I'm going to go get my water. That's just not what you do. So I said, sure. I had a beer, an illicit, an illicit beer. God, I'm still sorry. And we talked and we became buddies. And Luis had a stepson and two sons that lived with him as well, him and his wife as well. Gabriel, Yoel, and Yariel. And over the course of the next six years, I got to be their pastor. And I got to baptize all four of those guys in the church. Now, if I had said no that day, could that still have happened? Sure. But, I chose love over law, and God used it. We should be people who choose love over law, understanding that Jesus' law is the superior law. And just in case you think I'm letting people off the hook to do whatever you want under Jesus' law, as long as you're loving others, it is absolutely impossible to love others as Jesus loved us without being fueled and imbued by the love of the Holy Spirit. We cannot love others as Jesus loved us if we do not know Jesus and love him well. That the two things that sum up the law and the prophets, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen, love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as Jesus did if you do not love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen. It takes care of everything. And suddenly there's times when you shouldn't watch that, or you shouldn't do this, or you shouldn't have that, or you shouldn't shouldn't go there or you should do this or you should do that, but not because it offends some law or sensibility that we've added to over the years, but because to do that or to not do that is the most loving action to take. That's why it's important for us to still acknowledge that Jesus's law is the superior law and that Jesus is a superior messenger and the angels. Now your notes are out of order. The next one we're going to do is priest and then sacrifice. So I'm sorry about that. But it's important to us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priests because Nate is broken. It's important for us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priest because I am broken. When we were running through the slides before the service started, we got to this one, and the band and the tech team laughed at me. They're like, Nate, you think we don't know that? We haven't pieced that one together. And I said, well, my mom's coming. So this one's for her. Sorry, mom, this is news to you. I know that you don't need me to tell you that I'm broken and that I'm a human. And that I'm going to teach you the wrong stuff sometimes. The way I think about faith and the Bible and God and Scripture and all the things evolves. It changes. There's things I taught when I was 30 that I'm so embarrassed about now. And there's things I'm saying to you right now that when I'm 52, I'm going to be like, oh, what a moron. I just know that's true. I'm broken. And even though you guys know that, and you guys know not to put pastors on pedestals, and you would probably all say that you have a pretty healthy idea about that, and I consider it part of my personal ministry to you to act in such a way where it's very easy for you to not put me on a pedestal. That's my ministerial gift to you guys. You would probably all say that you know better than that. But we still get the jokes. Those still happen. I had a friend, a good buddy, still a friend of mine named Heath Hollinsworth. Heath had three brothers. He still has three brothers. Jim was the oldest and Jim was an associate pastor at the church that Heath and I both worked at. So we all worked together. And then Ryan and Hunter worked construction. So they're a little bit less important in the kingdom of God than me and Heath and Jim. Which is the, that's the point I'm making. And whenever they would be around their dad for a meal and it came time to pray for the meal, Heath was in charge of the service. He was program director. It was a big church. So he had positions like program director. Here, Aaron does that. But whenever it came time to pray for a meal, their dad really didn't like praying in public, so he would always get one of the boys to do it, and he'd kind of look them over, and he'd be like, Jim, why don't you lead us today? You're the closest to the Lord. You have the most direct line. And Heath would be like, I work at a church too, and I'm sure it flew all over Ryan and Hunter. But he would joke about it. It didn't really make him mad. He just thought it was the stupidest thing because Jim was ordained and Heath wasn't. His dad thought he had a more direct line to the Lord. And as stupid as that sounds, you guys say that to me. I know we don't really believe it, but we keep saying it. When I golf with y'all and I hit one in the woods, which is rare, but when I hit one in the woods and it comes bouncing out just miraculously, just a squirrel throws it and it just lands in the middle of the fairway, somebody is going to say, got that pastor bounce, somebody's going to say it. We make the jokes and we think the things, and I can tell you from personal experience, we exonerate pastors too much. We honor pastors too much. We think too much of them. We have too great an expectation for them. I am not to be exonerated. My job in God's kingdom is not more important than your job. My gifting is not more valuable than your gifting. And listen, your character is not less important than my character. A lot of us have more expectations for me and what my character should be than for ourselves. And that makes no sense because you're a royal priesthood too. If it's okay for you and not okay for me, then you either need to raise your standards for yourself or lower them for me. Probably raise. And I don't mean to hit that too hard, but the church has a long history of making the people who stand here way more important than they actually are. And we've got to knock that off. While I'm here, and just kind of kicking you guys in the gut, let me kick you in the teeth. The other thing I was thinking about with priests and why this is important is the historic role of the priest. Do you realize that for a vast majority of Christian history, from the first century A.D. to now, for the vast majority of that, Christendom did exist under a priesthood. And that those priests were the sole arbiters of the truth of God in the lives of their people. Do you understand that? The people, for much of history, were largely illiterate. The vast majority of people were illiterate for much of church history. And before the printing press, a Bible was so expensive that it took the whole town to raise money to get one, and then they'd put it up on the lectern in the church or in the pulpit, and they would literally chain it so that nobody could steal the Bible because it was that valuable, and it's the only one that existed in the town, and because everyone's largely illiterate, the only person who can read it is the pastor. Do you understand how easy it is to manipulate when that is true? Do you understand how vulnerable that populace was to the malice that might be in their pastor? Do you understand how limiting it is for your faith if there's only one person who can explain to you who's reading scripture on your behalf and then telling you what it says and then telling you what you should do about that? That's how we got indulgences and we paid for St. Peter's Basilica because they manipulated the masses in that way. Because I'm the only one in the room who can read this and I get to tell you what it means. That's incredibly harmful. And now, we live in a time when Bibles are ubiquitous everywhere. You all probably have multiple Bibles in your home. You probably have more Bibles than you do people. If you'd like to add to your collection, take one of ours. You can download it on your phone. You can look it up on the World Wide Web. You have universal access to the scriptures of God. And yet, I see so many of you, so many Christians, walking through life, functioning as scriptural illiterates, trusting your pastor to spoon feed you truth twice a month for 30 minutes. And that's all you know of this. People have fought and people have died and people have lived to make this available to you. And yet as Christians, many of us live our lives as functional illiterates who still rely on our pastor or spiritual leader to spoon feed us the truth twice a month? How can we be Christians and be so disinterested in what God tells us? How can we call ourselves passionate followers of Christ and yet not read about him? How can we have access to this special revelation of God and the inspired and authoritative words within it that tell us not basic instructions for life but about our wild and wonderful and mysterious father? They tell us all about that and we have access to it all the time. We can read it whenever we want. We can do all the research we want. We can even, you can download professors walking you through this as you explore it on your own. And yet we function as illiterates still acting like the only source of truth is our pastor for whatever sermon they want to give that day. Jesus is your pastor. He's your source of truth. And he made sure that this got left for you so that you could learn about him. I'm here to augment the work that you're doing. I can't do the work for your whole life. Neither can your small group leader. It's important to know that Jesus is our high priest because we have the freedom to go to him and to pray to him whenever we want. We don't need a go-between. We don't need someone else to spoon-feed us truth. He makes it available to us here. Now, let's end on a higher note than that. It's important for us to know that Jesus was the superior sacrifice because he was enough. It's important for us to know that Jesus was a superior sacrifice because he was. This is important to mention. Because the old sacrificial system, you had to perform a sacrifice, and then you were good until you messed up again, and then you had to go back and you had to sacrifice. Like I wonder about the people who like went to the temple for a certain festival and they performed all their sacrifices and they're good. They're good before God. If they die, they're fine. And then they like take a wrong turn or there's traffic getting out of Jerusalem and they say things they shouldn't say. Like, I guess we got to go back to the temple and do this again. But Jesus is a superior sacrifice because we need one for all time. That's it. We're done. We don't have to go back and keep making sacrifices. And yet, we do the yes and thing again where we go, yeah, Jesus died for me and he made me right before God, but now that I'm a Christian, I keep messing up, so I need to do more and I need to better, and I need to perform my own personal sacrifices to get myself back in good graces with God. And we make Jesus' sacrifice not enough. Yeah, that was good then, but I know better now, and I need to keep working harder and keep being hard on myself and keep making my own sacrifices to then get back into the good graces of God so that he will love me more and approve of me more. And we live our lives, I do this too, as if Jesus' sacrifice wasn't enough. And now God in his goodness and glory and perfection requires me, Nate, to make greater sacrifices to supplement the insufficient sacrifice that Jesus made for me. I think that we would do well to wake up every morning and remind ourselves, even if we have to say it out loud, what Jesus has done for me is enough. God loves me as much as he possibly can and ever will. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me less. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me more. And there's nothing I can do today to make myself more right before God. Jesus was enough. He did that for me. And then walk in the goodness and freedom of God. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Walk in that fullness. Walk in that grace. Walk in that gratitude by allowing the sacrifice of Jesus to be enough. That's why Hebrews can still, that's how Hebrews can still resonate with us today. By acknowledging that Jesus is superior to the law and the message of old, that he's the superior priest that gives us unfettered access to him, and we ought to passionately pursue that, and that he is the greatest sacrifice because he's enough for us once and for all. We don't have to keep supplementing that with our insufficiency. And to do all of this, as we're reminded of all of this, and we start with the sweeping prose about Christ, and then we see the comparisons, he starts to close his book by drawing this conclusion, and I think it's a great place for us to stop and put our focus on today as we prepare our hearts for communion after the sermon. But he starts to summarize his book and to wrap up by telling us to do this. I preach about this lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, my Bible says, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. In light of all that we learned, in light of who Jesus is, the image of God, the very imprint of His nature, and in light of the ways that Jesus is superior and serves us and sacrifices for us and is our high priest, in light of the law that is to love Jesus with all our heart, in light of the law that is to love other people as Jesus loved us and then so in turn love Christ and be fueled by that love, in light of all these things, what are we to do? What are the rules that we're supposed to follow? How are we supposed to live this Christian life? Hebrews 12, 1 and 2. Run your race. Go out there and run hard. Pursue Jesus with everything you've got. Go love other people with your whole heart. And to do it well, you've got to throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we don't do that by white-knuckling it. We don't do that by trying to be our own sacrifice. We don't do that by supplementing the work of Christ in our life. No, we do it by focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. If we'll do that, we will follow God's laws. We will pursue Jesus hard. We will love others well, and we will have run a good race. That's the point of Hebrews. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are, for how you've loved us. Thank you for your son. Father, I pray that it would be critically important to us to acknowledge the superiority of Christ. That it would be critically important to us to pursue Him, to love Him, to know Him. Father, if we are not in Your Word, if we're not pursuing You on our own, would you light a fire in us to do that? If we've spent too many years not knowing your Bible well, would you let this be the year that fixes it? If we've spent too many years adding to your law, would this be the year that we let that go? If we've spent too many years supplementing your sacrifice, would this be the year that we finally accept yours? And God, as we go from here, would you help us run our race? It's in Jesus' name we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for being here. This is the seventh part in our series going through the book of John. We're going to continue this series through the week after Easter. So I'm thrilled to see all of you here. Hopefully, as I've been encouraging you every week, you've been reading along with us. I think it's hugely important for you guys to be reading the Gospel of John on your own as you process it and we go through it as a church so that my perspective isn't the only perspective that you're getting on this book. That's why it's such a bummer that I realized yesterday I forgot to update the reading plan and the one that we have out there is not current. So I'm real sorry about that. I had a wedding to do yesterday and then basketball, so I didn't get a chance to do the reading plan. But we'll have that done for you tomorrow. We'll get it out online and we'll have a physical copy for you next week when you get here. If you are following along in the reading plan, just read the next two chapters. We've been going at two chapters a week and you'll be good, okay? But as we've been going through this week, I had a sermon planned out of John 11, looking at the story of Lazarus and the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept, John 11, 35. And I had been looking forward to that sermon. But as I got done last week and looked at the chapters that we had to cover this week, there's a portion, there's something happening in John chapter 13 that I just, I didn't feel right about doing a series in John where we don't cover this. There's been a ton that we've skipped over in the book of John. We didn't even stop on the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16. We haven't talked about that, which again is why we should be going through this on our own. But I just didn't feel like it was right to go through a series in John without focusing on what Jesus says in John chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's a seat back in front of you. And then later when I read the passage, it will be up on the screen. And I think we have it in your bulletin. There's really no reason, unless you're illiterate, to not read John chapter 13, 34, and 35 with us, okay? So in this verse, Jesus gives a summation of all of his teaching for the disciples. He's left with just the 11 faithful disciples that are with him, and we'll get to this in a minute, but he's giving them a summation of everything that he's ever taught them. And I find summaries like that to be the most helpful teaching or the most helpful advice, right? We know that good advice summarizes all the other advice and makes it a little bit more memorable. I think something that we can all relate to is many of us in this room have had kids. And we know that when you're about to have a kid, this is the time when you are receiving the most unsolicited advice you have ever received in your life. The only other thing I've ever experienced like it was when I was about to become a pastor. I had been named the senior pastor, and so I had kind of a month to get my affairs in order and then get up here and take over, at the time, Grace Community Church. And so everybody was giving me advice on how to be a senior pastor, including my atheistic uncle, who hadn't been in a church in like 35 or 40 years. I'm literally, I'm golfing with the guy. It's the last time I'm going to hang out with Uncle Dick. And he's in the fairway practicing, and then he like steps off the ball and he goes, Nathan, you know, I've been thinking about you becoming a pastor. And I'm like, what in the world is going on here? He goes, I just had something I wanted to tell you. And I'm thinking like, just like everybody else, come on, let's go. You haven't been in church in 40 years. Let's see what you got. It was okay advice, but I just thought it was hilarious that an atheist cared about advising me on being a senior pastor, right? And when you're a parent, you get all this parenting advice. It doesn't matter if they've had kids before. It just matters that they've read a book or seen something on Facebook. They will tell you what they saw. And sometimes this advice is even contradictory in nature, right? You got the camp over here saying you should use cloth diapers. And I'm like, you're crazy. And then you got this camp saying you should use regular disposable diapers. I'm like, these are my people, right? You got the camp that says when you get home, you do not let that child sleep in the bed with you. You put them in their room on night one or they are going to develop dependency issues. And you're like, holy crud, that sounds really hard. And then you have other people that are like, you let that child sleep in your bed until they are eight if they need to. They are your precious angel, you know? And Jen's reading books the whole time. Jen's my wife, not just some lady who reads books for me. So she's reading books the whole time. And she's getting all this advice. And it's contrary. This book says this thing, and this book says this thing. You're like, well, which person knows more about this? Who knows? Can I speak to their adult children to see if this worked out? You just don't know, and you're getting so much all the time. But one guy, this was super helpful, Kyle Hale, the worship pastor at the church that I was at at the time, I was on staff with him. He came up to me one day. He had three boys under five. So he had earned his dad's stripes, right? And he comes up to me and he goes, hey man, listen, a lot of people telling you a lot of stuff. And I'm like, yep, and here comes your thing. And he goes, listen, just for the first three months, just keep the kid healthy and stay sane. Whatever you have to do. Don't worry about what you're going to do to them. You're not going to do any permanent damage. Just keep the child healthy and stay sane. Try not to yell at Jen. That's it. Just do that. And I thought, this is good advice. I can do this. I don't know about all the other stuff. I don't know about the five S's and all the things, but I can do this. I can just try to take care of them, and I can try to not yell at Jen. This is good. This is actually how I still parent. Just make sure she's good and try not to get mad at Jen. That was good advice. It was a summation of all the other advice, right? It was memorable and easy and executable. And this is what Jesus does for the disciples in John chapter 13. Here's what's happening in John 13. I actually, I feel a little bit badly about the way that we've done this series in that we haven't done a lot to follow the chronology of Jesus through his ministry and through his life. We've dropped in on snippets of what he's taught and things that he did, but we haven't done a good job of following the chronology of Jesus. So here's what's happening in John chapter 13. Jesus has moved through his life. About the age of 30, he goes public with his ministry and begins calling disciples to him. And then they do ministry together through Israel. Israel is a relatively small country. It's really a small country by any measure. And so all over Israel, they're doing ministry and they're following Jesus around and he's teaching them how to do what he does. He's preparing them to hand them the keys to the kingdom. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but why didn't Jesus just come to earth, live perfectly, become an adult, and die for our sins? Why did he dabble for three years with this public ministry? Why was it essential for him to do this in order to die on the cross for our sins? And I think the answer is Jesus knew he was going to have to leave behind his kingdom in the form of the church. And he knew he was going to have to entrust that to people. And so he wanted to invest three years of his life into some young men so that he can hand the church off to them as passing them the keys to the kingdom. So I'm convinced that he spent an extra three years here on planet Earth with us for the main purpose of training the disciples to get them to a place where they were ready to take over his kingdom called the church and propel it into the future, which they absolutely did, or you guys wouldn't be sitting here in a different continent 2,000 years later, right? So that's what Jesus is doing with the disciples. So about age 30, he goes public, he calls the disciples to them, he trains them for three years, and then at the age of 33, he's crucified. And that week leading into the crucifixion is called Holy Week. And we're in the period of Lent that's leading up to Holy Week now. So Palm Sunday, which this year we're going to celebrate on April the 14th, is the day that Jesus goes into Jerusalem. It's called the triumphal entry. He enters as a king. But this sets in motion a series of events that by Friday has him crucified. We call that Good Friday. And then Easter is when he resurrects on Sunday. So he is in the middle of Holy Week here. It is the end of his life. He's sitting around one night with the disciples. If you were here the first week, we know, you know, that Jesus has just looked at Judas who had betrayed him and said, the thing that you are about to do, go and do it quickly. So Judas has left. He's at the end of his ministry with the 11 faithful disciples who he will hand the keys to the kingdom to and entrust them with the church. And he looks at them and he says, I have a new commandment for you, which is an interesting thing. Because the Bible says that Jesus had that all authority on heaven and on earth had been given to him. He had come down from heaven as God. He was God in the flesh. He could have added all the rules that he wanted to. He could have been given out commandments left and right. He could have done anything that he wanted. He could have made any rules that he wanted. And he waits three years to do it. And right before, like a couple of days before he's going to go be arrested and die for us, he says, oh, by the way, I have a new commandment for you, in verse 33, he calls them little children. Come to me, little children. Jesus doesn't play the little children card a lot. That's like maximum God card, right? Because they're peers. He's a dude, they're dudes. But in this one, he says, little children, listen to me. So this is like, hey, pay attention. Jesus is playing the God card here. He doesn't do this a lot. What's he about to teach? He says, I have a new commandment for you. So we should be leaning in. This is the one rule that Jesus makes. He could have made any rule his whole life. He's made one, and it's going to be this, and it's going to be a summation of all his teachings. So Christians, church, we should lean into this. If you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, you should be very interested in this new commandment that sums up everything that Jesus ever taught and did and said. Non-believers, if you're here and you're considering faith, you should be very interested in this because in this one commandment is the whole of the faith that you are considering. This is a hugely important, crucial passage. And this is what Jesus says to them that night before he prepares to go to heaven. He says this in verse 34. He leans in and he says, little children, disciples, church, for the rest of time, I'm going to give you, I have a new commandment for you. I want you to love one another as I have loved you. This is how the whole world will identify you from this moment on. I want you to love one another as I have loved you. Now, if you've been paying attention in the book of John, you should have some questions. How is this a summation of everything that Jesus teaches, and how is it different than things that he's taught in the past? Because at the beginning of the Gospels, in the beginning of Matthew, and at different places in John, he tells us that we are to, what, love our neighbor as ourselves, right? We know this commandment. This isn't new. This doesn't feel different. We know that we're supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. In fact, it was commonly known then. Then there's a story where Jesus is talking to a lawyer, a young man who's been studying the law, which incidentally is the Bible, and he asked the lawyer, what do you think are the greatest commandments? And the lawyer says, love your God with all your heart, your soul, and your mind, amen, and love your neighbor as yourself. This was a commonly accepted teaching. So how is this different than this commonly accepted teaching? There's another theme that runs through John of what Jesus teaches. Over and over again, he continues to come back to this idea that it's our job to believe in him. We looked a couple weeks ago when people asked him, what do we do to inherit eternal life? How do we labor for eternity? He says, believe in the one that the Father has sent. When he prays, after he resurrects Lazarus, Lazarus is a friend of his who dies. Jesus shows up at the grave. He brings him back to life, and he prays, and he says, Father, I knew you were going to do this. I did this so that they would believe that I am who I say I am, so that they would believe in the one that you have sent. So over and over, we see this theme in John that Jesus admonishes us to believe in him as the Son of God. And if we see those themes, it's already commonly accepted practice and commonly accepted teaching that we should love our neighbor as ourself, and we know that we should love God as well, and that it's our job to believe in God. How is this a summation of those things that Jesus has taught us? Well, we start when we understand this. When you look at the command to love your neighbor as yourself, do you understand that you are the standard of love in that scenario? That when the admonishment, when the instruction is, love your neighbor like you love yourself. And to love somebody for all intents and purposes is simply to want what's best for them and to act in a way that would bring that about. We love somebody, so we want what's best for them, and we act in a way that would bring that about in their life. That's what we do. And so when we love somebody as we love ourselves, then we are the standard of love in their life. So however we love ourselves is how we ought to love other people. And that's a problem because we are imperfect and we love ourselves imperfectly. There have been seasons of my life where I did not do a good job at loving myself. And if I were to love you like I love myself, then I would probably owe you an apology, right? There are seasons of your life where you love yourself imperfectly. You're not taking care of yourself very well. You're not making the best decisions for yourself. You're not bringing about the best things in your life. And so if you started to love other people like you loved yourself, if we're honest, that's a pretty low bar. When we say that we should love our neighbor as we love ourself, that sets the bar at us. And you'll notice that Jesus says this at the beginning of his ministry, before the disciples have watched him relentlessly love everyone around him. But at the end of his ministry, when they've watched him for three years, graciously and patiently and givingly and sacrificially love everyone around him all the time, Jesus raises the bar on this command. And he says, it's no longer good enough for you to love other people as you love yourself. No, no, you need to love them as I have loved you. You need to go and love other people as you've seen me love them. And when that's the commandment, do you understand that Jesus is now the bar on that love? Before we set the standard, go love others as you love yourself. That's our standard. And he says, no, no, no. I want you to raise it to my standard. Go and love other people as I have loved you. He says this to the disciples who have watched him over the years. Bring sight back to the blind. Make people who can't walk be able to walk again. Love on people who are found in the middle of sin. Restore people who the world would condemn. Argue with the Pharisees. Teach the multitudes. Perform countless miracles. Sit patiently with them. They've watched all of this. And Jesus says, as you have seen me love on you and minister to you, I want you to love one another that way. He sets the bar at himself, not us. But the question then becomes, if I am to love other people as Jesus loved me, how is it that Jesus loves me? And how does that fulfill the instruction that we should believe in Jesus and love God? How can this possibly be a summation of everything that he's taught? And to answer that question, we need to look at the way that Jesus loves. Now, I'm going to give you kind of three categories or ways that Jesus loves us. I would encourage you in your small groups this week as you discuss this, you guys can probably think of more ways or more categories of ways that Jesus loves us. But here are my three this morning. There are three ways, main ways, I think that Jesus loves us. I think Jesus loves us sacrificially, he loves us restoratively, and he loves us recklessly. Sacrificially, restoratively, and recklessly, I think, are ways that Jesus loves us. Sacrificially is obvious, right? If you were to ask anybody, believer, non-believer, anybody who has a cursory knowledge of Scripture at all, how does Jesus love us? One of the answers would be sacrificially. He died for us, so he sacrificed, he gave of himself for us. But it's not just that he died on the cross for us. That's the biggest of sacrifices. But we see him time and again in the gospels give of his time and give of his energy and give of his attention and give of his patience. We see him constantly choosing other people over himself. He even chose homelessness. He has foxes have holds and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. He just wandered around loving on other people, not being concerned with himself. So if we're going to love like Jesus, we need to love sacrificially, which means that we need to give of our time and our effort and our energy and our resources in his name and for him. And this happens a lot. We have people over there who are watching kids so that young families can sit in here and go to church in peace. And some of these families just need to sleep right now. I'm not even mad at them for not paying attention because they just need rest because it's hard to be a parent sometimes, right? So we have people who are giving of their time on a Sunday morning and loving on them so that they can be in here. We have people who are teaching the kids in there, loving on them, giving of their time. We have servants all over the church who are loving well through sacrificing. I see that happening a lot in Grace. Once a month, we do this incredible thing when we go to Pender County that was impacted by the floods. And Florence came in, the hurricane came in, there was floods, and we're good, and everything's settled, everybody's got power. Except out there, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of homes that have been impacted by the floods that are unlivable. Insurance can't help them out, and these people have no options. And so Grace actually sends a team of people down once a month to go and help restore these people and restore their lives and fix their homes. And so the men and women who do that on a monthly basis are going and loving sacrificially. They are giving up a Saturday to be down there, which is a big deal, particularly in NCAA tournament time, to give up these Saturdays. Incidentally, the trip this month got canceled and got moved to this upcoming Saturday. So if that's a way you'd like to love sacrificially, you can sign up for that online or indicate it on your communication card, and that's fine. And so there are all these ways to go out and to love others outside of our homes and to kind of step into the lives of others and love sacrificially, show up for the food drive and love the people, the kids who might not be able to eat over spring break. That's good. But to me, the surest test to know if we're really loving others sacrificially is whether or not we're doing that in our home. It's easy to go out in fits and starts and to kind of drop in and make an appearance and love here and then retreat back to those who know us best and be selfish and need our space and our time and our TV and all the stuff, right? That's easy to do. It's easy to step out and love for a couple of hours and then step back into our shell. I learned this lesson when I was in high school. I was 17 or 18 years old and I had just gone off to summer camp, right? A place called Look Up Lodge in Traveler's Rest, South Carolina. And it made a huge impact on me. I had grown up in the church, grown up, I think, as a Christian. But this was the time, this was the week where I really, really got it. Something switched for me, and I understood Christianity in a way that I never had. And so I'm on fire for Jesus, right? I'm like the classic mountaintop experience kid coming back from camp. Like I am, I am so fired up. I'm ready to charge hell with a water pistol. And it doesn't have to be one of those pump kinds. It can just be like the single action. Like I'm still in, bring it on Satan. I'm coming for you. Like I am ready. And I'm, my hair is on fire for Jesus Jesus. I come back and I'm telling my parents who raised me in the church and who love God and who love me, are super involved with the church. I'm telling them all the things that I'm going to do. I've made all these commitments. I'm going to do all the things. I'm going to start all the Bible studies. I'm going to lead all the things. I'm going to teach the little kids. You've never seen a Christian like me, Dad. I'm going to change the world. Dad says, that's great, son. Be nice to your mom. I'm like, man, you really cut the legs out from under a guy. And at the time, I thought he was kind of a jerk for saying that. Maybe he still is. But the point that he made is right. That's great. That's wonderful that you've had this mountaintop experience. That's wonderful that you love Jesus. Be nice to your mom and love your sister. It's easy to run out and fake it and sacrifice for others. It's hardest with the people that we know best. That's why we're meanest to the people that we love the most. That's why we have the shortest fuse with them. That's why we sometimes fail to offer the grace to others, the grace inside our home that we offer outside our home. If we want to love sacrificially, then it looks like, for me, this is something that I struggle with, when I come home sometimes, I know we make jokes about pastors and our job, and it is stressful looking at Facebook and golfing a lot, but there are times when I do come home and I am stressed. I've had a lot of meetings and a lot of things, and we've made decisions, and I've had to work hard, and the last thing in the world I want to do is sit on a chair that is too small for me and make Play-Doh donuts. I don't want to do that. I want to sit on a couch that is too big for me and eat donuts. That's what I want to do. But if I love Lily and I love Jen, then I'll come home and I'll sit down and I'll play. And I'll give Jen the space she needs to do the things she needs to do because she hasn't had that space all day and I'll engage with my daughter. If we love our family, we'll come home and we'll sacrifice for them. If we love the people around us, then we will consider their needs before they have to consider their own. I think sacrificial love shows up first in the people that we know best. Jesus also loves us restoratively. He seeks to restore us. There are so many examples of this. A couple weeks ago, Kyle did a great job preaching about the woman at the well, who at that time had had five husbands and was living with the sixth man who she was not yet married to, which by any account throughout all of history is generally referred to as scandalous, right? And Jesus doesn't bring it up. He just mentioned it as if it's true, but he doesn't seek to condemn her about it. He's far more concerned about restoring her and letting her know about who he is and the promises that he makes and her need for him. In the book of John, there's a story that some versions include where there's a woman who's brought to him in adultery in the city streets. And the Pharisees, the religious leaders say, should we stone her? And he has this impossible question to answer. And he does this thing where he makes everybody, he convinces everybody to go away by riding in the dirt. And once everyone is gone, he looks at the woman and he says, is there anyone left to condemn you? And she says, no, Lord. And he says, and neither do I condemn you. Now go and sin no more. He's not there to condemn her. He's not there to convince her, hey, you know adultery is wrong and you really shouldn't do it. You know that the thing that you were doing was shameful and that I don't like it. And that when you do that, you trample on my love. Like I'm here to die for you because you do stuff like that. Could you maybe knock it off? He doesn't say that. He says, neither do I condemn you. Now go and sin no more. We've extended this series a week so that I can preach to you about the restoration of Peter after he messes up. Peter messes up big time. And Jesus comes to him and he has every right to get onto him and condemn him and he doesn't. He simply restores him. What we see in the ministry of Jesus over and over and over again is that he is far more concerned with restoring you than condemning you. And in the church, when we look at other people, it gets so easy to identify that as sin. Is that person sinning? Is that person doing something that's wrong? Look at what they're doing in their life. Doesn't that count as sin? And Jesus says, yeah, maybe, but how about we love them first? He doesn't let them off the hook. He says, go and sin no more. Go and don't do this thing anymore. But first, he says, neither do I condemn you. He's always, always, always more interested in restoring than condemning, in restoration than condemnation. And if we are going to love other people like Jesus loves us, then when we approach others, we should always be primarily concerned with their restoration to spiritual health, not condemning them and defining what they're doing. We restore people. We do not condemn. That's the Lord's job. And Jesus loves us recklessly. Now, I like this one because we're going to sing a song after the sermon called Reckless Love. I think it's called Reckless Love. I never know song titles. It should be called Reckless Love. And it's about the reckless love of God. And it was a popular song in Christian circles. But we had some debates and some discussions about it as a staff because part of the concern was that it was erroneous to call God's love reckless because reckless kind of infers that there's mistakes made, that it's just like reckless abandon, that there might be some mess up or some error to his love or some misjudgments within his love, but it's good and it's fine and we like God's love and so that's okay. So that maybe it was almost theologically inaccurate. But after we talked about it some more, we decided to go ahead and sing the song. And I'll confess to you that the first time I ever even looked at the lyrics of the song was when we were singing it on Sunday morning because I'm really bad about keeping current with worship songs. We do a playlist on Spotify with the songs that Grace Raleigh does, and that's my worship. That's what I listen to. And if it's not on there, I don't listen to it. So I had not heard this song before. And as we're going through it on Sunday and I'm looking at the lyrics and it talks about how he leaves the 99 and he comes after us and he always chases us and he always pursues us and there's no wall that he won't kick down and there's no mountain that he won't climb to come after us. What I realize about the recklessness of God is that it's talking about this emotional recklessness where he has no regard for how much we hurt him. He is always going to pursue us. That's the recklessness of God. It doesn't matter how many times someone rejects him. It doesn't matter how many times someone makes him a promise and says, God, I'm never going to do the thing again. And then they turn around and they do the thing. It doesn't matter how many times we betray God or we walk away from him or we break his heart or we break his rules or we hurt his spirit, he is always going to forgive us and he is always going to pursue us. It doesn't matter how many times he extends a hand to us and we knock the hand away and we say, I'm not interested. He is still going to extend the hand again. He recklessly pursues us. This is the picture that he lays out in the Old Testament when he has a prophet named Hosea marry a prostitute named Gomer. He says, I want you to go and I want you to take Gomer as your wife. She doesn't deserve you. I want you to go marry her anyway. So Hosea, in obedience, does it, marries her. Inevitably, she cheats on him, goes back to her old life, and God speaks to Hosea again and he says, go back and get her and marry her again, regardless of the toll that it takes on you. That's the reckless love of God. Because there is something very human and very natural to this idea that once our heart has been broken, once someone's turned us down enough times, once someone has disappointed us enough times, once someone has required our forgiveness more than a few times, there's a very natural human thing to do to recoil and to withdraw our love from them and to not pursue them as hard and to not go after them as hard because it's hurt us so many times in the past. And so we recoil out of this sense of self-protection and we build up walls and we don't let other people in because we've been hurt so many times, and we've been damaged so many times that we don't want to experience that again, so we learn to protect ourselves from the possibility of other people hurting us. And God's reckless love says, I don't care how many times you hurt me, I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna pursue you. That's the recklessness of God. And if we want to love like Jesus, then we love recklessly. This is how Jesus is able to tell Peter how many times to forgive people, right? Peter goes to Jesus and he says, Jesus, how many times should I forgive someone when they wronged me? When someone wrongs me, when they disappoint me, when they let me down, when they break my heart, when I thought I could count on them and they show me that I can't and it really, really hurts, how many times should I forgive them? Up to seven times seven. As many times as it takes, you forgive them until they do it right. You forgive them as many times as you have to. You recklessly pursue them with your love. That's what it means to love like Jesus loved. We love sacrificially, we love restoratively, and we love recklessly. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking about how to love in that way, what becomes very apparent is we are not able to do that. We are not able in and of ourselves to love in those ways, to love perfectly sacrificially, to always empathize and love with restoration in mind. We are not able to love recklessly. We do not possess the ability to do that. And this is how it fulfills Jesus' teaching that we ought also to believe in him. Because what we understand is it is impossible to love others like Jesus loved us without Jesus's possession of and power in our hearts. You see, unless we believe in Jesus and he has taken up residency in our heart and has possession of our heart and his power is working in our hearts to change our ways and our desires to his and our ability to love to His. Unless He's doing that, unless we've loved God enough to believe Him and place our faith in Christ, there is no possible way we can be obedient to the command to love one another as Christ has loved us. So in this, we come full circle in seeing that it is really a summation of everything that Jesus has taught. It raises the bar on the commandment to love our neighbor as ourself. It fulfills the commandment to love God and fulfills the commandment to believe in the one that he has sent because it's impossible to do it without believing in Jesus. And in that way, it's a summation of everything that Jesus ever taught. Simply go and love. Andy Stanley says it this way. He's a pastor in Atlanta. He says, when you don't know what to say or do, just love others as God through Christ loves you. That's what we do. We love other people sacrificially. We love them restoratively. We love them recklessly. And then Jesus says, this is how the world will know that you are my disciples. This is how I want the world to look at you and know that you belong to me. This is what I want to be your defining and distinguishing characteristic. This should be the way the world identifies you to look at the way you love one another and you love others. That's what I want to define you. And this is something that I think the church gets messed up sometimes. He does not say that the world will know that you are my disciples by what you stand against, by how you define sin, by who you choose to condemn, by what you stand up and rally against in Washington. That's not how we are going to be defined. We're not going to be defined and identified by the world by our good doctrine or dogma or theology. We aren't made known to the world by winning a Bible knowledge trivia contest. We're not made known. The world will not know that we are his disciples by how well we know this book. Now, all of that flows out of our love for him, but it is not our definitive thing. It is not our distinguishing characteristic. Our distinguishing characteristic is who and how well we love. That's what Jesus wants to define us. All the other things are important, but if we fail to love others first, nobody cares what we believe. If we fail to love others first, nobody cares what we're against. If we fail to love others first, then nobody cares how well we serve. We are first to love others sacrificially, distortively, and recklessly. And this is how we will be defined. This is how the world will know that we are his disciples. What would it look like for you to be known in that way? What would it look like for the people around you to say whatever it is they want to say about you, but at the end of the day, that person loves people well? What would it look like to love people so different and in a way that was so other that when people saw you doing it, they were drawn to your God because there must be something else going on here. Nobody could possibly love others that well. Nobody could possibly sacrifice that much. Nobody could possibly mean it. You know how when you meet somebody who's super nice and super gracious and they're very kind to everyone, you think to yourself, they're faking it. You think to yourself, what do they look like when they're down? What if you never were? What if you weren't faking it? Because that love was fueled by Jesus and you loved everybody just as hard as he did. What if this was the distinguishing and defining characteristics of our homes? What if when someone entered into your home and spent some time with you and your family, when they left and they got in the car and whatever else they said about your home, I really like her napkins or those curtains or that's what cozy farmhouse looks like and that's what I want to do. Like whatever else they said about your home, the one thing that they took away was, man, those people love each other well. Man, I felt loved in that house. What if your kids growing up in your house, the one thing they'll say about mom and dad is, listen, they did some crazy stuff and there's some crazy, I got to knock off of me here in adulthood, but man, they love me well. And when I brought friends over, they loved them too. What if that's what was said about your house? That they showed the love of Christ there? What if that's what's said about the church? That when people come to Grace Raleigh, they walk away, and whatever else they experienced here, sermon was okay, music was great, announcements were outstanding. Whatever else they experienced here, they walk away and they go, those people love well. Those people loved me. And I'll brag on you a little bit because I don't think we're too terribly bad at this. Last week we had a guy here, we're getting our website redone. He's our web developer, a guy named Hugh. And Hugh is here. I invited him to just see the church and kind of learn more about us. And so he came in, and he came in after the first service, stayed in the lobby, came to the second service, and then I talked to him afterwards. And I just said, hey, you know, thanks for coming, whatever. And he said, dude, I love this place. I said, really? He says, yeah, these are the friendliest people I've ever met in my life. And he wasn't kidding. He said, they were so nice. He lives on the other side of Cary, like 40 minutes away. He said, if I lived closer, my family would start coming here next week. This place is incredible. So good on you if you were a part of that. I think this is one of the things we do well, but I think we can do it better. What if we were a church where no matter what other people experienced, they walked away and they said, those are some of the friendliest people I've ever met. What if that were everyone's experience? What if when you brought a visitor here, you brought friends or family here, they walked away and they said, that place loves well. It starts in the individual, it goes into the home, and then it comes here. And if we could be a church that loves other people well, that's what we become known for, that's the kind of church I want to be a part of. And you're here, I know, because that's the kind of church you want to be a part of too. But it begins with us. It begins with us pursuing Jesus and asking him and praying, help me to love other people as you have loved me. And what I love about this teaching is Jesus knows he's about to leave the disciples on earth. He's been a physical presence there. He has been the representative of the Godhead there. But he is about to leave and they're going to be the ones who carry the torch. And what better way as the torchbearers of Christ to represent him to the rest of the world than to go and be the embodiment of love to them as Jesus was. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We love you imperfectly. We love you inconsistently. We love you often half-heartedly. Often, God, we love you forgetfully. God, please continue to work in our hearts to draw us near you that we may love you more. And that out of that love, we might love other people more. Give us the grace and the patience to love sacrificially, God. Give us the sympathy and empathy and insight to love restoratively and give us the strength and the faith to love recklessly. God, may we, may our homes, may this place be known and identified for how well we offer your love to others. It's in your son's name I pray. Amen.