Sermons tagged with Israel

You don't even like the pack. What are you talking about? Of course, you're the most obnoxious in the room when your team's not even NC State. For those that don't understand what's happening right now, maybe you're new to the church and this doesn't make any sense to you. I'm a Georgia Tech fan. I grew up in Atlanta. Thank you. Yeah, good. My lone friends in the room. And listen, I will be the first to admit that over the years, I've been the pastor for eight years. I've given a lot of crud to the pack. I've made a lot of jokes. And even my Georgia Tech friends was like, you should open up with a joke at NC State's expense. I'm not even going to repeat the joke because I don't want to make it because it's dishonorable. I lost a bet with John Massey. John, raise your hand. He's the hero of the church. Yeah, there we go. He was going to have to usher in my Georgia Tech sweater this morning, except we lost. And so now I'm preaching in this. And I want you to know that more neutral things were offered to me. And I said, no, I want maximum red. I want a big logo. It needs to be as obnoxious as possible. I want to pay my bets. But that's what I'm doing. Here's the funny part about the bet. My wife wasn't here this morning when I got the options. I was brought some options, and I wanted to choose the most obnoxious. And so I grabbed Michelle, who's doing our announcements this morning morning and is just overall an untrustworthy person and I And I called her out to the lobby and I said before the service started and I said Michelle you need to be my wife this morning Jen's not here. She can't tell me do I look too fat in this and she said you look great and I told Jen I think she was lying to me and she's furthering my humiliation and having to wear this. But to my NC State friends, great game, wonderful atmosphere. We went to the game last night, and congratulations. That was a good win for you guys. This morning, we will continue with Daniel. I feel like stopping to pray, because now we're just like friends at a brewery talking about a football game. So let's do that. Let me just stop to pray to reset our mindset and then we'll dive into Daniel. Let's do that. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for friends and for fun and for football and for sports and all the things that unite us together. But God, we acknowledge that nothing unites us more than you. And so we pray that we would be united in you and in your presence this morning as we enter into the story of your servant, Daniel. In Jesus' name, amen. Okay, I think I can start to preach now. Now, the book of Daniel is one, and I had shared this with you guys several months ago, that one of the things we did, we meet as a staff and we plan our series together and we just kind of go, where do we need to take the church? And I kind of went back through the last five years of what we've covered as a church and noted the areas of the Bible that we had never touched before, the really significant areas of the Bible that we had never touched. And maybe you could even construe that we were negligent in not touching those. And so we just wanted to include those as we moved forward. And one of the places that we hadn't touched since I started here was the book, excuse me, of Daniel. And Daniel is a really impactful, prophetical book in the Old Testament. Now, here's the thing with Daniel. I'm not going to tell you that I'm preaching through the book of Daniel because I'm not. Because Daniel's 12 chapters long. And I see some of you nodding your heads. You know the book of Daniel. The first six chapters of the book of Daniel are what we refer to as narrative. It's a story. This is just a recounting of the events that happened. The last six chapters of Daniel are prophecy. They're eschatological prophecy, which means in reference to the end times. And just between you, me, and the gate post, they're crazy. They're really hard to understand. So here's what I'm going to do is just not talk about them. We'll just let them be confusing together. And if anybody has questions, we can talk about those questions together. But what we wanted to do is focus on the narrative portion of Daniel and ask, what can we learn from Daniel's experience in Babylon? And this is an interesting series because we're going to do this one week in Daniel here and talk about Daniel and his diet in chapter one. And then next week we have a morning of worship that I'm very excited about. I love a morning of worship. And then we'll pick it up with Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, who you know is Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. And then we'll look at Daniel and the lion's den. But we've not done those stories together as a church. And I think that we need to. And then after that, we're going to start our Christmas series, the name of which I do not know yet, but I do know what we'll be covering, which is kind of the songs that we sing. And we'll be looking at Christmas carols and what they actually mean and where they come from some scripture. So I'm very excited about that. So that's where we're going for the rest of the year. This morning, we arrive at Daniel. And so let me give you some context for what's happening at this moment in history, not just for Daniel, but for the nation of Israel. And then we'll look at some passages in Daniel to orient us in the story. Big, big overview. The nation of Israel is brought by Moses and then by Joshua conquering the land of Canaan and they claim it. Then they establish a nation. And after they establish a nation, it's ruled by Joshua and then some judges. And eventually Israel cries out for a king. And God says, I don't want to give you a king. And they said, well, we're going to be a middle school girl, and we're going to hold our breath until our face turns blue, and we're going to demand a king. And then God was like, okay, I'm going to give you one, but you're not going to want it. And then Saul was the first king. And then David, who we know, we know his story, David and Goliath, we know David, was the second king. And then the third king was Solomon. Solomon was the son of David, and he was the wisest man that ever lived. But after Solomon, his two sons, Jeroboam and Rehoboam, took over the kingdom, and there was a civil war and a split. And then from then, the nation of Israel existed as kind of this third world country that never gained international prominence and always struggled financially and spiritually and militaristically and all the ways. Militarily, that's probably the word that we want there. And all the ways, right? And then, eventually, the dominant powerhouse of the time takes over. And so Persia, Babylon, comes and conquers Israel. And when they conquer Israel, one of the things they do is they take the best and the brightest. They take the Ivy League students and they bring them back to, and the NC State students, and they bring them back to Babylon, and they begin to train them for service in the court. And part of the deal for that training is we have developed, Babylon, this is their perspective, we've developed a diet that is going to make you maximally healthy and helpful within the court, and we need you to adopt this diet. The problem with the diet was it went against the dietary restrictions of the Jewish heritage and of the Jewish faith. There were things that Daniel and his friends, Hananiah and Mishael and Azariah, were asked to consume that went against their conscience and their faith. And so they found themselves at this crossroads where they're essentially slaves and they're being asked to consume a diet that goes against their morals. So what do we do? And that's where we pick up the story. I'm going to read you a lot of verses this morning, but I want you not to hear a summary from me. I want you to hear exactly what's happening in the text, and then we will talk about it together. If you have a Bible, while I take a sip of this water, open it to Daniel chapter 1, and we're going to start in verse 8 and go through 15. If you don't have a Bible, it's in the seat back in front of you. Starting in verse eight, here's Daniel's response to the diet he was prescribed. But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way. Now, God had caused the official to show favor and compassion on Daniel, but the official told Daniel, I'm afraid of my lord, the king, who has assigned your food and drink. Why should he see you looking worse than the other men your age the king would then have my head excuse me because of you daniel then said the guard whom the chief official has appointed over daniel hananiah mishael and azariah please test your servants for 10 days give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the Okay, so this is the story of Daniel in Babylon. And we'll pick it up in verse 18 in just a few minutes. But in a brief interlude as we learn the story, and just so we recap that together, because sometimes when people just read passages to us, we kind of lose track. He's been put in this class of young men, my best guess is early to mid-20s to serve in the court in Babylon. And the king, Nebuchadnezzar, has left it to his officials to determine the best diet for these men to serve him well. And they've prescribed that to Daniel. And Daniel has said, please, can we not eat of that diet? Can we eat just vegetables and water? And give us 10 days. And in 10 days, you just tell us how healthy we look. Tell us what our skin looks like. Tell us how vibrant we seem. Tell us about our energy level and our sleep patterns. You watch us and you tell us how healthy we seem. And if we seem healthier, then let us just continue to consume this diet. If we don't, then we'll adopt yours, but just give us a chance. That's the premise of what's happening. Yeah, we understand that. Okay. So then here's after the chief official agrees to that, which was by the way, um, kind of him to do. Because he wasn't like, I could get fined or I could get detention. It was, if this doesn't work, the king will have my head. So it was high stakes. This is the favor that Daniel had built up by being a good guy. But he granted it nonetheless. And this is the story of Daniel entering Babylon is they said here's our standards of diet we would like you to adopt them and Daniel said can you please allow us to maintain our own and the results of that was they were healthier and King Nebuchadnezzar didn't find anyone else that could measure up to their excellence or their health. So the question is, as we read that as a church in 2025, what do we learn from that? And here's where I'll be honest with you in the challenge of the sermon this morning. This sermon, whether you realize it or not, maybe this is new information to you, but some of you, I suspect, already know where we're going with the content, which is Daniel and Babylon were surrounded in an atmosphere with different standards. We have to choose God's standards. What do we do? That's the sermon, and's what you preach. And oftentimes when I encounter passages and I find the cliche or the trodden path on which to go to preach it to you, I try to deviate and choose a new path out of respect for what you've experienced as listeners and churches before. But this morning and for this week, I found it important to just go ahead and tread the trotting. Go ahead and walk the path that has been cut for us because I think it's important and I think it matters. And so what I would have you understand this morning is, like Daniel, we are living in Babylon. Here's what I want you to understand. Daniel was a citizen of Israel. He was a Jewish man. He had Jewish parents. His lineage went back through the decades, maybe the centuries of Israel. And when he was taken to Babylon, he finds himself in a foreign land to which he does not belong, whose customs he does not know, whose rules he does not adhere to. He's an alien, a sojourner, and he doesn't belong there. And here's one of the things that I believe that Christians don't think about enough. I've made this point in previous sermons for previous reasons. But as Christians, we are aliens. We are sojourners. We are not citizens of the United States of America. We are not inhabitants here. We are citizens of heaven. Whether or not you understand this fully, when you decide to become a Christian, which is to faithfully acknowledge that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, and is going to do what he says he's going to do, then you transfer your citizenship from whatever country you were born in into the nation of heaven. And so if you're here this morning and you're a believer, you would call yourself a Christ follower, then what I would say to you is you may by happenstance be a resident of North Carolina. You may by happenstance be a citizen of the United States. You may even be one of those super cool people who are always a little bit pretentious about it that have dual citizenship and you have a British passport. Good for you. But ultimately, when you become a Christian, your citizenship transfers to heaven. You're a citizen of heaven and an alien and sojourner here. And so like Daniel, we are not residents of Babylon. And here's why this matters. Because what we see in the story of Daniel is that the Babylonians had standards that they had established, that they believed in, that they espoused, that they thought were good. And they took those standards and they said, Daniel, Mishael, Hananiah, Azariah, now that you're here, live according to these standards. And Daniel said with all courage, I'm not a citizen of this place. I'm a citizen of Israel. In our vernacular, I'm a citizen of heaven. Those standards are not my standards. And here's the courageous part. Will you give me 10 days to live according to my standards? And if they don't work out better than your standards, I'll adopt yours. But can I live according to mine? And so the very easy lesson here, as we look at the story of Daniel is, if it's true that we live in Babylon, but we are not citizens here, what standards of Babylon that everyone else is adopting, are we tempted to adopt? To fit in, to get along, to go along, to not ruffle feathers. I mean, one easy standard is in Raleigh, I should become an NC State fan. I will not. I will be a Georgia Tech fan. And I don't even like being a Georgia Tech fan. It stinks. I'll tell you that for free. But all kidding aside, our communities, our culture impresses standards upon us from Babylon that are not the standards of heaven, our citizenship. Our culture impresses standards upon us about what's okay to consume, what's okay to watch, what's okay to joke about, what's okay to say, what's okay to participate in. Those standards are presented to us externally from the outside in. And then we're challenged as citizens of heaven to just go ahead and go along to get along, get along to go along, to adopt those standards. But they're different than the standards of heaven. Our culture has different standards for us and for themselves. And I say themselves intentionally to make it separate from our culture as a church. We are not citizens of Babylon. We're citizens of heaven. But what I want you to understand this morning is that Babylon has some standards that we don't have. And let me also say this transparently and honestly to you. This is a hard sermon for me to write. Because I never, ever want to preach in such a way that I am convicting you and asking you to get on my level. It is always, here's my conviction as I interact with this text. If you want to enter into this conviction with me, go ahead. And so I'll be the first to admit to you. I don't get it right all the time with adopting the standards of heaven versus the standards of Babylon. Sometimes the jokes or the language that I'm willing to use on a Wednesday are not exactly what heaven would choose. And I've adopted the standards of Babylon. Sometimes in what I consume is not the standard of heaven, it's the standard of Babylon. And so I stand before you honestly and hopefully humbly saying, if you feel like you haven't mastered this, neither have I. But I've always said to you, let's not soft pedal what the text teaches us. Let's bravely encounter it together and allow conviction where it's deserved. And so what I would tell you this week is, for me, and I know some of you pretty well, so I know you're in this boat too, buddy. For you, maybe we don't do the best job of parsing out the standards of heaven and the standards of Babylon and making the choice of Daniel and choosing the standards of heaven. And so this mourning is intended to be a compulsion towards holiness, towards choosing to be like God. Holiness is defined as other, different, outside of. God is described as holy, holy, holy, because he is other, he is different, he is outside of, he is different than us. And so as citizens of heaven, we are called to be different too. And there are myriad texts I could pull from the New Testament to illustrate this for us. But the one I would highlight for you this morning is 2 Corinthians chapter 7 verse 1, where it says, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and soul, perfecting holiness out of reverence to God. We are called to be holy. We are called to live according to the standards of heaven, not according to the standards of Babylon. And that's what I want us to see this morning, is we are not called to live to the standards of everyone around us all the time. We're called to live to the standards of heaven. And here's a short aside I would say. And I've debated about this because this is a little bit more in your face than I typically like to be. So I'm going to say it over here. I don't know if you remember, but I've set this up in previous sermons as my reckless speculation box where I'm allowed to just say things off the cuff here and you can't get mad at me. Over there is where I'm actually preaching and you can get mad at me for those things, but here you can't get mad, okay? We agree? Great. Here's what I've learned in life. Here's one of the things I've seen. And I don't mean it to be critical. I've just seen it. You take it for what it's worth. The older you get, the more your life contracts. The older you get, typically happens, what I've seen, maybe I'm wrong, but what I've seen is your circle around you gets smaller. And due to that, your circle around you tends to agree with you about everything. And then all of a sudden, you've reached whatever age old is to you, whether it's 45 or 95, and everyone around you agrees with everything you think too, and then you all look at each other and you go, we've nailed it, and everyone else is dumb. When we do that, and we don't take in new information, and we don't learn new things, and we don't have other standards, we adopt the standards of everyone around us and we become subject to Babylon. Okay. Here's the thing about the standards of Babylon that's really, really tricky. On the surface, on the surface, their food is better. On the surface, what Daniel was being offered was meat and probably potatoes and some sort of curry. I don't know. It was Persia. There was something over there that was better than what we have here. It was awesome. And wine. That's what he was being offered. And he said, no thanks. I'd like green beans, Brussels sprouts, and water, please. He said, I don't want any of that. I want just vegetables. And so on the surface, the diet of Babylon is more attractive. And this is something I personally struggle with mightily. Part of my job, and Jen actually makes fun of me for this. Part of my job is to go to lunch with people. I don't even care what we talk about. Let's just go to lunch. You say whatever you need to say, I'm going to enjoy this nice meal. Part of my job is to go to lunch. And I go to lunch once or twice a week. And when I go to lunch, I love food. I love food. I love it. Last week, I scheduled a dinner with somebody at Coquette. Coquette? Coquette? I don't know. Coquette. All right, great. Brasserie. And do you know what I did? Like right away, like as soon as it was scheduled and I got some free time, I got on my phone, I Googled the menu, and I decided what I was going to get. I got the scallions. They were terrible. Don't get the scallions. Scallops. I didn't just get a plate of scallions. That's a great point, Linda. Also, I would just say, objectively, if there is an option for just scallions, don't get those. Not so great. But I like to look forward to the food that I eat. And when I go to a restaurant to meet somebody, I want to get the French dip. If you go to Winston's, they've got an incredible French dip. It's really good. And the fries are good. And you get a side of horseradish because you don't care about your heart or living past 60 and you dip your fries in the horseradish and it's great. But the wise thing to do is to get the blackened chicken salad, which is also very good, but it's still salad. Like it's still what rabbits eat. And I don't want that. I want the French dip. I want the steak frites, right? I want the buffalo chicken wrap with the homemade fries and the blue cheese. That's what I want. And so that is more appealing. But here's what I know. And let me make this point in my notes before I say this next thing, because I think it ties in. Just for the record, God's standards bring us true freedom. God's standards bring us true freedom. So I want to talk to that for a minute. God's standards bring us true freedom. Here's what I know. And I know this experientially. You may not know this and I'm not applying this to anyone, but here's my experience. Is when I, for three months, eat what's most appealing in the moment. I have the French dip or I have the steak frites or I have the buffalo wrap or whatever it is in the moment lunch is better also I need a nap that afternoon and in the future my blood pressure is higher and my heart rate is higher and my health is lower and my energy rate is less and my sleep is worse and my indigestion is more when I make the decision to have the most attractive thing in the moment. And what I also know from the rare times that I've been able to do it is when I make the wise choice about what I'm going to consume, that my energy level is higher, my mental acuity is better, my energy is higher, I feel more capable and healthier. And even, if I can just be honest with you, my skin looks a little better. I don't know who cares about that at all. I just know it's true. So here's my point. Babylon has more attractive options in the moment. But if we choose the wise thing, we're going to be healthier in the long run. If we compromise our morals in the short term, and we consume the show that we really want to watch, or we engage in the conversation that's easiest to engage in, or I would say this too, we engage in political discourse the way that the world does in the moment, it satisfies us in the short term. But I could give you example after example of ways to compromise our heavenly values for the sake of Babylonian values, where in the moment, it's more attractive to indulge in this behavior because it's less attractive to stick to heavenly values. But in the long term, what I want you to see is you will be healthier long term to adhere to heavenly values than you will to Babylonian values. And I don't think that there's much difference in this story about the long-term health of Daniel physically than there is about taking it and applying it to the long-term health of us spiritually. If you want to be healthy spiritually, if you want to be free spiritually, eat the moral salad now so you can have the energy and the health and the longevity later. That's, I think, what we learned from this. And here's the thing, and this is what I said I was going to speak to, God's standards bring us true freedom. I think that we think that if I live according to the standards of heaven and not according to the standards of Babylon, that I'm limiting myself. I can't indulge in that pleasure. I can't experience that thing. I can't do that thing that everybody else around me, all my coworkers, everyone else in my life, they get to do it. Why can't I do it? I should be allowed to do that thing too. And so we think that following heavenly standards limits us and limits our freedom. And so we try to be good soldiers and sign up for that and go, yeah, God, I'm going to live it myself and live a worse, less enjoyable life now because it's the right thing to do and I'm just going to sacrifice for it. And what's actually true is when I spend six months eating French dips, I feel like crud after that. And I don't have the energy. And I don't exercise. And I don't have the joy and the vibrancy of life. And I don't feel as up for wrestling with John, my son. And I don't feel as eager to lay in bed with Lily, putting my nine-year-old daughter down and listening to her talk about her day and the one time during the day where she's willing to share. Because I'm too tired. When I choose unhealth, I'm not as willing to take the phone call from someone at Grace who's going through something. I'm not as willing to make the phone call to someone who's going through something. And so what I find in my life, and you decide if this is true for you, is that when I make short-term decisions to live my life according to the standards of Babylon, rather than according to the standards of heaven, that in the long term I experience less freedom than I would have if I would have chosen heaven in the first place. Does that make sense? And so this story from Daniel that seems simple and innocuous, I believe actually has a lot to teach us. And it's simply this. You're not citizens of here. You're not citizens of the United States. You're not residents of North Carolina. You're citizens of heaven if you're a Christian. And we have different standards for health than our community does. And we think erroneously that choosing those standards offers us less freedom. And what we learn experientially and from the story in Daniel is that the greatest freedom is found under the standards of heaven and pursuing holiness. And that's what your heavenly Father wants for you. So let's pursue those. Let's pray. Dear God, thank you so much for this morning. Thank you for your servant Daniel and everything he means to us and what we can learn from him. Father, I know that there are ways and places in which most of us or all of us choose the standards of the place where we find ourselves versus heaven. And so I pray that we would be people who choose the standard of heaven and we would reject the standards of Babylon. Let us be healthier for it, physically, spiritually, mentally. Let us be better servants and followers as a result of those choices and give us the courage and the foresight to be people who choose your home, our home, over this temporary one. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Good morning, everyone. My name is Kyle. I am one of the pastors here at Grace, and I am downright stoked to be able to be preaching this morning. Obviously, I love opportunities to get to speak and to get to preach and just talk about what the Lord has laid on my heart. But ultimately, this is a story that we're going to dive into today that I have loved ever since I was a child. And honestly, this was not on purpose, but I think it aligns perfectly with the child dedication that we just did as well. And clearly the Lord works well. And amen to that. Can I get amen? Yeah, sweet. So if you haven't been, if this is your first time, or maybe you have been out a lot this summer, we are diving into and spending time in the life of Moses. And we are learning about his life and his ministry and the people of Israel as he has helped free them from slavery and is leading them towards the place where one day they will be their own nation and they will be the people of God. And so leading up into this point, right now, they're basically this nomadic group of people who the Lord is providing for them as they're moving forwards and they're continuing to learn how to trust him and trust his guidance and trust his provision. But ultimately, they don't have a whole lot going for them, quote unquote, as a nation. And yet the story that we're diving into right now is where they find themselves in their first battle that they will have to face. And I say find themselves there because ultimately they were attacked. There's these people named the Amalekites that decided, you know what? These people have no way of defending themselves. Certainly they have people, but they have no place to bunker. They have, they don't have resources to be able to fight a war. Let's go attack them. Let's go kill all of them and take their maybe few to many resources that they have while they're on the move. A pretty evil act. So along with our battle premise, we have some of these classic battle tropes for our battle fans out there. We've got our good versus evil. We've got our David versus Goliath, these group of people who never in their right minds should be able to win a battle like this. And yet they've got God on their side. And so you can imagine where that's going to go. And so let's go ahead and let's dive into Exodus 17. And we're going to start by reading verses 8 through 11. The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim. Moses said to Joshua, choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites. Tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hands. So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered. And Moses, Aaron, and Hur, Hur being the name of a person, went to the top of the hill. As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning. But whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalekites were winning. All right. I want to pause for a second because I just want us all to collectively recognize and understand how insane the premise of this strategy is. So I can only, like, I'm just imagining myself being Moses and going to God, God, these people are going to attack us. They're on the move right now. What should we do? And God's like, all right, I've got you. Don't worry about it. Grab Joshua. This is actually the first time Joshua is mentioned in scripture. He's going to be a big player coming here in just a few weeks. But ultimately, grab Joshua. Let Joshua grab some of our men, and they're going to go out and fight, but you're not going to go with them. Moses is like, all right, sweet. I got something special, baby. All right, I want you to grab Aaron, and I want you to grab her, and I want you all to go up onto this hill over outside of where the battle is happening, not even in the mix. And so then I'm like, I'm sure Moses is like, hey, all right, sweet. I've got God's staff. He's done a lot of cool things. He's done a lot of miracles. We're probably going to all grab it, and we're going to fly, or we're going to float down to the battlefield. You know, like what, what, what do you call that? Like we're going to hang glide down there. Um, and then it's going to probably become this super weapon and we're just going to, we're just going to wreck shop. We're going to hit them with an upper flank, which I don't know if that's the right, I don't, can you flank from the top or is that only from like ground level? I don't know, but we're going to say we're going to flank from above. That's what I'm imagining that Moses is imagining. That makes sense to me. Instead, God's like, well, not exactly. You are going to take your staff. You're going to have it. And this staff is going to come in handy. Okay, cool. But instead you're going to stay up on the hilltop and you're going to lift that staff over your head. And then, and Moses is like, all right, and then what baby? Like fire is going to rain down, whatever. And then you're going to lift that staff over your head. And then, and Moses is like, all right, and then what, baby? Like fire is going to rain down, whatever. And then you're going to hold it there. And that's it. You're going to keep it up over your head. And that is how you're going to win. And kicker, spoiler alert, if you drop your arms down, your guys are going to begin to lose. That's insane. And that doesn't make any sense. But it pretty much walks in line with the way that the Lord has provided for his people up to this point. It seems like when the Lord is asking Moses or asking the people of Israel to do something, it normally doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And it normally doesn't allow for many explanations for why they are continuing to survive, except for the fact that God is in control and that his ways are better. I think that when I look at this, what I realize and what I recognize is this. Were they to fight by their own hand, there could have been the possibility where they realized, hey, you know what? We're pretty strong and we're pretty good at this. But God wanted them to know without a shadow of a doubt that there is no way that you can win this battle. There's no way that you are going to be able to survive. There is no way you are going to be able to get through this except for by my hand and by my power. I am in control. My ways are better. Follow me. Trust me. Step out in faith and I'm going to provide for you. And leading up to this point, over all of these past few stories, which if you've been joining us, you know, throughout all of these moments, they have learned time and time again that God is never asking them to do the thing that makes the most sense. And oftentimes, he's putting them in situations where they are having to really step out into faith and to step out into fear. Hey, Moses, I want you away from your people that have to battle. Hey, the people who are battling, you don't have your leader with you. You do not have the staff of God that is going to be leading you into battle. And yet I'm asking you to trust me and to go out into battle and trust that everything's going to be okay. And so they did. They stepped down to the faith. They stepped into possible confusion. And ultimately, they found themselves in battle. And just real quick, I think this is a perfect connection to, if you were here last week, Aaron Gibson, in his preaching, reminded us that just as the Lord asked these people to step out in fear and to step out in faith in a way that seemed a little uncomfortable or maybe even possibly terrifying, that we're called to do the same thing. And so we can trust, just as they trusted, that God is in control and that his ways are better. And so they find themselves in war. They find themselves in battle. And Moses, Aaron, and Hur find themselves on this hilltop where Moses is doing everything he can to maintain his strength and to bear the weight that he was asked to bear so that his people can win this battle. So let's dive back in. We're going to read the next two verses. Exodus 17, 12 and 13 say this. When Moses's hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up one on one side and one on the other so that his hands remained steady till sunset. So Joshua overcame the Amalekite army with the sword. Let me read that again. Aaron and Hur held his hands up one on one side and one on the other so that they, so that his hands remained steady until sunset. And that is how they were able to win the battle. So first off, woo. Yeah, that's exciting. Sweet. We won. They won this unbelievable battle. Once again, they found themselves able to survive simply because God allowed it to be so. God has performed another miracle so that these people who never in their lives should have been able to win this battle end up winning this battle. But what I find so fascinating about this passage, God has already confounded all possible understanding or mindset of what is or is not possible. Why didn't he just give Moses this ultra super strength to where he could have kept his arms up for as long as he needed to do it? He's already performing this massive miracle anyways. Why not give him Kyle-like strength so he can keep those arms up for literally as long as his people need? But he doesn't. Instead, he provides from two faithful friends who are simply just able to bear some of the weight and to bear some of the burden that Moses was experiencing. It already said, there are times where it was too much for Moses, but these two men, these two faithful friends who care about Moses and care about the Lord, stood to him and they just simply bore some of the weight that Moses had been asked to bear. And what I realize is I feel like Moses could have easily found himself before that moment entering into a bit of the hero mentality. Hey guys, look, Aaron, Hur, you're welcome to come with me, but stand back and watch the master. I'm the one who's supposed to hold the staff. I'm going to hold it up. You guys don't worry about it. Honestly, y'all can go fight unless you're just a little scared. If you're scared, come and watch how awesome it is that the Lord threw me because the Lord has given me this task. I'm going to hold my hands up and our people are going to win this battle. But stand back. This is not your responsibility. It's mine. I got this, boys. He also could have taken on the martyr's mentality. Guys, this is going to be unbelievably hard. It's going to be too much of a weight to bear, and yet I don't want you to have to bear it with me. It is going to be so hard, and I don't want you to be mixed up in this. And God has given me this. He's given me the call that I'm supposed to be the one that's holding it. I don't want to have to make you guys hold that weight with me. You don't have to worry about it. I got it and I'll just figure it out on my own. Had he done either one of those, then both he and the Israelites would have failed. But instead, in his humility, what he realized and what he recognized is that Moses needed Aaron and he needed her to be able to bear his burden in order for him to carry out God's plan. He could not, he could not have borne the weight and borne the burden that came with what God had asked him to do without these two people, these two faithful friends on either side of him, helping bear that weight alongside of him. Ultimately, what Moses had been learning up to this point, what he learned here, and what he will continue to learn throughout the rest of his story, is that in his faithfulness with God, in his faithfulness to God, there are always going to be moments where the miracle doesn't come, but simply the people do. That just like God has given him this staff, he has also given him these people around him to live faithfully alongside of him. And to help him move forwards and to help him move on. And I think what he was keenly understood and what we need to be keenly aware of is in his story and every story throughout all of scripture and all of these teachings and all of these writings in the Old Testament and the New Testament. What we talk about all the time and what Nate reminds us all the time is that it is impossible for anyone to live out a life of faith and to adequately live within God's will in isolation. To try to walk in the paths of God by yourself and on your own, you will not succeed. And that's why it is so baked into the DNA of the church in general, but specifically of Grace Raleigh. That is why community is so baked into our DNA. What's our mission statement? Connecting people to Jesus and what? Connecting people to people. Why do we make such an emphasis on our grace groups, on our small groups, of joining volunteer groups, on creating opportunities and atmospheres outside of Sunday mornings where we get to connect and communicate and get to know one another? It's not simply so that you have some people that you can make friends and that that's cool. And hey it's nice to say hello to people on Sunday mornings. And it feels a little less awkward when you're walking in. It is because in a life of faith. Certainly it's always worth it, but we cannot do it or walk in the steps that God has placed before us alone. Because there are times where it's too difficult. There's times where it's too hard to bear if you're the lone person trying to hold up that staff over your hands. You know, I think back to when I came to Grace, and I'll spare you most of the details of it, but if you don't know, I've been here for about seven years, and I got a job offer here at Grace Raleigh, and I also had a job offer from a church back home in Georgia where I'd spent my whole life. And ultimately, if you put the two side by side and you did like a pro-con list of which one is best and whatever, basically it was a landslide victory for not grace. It's like pastor, no. Pastor was a huge reason I came here. I'm just kidding. But I was leaving all of my family. I was literally have been able to live where I was. I would have had all of my family around me, all of my friends. I was in a place that I knew I would have been making more money. I would have been working for a pastor that I grew up in his church. All of these boxes were checked to have gone here. The only thing that wasn't checked was the only thing that mattered is that the Lord had made it abundantly clear, Raleigh and Grace Raleigh is where I have you. Your next step of obedience, Kyle, is to move to Raleigh and to be a part of this church. And seven years later, I can tell you with all certainty that I am able to present to you that it was the right decision. I have been so blessed and been able to see such immense and unbelievable joy by being a part of this church, by being a part of Grace Raleigh's student ministry, Having a wife. I'm about to have a kid in a month. Like joys that I beyond compare. Beyond what I could have ever asked or imagined. Have simply come by being a part of this community. And being a part of this church family. I tell you that. So that you realize and recognize. What I'm telling you. Is without a shadow of a doubt. The Lord had me here. And also to tell you that so that you realize and recognize what I'm telling you is without a shadow of a doubt, the Lord had me here. And also to tell you that I promise you, had I tried to do so in isolation, I would not still be here. I would not have experienced those joys because, guys, even within the will of God, there were moments that I felt super lonely and super isolated. I moved away from my whole family. I'm missing all of these incredible things and all of this stuff that they're getting to do. I moved away from all of my friends. But I was able to lean on the strength of families that were here, who welcomed me into their families with open arms, people like the Rectors and people like the Winstons and the Gentiles and the Hills who brought me in and made me a part of their family. And certainly they weren't my family, but it just held my arms up just enough to where I could move past that loneliness and back into this beautiful, joyous will of God that he had shown before me. In this ministry, I could have come in with the haughtiness of, hey, the Lord's got me here. He made it abundantly clear he's got me here. So if you want to be a part of Grace Students as an adult, as a parent, as a kid, hop on the coattails and let's get rocking because your boy's about to kill it. Had I done that, that ministry would not have been a success and I would no longer be here once again because the ministry would have failed under the weight of how limited my ability is. But instead, in moments where it was confusing and where it was hard and I didn't know what the next step to make was, and in moments where I questioned, am I right to still be here? Does the Lord have me somewhere else? I had parents and I had students and I had volunteers who took up that battle, who continued to serve faithfully and who continued to love me and encourage me and bring me wisdom and allow me to see and understand the forest through the trees. And certainly that was a weight that was mine to bear, but there they were on either side just helping me hold it a little bit longer. And now I get to be on the other side of that and just look back at the immense and unbelievable joys that I would have missed out on had I tried to do it alone. And every one of us in this room wakes up every morning and we put up our staff in some way. I got a prop. I'm sorry. I shouldn't do it this way, but now I've started saying, so we're going to say it this way. We're talking about the Lord's provision and whatnot. This is just out back. Like I told him, like, why is this? This was outside of this door. Why was it there? I don't know. But hey, clearly the Lord wanted me to use it. I told Aaron Gibson, I'm going to pick up a table later, but I'm a little bit worried because I'm not actually strong. And he's like, hey, you know,'s a staff out there. I was like, okay. Anyways, let's dive back in. I'm so sorry. But every one of us, we wake up every morning and we put our staff up in whatever way the Lord has put in front of us. I'm going to switch my notes a little bit. Those of us who are married, we have the opportunity and the joy and the privilege to be able to recognize and understand the sacrificial love of Christ that he has for his church. We get to know that and experience that and we get to share that with our spouse. But man, sometimes the anger and the frustration kind of wins, you know? And sometimes it gets a little bit harder to see and to value that love. Our parents. We have the opportunity to raise up these kids to know Christ and to know the love of Christ and to live in his ways. And we get to understand and value and teach them the unconditional love of God by showing them this unconditional love. But man, these kids are really getting annoying and frustrating and hard to handle. And I know you laugh, but I know you laugh because you know it. We need those people. We need our Aaron and we need our her to where we can still uphold and maintain that staff and live out this call that he's put in front of us. If you work at a job, we get to rest in the fact that we are doing something that the Lord has uniquely designed us to be able to do. Not only that, but he has given us our own unique mission field where we can share and show the love of Christ to a group of people who may or may not have ever experienced it before. Man. Sometimes in the midst of that call to be able to be that light for those people, anxiety and fear and worry and frustration take over. And it's too much to bear on our own. And it's in these moments where we know that we're taking up our staff and we know that we're living faithfully to God, but it's in these moments where God's plan gets hard. We're on our own. I don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to do it. Where we need our Aaron and where we need our her. Someone who's able to help bear with us and bear our burdens, as Paul says it, bear our burdens in love. The people who, as Hebrews says, will encourage us and will spur us on towards love and good deeds, spurring us on towards what the Lord has for us. People who will offer us their shoulder or offer us a hug so we can just let out some tears. People who will find and offer us some grace that we're not able to see for ourselves. People who will offer us a dose of perspective that we're too close to perceive on our own. People who will give us ears to listen. Will give us mouths to speak wisdom into our lives. And people who will bring their faithfulness in being able to pray for us. Because what's on the other side of that burden, what's on the other side of the weight of this staff, are joys beyond compare. And I want us all to be able to experience those joys, but we're not going to do it unless we do it together. And so my final reminder is this, that the door swings both ways. I know in this church we have a lot of people who love being able to be the Aaron and to be the her, who jump at the opportunity to be the person to say, hey, bring me some of your weight and let me carry it for you. Let me serve you and let me love you in this way. I think sometimes those people have a hard time remembering that you need those people as well. And so let us as a church, as Grace Raleigh, as a Grace group, as a part of our volunteer teams, let us be Aaron's and let us be hers for one another. And let us also be Moses and step outside of our comfort zone and in humility and in openness and in vulnerability, allow other people to help us bear our burdens so that we can experience the other side of what the Lord has for us. Pray with me, please. Lord, we love you so much. God, thank you that you are always with us, that your plans are always best. But God, thank you so much that you give us the people besides us and around us to uplift us, to uphold us, and to allow us to pursue you. Lord, I just pray that as we take up our mantle and do as Aaron asked us to do last week and find our staff, find what our next step of obedience is, God, that we remember that as we take that step, we do so not on our own, but side by side, hand in hand with the rest of the believers that you have placed in our lives and the rest of the people that are in this room and that are a part of our church family. Lord, we love you so much. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. So good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. I've got to tell you, I'm really touched by your attendance this morning. Really and truly. Normally I make a joke on holiday weekends about people coming. And this morning I woke up and I got my email. I had a Duke alert that there's going to be some power outages. Shane, you work for Duke. Fix that. Make sure 9-2-2-1 Kirk Hill is not affected. And I was like, man, it's a holiday weekend, and we have a tropical storm bearing down on us. No one is coming. And look, here you are. This is really, really touching and great, and that was really good worship. If you saw Gibby and I talking as I was setting up, I was laughing at him for messing up in the last song and just crying out Jesus in the middle of a line. Thank you, Kristen. You saw it too. And he said, no, no, I didn't mess up. I was just excited about Jesus. And I don't believe him. But I also do know that he is excited about Jesus. I'm also excited to have the princes here with us this morning. They're here with us for a few weeks. Sarah, you're hosting for us when? Next week? Perfect. And she's going to give us an update and tell us everything. So come back then. Well, I'm so happy to have you guys in town. And we are so happy to be the church that you are part of. We talk a lot about building God's kingdom. And you guys are in South Africa building God's kingdom, and it's a part of our heart that's out there, and so we're glad that you guys are with us this morning. So thanks for joining us. If you don't know them, who cares? It's not a big deal, but we're glad to have them, and you should say hey to them after the service and get to know them a little bit, but they're going to be here with us for the next three weeks. Yes. Perfect. So it's a, it's a big morning and I'm happy to have you here as we continue in our series. And if you're watching online or you're catching up later, thanks so much for doing that. That means a lot to us as you enjoy this weekend, doing whatever it is you're doing. We're in our series in Moses and this series, if I'm just being honest, has been a little bit different for me as a pastor and as someone who has to write sermons every week. You guys make me do this. Typically, when I choose a series, I kind of choose a series, and if you're in the meetings with us with staff, we'll have a series idea, and I'll go, that's a great idea, but then I immediately go, what are the sermons? How do we make this compelling? And the way I think about it is, will that preach? Can I make a sermon out of that? But for this series, it's been a little bit different of an experience, because in this series, I'm telling the story, we are telling the story and going through the story of the life of Moses. And we're telling the story really of the Genesis of the nation of Israel. And so it's really less about will that preach? And it's more about what are the essential elements of the story? I heard somebody say one time, this just comes to mind, the radio sports talk guy, that people should go in the Hall of Fame if you can't tell the story of that sport without their name. Then no matter what they did, they should go into the Hall of Fame. Thank you, Zach, for affirming that. And so this kind of works like that. What are the things, if we're going to walk through the life of Moses together and tell the story of the origin of the Hebrew people together and their exodus from Egypt and their intro into the promised land, what are the elements of that story that we just absolutely cannot pass over? That was Freudian there, the Passover. Look at me. What are the elements that we cannot skip that we must include? And one of those elements is the provision by God in the desert of manna. And a little subtext in that story is the provision of quail. You cannot tell the story of Moses. You cannot tell the story of the birth of the nation of Israel without talking about the provision of manna in the desert by God. You have to tell that part of the story. And so this really isn't about does that preacher, does it not? This is about, we have to tell this part of the story. And then what I'm encumbered with rather than does this preach, is this inspiring? What I'm encumbered with is why does this matter to us now? That's wonderful. It's good to learn about our God. And at a baseline, if all we do is look at the stories and learn about our God and his character and who he is, that's enough. And that's a good exercise and it's time well spent on a Sunday morning. But I think we should press further and say, but what do we learn from it that matters to us now? How does that impact me today? So we're going to look at this story of God's provision, but we're going to be asking the question, how does this impact me today? And we're going to do that by looking at two big questions that really, for me, as I read the story, jump off the page and make me go, why is that the case? And I think if we answer those questions and we can find a way that this really impacts us and should matter to us today and our daily lives as we interact with and hopefully pursue God. So I'm going to point to some scripture in a minute. And actually, this morning is the first time this has happened. I bought this Bible. This is called the pastor's Bible. It's got three tassels that hang out of it, which is an obnoxious amount of tassels. And who would ever need three tassels? But now I have exactly three passages from three different books, and I'm using all three tassels, and I'm so excited. So I've used the first one. That one's out of the way. We're in the book of John. That's where we're going to turn first. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. But before I start jumping around to the passages, I just want to make sure that we know what's happening. Moses is moving the Hebrew people through the desert. They've escaped Pharaoh. Pharaoh's army has been destroyed in the Red Sea with the Sea of Reeds. And now they're wandering through the desert being've escaped Pharaoh Pharaoh's armies been destroyed in the Red Sea with the Sea of Reeds and now they're wandering through the desert being led by God a pillar of cloud by day a pillar of fire by night they're following the pillar they're walking towards God if you look at the way that they're supposed to be arranged this tribe next to this tribe in this direction and yada yada yada they were actually marching through the as one enormous cross, which is pretty cool with Jesus in the center of it as the bronze serpent. So, and we'll get to that story. But there comes up the question of numbers and I think it's relevant this morning. There are different scholars say different things. No one's sure. There's a figure in the Bible where it said there were 600,000 men. And so then you extrapolate that out to women and children. And so some scholars say that there was as little as 300,000 people moving through the desert. Other scholars say there was as much as 2.5 million people walking through the desert. So that's a large delta of difference. But regardless of where you would land on that, and I don't expect anyone to go home and really drill down on the number of Hebrew people in the desert, but if you were to, what you would arrive at is there was a lot. There's a lot. And those are mouths to feed. And some of you know that I like history. I like to study empires. I like to read biographies. Last year, I read a biography on Napoleon Bonaparte, who was, by the way, my least favorite general I've ever studied in my entire life. I can't stand that guy. But he's famous for saying, an army marches on its stomach, meaning the secret to war is supplying your army with what they need. And if you've studied history and you've studied war and you've studied people moving across continents, what you know is they are only as good as their supply chain. They can only fight as hard as they have fresh shoes and fresh socks and fresh food coming to them. And if you disrupt that supply chain, you disrupt the army. By the way, this is what made the Mongols so incredible is they didn't need a supply chain. They just ate everything that they saw, and they were the most fascinating force in the history of history, just for the record. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. But an army marches on its stomach, meaning throughout history. One of the biggest challenges of moving a large group of people transcontinentally is sustaining them. And this is the challenge that Moses was facing. He's got between 500 and 2.5 million people that he's responsible for, and they have to be fed. And they grumble. This is hard to do. It's hard to sustain ourselves in the desert. I would assume that each family left Egypt with some amount of sheep or cattle or something to sustain them. But eventually those resources start to dwindle. And so they grumble that they're not being supplied for, they're not being cared for. And this is a sufficient gripe, right? Moms and dads, you're in the desert, wandering, following a pillar. Moses says we just go that way. In your head, you're thinking, we should be there there by now and you're not. What's going on? You're worried about your kids because you can't feed them every day. You're worried about your mother-in-law because you can't feed her every day and frankly she's cranky when she's hungry. So it'd be really nice if we could take care of her. Some of you are sitting next to your mother-in-laws. Don't laugh at that joke. I just saw somebody turn their head. Sorry. This is a reasonable gripe. We're hungry. We can't feed each other. And so God says, okay, I'm going to provide you with something. In the morning, you're going to wake up and there there's going to be this white, flaky substance on the ground. Gather it up, and that will be all that you need. But only gather what you need for that day, which we're going to come back to that idea, because I think that's interesting. Only gather what you need for that day, and every day I will provide for you. And they called that substance, it was like a doughy bread, but it was flaky. And they called that substance manna, which to my knowledge means, literally, what is it? It's like the terrible mascot for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Izzy. I've never been more disappointed in my life. As a kid growing up in Atlanta, I was so excited that the Olympics were coming to my city. It was such a big deal. And by the way, Andre Agassi and Brooke Shield stayed at my friend's house in their basement because they were a host home for the Olympics, which was really cool. I'll tell you about that sometime. But the mascot, when they revealed it, sorry, I know it's stupid. The mascot was named Izzy, which means what is it? And it's like, the mascot's Manna? This is dumb. What a stupid mascot. But that's what they named the bread because they didn't know what it was. So they called it what is it? And that became the name Manna. That was God's provision. And then at one point or another, after God was providing the Manna, they would go out and they would gather it. And we'll see in a little bit that some of them gathered more than they should. And they incurred the anger of Moses and God. And then at some point or another, they said the reasonable thing, the thing that we would say, God, it's so nice that you're providing this for us. I'd like some steak. Like, I'd like some meat, some protein. I'd settle for fish. I'll go to Long John Silver's if you'll just make it available, like anything, God, besides just this bread, just this daily bread, right? And so they said they wanted some protein. And so God responded and he sent them some quail. But it turned out that that was kind of a bad ask. And we're going to see that part in the narrative. I'm going to pull that out. But for a portion, God provided some quail. And then they decided they didn't want quail anymore. God got his way, and then they were back on manna, and that's what sustained them through the desert. And the import of this gesture and this provision echoes throughout Scripture, which is why we cannot tell the story of Moses without talking about the manna that was provided. The biggest reason is this. The manna was a picture of Jesus. The manna was a picture of Jesus. Many of you know this. And so I'd like to remind you of this and pull your mind back to it. Some of you may not. But the manna was a very intentional picture of Jesus. And this is one of the things that marvels me about our God and his sovereignty. We know that God sees into the future. We know that God knows all things. We know that God is sovereign, that God plans. And I say often, sometimes things happen in our life, we can't see what's down the road, but God can and he knows and he's guiding us down this path. And I think even as we acknowledge that truth, that sometimes in our limited brains and in our limited ways of thinking, we think to ourselves, yeah, God sees six weeks down the road or six months down the road, or maybe six years down the road. But in this one, he's seeing 6,000 years down the road. And we don't think about God thinking like that, but he was because he knew that this manna was an intentional picture that he was painting of his son. It's an illustration of what Jesus is. And just so you know, that idea isn't something that scholars came up with. There wasn't theologians reading the Old Testament and then reading the New Testament and going, goodness, this seems really similar. I think those two things are connected. No, these are the words of Jesus himself. And we find them in John chapter six. Sir, they said, always give us this bread. Then Jesus declared, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Direct correlation. Jesus is talking to a Hebrew people who are entrenched in their culture and know it well. And so when he says, my father sent you bread from heaven to sustain life because of their natural culture, national culture and institutions, they immediately go back to the time of Moses. We as Americans just got done celebrating the 4th of July. In my house, in my kitchen, we had some friends over and I insisted. I put Lee Greenwood, I'm proud to be an American, on the Alexa as loud as it would go and I made everyone hold their hand over their heart and sing every word that they knew to the song. And it was super fun. And when we think about America, we have some things on the 4th of July that we all celebrate, whatever it means to us. The reality of it is this is the great experiment. This is the great democratic experiment. It's the greatest country to ever exist on the planet. It's the most powerful military to ever exist on the planet. And it's the most wonderful and the most free place to ever exist on the planet. And we ought to be grateful for it no matter what we think about our current state, yes or no. This is a great place to be. And so when we celebrate the 4th of July, we draw upon the history of where we are. In the same way, when Jesus says, you remember God providing in the desert, they draw upon where they had been and where they were. And they immediately understand and go back to God's provision in the desert of manna. It's a direct correlation. And Jesus says, my father gave you bread daily to sustain your life, to give you life. And now he gives you me. I am the bread of life. And the picture is very clear. We are told that when we do not know God, when we are separated from him, that we will surely die. This is the penalty in the Garden of Eden. And so Jesus comes that we might have life and have it to the full. He comes that life might be restored. And so he says, my father sent me to restore our life. Right? He sent me to restore your life and to give you life. He is acquainting himself with the manna and he is saying, I am the bread of life. This is all throughout scripture. So we know that the manna is a picture of Christ. And it's well and good and appropriate that at the end of this sermon today, towards the end of the service, we're going to take communion together. And when we take communion together, we're going to break the bread. And Jesus at the Passover, before he's arrested, takes the bread and he breaks it and he says, this is my body that's broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. That is not just a quaint illustration of what's about to happen to him. It is an intentional connection to what the Hebrew person understands as the sustenance of God in the desert providing life for them. It is a picture of God's provision. So the first thing we see and know about the manna that matters to us very much is that it's a picture of Jesus and God's provision and how he cares for us. We must lock that in. With that being true, there are two questions for me that jump out of the narrative that I think if we can examine them and maybe wrestle them to the ground, at least that's what I tried to do this week as I prepared, that it can illustrate and illuminate for us how this story matters to us today. The first to me is the question of stockpiling. God put a very specific provision in there. You are not allowed to stockpile the goods. You cannot keep more than one day's provision. As a matter of fact, this is what it says in Exodus 16, 19. So I, so I can orient us towards this thought. In Exodus chapter 16, verse 19, after God has said only take enough for the day, then Moses said to them, no one is to keep any of it until morning. However, some of them paid no attention to Moses. They kept part of me or not, but my largest pet peeve in life is any form of inefficiency. My second largest pet peeve in life, just for the record, is when you impose your noise on me. I don't want to hear your phone in a public place. But I loathe any form of inefficiency. And so this directive to only gather what you need for today goes against what I believe wholeheartedly about efficiency. Doesn't it make more sense? Carter, I know you agree with me on thinking. I know you agree with us. Doesn't it make more sense on Monday for you and the able-bodied people in your family to go gather as much as you can for the rest of the week so you don't have to do it every day and you know that it's there and you have the sense of security that it's there. And it's not like there wasn't enough. We're not talking about being selfish because we're told there in scripture that whatever was left over fades away, that when the sun comes out, it melts it away. So there's more than enough every day, which means if your family wants to go out and get enough on Monday to last until Wednesday, or maybe even Friday, you can do that. And isn't this how we handle our daily sustenance anyways? When you go grocery shopping, do you shop for one day like a lunatic? Or do you shop for the whole week? You shop for the whole week. Of course you do. And if you're really crazy, you shop for the month at Costco, which we went to Costco the other night and it was closed because the power was out. And I've never been so disappointed in my life because we were at Costco without kids and I was so excited to go. We ended up wandering around the mall aimlessly. But this makes sense to us. This is how we think. We don't think about daily, I'm just going to go to Sprouts and get what I need for one day. That's what crazy people do. You shop for the week so you don't have to do it anymore. So it makes the most sense to stockpile it for the week, right? But God said don't do that. And I don't understand why. Because besides the practicality of it, it would also give you the sense of, okay, food has been sparse. It's been difficult to feed my children as a father, as a wife, as a patriarch of the family. I'd like to know my family's provided for it. It makes me feel good to know that we have five days rations. And there's even a provision, if you read the text, of an amount that you can gather for each eating person in your home. So there's a provision for that that God lays out. And when I read this story, I kind of wonder, like, what's the big deal? Why can't you stockpile manna? And the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it's because of this. Because you cannot stockpile Jesus. You cannot store up enough Jesus. If manna is a picture of who Jesus is, and it was always to be intended not just to feed this small group of people relatively for 40 years, but to echo throughout the centuries as to God's provision and what it is, then it's important to know and understand that you cannot stockpile Christ. You cannot gather enough of him on a Monday to sustain you on a Wednesday. You can't go to Christmas and Easter services only and expect that amount of Jesus to sustain you throughout the year. Which right now I'm talking to a group of people who have come to church on a holiday weekend with a tropical storm looming. So you get this. So if you're listening online, this is for you, pal. But in Christianity, I think we do this a little bit. We come to church on Sunday. I get my fill of Jesus. My kids get their fill of Jesus, and we're good. And then I'm going to go throughout the rest of my week and do whatever it is I need to do. And the next Sunday I'll get my fill of Jesus. But that's not how Jesus works. That's not how manna worked. And if you think about it practically, that's not how diets work. If you say you're going on a diet and on Monday you manage against all odds to eat salads with some sort of vinaigrette dressing that's not even good. And then the rest of the week you eat Reuben's and fried foods, which I'm not speaking from experience there, I'm just saying hypothetically. That's not a diet. You can't eat healthy enough on Monday to be healthy on Friday if you don't do it again. And I think the picture that God is painting here with the daily provision and sustenance of Christ is we cannot get enough Jesus on Monday to make us healthy on Wednesday. We should still wake up craving him. This is why at Grace we say one of our five traits is we are people of devotion. And I say often, and I have not said it often enough lately, but this is why I say it, that the single greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life, and I'm completely convinced of this, is to wake up every day and spend time in God's presence through his word and through prayer. There is not a single greater habit that anyone can develop than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. It's the most important thing. Every day when I get into my office, most days I fail sometimes, but most days the very first thing I do when I get into my office is I get in my office and I shut the door and I read my Bible and I spend time praying over that day. I try to do that every day. We have to do that. We need to get, we need to think of it. Think of a daily devotion in this context of this story as gathering our Jesus every day. Every day we spend time in prayer. Every day we spend time in God's word. Every day we spend time worshiping. And that looks different at different seasons. Sometimes that means you go on a hike, you just walk, or you go on a run and you take your earbuds out and you don't listen to any noise and you just talk to God and you allow God to talk to you and you experience him that day. I'm not saying it has to be formulated every day, but every day we need to be in the habit like the Israelites. This is what the picture is for. It's not to sustain them. It's to remind us for generations of what we should do. We should wake up and gather Jesus. And it's not lost on me that this happened in the morning. Because when the sun gets hot, it melted away. I've always told you, you have your quiet time and your devotional time whenever it works for you. Morning, afternoon, evening, just do it. But that's a little bit insincere because I can't back this up with paperwork, but I kind of think you should do it in the morning anyways. I don't care if you're a night person. Just saying. We should wake up every day and gather Jesus. And we should understand we can't gather enough Jesus on Monday to make that enough on Wednesday. It has to be a daily practice. And so what God's provision reminds us of and what his prohibition reminds us of is we cannot gather enough Jesus to stockpile him for the week. As believers, we must pursue him every day. We must wake up daily and gather Jesus. It's vitally important. The other question that comes up to me in this story, this one's a little bit trickier. It's the provision of the quail. At one point, though God is providing daily, the Hebrew people say, hey, we'd like some variety. Can we get a little bit of a buffet situation going on? Maybe I'd like some Chinese. Like they just want something else besides this manna, this nutrition brick that they get every day. And so God gives into them and he says, okay. And in Exodus, we're told that God provided quail for a little while, but in numbers, we actually get an insight into this portion of the story that provides a lot more color and it becomes very interesting. And it makes me ask some questions. Numbers chapter 11 verses 18 through 20. This is after they've requested the quail. Tell the people, consecrate yourselves in preparation for tomorrow when you will eat meat. The Lord heard when you wailed. If only we had meat to eat, we were better off in Egypt. Now the Lord will give you meat and you will eat it. You will not eat it. This is the funny part. This is crazy. You will not eat it for just one day or two days or five, 10 or 20 days, but for a whole month until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it. Gracious God, because you have rejected the Lord who is among you and have willed before him, saying, Why did we ever leave Egypt? I got to be honest. When you read that, it really reads like a vindictive elementary school kid, right? Who's just mad. You want quail? I'll give you quail until it comes out of your stinking nose, you son of a gun. You whiny little cuss. It's just funny, man. And so when I read it, I'm like, what gives, God? Why are you doing that? It seems like a pretty reasonable request. Maybe nutrition bricks get old. And they'd like to eat some meat. That seems fine to me. But it angered God. And he said, I'll give it to you until you're so sick of it that it comes out of your nose and you loathe it. Why did he do this? Well, the answer is right there in the text. If you have implicit rejection of his provision already. It was an implicit rejection of his miraculous provision. They had become used to it. They had grown to expect it. When Jesus first arrived in their life, when they first experienced God's provision, it was a miracle and they were blown away by it. Look at this. Look at all that we have every day. Oh my gosh, look, I don't have to struggle for my family anymore. I don't have to worry about my kids anymore. It just shows up every day. And I don't even have to worry about gathering enough for tomorrow because I know that it's going to be there tomorrow because God's blessings renew daily. I know that this is going to be great. Look at this, look at this, look at this. And then eventually they get tired of it and they're like, yeah, we need some more of God. And they fall into the terrible habit that we do. We have a terrible habit of asking for Jesus and. Don't we? We have a terrible habit of making Jesus not enough. God has miraculously provided for our salvation and for our peace. And his mercies are new every morning. He gives us our daily bread that we can eat of and hunger no more. He makes us a path to righteousness for his name's sake. He makes it so that this life can be viewed as a wisp or a vapor. And that the tragedies that we endure are called by Paul momentary difficulties. God renders those things true by giving us his son, the bread of life. He gives us a hope for a future where all the wrong things will be made right and all the sad things will be untrue. He's provided us everything that we need. He gives us his peace in all situations so that his servant Paul wrote, I have learned what it is to live in little and I have learned what it is to live in much. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. He has given us peace in every situation. He has defeated sin and shame and death so that we do not need to fear those things anymore. He has given us all that we need, and yet we get Jesus. And we say, but can I also have some quail? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also be comfortable? Can I have you, Jesus, and also go on nice vacations? Can I have you, Jesus, and also drive a car that I'm proud of that signals success to the people who see me? Can I have you, Jesus, and also can you make sure that no one in my family ever gets sick? Can I have you, Jesus, and also can you make sure that I never get sick? Can I have you, Jesus, and can you make sure that my marriage is perfect and that it never struggles and that I never have any problems? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also have a spouse? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also have a child? Can I have you, Jesus, and also these other things that I want? Don't we have a terrible habit of craving Jesus and? There have been times in my life when I've been worried about how things were going to go. Where I've been worried that I wasn't going to be the servant that this church needed. And I've thought, maybe I'll lose my job. Maybe I'll need to quit. Maybe they need someone else. Maybe I'm not serving it well. There's been times over the years, for good reasons or bad, that I feared that I would lose everything. And do you know what brings me back to peace in those thoughts? To think, well, I could lose my job. I could lose my house. I'll still have my family. I'll still see my kids every day. Nothing can take their love away from me. Nothing can take my family away from me. My wife and my children. I'll have that. And at the bedrock, no matter what happens, I'll have them. And I'll have their love. And I have some friendships in my life that I know that no matter what happens, that can't be taken from me. And I'm sure that some of you have been there too. If you haven't been there yet, it's just because you're young. You will. But the provision of the quail and the anger of God, I think, reminds us that this is how we ought to think about the provision of Christ. No matter what happens in my life, I have Jesus. No matter what sickness befalls me, what tragedy befalls me, no matter what situations happen in life, no matter what I have or I don't have, whether I live in affluence or I live in poverty, no matter what happens at the end of the day, I have Jesus, and he is enough. And I don't think in our Christian lives we readily enough default to that foundation of love and provision. This is why God gets angry at the request for quail, because it's an implicit rejection and entitlement to what he's already provided us. And so here's what I want to press on us this morning. That when we see this in the Bible, when we encounter manna through Bible lessons or podcasts or sermons or whatever it is we listen to, when we encounter this idea, what I would love to press upon you is this, that the manna in the desert and the provision of the quail should remind us of this. Let's daily gather Jesus and let him be enough. Like the Hebrew people, let's daily go out and gather Jesus in the morning. I need him today. I'm going to spend time with him today. I'm going to appreciate God's provision today. I'm going to reflect on what that means for me today, both today and in eternity. And then let's let that be enough. Come what may, no matter what else happens, I've learned to be at peace with plenty, and I've learned to be at peace with little, but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Let's let God's provision each day of Jesus be enough. Let me pray for you, and then we're going to take communion and celebrate that provision. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how you've provided for us. Thank you for your son Jesus. For who he is and for what he means and how he's our daily bread. Thank you that we can eat of him and not be hungry again. God, I pray that we would be people who are people of devotion who daily pursue you and who daily pursue him. Let us diligently, as your children in the desert did, go out and gather him every morning and be nourished by his love and by his peace and by his forgiveness and by his mercy and by his grace and by his humility. Let us be people who pursue him. And God, I pray that he would be enough. There's so many other things that we want, God, and sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not, but they're nothing compared to him. We consider all things rubbish compared to the surpassing goodness of knowing Jesus. I pray that that would be true of us as we gather him and as we pursue you. I pray that you would also help us to remember that he is enough, that your miraculous provision is enough. Please let us never grow entitled to what that is, but to always marvel at your goodness and at the miracle of your provision. In Jesus' name, in the name of the daily bread, we pray. Amen.

All right, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here and making Grace a part of your Sunday morning. If you're new this morning, I have great news for you. You've picked an excellent Sunday to begin attending Grace. I realized in this last week, we're constantly looking for ways to make ourselves better. And I realized in this last week that we have been using one-ply toilet paper in the bathrooms. I did not know this, but that is completely unacceptable. So I found out who was in charge of these purchases, and I said, we've got to do better, and they said, what should we do? And I said, go to the store and find the most expensive kind and get it. That's what we deserve at Grace. So if you're here for the first time, I got good news for you. This is a luxurious experience in the children's hallway. We did make that improvement. I'm not just making that up. This is the last part of our series in Isaiah called the Treasury of Isaiah, where we're kind of acknowledging it's 66 books. It's a ton of stuff that really would bog us down if we tried to go through the whole thing exhaustively. And so I've done my best. Jacob, don't go to the bathroom right now. It's too tempting, he says. I can't wait for him to come back in. I've already got a joke loaded. All right. That was quick. All right. Let's get it. Let's pray. Let's get it together. Okay. So we can't go through the whole book exhaustively, but we can pull out some of the more impactful scriptures and reflect on them as a body. And this was actually supposed to be a six-week series, but I wanted to extend it by a week so that I could talk about this verse in Isaiah with you. It's a short and simple verse that we'll get to in a minute, but I think it's such a hugely impactful concept, and I know of several folks in our body, in the church, who very much need the truth of this scripture today. But as we approach it, I want us to think of a memory that most of us probably have. Some of you may not have this memory for different reasons. This was something that Jen brought to my attention as I was kind of talking through this concept with her. Jen is my wife, for those that don't know. And so she was talking about when she was a little girl and they were taking a road trip and she's in the back of the car. And they did, you know, they were, she grew up in Birmingham, or Birmingham, that's how you're supposed to say it. And they would go down to Dothan for Thanksgiving. They would travel over to Memphis for Christmas. They did road trips a fair amount as children. They drove down to the Florida Panhandle every year. And so road trips were a thing. And sometimes on those road trips, you'll remember from when you were little and still now, it starts to rain, storms roll in. And sometimes it's what Bubba from Forrest Gump would call big old fat rain. It's coming down in sheets. You can't see anything. And when you're a child and you're in the back and you're peering over and you're looking, you can't see anything. You can barely see the car in front of you. And you don't know how your mom or your dad is still driving. In this case, it was her dad. And you start to get scared because it's coming down heavy and it's hard to see. People even have their hazards on, which just isn't a sign. I want to be as nice about this as I can. If you're driving in heavy rain and you put your hazards on, we're in the same rain you are. We know, okay? We know it's a treacherous condition. Just throwing that out there for you to consider, hazard people. All right. You're in the back. It's scary. And you're worried. It feels tense. It's the rain that's so loud that you can't hear and you can't talk anymore. You're just trying to weather the storm. And Jen remembers looking at her dad and seeing the placid, nonplussed expression on his face, and she was fine. He is at peace, so I am at peace. I'm looking at my dad. He's not worried about the storm. I'm not worried about the storm. And as a dad, those of you who have driven through those storms, you've done it plenty of times, you know. I've driven through storms before. I'm going to drive through storms in the future. This one's going to be fine. Even if it's the worst one, this one's going to be fine. And so his peace gave her peace, right? And what it got me to thinking about is what if we could go through life and the storms of life with the type of peace that your dad had when you were a little kid and the storms came and we're driving down the road. Well, God offers us this peace a few different places in scripture, but he talks about it first specifically in Isaiah. In this short, I think very powerful verse where Isaiah writes this about God. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. I really like that descriptor there, perfect. Not just any peace, but a perfect peace, a kind of unthreatened peace, a kind of restful peace. And when I think about that kind of peace, the way to understand it, I think about, because you guys know, I've told you before, I enjoy history. Last summer, I had the opportunity to listen to a biography on Julius Caesar. I try to always be reading a physical book and then listening to a book. I read the fun ones and I listen to the boring ones. It's the way that I get through them. So I'm listening to a biography on Julius Caesar. And they talk about within that biography this idea of Pax Romana, Roman peace. It was a thing that the Roman Empire offered to the conquered peoples. And it kind of worked like this. One of the places that Julius Caesar, he became famous in the Gallic Wars. So he went up into what we understand as modern day France and Belgium and Switzerland and that area. And there was different Gallic tribes. And the way that we think about nations and states is pretty new in the span of human history. Most everybody, particularly in Europe at that time, existed within tribes and clans. And those tribes and clans would bind together, sometimes under a successful warlord, sometimes just out of mutual desire for protection, and they would create these pacts. If you get attacked by another neighboring tribe or clan, then we will come in and we will protect you, and you offer us your protection as well. It was these agreed upon truces. We're not going to attack you, but if anyone attacks us, we'll attack them on our behalf. But these allegiances and alliances would change on a whim. Every five years, every decade, every year, there's different alliances and allegiances to keep up with. This one's attacking us, that one's attacking us. So even while you're in a peace, it's a fragile peace. It's a threatened peace. If you existed in those tribes in that day, even if it wasn't a spring when you were watching your husband or your brother or your son go off to war to defend the tribes, you were still on the lookout. You still knew that any day someone could bring word that the peace that you had has now been broken. It was a fragile peace. And so what the Roman Empire offered is to come in, and now they've conquered all the tribes. And you are now under their protection. So if someone attacks you, the weight and the force and the might of the Roman army is going to defend you. It's not just these inter-familial clashes anymore. Now they're messing with the Roman Empire. So the Roman Empire, once they conquered you, which sounds bad, one of the nice offshoots of that is you now have a protected peace. You now have a peace that there is no force strong enough to compromise. As long as you like pay your taxes and stuff. But Pax Romana was this kind of empire-wide protected, unthreatened peace. And I think that that's a profound idea for us. Because we understand what it is to exist in a fragile peace. If you have young children, you understand what fragile peace is because you send them to the playroom to give you two moments respite. And they're up there and they're fine. And then they start yelling. Someone's upset. And you go and you broker a peace. You stop playing with that. You give that back to them. You start using your head. You quit being a jerk. Everyone's fine. Okay? And then you leave. And you have five more minutes of a fragile peace until it's broken again by someone's scream. If you exist in a marriage, you know what a fragile peace is. I don't mind telling you because I can't say honestly they're infrequent, but I don't mind telling you that a couple Saturdays ago, Jen and I were enjoying a very fragile peace. Just for whatever reason, on that particular day, with other things going on in our lives, there was just something simmering under the surface all day long. Neither of us could do anything right. We were just kind of, we're at each other's throats, then we apologize and start forgetting, man, I don't even know why I'm mad. It doesn't even make any sense. And then five seconds later, someone pauses in a conversation too long after a question, and now let's get them. So it was a fragile peace. We know what fragile pieces are. And what God offers us is this protected peace, this perfect peace, this peace that is unthreatened and unmoved by forces both within and without our control. It's really this profound peace that allows us, as we go through the storms of life, to think, been through storms before we will go through storms again and this one will be fine even if it's the worst one and what's really profound about that piece is that God is the one driving we are in the back seat looking at the face of our Father who is unmoved by this storm too. This is the kind of peace that God offers his children. However, he doesn't offer it to everyone. We're going to look at who has access to this peace. But before we do, I have just a couple of reflections on what it means to have perfect peace. What is perfect peace and what are the implications for us? And if we think about it together, how can we better understand this idea of peacefulness? Well, the first thing that I would bring to your attention, the first thing that sprang to mind for me is that God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. God's peace surpasses knowledge or understanding. It's not going to make any sense. Paul writes about this peace in Philippians, famous passage, Philippians 4, you have the peace. When you watch someone walk with this amount of peace and clarity and tranquility, it defies understanding and logic. I think of this great story in the Old Testament in the early chapters of 1 Samuel with the high priest Eli. He's the high priest of Israel, and he's just taken in Samuel to live in the temple who's going to dedicate his life to service to the Lord. And Eli has two sons. I believe their names are Hophni and Phinehas. And they're jerks. They're absolute jerks. They're using their political power for all of the wrong reasons. They're taking advantage of taxpayers, taking advantage of the poor. They're taking advantage of women. They're doing all the despicable things that we hate when people in those positions do them. And one night, God gives Samuel a dream. And the next morning, Eli insists that Samuel tell him what that dream is. And so Samuel finally tells Eli the worst possible news any father can receive. And he says, in my dream last night, God told me that your two sons are going to die soon and they will not be in the priesthood anymore. One of them is not the next high priest. And so in one comment, in one answer, Eli learns the worst thing that any father can possibly learn. You are going to lose your children and you are going to lose your legacy. There's nothing worse than that. And Eli's response, very next verse, doesn't miss a beat, doesn't go pray about it and come back with a prepared statement. Very next verse, Eli says, it is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him. That's a pretty remarkable piece. To receive the worst news any father can possibly receive and the response out of the gate, it is the Lord. do what seems good to him that is a peace that passes understanding that is a peace that can't be explained that is a peace that we would marvel at and it is a peace that we should be jealous of the other thing i would say about god's perfect peace, and I think that this is really important. God's peace provides rest for the soul. God's peace provides rest for our souls. There are those of you in here who came in tired this morning. You woke up exhausted. You slept eight hours and it wasn't enough. There are those of you who go to bed being kept up by the things you're worrying about. And when you wake up, your mind is racing just as fast. And when that issue gets settled, the worry monster that exists in your head finds another thing to attack and push into the forefronts of your thoughts so that you never get any rest from the anxiety that you feel and from the things about which you are worried. Some of us have carried burdens of relationships. Our marriage is cruddy. Our children are estranged or drifting. We've received a tough diagnosis. We're watching a loved one walk through a hard time and there's nothing that we can do about it. And we are exhausted. We are exhausted with worry. We're exhausted with worry about things that are outside our control. Which is why it's so important to understand that God's perfect peace gives our soul a place to rest, to stop and to shut it down and to be okay and to not worry about the next thing and to be realistic about what is within and without our control. God's perfect peace offers us rest. And for some of you, that's what I want for you this morning, is to move towards a place where you can finally slow down and rest and tell that worry monster to shut up. But God does not offer this peace indiscriminately. It is offered to everyone, but we have a part to play in the reception of this peace. If you look back at the verse, it says, you will keep in perfect peace who? Those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you. God's peace is only for the steadfast and can only come through trust. God's peace is only for the steadfast, for those who persevere. Persevere in what? Persevere in their trust of the work of Jesus Christ. And we're going to talk more about that trust and exactly what we're placing it in and how that's helpful to us. But we have to understand that though this peace that God offers is offered to everyone equally, it is not offered without discrimination. There's a part that we have to play. And the part that we have to play is to trust God, is to place our faith in him. And when we do, when we truly trust, when we truly see ourselves as the little kids sitting in the back seat watching our heavenly father drive us through life, when that is our posture and we trust him and we can sit in the back and we don't have to worry about it, when that's our posture, he will give us perfect peace. And when that is your posture, the peace that you can have goes beyond understanding and is unfathomable, I believe, to the non-Christian mind. And I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. I was trying to think of the best example of this kind of peace. Someone that we've seen in our lives or in history go through a remarkably difficult time and yet maintain this consistent, faithful peace despite all the circumstances. And I was reminded of the story of a man named Horatio Safford. Horatio Safford lived in the late 1800s in Chicago, and he ended up writing It Is Well, the famous hymn that a lot of us know. And a lot of you may know the story or bits and pieces of the story surrounding the penning of It Is well. It's the most famous story about how a hymn was written. But I bet that you don't know all the parts. And for some of you, you still have no clue what I'm talking about. Horatio Safford was a Christian man who lived in Chicago in the late 1800s. He was a successful lawyer. He had five children, a boy and four girls, and a wife named Ann. And in the Chicago fire of 1871, Horatio lost a vast majority of his net worth. He lost his practice, the building where his practice was. He lost his home, and he had several properties and holdings throughout the city of Chicago. He lost those too. The fire ruined him. In the wake of the fire, his four-year-old son fell to scarlet fever. So now he's lost a child. Believing that his wife and he and his daughters needed a bit of a respite, they said, let's go to England and take a deep breath over there. As they were planning their trip to England, his plans changed. Something in the States was requiring him. And so he sent his wife Anne ahead with his four daughters and said, you guys go. I'll be there in about three weeks. On the way to England, the ship carrying his family sunk. All four daughters were lost. He received a cable upon Anne's arrival in England. I alone survived. Horatio gets that news. He boards a ship, and he goes to be with Anne. On the journey over, the captain of the ship was aware of the tragedy that had befallen Horatio, and he called, he sent for him, and he said, hey, we're at about the same spot that your family was when they sank. Just wanted you to know. And Horatio sat down in the midst of that tragedy, of being a modern-day Job, where in seemingly one fell swoop, he lost his possessions and he lost his family. And he sits down and he writes the hymn. At the time it was a poem. Years later someone put it to music and it became a hymn. He writes the poem. It is well. It's the famous hymn that we know. And with that context, when you know that he's writing this on a boat over where his drowned daughters rest, having lost a son and everything he owns, going to see a wife that is as crestfallen as him, he sits down and he, listen, he writes these words. This is the first verse of it as well. He writes this, when peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot thou has taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. Cindy, leave that up there, please. Look at that. Look at that and put yourself in his shoes and think about your ability to sit down and write, when peace like a river attendeth my way and when sorrows like sea billows roll. Oh, you mean the same sea billows that just claimed your daughters? The same sea that just cost you your family? That your God created? When you feel like you have every right to be so angry, and yet you choose to sit down and say, when peace like a river attends my way, and when sorrows like sea billows like the ones that claim my family's role, whatever my lot, you have taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. How does someone write that? How is that the response to trials and to tragedy and to the storms that threaten your peace? I can only tell you how by pointing you to the second verse because he explains it to us. Though Satan should buffet. Those trials should come. Let this blessed assurance control. I love this. That Christ has regarded my helpless estate. And has shed his own blood for my soul. How does he maintain perfect peace? Because his mind is steadfast in his trust in God. How does he maintain his perfect peace? Because he knows that Jesus died for him. And what he writes about that death of Christ is so important. And I think so profound. He says, when Satan should buffet, again, a reference to the sea, buffet like the waves on the ship when it sank. When Satan should buffet, when trials should come, the ones that he's been walking through for two years, let this blessed assurance control that Christ has regarded my helpless estate and shed his own blood for my soul. And I love that word that he chooses there. I love that word helpless. Because when we think about our helplessness before God, particularly as it relates to Jesus Christ, I think we tend to put it in the context of this myopic view of the gospel in which Jesus only died to take my soul up to heaven. And so when we think about our helplessness, we think about the helplessness, what it means to be helpless to get our soul to heaven. We think about what it means to be helpless to go from dead in sin to alive in Christ, from in this temporal body to in my eternal soul. We think about our helplessness to make that jump to a perfect eternity with God, and so we need God's help. We need Jesus' help to get us there. But what I want us to think about is that is far from the only way in which we are helpless. We are, every single one of us, every single person in this room can get a call today that changes your life forever. We are one vibration in our pocket away from a profoundly different existence. And let me tell you something. You are helpless against that phone call. There is nothing you can do to prevent it. We may act like a big, tough, civilized society with an important pharmaceutical complex and the most advanced medical equipment in the world. And we can act like we can fight cancer. But we are helpless with who gets it and when they do. Even the most fastidious of us are sometimes helpless against the onslaught of that awful disease and its acquiring. As parents, we are helpless when our kid is driving down the road. Do you understand? Our fortunes could be taken. Our families could be taken. There's so many different ways that life can buffet us. There's so many different trials that could come. And we exist in part because we're Americans and we're the most independent, individualized civilization that's ever existed. We exist as if we're driving down the road, facing the storms of life on our own with the wherewithal to get through them. But listen, you're helpless if a tornado comes along and sweeps you off the road. There is so much in life to which we are rendered helpless. And I don't think we go through life understanding that. We are not grown adults capable of handling the buffets of life. We are newborn babies that are vulnerable to this world and this universe in ways that we don't understand. And so when Christ regards our helpless estate, it's not just our soul's inability to get itself into heaven. It's our inability to protect ourselves from the seasons of life. And it's for that that he shed his blood. It's for that that he died. And that's something that Horatio knew. That it wasn't just the helplessness of his soul, but it was our complete lack of agency to prevent ourself from suffering in the first place. And it's this simple truth, I believe, that won the day for him and wins the day for us. When Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. It's the knowledge in the midst of our trials that when Jesus conquered sin and shame by dying on the cross and raising from the dead, when Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered this too. Whatever this is for you, he conquered this too. There's this great passage that I refer to a lot, Revelation chapter 21, verses 1 through 4. I won't belabor the passage here, but there's a phrase there, there's a promise that the former things will have passed away. There will be no more weeping, no more crying, no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And I love to ruminate on what those former things are. Cancer, divorce, abuse, despair, orphans, loss, tragedy, awful phone calls, relational strife, being born to broken parents who hurt you because they're hurt. All that stuff is the former things that's passed away. And what we know is those former things, those things that will pass away, the things that exist in your life that are wearing you out and making you tired and making life so difficult right now, the things you go to sleep worrying about, the things you wake up worrying about. Whatever's waiting for you on the other end of that call one day. We can have perfect peace in those trials. Because we know that because Jesus conquered sin and shame, he conquered that too. We know that because he offers salvation to those who believe in his shedding of blood for them, that even when we lose them, and even when the trial claims them, that we will see them again in eternity. We know that this life is but a mist and a vapor compared to what awaits us on the other side of passing. We understand that. And so in a few minutes, in a few minutes, we're going to sing it as well together. We're going to stand and we're going to proclaim these words back to God. And so my prayer for you in preparation for this and even this morning as I've been praying about the service is that you'll be able to sing that with authenticity. That you'll be able to sing it as well. And if there is something in your life that is so hard that it's hard for you to muster the singing, that it's hard for you to muster the words, then listen to the people singing around you and let them sing on your behalf. And know, know that we can say that though peace like a river attends, when peace like a river attends our way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever our lot, God has enabled us to say, it is well, it is well with our soul. I want to finish by reading you this fourth verse. This fourth verse is not one that is often sung. But as I was reviewing the lyrics in reference to our my soul. I pray that God will whisper his peace to you this morning. Let's pray. Father, we need your perfect peace. We need your protected peace. Everyone in this room is walking through a storm of one sort or another. Everyone in this room will walk through more. And so God, when we do, I pray that we remember that you are driving and that we are resting. Help us find our rest in your perfect peace. Help us remember that whatever it is we're facing, that Jesus has conquered that too. And God, give us the courage to sing and to proclaim and to believe that even if it isn't well with us now, that it can be, and you will make it so. God, whisper your peace to us this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. I can't remember the last time I got up here and thought, gosh, I'm not sure how to follow those excellent announcements. But well done, Haley. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to put her on staff. We will pay you $25 a week. As Haley mentioned, this is the second part of our series called The Treasury of Isaiah, where we're diving into the very rich Old Testament book of prophecy called Isaiah written by the prophet Isaiah. Last week, we started in Isaiah chapter one, and it really wasn't like an introductory sermon in the sense of acquainting you with the book of Isaiah. So that's what we're going to try to do this week. This week probably should have been week 1 of the series, but if I started Isaiah and didn't preach to you out of that passage last week, my little head was going to explode. So I had to do it. Last week I was preaching. This week I'm going to be teaching. It's going to be a little different because we want to do an overview of Isaiah. And I want to take some time on the front end this morning to make sure that you guys understand what a prophet is, the role of a prophet, how the books of the prophets fit into the Old Testament and the Bible narrative. So up front, we're going to spend probably eight or nine minutes just understanding what this is, and then we're going to get into the overall message of the book of Isaiah as it presents Christ to the people of Israel. So we'll kind of march down that path today. The first thing I wanted to talk about with kind of an overview of the idea of prophecy is the idea of a prophet. Because I think that many of us who are maybe haven't been exposed to a deeper study of them, just hear the word prophet or prophecy and just think about some guru making guesses about the future. Somebody's been given a vision and they're going to tell us what's going to happen in the future. This is what a prophet does. A prophet tells the future. It's kind of how we think about them. And a prophecy is something that tells the future. Prophesize what the future is going to be. And this is in part true, but a vast majority of the prophecy that we have in the Bible is not that. It's not projecting forward years and years and years. And the role of a prophet is not to tell the future. Somebody mentioned this to me years ago, I think in one of my seminary courses, and I found it to be a very helpful phrase and it's in your notes. Here's the role of a prophet. A prophet has an ear to God and a mouth to the people. A prophet listens to God and delivers that message to God's people. And sometimes that's a prophecy about what's going to happen in the distant future. And that's what we're going to look at today. Isaiah and his messianic prophecies, his prophecies about Jesus in the very far future, hundreds of years away. But 85%, if not more, of the prophecy that we have in the Bible is prophets warning the people of Israel, the children of God, what's going to happen if they don't get right. It's very rare that a prophet is called upon to give good news. It's kind of the cruddy part about being a prophet. Prophets are not gurus and seers that tell the future. Prophets are cantankerous, grumpy old men who tell it like it is and just don't mind telling the truth and not being liked for it. That's what a prophet is. And they have a very specific role in God's kingdom. And as a matter of fact, to show you how hard it is to be a prophet, particularly in the Old Testament, we can look at Jeremiah. Jeremiah is referred to as the weeping prophet. He wrote the book of Lamentations, the saddest book in the Bible. It's just all sad. It's all bad. There's one verse in there of hope. And we actually preached about that in Great is Thy Faithfulness in the songs we sing. The book of Lamentations is very sad. And Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet because his entire life, God gave him a message and no one listened to him. People stopped showing up. They told him to shut up. We don't want to hear it. We're tired of it, Jeremiah. Jeremiah's like, if you don't get right, the path you're on is not good. It's going to lead to destruction. And nobody's listening to him. Nobody wants to hear him. Nobody believes him. And so not only does he spend his whole life ostracized and pushed to the fringes of society with no friends and nobody likes him, but also he has to watch this slowly sinking ship of Israel fade into oblivion. He knows destruction is coming and they will not listen to him to try to stop it. That's the life of Jeremiah. Because what prophets have to say is almost always negative, is almost always a warning. It's almost always God kind of grabbing Israel by the scruff of, by their collar and shaking them trying to get their attention. It's very much what it sounded like last week in the first group of verses that we read. That's typically what prophecy sounds like. Because those messages are so hard, for many believers, the books of prophecy are difficult and unapproachable. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but I bet if we did, the percentage of people in this room who can honestly say you've read all of the books of prophecy in the Bible, all the major prophets and all the minor prophets, would be pretty slim. This represents, for many believers, kind of a gap in our biblical knowledge. So to that end, I just wanted to try to demystify it a little bit for us and make it more approachable and maybe encourage some of you to introduce this into your studies. But here's, there's 17 books of prophecy in the Old Testament. There's five major prophets and there's 12 minor prophets. Now, don't answer out loud, but in your head, what's the difference between a major prophet and a minor prophet? The length of the book. That's it. That's all it is. It's not import of message. It's not impact in the kingdom. It's just four dudes wrote five long books and 12 dudes wrote 12 short books. That's all it is. And we got real creative in how we titled that. now it's forevermore Major Prophets, Minor Prophets. The five major prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Daniel. The 12 minor prophets are Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. Those are the 12 minor prophets. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, very much. There's actually, one of the reasons I did that is to be able to bring up, we're challenging the kids to learn all of the books of the Bible. And that's the trickiest section. Don't let anyone tell you different. That's the trickiest section. We're challenging them to learn all the books of the Bible. If they do, then they get to pie Miss Erin in the face. But some of them have mutinied and insist that it gets to be me. So that could be in our near future, and I would very, very happily smile under the shaving cream and take the pie to the face, because I think that's a wonderful reason to do it. So if you have kids, talk to them about that, and if they're up for it, get them to do it. It's a really, really good endeavor. I don't want all of them to pine me in the face, but, you know, we'll do what we have to for Jesus. But those are the major and the minor prophets. And here's how they fit into the Old Testament. I want you to understand this. I know that this is academic, but I want you to understand your Bibles as you approach them. Okay, so Genesis through Esther is really the narrative portion of the Old Testament that's telling the story of the nation of Israel from beginning to end the books of the law are a little bit different Genesis Exodus Leviticus numbers in Deuteronomy the first five books those are a little bit different because there's they're not all narrative there's some details in there like the book of Leviticus that gives specifics about sacrifices and religious rites and things like that. And then Deuteronomy kind of repeats things. It means law repeated. So it's not all linear. But basically from Genesis to Esther is the linear story of the Old Testament, the story of the children of Israel. It reads like a novel. Every page you turn, you're progressing in the story. Then you get to the books of wisdom, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. The books of wisdom are exactly what they sound like. They're just wisdom books. They're nestled right there in the middle of the Bible, and they offer good wisdom. And you really don't need a lot of context to appreciate what's in those books. The context does help, particularly in the Psalms. Then after that, you move into the prophets, the major prophets and the minor prophets. And those, this group of prophets fits back over the narrative story and just offers different details of different portions of the story that's told in the Old Testament. And while we're here, 1 and 2 Chronicles is basically a retelling of 1 and 2 Kings from a different perspective. Now you know your Old Testament. For those of you who have never taken the dive into the minor prophets, and you want to, a few years ago, it's more than a few now, I realized that I had a shameful gap in my knowledge of Scripture and wanted to tackle the minor prophets. And I was able to find a great commentary by, I think, Dale Ironside, that it's a one-volume commentary for all of the minor prophets. So if that's something that, if you're a sicko and you want to dive into that, do it and email me and I'll get you the book or you can borrow mine. It's a great way to study the minor prophets. So that's what a prophet is, ear to God, mouth to the people. Those are the books of prophecy in the Old Testament. That's where they sit and how they relate to the rest of your Bible. Now what I want to do is look at the book of Isaiah and look at an overview of the messianic prophecy within the book of Isaiah. So we can ask the question, who is the Savior that Isaiah presents to God's people? And it's appropriate to do this with Isaiah because depending on who you ask or AKA what you Google, there is no book more quoted in the New Testament than the book of Isaiah. Some people say Psalms, some scholars say Isaiah, but it's up there in how often it's quoted. And there is no book of the, there's no prophetic book that's more quoted in the New Testament. And there's no books of prophecy that contain more messianic prophecies than Isaiah. So it's right and good as we camp out in the book of Isaiah to look at how he portrays our Savior. So he does this kind of in three different ways. Isaiah portrays Jesus as king, servant, and conqueror. And for my overachievers who like to take extra notes, he portrays him as a king in chapters 1 through 37, a servant in chapters 38 through 55, and a conqueror in chapters 56 through 66. So it kind of follows this flow. So what I want to do is look at some highlight passages within each of those groups of chapters to show how Isaiah portrays Jesus in this way, the words that he uses to do it to familiarize us with some of the prophecies. And then I want to ask, what's that role mean and how should we respond to it? So the first way that he does it, the first half, a little bit more than half of the book, is he portrays Jesus as a king. And maybe the most well-known passage that does this is in Isaiah 9, verses on and forever. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this. So this is Jesus being portrayed as a king. He's going to sit on David's throne. He's going to rule forever. Wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace. Isaiah is laying out for us that he is going to be the king of the universe. And it's difficult reading this when it's so very clear he is going to reign forever, how the Hebrew people, how the Israelites could have construed that to mean, oh, he's going to sit on David's throne and he's going to reign in Israel. It's going to be an earthly kingdom. But that's what they thought. But here, very clearly, he's coming to reestablish David's throne and to rule an eternal kingdom that will last forever. And this is a famous prophecy that we see a lot, like I said, particularly around Christmas time. I'm toying around with the idea. Jen mentioned it to me, and usually Jen's ideas are pretty good. Our Christmas series may be based entirely out of this passage where we look at a wonderful counselor. So we look at the adjective, and then we look at the title, and we talk about why those things are important. So it might be those four things, wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace. This might be our Christmas series, but in it and in the first 37 chapters, Jesus is portrayed as a king. And so it's worthwhile to ask, what does a king do? What's the role of a king? Well, a king historically rules and protects. That's what they do. If you've read your history books, if you like learning about that stuff like I do, what you find over and over and over again played out in all of mankind and all of history is that a king rules over people and promises to protect them. So in exchange for the king's protection, I offer my fealty. I will now serve you because you are the king. I will submit to you because you are the king. And you rule over me, so I accept that rule. And in my submission, in my servanthood, and in exchange, you protect me. And so this is what Jesus does as he sits on the throne. We allow him to be the Lord of our life. He rules over us and he protects us. Now we can't misconstrue that and make that let us think that he protects us from all bad things, from all hurt and all pain. We know experientially that's not true, but he does protect us from the schemes of the devil, and he does come to rescue us, and he is building an eternity for us in which we will be protected for the rest of time. So a king rules and protects, and in exchange, we offer our service and our servanthood. Now, here's's wonderful about our king is he's also servant. We see this in Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53 is probably the most famous passage of prophecy in the Bible. I'm going to read verses 3 through 6. yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. And the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray. Each of us has turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. In this middle section of the book, Isaiah prophesies about the coming Messiah, portraying him as a servant. This is the remarkable thing about Jesus. Because he is the Prince of Peace. He is the Lord of Lords. He is the King of Kings. He is Almighty God. And he does not have to humble himself to serve us and yet he does, yet he chooses to. We see him when he condescends and takes on human form. When he gives up his God form and he takes on our human flesh. And he comes down here and he literally washes our feet. In the series that we just got done with on the Upper Room Discourse called Final Thoughts, we talked one week about how he washed the feet of his betrayer so that he could go take his payment with clean toes. Jesus did this. He serves us in this way. And this is the role of what a servant does. And we think, why is it important to know that Jesus is a servant? Well, a servant loves and provides. A servant loves you and provides you, provides for you. If you're serving someone else, you're loving them in that moment and you're providing something for them in that moment that they need. And the remarkable thing about the servanthood of Christ is that he doesn't have to do it. You understand that? He doesn't owe you service. He condescends to serve you. And there's something powerful about that kind of service. I think service is most compelling when it is inverted. Service is most compelling when it is inverted. Service is most compelling when the person offering the servanthood has nothing compelling them to do that and nothing to gain from that servanthood. And the person receiving the service has no right to that service. And no one looking on would assume that they were going to get that service. And so we invert our roles. The best example I think I've ever seen of this is my late father-in-law, John Vinson. John was a remarkable man, and stories about him would leak out all the time, because you could never get him to tell you what he did and what was going on. But after, in retirement, they bought a house in a neighborhood called the Georgia Club outside of Athens, Georgia. And that club, he spent his career as a senior VP for Bell South and then AT&T. And so when he got done, they moved out to the Georgia Club. It's a gated community with a golf course and sidewalks, and it's a peaceful little place. And when you live in the Georgia Club, you don't have to cut your own grass. It's one of those places. HOAs are probably sky high, but a crew comes through and they buzz your Bermuda once a week, so you don't have to fool with it, right? So I would go over there from time to time. Sometimes we'd play around a golf with John. Sometimes I'm going over with Jen just to visit or whatever. And sometimes there'd be this white cooler on his front sidewalk. And we couldn't figure out, John, why is that cooler out there? And he'd go, I just left it. And we'd be like, do you want me to get it? No, it's fine. And you'd go out there and look in it. And there was Gatorade and water and fruit and snacks and ice and we couldn't get out of him what it was he wasn't a man of many words and he wasn't the kind of guy you wrestled to the ground to pin down stuff while you just let him be but we figured it out that that cooler miraculously appeared when it was the day for his yard to get mowed and what he was doing every week for the crew that was coming around is providing them with Gatorade and water and fruit and snacks. He wasn't telling anybody about them. He didn't have to do that at all. That's just how he wanted to serve those guys. We found out after his career that there was some parking attendants and security guards that AT&T had hired to monitor its executive parking garage. And John learned the names and birthdays of those guys and on their birthday would bring them a dozen donuts, tell them happy birthday and hand them a little card with a gift card in there. He didn't have to do that, but he did. Another time, he was getting his car worked on, and he was talking to this young mechanic. And the young mechanic was sharing with John excitedly that he had just saved up enough and ordered this dream motorcycle that he had always wanted. And John thought that was great. So the next day, John shows back up at the garage with two of the best motorcycle riding gloves he could find that he knew would match the motorcycle that the kid was getting because he had told him about it. The last one I'll tell you, I think I've shared this before. One year, Jen and I bought John a nice North Face fleece for Christmas. And when you're in your mid-20s and you're both working in ministry and you're poor, a $95 North Face fleece is a big deal. Like this is, we love you, right? So we, everybody else got like a $20 Christmas gift that year so we could give John the $100 fleece. So we give him the fleece. And over the course of the winter, we realized this fleece is really not making any appearances. We don't, did he hate it? Did he not like it? And finally, Jen was so hurt that he didn't like it. And we gave it to him and yada, yada, yada, that he admitted that he was driving down the road one day. And it was a particularly cold day. It was sub-free freezing. And he looked on the side of the road. There was one of those sign spinners and the sign spinner was just wearing a long sleeve t-shirt. And John thought he must be cold. So he pulls over, gets out of his car, takes off the fleece, hands it to him and said, you're going to need this a lot more than me. And gets back in his car and keeps driving down the road. Let me tell you something about that kind of humility and servanthood. Those small actions resound and ripple for eternity. I went to that man's funeral, and it was an outpouring of service like that. It was an outpouring of this inverted servanthood where he had spent a lifetime serving people he did not have to serve. Whenever I would go over to his house, he would have Andy Griffith on the TV 100% of the time. I don't know how he found that many episodes. And whenever I would go in, he would immediately change it to whatever sport was on. Even if I didn't want to watch that sport. He just knew I liked sports. So he would always change it. And I'd beg him not to do that, and he would insist on doing that. And when we had his funeral, the church was filled with hundreds of people that John had quietly and faithfully served for his whole life. So when we see the service of Jesus, the king who chooses to serve us, the correct response that we should have is to serve others as Jesus serves us. It's Isaiah's way of preaching Jesus's new command in the upper room discourse what's the new command that the disciples were given in John chapter 13 go and love others as I have loved you the Isaiah preaches that exact same message he just says it this way go and serve others as Jesus has served you go and offer Jesus type service to people who don't deserve your service. Go be a humble servant to everyone you meet. And let's be honest about this, Grace. In this room, we have an unusual concentration of people who have opportunities to invert that service and to serve people around you who probably don't think they deserve your service. To serve people around you that you have nothing to benefit from by serving them. When someone is on a lower echelon in life, experience, wealth, position within a company, whatever, and they serve someone higher, that's natural, that makes sense. But when someone higher serves someone lower, those kinds of acts push people towards Christ. Those kinds of acts change minds and change lives. And we have the opportunity to do that. So I'd love to challenge you through the book of Isaiah to think about the people in your life you might serve more. Or better. Or differently. Let's not look for the opportunities to be served. Let's be like our good and gracious king and look for opportunities to serve. And as we do that. As we serve like our king, we wait on our conqueror. This is how Isaiah finishes up his book in chapters 56 to 66. And we have two verses that I want to look at. The first is Isaiah 56 verse 1. This is what the Lord says, maintain justice and do what right, for my salvation is close at hand and my righteousness will soon be revealed. So he's like, hang in there, keep doing justice, keep serving people, keep flipping things on its head, serve the oppressed, because my righteousness is coming. My salvation is coming. It will be revealed. There is something that's going to happen at the end of this. And then we get a little bit clearer picture over in 62 verses 11 and 12. The Lord has made proclamation to the ends of the earth. Say to daughter Zion, see your savior comes. See his reward is with him and his recompense accompanies him. They will be called the holy people, the redeemer of the Lord, and you will be called sought after and the city no longer deserted. The end of Isaiah, Jesus is portrayed as a conqueror. My salvation is coming. My righteousness is coming. Recompense for evil is coming. And the city will be conquered, and it will not be called deserted. And see, here's why it's important to see Jesus through these lenses of Isaiah, particularly Jesus as conqueror. Because a conqueror presses forward and the scales of justice tilt in his favor. A conqueror presses forward and the scales of justice tilt in his favor. Now here's what I mean. A conqueror does not sit back. A conqueror does not establish defensive lines and erect bulwarks. That's not what a conqueror does. A conqueror doesn't think about defensive postures and keeping things out. No, a conqueror presses forward. A conqueror goes to get. A conqueror goes to claim. Jesus, we understand, is on the move. Jesus is pressing forward. And when people have conquered in history, you can look through history. When people conquer, they write the history books. The scales of justice tilt in their favor, rightly or wrongly. I'm not saying it's fair. I'm not saying it's right when one group of people moves in and takes over a continent and then they get to write the history books about it. I'm not saying everything that happened was good and right and fair, but the scales of justice tilt in their favor because they write the history books. So when Jesus conquers, when he moves forward, he will tilt the scales of justice in his favor. And this is great news for us because it will be right and good and it will be fair. And when Jesus conquers, the only people who suffer are the people who deserve it. The only people who suffer are the ones who have not submitted to him. That's it. And then the scales of justice are tilted in the direction in which they should be tilted. They're tilted towards right and good and true. They're tilted towards Revelation 21 where the former things have passed away. And what's interesting to me as I look at this overview of Isaiah and we see Jesus as a king and a servant and a conqueror, is it's so similar and follows thematically that same refrain I remind you guys of so often, that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. Which follows the pattern of Isaiah. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the king of the universe. He's divine. He's the king. Isaiah, Jesus is king. It's to believe that Jesus did what he said he did. He came as a servant and he suffered for us just as Isaiah said he would. And then he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come and conquer sin and death and shame for you. And he's going to claim you and take you back to the perfect future where he will protect you. It follows that refrain that I offer you guys of explaining salvation follows exactly the message of Isaiah. When things sync up like that, I just kind of think, God, you're pretty neat in the way that those things get drawn out. And so what we do in light of this, in light of this overarching picture of Jesus through the lens of Isaiah, and I wrote this down because I wanted to get it right. As we wait on our conqueror, we submit to our king by serving like our savior. As we sit in the here and now, we wait on our conqueror. He is going to come claim us. As we wait on him, we submit to our king. And we submit to our king by serving others like our savior served us. And in that service, we will build up this kingdom and draw more people to our Jesus. And I think that's what we can take away from the message of Jesus in the book of Isaiah. As we wait on our conqueror, we submit to our king by serving like our savior. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your prophets. Thank you for the men and women who have been submitted to lives of being ostracized, being ignored, being disliked, being relegated to the fringes because they had to say hard things on your behalf. Thank you for their courage and for their bravery and for their example and for leaving us a record of what they've said. God, I pray that we would continue to learn from your servant Isaiah, that what he says and what we discuss would push us closer to you. And God, I pray that you would give us eyes to see this week that we might serve other people as you've served us. Give us opportunities to serve people who don't expect our service, Lord, and in so doing, would they see a little bit of Jesus in us? And would we bring people into your kingdom as we go through our lives serving others as you served us? It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.