Sermons tagged with Rest

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 September Sunday. Happy kickoff day to those who are celebrating. If you're joining us online, wherever you are and whatever you may be doing, we are grateful for that. This morning is our own kickoff of sorts as we kick off our new series called Gentle and Lowly, titled for the book, Gentle and Lowly, that we still have available in the lobby. We got 20 more copies last week, so there's some out there. Those are available for $10 a piece. Just grab some on the honor code. You can drop cash in the acrylic boxes on the way out. You can put them in the baskets if and when they come by. You can send us a money order and I will sign for it. Whatever you want to do for your $10, you feel free. But take a book if you'd like one. We're going to be going through that this fall together. And I have found that the church always thrives. There seems to be kind of a greater pulse. We kind of come alive a little bit when we all have a shared experience, when we're doing some of the same things together. And so this is an opportunity for that. It's how we kind of, you might not know this, but at Grace on staff, for me, as I think about the year, our ministry year starts in September, and then we sprint all the way to Memorial Day, and then we kind of, we have summer extreme, then we take a breath and then we get ready for September again. So I wanted to start our ministry year on the same page together, going through this book. This is a book that the staff has gone through. Kyle, our now family pastor, recommended it to us. We went through it as a staff. It was a very impactful book. We've had a small group go through it and they really loved it. And so I thought it would be good for the whole church to move through this book as well. Now in the book, there's something like 16 chapters or maybe more. And this series is only eight weeks. So clearly I'm not going to cover every chapter. I've chosen the ones that I feel are most relevant to grace, which is by the way, one of my favorite things about being a pastor of a small church is that I feel like we know each other and I know you. So when I go through a book like this, I can pick the chapters that will probably be most relevant to us, which is something that I take. I feel a great privilege in being able to do. But if you want the full experience, then you'll need to read it on your own as we move through. We will move through the chapters chronologically, but I will not hit each one. So I would encourage you to grab that book and be reading it this fall as we go through it. As we begin the series, I want to start with a little thought experiment, okay? And now this is going to require us to activate our calcified, recalcitrant imaginations, okay, that many of you have not used in a long time. I have a four-year-old son. I'm 44. I'm too old to have a four-year-old son, especially one as imaginative as he is. That kid will talk to you for 10 minutes straight, and 85% of it is complete nonsense, untethered to reality. He's got the most active imagination, and I'm bad at imaginative play. I would have been better at 24, but not much better. Okay. I haven't used my imagination since I was three. And then I, then I, then I cut that guy off. It was like, that's useless. That's not practical in the adult world. And I moved forward. Some of us are like that. We haven't imagined anything in a long time, but I want to ask you to dust it off and imagine this with me. okay? Let's pretend, and I know, I just said pretend and you guys are like, you lost me. Let's pretend together that you're going to go see a movie. And this movie you've seen from the trailers is about a creator, a deity that builds a world. And this world, the people or the beings that inhabit it, rebel against him, do not follow his rules, do not care about his presence. Most of them live lives that essentially ignore him. And they turn themselves from him. Now, I know that this is not difficult to know where I'm going. But I do want you to depict that world in your head. There is a deity. He is the main character of the movie. He creates a universe. And the center of that universe is a world. And the people, the things occupying that world are made in his image to glorify him. And yet they don't do that. They turn against him. They rebel against him. They do not care about him. And so to rectify this deity, to rectify this creation back to himself, he sends his son and says, go fix it. He sends his son to this creation and he says, I want you to go get these, get my beings, get my creations rectified back to me, facing me, serving me, and right relationship with me. Go fix what's broken. If you're imagining that with me, it's a movie that we're going to go see, and this character is sent down to creation to rectify creation back to the creator on behalf of the Father. Let me ask you this question. How would he have the right to describe himself? How would he have the right to describe himself? How would that character be able to describe himself? This character comes down, the son of the deity comes down. He says, I'm here to rectify this and to get you facing back towards God, back towards your creator. How would that character have a right to describe himself? Angry? Authoritative? Vindictive? Powerful? Just? He would have the right to be ticked, wouldn't he? He would have the right to bow up and say, you are humans, I am deity. I'm more important than you. I'm a bigger deal than you. If you don't listen to me, I'm going to get you right. Wouldn't he have every right to come down here, to be angry, to go down there, sorry, and be angry and be upset with the inhabitants and get right and say, you better cower in front of me because I'm not a problem that you want to have. And right now you do. If we imagine that movie and we imagine that character, I think it's very easy to imagine how that character might describe himself when asked. The parallel is very simple and very easy, and you guys spotted it as soon as I started the idea. But this is what Jesus does. This is the movie that we live in. God created us. He populated at the center of the universe. He populated this world with people that were made in his own image. And those people have rejected their God. And so God sends his son to rectify the situation and to turn creation back to him. He sends his son Jesus and says, go fix it. And then we ask, how would this person have the right to describe themselves? What would make sense? How would you describe yourself? How would you expect him to describe himself? And this, to me, is the arresting principle of the book Gentle and Lowly. Because according to the author, Dane Ortlund, there is but one place in Scripture where Jesus describes himself. There is but one place where Jesus gives a description of himself. In the Gospels, he's described many, many times, but it's always by his followers. It's always by the people around him. Jesus never goes on about himself. He never describes himself. He's very humble like that. But we have one place where he does. And this to me is the arresting principle of the book. What is the one place in scripture where Jesus describes himself and what does he say about himself given how he has the right to describe himself, which is any way that he wants, given what his attitude, what we would expect it to be if we were watching that movie. Given all of that, Jesus describes himself in one place. How does he do it? Matthew 11, 28 through 30. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. This is the one way that our Savior describes himself. And I memorized this verse as a kid in the King's English. So to me, it's still, come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. For I am gentle and lowly in heart. This is the one descriptor Jesus gives of himself. And it is profound in myriad ways. So this morning, I want us to sit in these words and reflect on what they mean with the goal of launching us into a series in which we will marvel at our unexpected Savior. That's where we want to end today. But where we begin is with the words of Christ when he describes himself. And the first thing he says is, Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. And as I thought about that, this occurred to me. We come to Jesus when we come to Jesus, we are exhausted. Have you ever thought about that? When we in our lives reach a place where we reach out for Christ, where we turn our countenance towards him, where we say, God, I need you. Jesus, I need you. Jesus, I welcome you. Jesus, I'm done with this. Whether it's for the first time, and maybe there's those of you in here who would not yet call yourself a Christian, but you're kicking the tires because spirituality seems important to you right now. And you're not quite sure, and you might not have all the answers, and you might not be totally on board with have all the answers and you might not be totally on board with this church thing and you might not be totally on board with this Bible thing, but you know that you need something. So here you sit in church curious about spirituality. And so maybe for the first time in your life you're considering reaching out to Jesus. Or maybe like most of us, you're here and you've had times in your life when you've reached to Jesus. You've had times in your life when you've forgotten. Times in your life when you held him at arm's reach. Times in your life when you allowed yourself to get too busy and you didn't prioritize him in your life. But something happens to bring you back to him. To cause you to reach out for him, to cause you to recognize your need for him and to be relieved by him. And do you know what we have in common, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, when we reach out to Jesus, do you know what's common about that that I think is remarkable? Every time you do it, you're tired. We reach to Jesus when we are exhausted. I've never known anyone who is crushing it. Their days are good. Their burden is light. Everything's going well. They're in cruise control. Their kids are awesome. Their marriage is happy. Business is good. Everything around me is great. That person doesn't tend to go, you know what I need? Jesus. That person just tends to love the goodness of life. But the people that I see in my life, again, whether it's for the first time or for the 12th time, who are reaching for Jesus, you know what they have in common? They're tired. Life feels heavy. It feels hard. There's this latent unhappiness or discontent that I can't seem to shake. Every now and again, we'll have a good day and we'll have a good smile and we'll have a good interaction and that feels nice. But then when we just kind of get back to ourselves, we just kind of shrink back in because we're exhausted and we're tired. And so I think, and I don't know this to be sure, I cannot interpret the intentions of Jesus himself, but it would make sense to me that Jesus says, come to me. When he invites people, come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. Come to me, those who are exhausted, because I think it's possible that Jesus knows there's no other way that we go to him until we are exhausted, until we have worn ourselves out, forgetting about him and going about our lives however we want. And then there's an emptiness in that that causes us dissatisfaction. And eventually, in that exhaustion, Jesus in his goodness invites us to him. And so I think he says, come to me all you who are exhausted because that's the only way we go. Energized people don't run to him. They think they're fine. And so maybe simply today, if you have been crushing it and you have been cruising, maybe today we don't drop something on the ground and wait for it to break to start asking Jesus to pick up the pieces. Maybe today we go to him before we get tired. Maybe this fall, as we commit to this series, and we commit to going through this together as a church, maybe September isn't just the start of our ministry year here. Maybe it's a renewal of the fervency of your faith. Maybe you are tired. Maybe you are exhausted. Maybe it doesn't feel like summer was long enough, or if you have young kids, it feels like it was way too long. And maybe you are just catapulting into September and all the things and you're already tired. You need a vacation from your vacation. Let this, this verse, Jesus's invitation, be a lighthouse to us, beckoning us in to go to Jesus this fall, to reconnect with Jesus this fall, especially if we are tired, especially if we are burdened. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden. If that's you, let's go to Jesus this fall. If we're tired, let's turn to him. He beckons us. But he doesn't stop there. He follows it with this interesting statement. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light, which is an interesting, oh yeah, this is what that means, which is an interesting thought. It's an interesting verbal flourish, right? Come to me all ye who are weary and heavy laden for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. It's, we kind of get the connotation. We understand that a yoke, at least I hope you do, if this is new information to you, your school failed you at some point, but a yoke is the thing that goes across the back of the ox so that they can pull the plow or they can pull the cart or whatever it is. It's the thing that goes over the animals so that they can pull it and be used. So he says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And so we kind of understand that imagery on a visceral level already. But here's what you may not know about that word yoke and what it means. In Jesus's time and in the times in Israel prior to, rabbis were the teachers. And I'm not going to go through what it takes to become a rabbi, but there wasn't a lot of them. It was like making the NFL. And the rabbis, they were the religious teachers. They were the ones charged with teaching God's people about God's word. But there was differences in interpretation. And different rabbis would see things differently. One easy example of this is, it's said in scripture that you should remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. You were not to work on the Sabbath day, which for them was Friday night to Saturday night, those 24 hours. And some rabbis looked at that and interpreted very, very strictly and very piously. And they said, if you have sandals that use a nail to fasten the leather to the sole of the sandals, those sandals have metal in them, and you can't wear them because it's requiring more of your body to pick up your foot, and that counts as work. So you cannot wear those sandals on the Sabbath. And other rabbis went, that's absurd, wear whatever you want, right? Those would be our rabbis, right? Nobody in this room is like, I'm pro-nail guy. That's the one I want. There was disagreements. If your donkey falls in a ditch on the Sabbath, can you pull it out or do you have to leave it there until Monday? When you tithe, what do you tithe? When the laws contradict each other, do I lie and protect somebody or do I tell the truth and get them in trouble? When the laws contradict each other and you don't know which way to go, that's what the rabbis were for. And so they had, they each had a way of understanding all understanding and applying and teaching all of the rules and the law and the old Testament. And that way of understanding those things was called their yoke. So when you would follow a rabbi, you would take their yoke upon you and follow the rules their way, which is not very much different than our current day denominations. Some people think that we should sprinkle water on a head of a baby, and that's baptism. Some people think that baptism is you get maximum wet, and it's for professing believers. We have difference of opinion on that. So we started the Presbyterians and the Baptists, right? Methodists have different ways that they interpret things. Lutherans, Pentecostals, we have these different things. And so back to this point, and now we can put it back up there, Laura, yoke equals religion. Yoke equals religion. It's not just an image. It's not just a metaphor. It really does mean religion. Way of thinking about faith. Way of following the rules. Way of living up to the standards of God. And so Jesus says, and this is what makes it remarkable, come to me you who are exhausted for my yoke, my religion, my way of living out your faith is easy, and my burden is light. And here's the way he makes it easy. Jesus does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He does not seek to encumber us with rules, but to liberate us with relationship. He says, at one point in his ministry, somebody asked him, what's the greatest commandment? And he asked it back to them, what do you say it is? And the person answers, to love your Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus says, you have spoken wisely. On these hang the whole law and the prophets. And what Jesus meant in that statement is, if you'll simply love God and love others, you will capture all the Old Testament. You will live out the truth and the rules that are found in the Old Testament law. The 630 something rules that Moses brought down the mountain. If you will simply love God and love others, you will fulfill those things. And then he further simplifies it in the upper room discourse in John 14 through 17. We spent a spring there one time. They're, to me, the greatest collection of chapters in the Bible. It's God's, it's Jesus's final instructions to his disciples. And he says in John 14, this new command I give you, this new command I give you, do you know what it is? Go love others as I have loved you. He drops off the God part. And he says, this one command, you live by this one command, this one rule, this one thing encumbering the yoke. And that's what I'm asking you to do. And it might feel odd that he leaves off the God part, but what Jesus knows is there is no possible way for us to love others sacrificially unless Jesus himself is the one empowering and infusing that love. I cannot love you the way that I'm supposed to love you the way that Jesus loved you. I can't even sniff at it unless I am actively, adamantly, and ferociously loving God first. Then I can love you. That's why Jesus sums it up this way. And he does not encumber us with rules. Because rules are tricky anyways, aren't they? Think about one of the most basic rules. Honor your father and mother in the Lord for this is right. Great. What if your dad's a degenerate? What if he left the family? What if your mom's abusive? What does it look like then to honor them? What if they tell you to do things that are actively wrong? What does it look like to honor them? Maybe you have great parents. What does it look like to honor them when you're eight? And what does it look like to honor them when you're 48? That simple rule, honor your father and mother, gets tricky. And so you know what Jesus says? Let's not worry about the pedantics of that. Let's simply love others as I have loved you. How did he love? Sacrificially. He gave of himself. Always. Always patient. He was always gracious. He was always kind. And in this way, he forces us into relationships. This is why we say at Grace that we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. Because our faith necessarily presses us into relationship with Jesus and then into relationship with others as we are tasked with loving one another as Jesus loves us. So when he says, come to me if you're tired, my yoke is easy and my burden is light, it's not to encumber us with rules. It's not to encumber us with do's and don'ts. It's simply to love your neighbor. We can make a rule that you shouldn't flip somebody off in traffic when they cut you off. We could make that rule. We could write it down. We could agree to it. We could abide by it. We could probably find something in Scripture that would lend itself to this idea that hanging your finger out the window is probably not a great idea in traffic. We could do that rule. But doesn't just love of our neighbor dictate that we would never do that anyways? And in this love, doesn't it make the relationship more genuine? What if every Monday, Jen sent me an email, and she said, this is what I need you to do for me to feel loved this week. And it was just a to-do list. And that was the basis of our marriage. And I did the things, and by Thursday, I'm lovable. I did them all. We good? Yes. She gives me a big hug and a kiss. Yes. Great. Now, here's the thing that she and I both know. I wouldn't do it. I'd want to. I'd really be up for it. I kind of like that policy. That makes things a lot simpler, doesn't it? But that's not how relationships work. So that's not how our relationship with Jesus works. So if we're compelled to go to him, it's not a list of do's and don'ts. It's a relationship that we lean further into with him, and then we lean outward into others. And the love of Jesus is what makes those relationships possible and makes us able to love well. So I would say if we are tired and we're not loving others well, maybe it's because we haven't been fueled by Jesus in a long time, and we should again choose to go to him. Now, that sentence is hugely important for who to know who he's inviting and what he intends for us. Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. We go to him for relief. But this is the part where he describes himself. And what's remarkable is he describes himself as gentle and lowly. But it's important to understand Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Jesus is required to be neither gentle nor lowly. Do you understand that? He doesn't have to do that. If we go back to the movie and think about what that character might be who comes down from on high to rectify creation, what attitude might he be carrying with him? Again, how would he have the right to describe himself? And we don't actually have to imagine this very much. There's actually an example of this movie in scripture. If we keep turning the pages of Matthew, eventually we'll get to this parable that Jesus tells. And it's a picture of the Old Testament prophets and Israel's reaction to Christ. And he says there was this owner of the vineyard, and he rented it to some workers with the agreement that they would give him an allocated amount of the profits, of the goods goods they would take, they would take some of the harvest. He would take a big portion of the harvest. And so when harvest season came, he sent some representatives, the owner of the vineyard sent some representatives to the workers, three of them. And it said, okay, it's time for us to collect the owner's share of the harvest. And the workers killed one, beat one up and st stoned the other one, and sent the two back to tell the owner, get lost. And so the owner sends some more of his representatives, and they do the same thing. And they tell him to get lost. And so then the owner says, I'm going to send my son. Surely they will respect him and give me my profits. And then when his son shows up, they kill him. Because now we can claim the inheritance for ourselves. This is a picture of the prophets that God sent to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament. They rejected them and they stoned them and they beat them up. And then eventually sending Christ. But again, if you're the son going to these ungrateful workers, what would your attitude towards them be? How might you feel towards them? What might you want to say? I remember I was playing a pickup soccer game in South Africa one time. And my dad and I were playing together. And dad he dad was I think was playing in goal and somebody was coming approaching the goal we're playing indoors and they kicked the ball and they kicked it as hard as they could and it hit my dad right in the face and snapped his snapped him back and it was like point blank it's from like me to Tom and it's indoor and we're all having fun there's's no reason to kick the ball that hard. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I saw red. I like, and I, it couldn't be helped. As soon as play started again, I ran into that guy as hard as I could. And I took him out in front of all the kids and in front of the people that we took there. I was one of the leaders of the trip. He was one of the people that we were ministering to. He was one of the camp leads. I flew 10 days to minister to him out of the overflow of the goodness of my heart. And when that ball hit my dad's face, I didn't care who he was. And after I did it, I was like, well, that's probably not the best way to handle this. How might that son feel going to that vineyard to rectify those people back to his father? Angry, entitled, knowing that he could squash him like a bug if he wanted to. And yet, gentle and lowly in heart. And I don't do this often, but that Greek word heart that's used in the text means center of your person, essence of your being. It is who you are in character to your core. And our Savior, who has every right to be angry. Who has every right to chide us for our betrayal. Who has every right to squash us under his thumb. Who has every right to say, I am here and you better come to me for I am fierce and I am angry and I am powerful and you've got about three seconds to cower before I prove it. Instead, he says, I am gentle and lowly at my core. It is the essence of who I am. And that word gentle is so interesting. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Have you ever experienced the gentleness of God and how he works to turn our hearts towards him? Where there's something in your life that you know doesn't need to be there. You know it's wrong. You know that attitude or that behavior or that pattern is unacceptable to God. You know that. And yet you persist. And God has every right to crack you over the head with a two-by-four, to come running at you and knock you over in the middle of a soccer field. He has every right to just sweep your legs out from under you and force you in your humiliation to see the errors of your ways and begin to walk right. Doesn't he? But he almost never does. Gently, humbly, graciously, he massages the areas of our life as he cradles us and offers us comfort and walks us humbly into a profound submission and conviction of our sins. Have you ever experienced the gentle conviction of Christ? Maybe you're experiencing it now, this morning, as you hear Jesus calling you back to him. And maybe it's not some big thing. Your life's not going to blow up. He's not going to hit you with a two-by-four, but maybe this morning he's gently urging you back towards him. Jesus describes himself as gentle, and I don't think that we often enough marvel at how profound and meaningful that is. Because he didn't have to. And then he said, he's lowly in heart. He's humble. And this morning, what I want us to understand is that to be lowly is to be accessible. To be lowly, the way that Jesus is talking about, is to be accessible. And now, imagine, let's go back to the movie. This deity comes down from on high to right the wrongs and to rectify us back to our creator. Do you think you're going to get a face-to-face with that person? Like, do you think you're going to get to talk to them? Who's going to talk to that person? Who's going to talk to that entity that comes down? World leaders? The Pope? Rich people? Let me tell you what I'm sure of. That person comes down tomorrow to rectify the world back to the Creator. He's not taking a meeting with any of you. Years ago, and I still kick myself to it because it was a complete waste of time. Years ago, I emailed a United States Senator. I'm not going to tell you which one, and I'm not going to tell you what about. But I emailed a Senator because there was something happening that concerned me, and I wanted to express it. And here's what I know happened. Some 23-year-old intern read it and went, this is dumb, and deleted it and never told a soul about it. I wrote an email to an unnamed intern is what I did. It was a complete waste of time. We understand accessibility. This person who comes down from heaven is not someone that is accessible to the likes of us, unless, he says, I am lowly and gentle. I am meek. I am accessible. And we learn that he is accessible through his Holy Spirit. And we learn that where two or more are gathered in his name, that Jesus is there also. Jesus' presence is with us now in this room today. He offers that to us. He makes himself accessible. So that when we pray, when I pray in a few minutes, if you pray with me, the Holy Spirit is uttering things too deep for words to God to tell him what I really mean through the heart of my prayers. And Jesus himself is sitting at the right hand of the Father as he offers us his presence and he is interjecting to the Father on our behalf. He is that accessible. So here's what I want us to do this fall. Here's what I want us to do with gentle and lowly. Let us this fall marvel together at this unexpected Savior. Let us just take these eight weeks and read through this book and learn more about who our Jesus is and let us collectively marvel together at this unexpected Savior who comes down and he says, are you tired? Then you're who I'm looking for. Are the rules hard? Let me invite you into relationship. And let me tell you about myself. I am gentle. I don't have to be. But I am gentle at my very core. I am accessible and lowly at my very core. I hold on to none of the rights and privileges that you might impugn upon me. I am the most unexpected of saviors. And so this fall, what I want us to do is marvel at him together. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are. Thank you for your son and how he loves us, how he shows up for us. Jesus, thank you for being gentle when so often that gentleness is not what we deserve. Thank you for being humble and lowly and accessible that we might come to you. Thank you for being an unexpected Savior. Father, thank you for sending him to us. Jesus, thank you for leaving us with your spirit. I pray that we would together marvel at you, Jesus, and who you are, and that we would be more desirous of you with each week that goes by and that for those of us who are tired that we would use this morning as a reminder to run to you and seek rest. Jesus, it's in your name that we ask these things as you advocate for us to the Father. Amen.

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

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

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

Good morning. Grace, I would just like to point out that I'm the guy who fixed the sound. Let's pray and go home. I think we can leave on that one. Actually, and I fixed it by doing absolutely nothing. That's what happens a lot of times, right? Like you go try to fix somebody, somebody asks a question, and you just act like you do something. It's like, thanks, man. You know so much about everything. Hey, I'm so glad that you are here and you decided to join us this morning if you're new. My name is Aaron. Happy Father's Day to all you dads out there. Thank you for choosing to come to church instead of asking your wife if you could stay home and watch the U.S. Open. Jesus does love you more for that. I'm just kidding. He doesn't. I know some of you. Hey, we are in the third week of a series called Idols. And just to kind of set us up, kind of get us moving in the direction we're heading this morning. So you've got like the US Open, right? Very prestigious event, great golfers and all that. Then there's another event that's really close to it. It's the Grace Raleigh Golf Tournament. It's same prestige, same level of competition, same caliber of players and we had it back April, but nobody signed up. So what we did instead, we actually, there was like 16 people who signed up to be a part of it. So we quickly veered away from like tournament and we said, okay, so what we're going to do instead is just give whoever wants to play a reason to take Monday off and go play golf and hang out with one another, right? And so I just want to be very open and honest. I am, I'm not a good golfer, okay? And because of that, like, I don't typically sign up to be a part of stuff like that because I don't need you to see and remind me that I'm not a good golfer. Like, I'm learning. I love to play. I play often. I'm just not playing well. So I typically avoid stuff like that. But I look through the list. I look through the roster, and I was like, okay, I may not be the worst one there. I was. I was the worst one there. Absolutely. And I can tell you, there's proof that I was the worst one there. So what happens is as soon as you pull up, we were at Zebulon Country Club. If you've ever played there, you'll know what I'm talking about. You pull into the parking lot, and immediately atop of a conversation is the ninth hole, right? Because as you go to park, like some people will remind you and like warn you, hey, listen, you see that? There's a tee box right there. Like it's really close. The green is really close to the parking lot. It's really close to the clubhouse. And you don't want to park there because some idiot's going to hit the ball too far. It hit a car. You don't let it be your car, right? And so immediately what happens is you, okay, yeah, let me move. Like I'm going to go somewhere else. then we went. We played the eight holes, and I played terribly. Like there's all this added pressure, which is dumb. I'm not a good golfer. Everyone knows I'm not a good golfer. Why do I feel like I have to play like a good golfer? That's another reason. If you play golf and not well, why do you get so mad that you're not playing? What do you expect to happen? So we go through the entire eight holes or we go through eight holes. Then we get up to nine and then you start thinking about the parking lot again. Right? Well, I start thinking about the parking lot again. When I went up to the tee box, what was going through my mind was not, hey, there's a sand trap just in front of the green. Make sure, play the left side. I don't think, hey, you know what? I want to hit this in the back of the green and make it spin. I don't even know how to make the ball spin. I don't know if it does spin when I hit it. I have no clue. So that's not what going through my mind is. I line up to hit the ball. What I start thinking about is, don't be the idiot who hits a car. Like, don't be that guy. And I take my backswing, and I come through, and man, y'all, I blade it. Like, it's just, I hit it, and it just rockets towards the parking lot. Not just towards the parking lot, towards the Mercedes flipping bins, okay? Now, was anybody here? Did anybody go? Dude, either of you drive a Mercedes. Because if you do, this was going to have a very different ending. Like, it went past the Mercedes. There was this banged-up truck. I hit that thing. But no, so as you can figure out by now, like it went straight. I'm telling you, like everything got real. It was movie type slow motion. You know what I mean? Like I could see which way the blades of grass were going. There was a groundskeeper. He was in the sand. He just watched it. Uh-oh. It just looked. And then I'm telling y'all, like it was the loudest bang I've ever heard in my life. It sounded like this dude's ex-wife was really, really mad, found a sledgehammer in his car, and went to work. It was so loud, and everything in me just sank. I was like, oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. For one, the first thought was, my wife is never going to let me play golf again. I just played an $80,000 round of golf at a mediocre golf course. What kind of, I'm the idiot that everyone's thinking about. And then my second thought was, I have people with me. Like they all saw that I'm the idiot who hit the car on the other side of the green at Zebulon Country Club, right? And so I turn around, I'm like, well, maybe,, there's this idea of, okay, I'm one of their pastors. Which I am, by the way, if you didn't know that up to this point. But I'm one of their pastors. Maybe I'll turn around and there'll be some grace and some kindness. Here's what I. That's what the heck I turned around to. That was just that exact noise. No, I'm telling you. There's a guy. I'm not going to. We share the same first name, Carly Buchanan. It's his husband. You don't need to know the rest of it. But I turn around, and here's what I see. Like, he's laughing so flipping hard. Like, he can't even control his shoulders. I'm like, are you, you're a jerk face. And then I said, okay, well, there's still two others. And I look and there's another guy swinging a golf club. Just, oh, let me act like I don't see anything. But still there's a single shoulder. He's not as big. I'm like, are you kidding? There's one other guy. And I look over to him and his face is like this because I'm on his team. And he's like, we can't use that ball. I gotta, I gotta show up now and do something really good. Right. And I'm like,, my, this is the worst day ever. Okay, so immediately I start going into damage control. How do I make sure nobody else finds out? And about that time, the little golf club swinging guy, he yells out to people on another hole. He hit the Mercedes. I'm like, are you kidding me? Listen, I'm not joking about this. Two weeks later, two weeks later, we were at the AJ event. I think it was two weeks. Anyway, it was a couple weeks later. Somebody came up to me who wasn't even at the golf course and said, hey, I heard about the ninth hole. Dude didn't even go to our church. I'm like, are you kidding me? And the entire time I'm thinking, everybody knows I'm the idiot who hit the car. Not just a car. It was a Mercedes. And, like, everything that was the reason that I don't go get involved in stuff like this. Now, we did go. We went and we really looked over the car pretty well, make sure there was no dings or anything like that. And there was at some point the guys that were there with me, they tried to start consoling, except for the one jerk face whose shoulders are going like that. Like everybody was like, hey, don't, Aaron, it's all right, buddy. Like it happens. They certainly have to take a little bit of accountability. Like when you park there, like you knew there was going to be an idiot. You didn't know you were going to be the idiot, but like you knew there was a possibility. So they started to give some comfort, but I'm telling you, I'm telling you, like there was just this overwhelming overwhelming sense of not good enough, and everybody knows it now. Like, there was this overwhelming sense of everyone sees that I don't belong here. I don't belong at this tournament. I don't belong being here. Like, there's nothing about it. And fortunately, these guys came, they consoled, and then I do just want to say, like, I piped the next drive, right? Like, it looked really, really, so much so that the greenskeeper who watched it go like this, he was like, that wasn't the same guy who hit the bins, was it? I was like, shut up, dude. So, but there was this sense and this need, this overwhelming awareness where I was different. I didn't belong in that place. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever felt the not good enoughness? Have you ever felt like your weakness, your insecurity, all the things that you're worried about? Everybody kind of sees. And maybe it's just not a weakness, but maybe it's just a difference that someone else doesn't approve of. Maybe you feel it when mom-in-law or dad-in-law or mom or dad come to the house, and suddenly they start looking at everything, and you know there's going to be some criticisms. You know where they're going to say, hey, you should really do this different. You know they're going to say, you're not raising your kids right. I didn't let you do that. You've got to do this differently. Maybe it's in co-working world, right, or with your boss, or maybe it's whenever you go with a group of moms, and all the moms seem like they have houses that kids don't live in, right? Like it just, there's this overwhelming sense and awareness of different. Don't belong. Not good enough. And there's this pressure that in order for you to accept me and to like me, to approve of me, I have to become who it is that you want me to be. Not good enough. It's a powerful motivator. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. I have. And that's what we're talking about today. We started a couple weeks ago a new series, as Aaron was saying a little earlier, called Idols. And essentially what an idol is, an idol is anything that we elevate to a position of authority in our life. It could be anything at all. But I love what St. Augustine says about it. He says that the matter, the challenge, the problem, the difficulty with living the holy lives that we want to live is a matter of disordered love. It's loving things out of their appropriate order. That's not just a Christian thing. That's a human thing, right? Well, whatever's at the top of your list, whether it's a person, whether it's a thing, that's what's going to call the shots in your life. That's idolatry. Whatever is at the top of the list is going to determine the steps that you take because we shape our lives around pleasing that person or attaining that thing. And Nate talked with us last week. I don't know why I pointed over there. He's not over there. Nate talked with us last week about power and how when power becomes something that becomes the ultimate thing, it just rattles everything and how it destroys relationships. If you missed it, you can check it out online. Go and listen to that. Today, we're talking about approval. And I know the thought, I know the argument. You may have even had someone who leaned over to you and said, I really don't care what people think about me. Yes, you do. Because you wouldn't have said that if you didn't want us to think you were cool for saying it, right? Approval is not a bad thing. And approval, I wouldn't even say is a desire so much as it is a need. A need for approval comes from an awareness of self. A need for approval comes from this awareness of that I'm not perfect. And so what we need in these moments is if you are a Christian, you became a Christian because you were aware that you fell short and you needed Jesus. The sense of approval. It's not a desire, it's a need, but maybe you are a person who generally walks through life with an understanding that none of us are perfect. None of us have everything together. Like we all have things that we're working on. And so the opinion and ideas of others generally don't bother you. Here's what I would ask you to consider. and here's what I would argue. There is someone in your world whose voice influences the things that you do. There is someone in your world that what they think about the decisions that you make influences the decisions that you make. Approval's not a bad thing. It just makes a crummy God. Because here's what happens. The danger with approval, the idol of approval creates a fear of rejection that places our identity and worth in the people around us. The idol of approval, when approval gets to the top of the list, when it becomes the ultimate thing that we have to have, we have to have it from the people around us, we have to have it from the person, whatever it may be, it shapes who you become. And what we avoid is this fear of rejection. All of the idols are connected to your identity. All the idols that we'll talk about in this series, they determine who you become. Approval is the only idol that places your identity in the hands of the people you seek to be approved by. You know this. In order to be approved by someone, you have to either become or show them something they would approve. And what happens is when approval becomes ultimate, your sense of value and worth is determined by the acceptance of the people around you. And it creates this internal tug of war. You see an example of this in John. Jesus is pretty far into his ministry at this point. He's at kind of rock star status. Like everyone who knows who he is. Some people like him, some people don't. There's some people who do believe in him. There's some people who don't believe in our life. It creates this internal tug of war. This is who I am. This is what I believe. This is what I want to do. In order for people to accept, approve, like, love, respect, I have to do this. And when approval's at the top of the list, it's always going to win. Your value, your worth, your identity is going to be in the hands of the people around you. And let's think about that for a second. What version of right and wrong do you choose today? We live in a world full of opinions. Everyone has an idea about the way you should or should not raise your kids. Everyone has an idea about what is right and what is wrong. And it's also people don't see the action that you do in light of who you are. They determine who you are based off of the action that you do. We see it with political affiliations, political views, religious views. You don't believe this. You are this. You see it with, again, like the way you raise your kids, the way you discipline your kids. You see it with whether you shop at Target or Walmart. I get that one a little bit. Like, don't go to Walmart. Like, there's nothing good that happens at that place. But like, we see these things in our life and people determine who we are based off of who we do. And when approval becomes our idol, it creates this exhausting desire to please. It creates this exhausting pursuit of a fragile approval that can be taken away at a moment's notice. Because when you gain someone's approval, in order to be approved by one is to be disapproved by the other. It's a dangerous place to be. It's a dangerous thing. And so the thing that we really need to take away from when we idolize approval, we ask people to fill a need that only God can satisfy. And so this exhausting race, this pull back and forth, this constant trying to, okay, I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this person to this person. I need to be this to this over here. Like we, it's exhausting. And you're always going to be left feeling less than because it highlights the differences and typically what we would assume as weaknesses where we've dropped the ball. It brings those to the surface. Because people, and again, let me reiterate, I want to make sure that you're not hearing the wrong thing in this. Approval, it's not bad. It just can never serve you the way that we're asking it to. Because we start looking at broken people to fill this need that we were designed to have filled by God. And so approval from people just creates this fragile pursuit of never good enoughness, never quite arrived yet. The best person that I've seen, the best story throughout scripture that I've seen to kind of illustrate the difference of a life defined by the fear of rejection and a life defined and transformed by the approval of Jesus is with the Samaritan woman. Let me read for you just a second, then we'll talk about it a little bit. This is in John chapter 4. If you have your Bibles, you can turn there. We're going to put it on the big digital Bible in the sky, too, so you're more than welcome to read that one. But in John 4, starting in verse, I'm going to start in 4, but it from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, will you give me a drink? His disciples had gone into town to buy food. Verse 9 says, the Samaritan woman said to him, you're a Jew and I'm a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews did not associate with Samaritans. If you've been in or around church very much, you've probably heard this story. Even if you haven't been around, you may have heard reference to it. But in case you aren't familiar with some of the implications of the details that John gave, right? So the fact that it says she went to the well at noon says a lot about the life that this lady was living and the life that she was avoiding. So going to gather water was a common practice from the women in that day, but they would typically go one to two times a day, but it would always be in the morning or just before sunset because it's a cooler portion of the day, right? So, but not just was it practically better to go at those times, but it was also a time and an opportunity for community. Like there was a lot of ridiculous restrictions on women in that day and the way that they could function in public and especially around men and things of that sort. So whenever they would gather at the well, it was an opportunity for them to just be. Like they could hang out. They could hang out in their community. They could have conversations. They could talk about whatever it is they needed to talk about. They were just free to be there. And the fact that this lady, when at noon, shows us she was intentionally trying to avoid the people from her own town. Like she went at a time when she wasn't expecting anyone else to be there. And not only that, there's a lot of scholars and a lot of theologians point to that there was a lot of springs of water, a lot of wells closer to her village that she could have went to. So not only did she go at a time when she was expecting not to see someone, just in case, I'm going to go to a place further off. Like we don't know if, we don't know for certain if it was an idol of approval that she was dealing with. But what we do have a very good indicator of is she was avoiding rejection. She was avoiding the fingers. She was avoiding the conversations. Because what we find out a little later in the story is the life that she's living, some of the mistakes that she's made, some of the things that she's done would have been frowned upon by her community. And so what we can see in her life is that she is being shaped by an avoidance of rejection, which is a good indicator that there's a lack of approval in her world. I struggle with this. I struggle with the idol of approval much more than I'm proud of. Like, it rears its head up often. Like, I just need people to like me, partially because I'm so awesome, but also because the, like, no, there's just this, it's just something that pops up. Like, all of the idols do. I think they were all susceptible at different times. But this is the one that seems to pop up with me more often than not. And I was having a conversation with a couple of, actually three different people. So y'all are the fourth person I've ever told. Don't tell anybody else. An analogy that I used is with every interaction, every person, there's a brick wall. There's an imaginary brick wall. And the less bricks that are on that wall is an opportunity for me to come over. It's you accepting me, you bringing me in, you respecting me, you thinking whatever it is that I need you to think of me. It's I need you to love me, I need you to welcome me, I need you to do whatever. The less bricks that are there, the closer that I get to being fully brought in by someone. But the more bricks that are there is just the opposite, right? The more bricks that are there, it's more of a reason for you to not accept me. It's more of a reason for you not to like me. And so what I had told these people in this analogy was it feels like at times every conversation, every interaction, it doesn't matter if it's at like a rehearsal, it doesn't matter if we're hanging out and passing and going to grab lunch, if I'm passing you and barely talking to you in Walmart, in certain seasons of my life, it feels like every conversation I'm carrying a brick. I'm either putting a brick onto the wall and giving you a reason to not take me, to not like me, to not love me, to not accept me, or I'm taking a brick off of the wall. It's an exhausting pursuit. You're constantly carrying this weight of being whatever people need you to be, whatever people want you to be, oftentimes at the sacrifice of your own personal convictions, your own personal beliefs, your own ideas of who you want to be. We've all stood on the other side of a decision of regret. Like, why did I do that? For me, in my life, most of those decisions have been on the other side of, I've got to either remove a brick or I've got to put one up. That's an indicator for me. I didn't realize it until like I was writing this sermon this week, that whenever I feel that weight, whenever these moments start to happen in my life, when I feel like I'm either removing or putting a brick on, it's an indicator that approval is being elevated in my life. Not just simply because there's a need for it, but I'm looking to people for validation. I'm looking to people to affirm that I'm someone. I'm looking for people to help me realize that I am who I need to be and that I'm okay being who I am. I'm looking for people. That's an indicator. I don't know what it would be for you. Maybe that resonates with you. But some other indicators that approval has gotten really high on our list, is moving up the list in terms of desires, is when the one criticism speaks so much louder than 100 compliments. Like, you've got something, you've done something, you believe something, something happened, and there's so many people who are telling you, love that, you killed it, but there's one person, and that voice keeps you awake at night. When the idea of one person not liking you, being disappointed in you, thinking you messed up or that you let down, like it just rattles you to the core. Another indicator would be a lack of confidence, not just in you, but a lack of confidence in decisions that you have made or are making. And so what happens is we seek constant reassurance. I need validation. I need you to affirm that I'm doing the right thing. And honestly, in those seasons when approval is way up there, you can't make a decision without getting input from other people. These are indicators that we're seeking approval from a broken people. We're seeking approval from people who can never feel that need. This is what's happening in the world of the Samaritan woman. She's living a life avoiding the whispers, avoiding the reminders that she's not good enough, avoiding the reminders of the mistakes that she's made, and then she talks to Jesus. And this conversation changes everything in her world. Now, so something to understand, you saw that she was surprised that Jesus even approached her and talked to her. So remember, she's trying to avoid people. She's trying to avoid the people of her town. So she's going even further than what she needed to. And as she approaches Jesus, she's certainly thinking, okay, today's not the day that I'm gonna get a break from it. Because in this conversation, in this man, like with the man and woman, there was so many reasons why she would feel rejected by him. As she approached and as she got closer, as she saw that not just is he a man, but he's a Jew, as she got closer, she realized, oh man, there's religious tensions here that go back thousands of years. There's racial tensions there. There's cultural tensions that say men are not allowed to talk to women in public. Most husbands didn't even talk to their wives in public, much less a single man talking to a single woman in public. It just didn't happen. And as she got closer and closer and closer to the well, what had to start resonating with her a little bit more is, okay, today is going to be another day, just like the rest. But that's not what happened. Jesus talked to her. He broke cultural and religious norms, and he treated her like a person. Treated her not like she just had something, that he wanted something from her, but she had value in her world. And then there's a funny part of the conversation where they're talking about the water, and he's like, Jesus tells her, hey, so the water I've got, like, you won't ever be thirsty again. She's like, you ain't even got a bucket, man. Like, you asked me for water. How you got water? Like, what are you talking about? And then this happens in verse 14. Maybe not 14, 15. Actually, I'm going to go to 13. Jesus answered, everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. Whoever drinks the water that I give them will never thirst. This is quite true. So she goes and approaches and has this conversation, and then comes the question, right? Jesus brings up this very thing that has shaped her life. Jesus brings up what is likely the very thing that is causing her to feel rejected by the people in her town and need to be approved. It's the very thing that's made her feel not good enough. And Jesus, you had to bring that up? Like, you can't really, like, Jesus knows everything everything. He knows everything. Like he just told her. So you have to kind of ask this question. Like Jesus, why did you have to bring this up? I really don't think it was because he wanted to remind her. See, you're not quite perfect, are you? See, here's this thing in your life. You got to get this worked out. You got to fix it. She didn't need reminding of that. I think that Jesus brought up the question because he wanted to let her know, you don't have to do that here. You don't have to pretend with me. You don't have to feel the weight of your failures. You don't have to feel like you are the sum total of your mistakes. You don't have to feel like you have to be someone else in order to be accepted, approved, and loved by me. For the first time in probably a very long time. This lady who has been rejected time and time again comes to a conversation with someone who knows everything and welcomes her in. And suddenly there's a rest. I don't have to chase. I don't have to be. I can just be. I don't have to conform to what your idea of good and bad is. I can just rest in the approval of Jesus. And it changes her life forever. You can come on up here. It changes her life forever. What's incredible is you read throughout the rest of the story, there's a boldness and confidence after finding this approval that she runs back to the town. She runs, she leaves her water jug. She runs back to town, back to the place where she has faced rejection over and over again, back to the place where she's reminded you're not good enough, back to the place that people have told her and made her feel like you don't belong here. You're not one of us. You aren't good enough. We'll never approve of you until you fix everything. She's a boldness and a confidence that takes her back to that place and resting in the approval of Jesus, she becomes the person these people need in their life. She has influence on her community. She has influence in the people's lives around her. Resting. Listen to me. This is just an aside. I said I wasn't going to say it, but I want to. And so here we are. The people in your life that you feel like you have to measure up for, the people in your life who rely on you and depend on you, the people in your life who need something from you, what they need from you is to be the person that Jesus is asking you to be. Jesus is not going to lead you to be a poor wife, a poor husband. This lady, this, the first evangelist, I think she, she was, she was the first person to hear, hey, wait, you're the Messiah? And she went back to her, and she had influence in the lives of people who wanted nothing to do with her. When the voice of Jesus became the voice that she rested in, when the voice of Jesus became the voice that she found her approval, she found her identity, she found her life in, it changed her world. She realized that she didn't have to be all things to all people. There were certainly still people there, still people in her community that didn't respect, that didn't like. They may have still whispered. There were certainly people in her community who still didn't listen to what she had to say. But the beautiful part about it is after she found rest in the approval of Jesus, she didn't need them to anymore. They were no longer shaping who she became. Whose voice are you listening to? In certain seasons of your life, whose voice are you listening to? Do you know what Jesus thinks about you? Like, do you know what God thinks about you right now, knowing you fully? Ephesians 2.10 is one of my favorite verses. It's the Apostle Paul. He says that you are God's masterpiece chosen in Christ Jesus to do the good works that he prepared for you ahead of time. He says you are God's masterpiece. There's some versions that say worksmanship, craftsmanship, but the Greek word that Paul used there is poe. Let me look at it. I want to make sure I say it right. Well, I'm going to read it. Those are the right letters. I'm going to say it wrong. Poema. He says, you are God's poema. It's where we get our word poem from. Do you know what God thinks about you? You are his poetry. You are God's poem. His work of art that before time began, he loved. You do all of the things that you do, but do it from an awareness that you have of God who looks at you as his work of art. Let's pray. God, thank you so much. Thank you for the love, the life, the grace that you offer. God, there's going to be seasons, some of us more often than others, when the need and desire for approval begins to become our focus, when image management becomes the thing that we work on the most because we need people to let us in. God, what I ask you to do is just with the softness and gentleness of your Holy Spirit, remind us. Remind us who we are in you. Remind us of the life, the freedom, and the rest that we found in you as our Savior. And let us live our life, God, from a position of approval from God instead of seeking the approval of man. We trust you. In Jesus' name, amen.