Sermons tagged with Theology

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks so much for making grace a part of your Sunday. This morning, as we were getting ready for the service, I looked at the chairs and I went, it's the summer months, crowds are going to start to dwindle. I don't want people to show up in the room to feel cavernous. So I took a chair off of the end of each row. Yeah. And then I was talking with Shane and Phil, who've been here longer than me. And they said, hey, next week, maybe leave all the chairs in there. And I said, yeah, I'm going to consult with you two before making any more rash decisions about this. So I'm as surprised as you are that it's crowded here. And my standard joke is if you had a hard time finding a parking space, or if you had to make your own, you know what time it starts. So that doesn't feel like it's my problem. Welcome to Grace. Several years ago, I was at my previous church. And at that church I served essentially as an associate pastor, but one of my roles was to serve as the family pastor. Hang on, this is driving me nuts. I was not the IT guy, just the family pastor. One of my roles was to serve as a family pastor and in a larger church staff, it was a larger church at the time, the family pastor oversees the children's ministry and the student ministry and the people who run those ministries. So in that capacity, I had a guy that worked for me named Alan. He was a youth pastor. And Alan, it was getting to be the summertime, and we told him that he could hire some interns for that summer. And one of the guys he hired was a kid named Aaron. And I don't really know. Aaron was young, in his early 20s. I don't really know how he found the church. I think he just kind of started coming and volunteered and wanted to get involved in the youth ministry program. And Alan wanted to hire him as an intern. And so I heard that he got hired. And so I kind of went and met Aaron. And he was one of these guys that just immediately upon meeting him, I thought to myself, I don't like this dude. I like this guy. I don't like him. I don't like the way he chooses to present himself to the world. I like the way he looks. I like the way he talks. I'm not going to describe any of those things, lest I offend some of you. But the biggest thing I didn't like about this guy that rubbed me the wrong way was that everything he did, everything he did, he may as well have worn a t-shirt every day that said, please like me. And he was one of these people that had gotten involved in youth ministry because in my estimation, he had never been around people that liked him a lot. And he thought, well, then I'll shoot fish in a barrel. I can win middle schoolers over and get them to like me. So it was like he was in ministry as his own personal ego project to make himself feel better about himself. So he wanted to be cool. He was never cool. So I'll go into youth ministry so kids will like me and I'll feel cool. And I'll be honest with you. I've been at this a while. It takes one to know one. Early on, I had to repent of that same attitude of I just want to be respected and I want people to like me. And I think a dirty little secret of being in professional ministry and all I did is go pro with my faith. Okay. That's all I did. We're all supposed to be ministering. We're all supposed to be Jesus's ambassadors. I just decided I'm going to take my talents to the professional level and get paid for this. Okay. But everybody's supposed to do the same thing. And a lot of the people who get into ministry early on, it's an ego project. I want to feel important and respected, and God sanctifies that and massages that out of us. So hopefully we can minister out of a gentle and contrite spirit and a humble heart and genuinely want to usher people towards Jesus and towards his kingdom. But what I sensed in this guy, Aaron, was that he was off the charts, look at me, like me guy. And I thought it was gross and I didn't like it. And I went to Alan and I said, dude, I said, I like that guy. It doesn't need to be around youth ministry. Nothing nefarious was going on. I didn't suspect anything nefarious. I just suspected that his motives for ministering were wrong. And I didn't want that around our ministry. That's not why we get involved in what we're doing. I was like, I don't like him, not comfortable with him. You need to get rid of him. And he kept defending him, but all summer long, he was just one of these guys that immediately when I met him, I didn't like him. And it makes me wonder if when I start talking about people that you just don't like, if any of you can think of somebody right now that you just don't like. And I would ask you, besides the older gentleman that greets at the front door, Ron Torrance, that's mine that I'm thinking of right now. So y'all aren't allowed to pick Ron, you have to pick somebody else. I think everybody in this room has somebody they can think of when I say, who's somebody that you just don't like? And now maybe immediately our minds will go to celebrities or people that we've never met, but we've seen in different medias and we just don't like them. I'm not talking about them this morning, although that is an ancillary application of this. I'm talking about people in your life that you know that you don't like. Now, some of us are like Kyle. This morning, I asked Kyle for some sermon research before the service. Hey, man, can you think of anybody that you just don't like? And he was like, I'm sure if you gave me a minute, I could come up with somebody, but no. And then there's other people I talked to this morning were out of nowhere. I was like, hey, don't you know so-and-so? And he says, he's a good buddy of mine, and he says to me, yeah, I do know him. You would not like this guy. I can't stand him. So there's people on different, and I said, you're going to like the sermon this morning, dude. There's people on different ends of the spectrum, but no matter where you sit on that spectrum, we can all think of people that we've met in our life that we don't particularly care for. Sometimes very justified, sometimes small, silly reasons. I don't like their attitude, whatever it is. I don't like the cut of their jib. Whatever it might be, we have people that we don't like. And because that's a reality of life, because the reality of life is from time to time, we will meet people, we will be surrounded with people, we will be in close contact with people that we don't particularly care for. A co-worker from time to time, our spouse, our parents can rub us the wrong way sometimes, our children can rub us the wrong way sometimes. But there are people, those people we kind of bring back into the fold because we need to, but there's some people that we will just write off. Like, I just don't like that person. Don't want to deal with that person. A neighbor that is your mortal enemy, whatever might be going on in your life, we have those people that we simply don't care for. And a question that has come up often in my life as a Christian is kind of this theoretical question, is it okay as a Christian to not like someone? Is that all right? And so that's really the opening question of the day. There will be some people you simply don't like, but is that okay? There will be some people that you simply don't like, but is that, as a Christian, is that okay? Now this comes in the middle of a series, or This is actually the last part of the series called In Light Of. We've been going through Romans since February. We went through the first eight chapters, which meticulously build a case for humanity's need for Jesus. And then there's the culmination of those chapters in Romans 8, where we do need Jesus very much, and then promises are made to us that nothing can ever separate us from his love. And in light of this wonderful truth that Jesus accepts us, loves for us, paved a way for us to spend eternity in relationship with Almighty God, how should we then live our lives? So every week we've been looking at a different chapter in Romans 9 through now 15. In light of that truth, how should we live our lives? And so this week we come to Romans 15, and I believe it asks this question, or at least it answers this question, one that we deal with from time to time. As Christians, is it okay for us to have people that we simply don't like? Now, if you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, thank you so much for being here. And I have good news for you. I'm not preaching to you this morning. If you're not a believer this morning, you are free to not like whoever you want. You do not have to hold yourself to the standards of this. But if you're a Christian, that may not be our answer. So to that question and to the unavoidable reality that from time to time there are people in our life that we simply don't like, is this okay? Are we allowed to do that? Paul writes this, Romans 15, verses 5 through 7. May God, who gives endurance and encouragement, give you the same attitude of mind towards each other that Christ Jesus had, so that with one mind and one voice you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Verse 7. Accept one another then, just as like people? And sometimes it's for very justifiable reasons. But as we approach Scripture and say, is it ever okay for a Christian to simply not like someone? This is the instruction. Accept others as Christ accepted you. What does he say in verse 5? He wants to give you the same attitude of mind towards each other as Christ has towards you. So in two different ways, when we ask the question, is it okay to have people in my life I simply don't like? And I want to be very clear here. Obviously, obviously, we're not asking the question, can I be openly mean to them? I don't like them. Therefore, I feel like it's my right to ridicule them and belittle them in the workplace until they quit in shame. We're not preaching against that. I'm going to assume you know that. If you don't know that, there's a great fourth and fifth grade class right over there that might be on your level. Obviously, we know it's not good to ridicule people, to treat them poorly because we simply don't like them. Hopefully, we are of an elevated morality and sense of character that even when we don't prefer somebody, even when we don't like somebody, we find it within the magnanimity of our generous character and spirit to be nice to them from time to time. We have probably executed that. That's how we get around in society, is we learn to at least be cordial to people, even if we don't prefer them. And we tend to think as Christians that this is an okay model. As long as I'm not a jerk, then I'm fine. But that's not what Romans says. What Romans says is we should have the same mind towards others that Jesus has towards us. That we should accept others as Jesus accepts us. Which is different than if you just don't like somebody, try to be nice to them. No, no, no. We should think of them as Jesus thinks of us. So let me ask you this. How do you think Jesus accepts others? Do you think that Jesus is in heaven? And when some cranky old lady dies, he looks at Paul and he's like, Paul, I can't think of a name that's not offensive right now. So I'll choose one that is. Karen just died. Paul, you're welcome. Thank you for being the foil for that joke. Paul, look at this. Karen just died. And both Jesus and Paul go, oh, geez, this is going to be a handful in heaven. Do you think there are people that pass away that Jesus is like, I was really hoping that they wouldn't accept me because they were going to be Satan's problem. And now there's eternity with this person. I'm going to talk my ear off. Do you think Jesus does this? Don't you think he likes people? Don't you think he likes you? Do you think that when you get to heaven, you'll be like, Jesus, man, that I could be. I've already given the example of Aaron, and we're going to come back to that story and redeem it a little bit. But you think I'm going to get to heaven and be like, Jesus, like, for real, dude. Aaron, he was the worst, right? And you think Jesus is going to be like, I know, thanks for bearing that burden for me, brother. No, no, obviously Jesus likes everybody. And some of my Bible scholars in the room may go, well, hang on, he didn't seem to like the Pharisees very much. And I'll give you that. He was stern with the Pharisees. But we also see a Jesus that when one of them came to him in John chapter 3 named Nicodemus and wanted to talk with him and ask him more questions, and he asked to meet Jesus at night. Why? So that his Pharisee peers wouldn't see him meeting with Jesus and so bring shame upon his good name. He wanted to meet with Jesus in secret, and Jesus knew that. And what did he do? He didn't say, no, I don't care for you. I don't like your kind. You want to talk to me? You talk to me in the middle of the day in front of everybody. No. He said, all right, let's talk. And he had an open, honest, generous conversation with Nicodemus. Well, he didn't seem to like the Pharisees very much. Okay, well, he was stern with them from time to time. But do you not think that Jesus wanted to see them in his kingdom? Do you not think that Jesus knew who they were inside and out and wanted to see them come to faith and use the influence that they had been given to usher other people into that faith? Do you not think he saw the best in them and wanted the best for them? I think it's a really, really difficult argument to make that Jesus simply doesn't care for some people. That Jesus has an attitude towards people of, you know, I really don't like them very much, but I'm going to be nice to them if they're around. I'm going to try to think positively of them, which should really inform the question for us, am I allowed to simply not like someone? Well, all I know is that we're instructed in Scripture to have the same mind towards others that Jesus has towards them. And we're told to accept people as Jesus accepts them. So let me bring this more personal, if we're still having a difficult time with the concept, and ask you this question. How did and does Christ accept you? This is a really important question. Because you're here this morning, it's a Sunday, most of you woke up and showered, you put on decent clothes, you're presenting yourself. This is an environment in which it is imminently easy to be liked. All you have to do is shake the hands of people who look at you. If someone says good morning, you say good morning back. If someone says, how are you doing? You say, good, I hope you are, or good, how are you doing? It's really easy to put on the facade. Just be nice to everybody, you'll leave likable. It's harder with the people you see every day. It's harder at home. And it's harder for the people who know you the best to like you the most. That's why we love to be fully seen and to be fully known. To be fully seen by your spouse and to be fully known by them is this great picture of love, to really know your kids and know what they're capable of and understand all the ugliness in them and go sweep it aside and love them deeply anyways. And for people to offer you that is exceptional love. And it is very rare for someone to know us deeply and yet still like us. That's what makes friends and spouses so deeply important and meaningful in our life. But even those people who know us the best don't know us completely. They don't know every racist thought we've ever had. They don't know every pretension that we hold. They don't know every time we look down on someone else and so elevate ourselves. They don't know what we really think of that person that posts that thing on Facebook. Even the people who know us the best don't know everything that's happening in us all the time. And the reality is that for most of us, we think and feel pretty confident that if they did, they would not still like us. Jesus knows all of those things. And Jesus likes you, accepts you completely. He knows what's worst about you. He's been with you through the Holy Spirit. His presence has been brought into your lowest moment where no one else was and that you never talk about. And Jesus is excited for you to come to heaven with him. He likes you. So I would ask you again, those people in our lives that we don't like, we're told by Scripture to accept them as Christ accepted us. So how did and does Jesus accept you? And I love thinking about this. Jesus accepted you when you accepted him, knowing everything that you would be and become after that, the good and the bad. And he still likes you. He still wants you around. So that's how we are supposed to accept other people. This is difficult, right? And I know that some of us might go extreme with this. Do you mean that Jesus really likes the terrorists from 9-11, Nate? He really likes them? I believe that Jesus loves them. I believe that Jesus was hurt deeply for them. I believe that Jesus saw impressionable young men that were deceived by evil and led to believe things that were fundamentally untrue to a place where their life was defined by hate, which is the exact opposite of what Jesus wanted for them. So I believe that he grieved for them, that he did love them. Many of us in our life have people who have hurt us deeply. Nate, it's easy for you to say that I'm not allowed to not like somebody, but you don't know what my dad did to me. You don't know what my mom was like. You don't know what my ex-husband did. You don't know what my ex-wife did. You don't know how awful my brother was growing up. You don't know that. I have a right to my disdain. I have a right to my dislike. You probably do. You probably do. All I can tell you is that Paul prays that we will learn to accept them as Christ accepts us. All I can tell you is that Paul tells us that we should have the same mind towards them that Jesus has towards us. Now here's, and I want to say this before I move on. I believe those extreme examples are the exception, not the rule. I believe when I asked you to think of somebody in your life that maybe you just don't care for, that for most of you, that answer was not from some place of deep wounding and hurt. For most of you, it was an answer similar to me. I didn't like this guy. He just rubbed me the wrong way. I never did prefer him. But for both examples, how do we find a path towards that generosity and magnanimity of spirit where we can actually find a way to like people that we don't like? Well, I would like to invite you to learn to ask what I think is a very important question. What are their actions telling me they really need? When I see someone acting in a way that I don't like, what are their actions telling me they really need? When I was looking at Aaron and I immediately decided I didn't like him, not Aaron Gibson, our worship pastor, I still don't like him, but Aaron from the example, the youth intern. And I immediately, I decided I didn't like him. Why did I not like him? I didn't like him because he was trying to get approval from kids and that's not where you should get approval, man. That's not the reason to get in here. So you need to get your fragile ego out of here. I didn't like him because he wanted approval and acceptance. Because he wanted to feel like he was enough. He had never felt before in his life like he was enough. And he didn't, And here's the thing. Everybody wants that. Everybody in this room wants that. Everybody in this room might as well tattoo across their chest or across their forehead, am I enough? We all wonder that. So how could I not like somebody for asking the same question that I do? It's just that some of us figure out how to get that question answered in more socially acceptable ways than he did. But if I would have stopped and just said, what do his actions tell me that he needs and wants? I would have very quickly arrived at, Aaron just wants to be enough. And that's not really something worth condemning him for. Maybe I should show him instead of withhold from him. I've seen clips going around recently about people losing their minds in public places. Groups of people losing their minds in restaurants, yelling at waiters, yelling at owners, throwing things in Chipotle, yada, yada, yada. And it's easy to watch that and be like, those people are completely unlikable. And that's the most mild way I can summarize my thoughts in that moment. We have every right to disdain them and their behavior. But if you ask this question, what do their actions show me that they need or want? What their actions show me is that they want to feel respected. They want to feel like they have some sense of control. They want to feel like their needs are valued like everyone else's. And for whatever reason, something's happened in their life to make them think that nobody cares about them. And so rather than sit back and quietly take it, they're going to be vocal about demanding it. Who among us does not want to feel in control from time to time? Who among us doesn't want to be respected? Who among us is happy with taking a backseat to everyone else if that's the paradigm that we feel like we live with? And so when we ask this question, what do their actions tell me that they need? It gets us to this place of empathy and understanding, which kind of paves the way to liking them. And so I want to ask you this question. What would happen if we chose empathy over disdain? What would happen if we chose empathy over disdain? If when we see somebody that, and we go, I don't like them. I don't like people who vote that way. I don't like people who post that way. I don't like people that agree with that, that are of this political party. I don't like people who whine about this or carry on about this. I don't like high maintenance people. I don't like low maintenance people. I don't like tough people. I don't like weak people. Whatever it might be, the people that we don't like. Stop when we feel ourselves not liking someone. I want you to test this out. For some of you, it's going to happen very quickly. You're going to be leaving the aisle and the person in front of you is going to be going slow and you're going to feel rage well up within you. Why are they moving so slowly? Pause. What are their actions tell me that they need? Time, you jerk. That's what they need. They're old and they need time. And you will be too one day and you will need time. So relax. Next time you feel yourself tempted to not like someone and give in to that, pause. What do their actions tell me that they need? And is what they need really that condemnable? With the people that have hurt us deeply, what do their actions tell me that they need? Some of us, I'm sure, and I don't want to speak too lightly about it, but what we know from research and experience, some people grew up with a dad that was violent. What do those actions show you that he needs? He probably needed a good dad too. He probably didn't have that either. He probably needs to be understood. He probably needs somebody to love him enough to sit him down and say, hey man, this is not the way you should be, but he's never had anybody who loved him enough to say something. I'm not trying to excuse away abusive behavior at all. I'm just saying that there is a way to begin a path towards empathy by asking ourselves, what do their actions tell me that they need? And then beginning to understand what motivates the bad behavior, not defining them by the bad behavior. At the end of Aaron's tenure, he finished being an intern, and he wanted to come on as a youth assistant in a full-time capacity. And I wasn't going to let that happen. And so he asked to meet with me to know why we chose not to hire him. And I told my youth pastor to take the meeting. I didn't want to do anything. No, I'm just messing around. I took the meeting. And leading up to that meeting, I thought to myself, you know, I have to love him enough to tell him the truth. I have to respect him enough as a human to tell him the truth. And we met and he said, why can't I move forward at this church? And I said, and I told him, I said, man, here's what I think. I think that you need to take a break from youth ministry because I don't, I don't think that you're really happy with yourself. And I think that you're in this to try to gain the respect of others, but getting the respect of some students is really not going to make you feel okay about yourself. So I think that you need to get involved in a small group of your peers. You need to let God speak to you. You need to pause and consider whether youth ministry is really the career that you need to take or if you're just doing this for selfish reasons. And once you've reconciled with those things, I think you should move forward with whatever path God gives you. But right now, I think you're trying to get into ministry for the wrong reasons and you're going to end up crashing and burning. And he thanked me. And he went on and he, honestly, he followed my advice. He did what I told him I thought he should do. He took some time off, got involved in another church, met a nice girl, decided ultimately to go back to school to get a Bible degree and to get into ministry. But he called me years later and he said, I just want to thank you for that conversation because you were right. And God did have some work to do on me. Now here's what's really important. That story works out like I'm the hero, but I never tell those stories because I'm not. Here's where I failed him because I let my dislike get in the way. I could have had that conversation with him in May. And I could have been a part of helping rehabilitate him, helping him grow through that. And in September, he didn't have to experience the rejection that I imposed on him because I refused to love him enough to tell him the truth about himself. And because I was a coward, and because I didn't love him enough, I was happy to just sit and dislike instead of asking myself, what do his actions tell me that he needs? And then acting according to that empathy rather than disdain. I withheld from him. And the other way I withheld from him, and this is awful, nobody needs my approval. Nobody cares what I think about them. I'm not here to claim that. But if you just think about the dynamic, here's a young 20-something kid, he's 21 years old. I'm at the time 36 or 36. No, I was 34 or 35. And I had, by all measures, accomplished what he wanted to do with his career. I was what he wanted to be. Now, that's just a position. It's not me personally. It's just the position. We understand the dynamics of someone early in their career, seeing someone that's progressed in their career going, I want to learn from that person. Meaning because of my position, realizing that all he wanted was to be told that he's enough, I could have gone to him and I could have said early on, hey dude, Jesus loves you. You are enough. I think you're going to be great. Here's your challenges to what greatness could look like. Here's where your character may be getting in the way of what God wants to do with you. But I believe that if you're willing to be open about that and move on from them, that God can do some powerful things with you. So you stick by me and we're going to tackle this together. How much better does that look than just simply choosing to not like him for justifiable reasons for the five months that he was in my care? What does choosing to not like him win me? What did I prove to him? What did I prove to myself? What benefit is it to us to have people that we've simply reconciled to ourselves? We're not going to like them. None. But here's the benefit if we do. I'm skipping two points in your notes if you're following along. The last thing is the result. Verse 7, complaining about. The result of refusing to dislike someone, even when it's justifiable, but offering them grace and searching for empathy instead and seeking to understand what their actions tell us that they need and loving them for what motivates them, not judging them for their behaviors. The result of that is that people bring praise to God. The result of that, if we can practice that here, is to create an environment where everyone feels loved and everyone feels accepted and everyone feels like they're part of the church and everyone feels like they're welcome here and everyone wants to be a part of what they are. And because they're so accepted here, they will accept other people. The result of that is not just about grace. It's about the kingdom and the community of God. What if God's children would quit seeing it as an option to simply not like people because we can and we don't want to? But what if the kingdom of God took upon itself to see people with grace and with empathy and to understand what lies behind the behaviors and to love the person that has the same motives we do, to like, to be loved, to be known, to be respected, to be cared for? What if we began to see people for that and how we were instead of seeing them as the world was and looking for reasons and excuses to disdain them? How much more attractive and fragrant would our faith be? How much more praise would be brought to God if we would simply quit letting ourselves dislike people for reasons that ultimately don't matter and start making ourselves ask for God's empathy, for God's acceptance of them, for Jesus's mind towards other people that Jesus has towards other people. What if we started becoming people like that? What if the kingdom of God started offering empathy like that? How much more praise would be brought to the God that we all serve? So let's stop not liking people. Let's knock it off. Let's find paths to empathy so that we can accept everyone with the same mind that Jesus does. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for these seniors that have graduated and are moving into a new phase of life. God, I pray specifically that you would be with each of their moms as they worry here for the next several months, probably in a continued way. Give them your peace of spirit as their children go and step into these new phases. Lord, I pray that we would be a people who like folks the way you do. That we would find paths to empathy and understanding so that we might think the best of them. So that we might love them well as you do. God, where there are roadblocks to this, where there's difficulty there, where we just have a person that we just can't get around to liking, I pray that you would help us begin to break down those walls and show them your love and your acceptance and your grace and your goodness. In Jesus' name, amen.

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

All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Erin, and I get the privilege of being one of the pastors here. And thank you for being here this morning, whether you're joining us online or whether you're here in person. We are just grateful that you chose to carve a little bit of your Sunday out to spend it with us. This morning, we are actually continuing in our series, as Mikey kind of reminded us, in Gentle and Lowly, where we've actually been looking at the character of Christ. We've looked at his compassion. We've looked at his humanity. We've looked at him as our gentle priest. And last week, we looked how he is our intercessor, as well as our advocate before the Father. And this week, we're going to jump ahead. We're now in chapter 18, and today we're actually looking at his yearning bowels. That one took a minute to sink in, didn't it? For those of you all that giggled and or wanted to laugh but chose not to, may that middle school boy that lives inside of you remain there forever because they bring such joy and interest to life. And for those of you that the yearning bowels may have brought up unfortunate thoughts of explosive bowels, I apologize on that front as well. And I hope that in this morning I can erase those visions from your head. And you can't blame me for today's topic. Nate holds that one firmly on his shoulders because he's the one that picked up the book and went through chapter by chapter and decided what he felt is what Grace needed to hear. So he's the one that chose that y'all needed to hear about yearning bowels today. But in actuality, if you dig into the chapter, what the chapter is about is about God's yearning love for us, about his tender and his compassionate heart that reaches in and grabs us in the depths of our sin and wants to pull us out. And as I read this and I continue to read over this, I have to admit, and I stand before you very transparent as one of the pastors and say, I struggle with this. And I struggle with what this says. I know it to be theologically the truth but I have moments when I look at it and say hmm there's a God that loves me down to the depths of his being to his core. He loves me that much and I struggle with And I ask sometimes, how is that truly possible? For those of you that know me, this next statement will not come as a shock, but I am a people pleaser by nature. And for as long as I can remember, I've sought the approval of others. It's just who I am. It is part of my wiring, I truly believe. If you go into all the personality tests and you look at all the things, like I'm a helper. I don't know all the numbers and letters. I just don't. But that's just who I am. That's how I'm wired. I also think environmentally there was an impact. My dad was in food retail. We moved a ton when I was a kid. I was in four different elementary schools before I hit fifth grade. So I spent a lot of time trying to fit in, trying to find new friends, trying not to be labeled as, you know, the new girl. That's not something I wanted to carry. I just wanted to fit in and be part of a group or like just a little cluster. The other thing is, is that I didn't in those elementary years have a foundation in God's love for me. I grew up with parents who were believers, but we were also a family that were Christers. For those of you that don't understand that terminology, we went to church on Christmas and Easter. That was my exposure to the church. Good or bad, again, that's just what it was. I also had a brother who played travel hockey, so we were always on the road. These were choices that my parents made, and I don't hold any of it against them by any means, but I think it helped to form who I am and how I continue to do. Because from childhood and even into adulthood, my world's been marked by a lot of striving. This striving to be accepted, this striving to prove myself, to somehow earn a place. And then after I became a Christian, that striving also fell into, I think, and shaped how I viewed God. I knew that I loved him. I knew I believed in who he is and who he says he was. I knew that what scripture said about him was 100% true, but I still doubted sometimes that he could love me the way that he said he did in scripture. Because y'all, I knew I'm messy, I'm stinky, I carry lots of baggage. I carry lots of shame, lots of regret for my past. And so for me to think about that kind of love hitting home for me is hard sometimes to wrap my head around. And so as I was continuing to prepare, Nate and I have met a few times. And again, this might be shocking to you all. He came to me a couple times and said, you have too many words. You need to parse it down just a little bit. But he challenged me to find one thing, just one thing that out of this chapter and out of what I've studied, that I would hope that you guys would walk away with. And so, Nate, I apologize ahead of time because in looking for my one thing, I may have veered off course from what we had talked about originally. So this is what we've got, though. But he challenged me to think about one thing for you all to walk out of here with today as we talk about God's love for us. And the thing that hit me somewhere in all of this was from John chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. And what that says is, a new commandment I give you, love one another as I have loved you, so you must love one another. And by this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. Y'all, when I read that, when I went back to it and I read over it and I read over it again, and it hit me right in the face. How is it that we can love others if we don't believe that he loves us? He states in that commandment, he wants us to love others like he's loved us. But if I doubt or if I don't believe in the love that he's given me, how then in turn can I give that love out to others? And I think that's why our world today is starving. It's starving for the kind of love that Jesus offers to us. This love that's real. It's not a political correctness or tolerance. It's not a kind of love that is social niceties, but it's the kind of love that is rooted in stays, forgives, it heals. So when he says for us to love others the way he's loved us, he's not asking us to try to do better. I think what he's doing is he's inviting us to be transformed. Transformed by the love that he has for us first. Because see, we can't love others like Jesus until we trust that we're loved by Jesus. This is it. If you hear nothing else I say today, this is it. That we ourselves can't love like he asks us to love others until we trust that we're truly loved by him. And this love that he has for us and is asking us to give out to others, it's not a cautious love. It's not a distant love. But it's a love that is actually drawn into our need and our messy. Which that's the part that I think for a lot of us is scary, right? So when we're at those places down deep, and this is where I said before, I have messy, I have lots of background baggage, right? But that's the place that Jesus wants to meet us and dig in, in that place of sin and love us all the more. So in those places where we feel the most unworthy or the most unlovable, the most ashamed, he wants to meet us there. We have to learn how to wrap our heads around that. And I think that there's a lot of us in this room that may be like, yeah, well, he extends that to others around us. I've seen it. I've seen it. I've seen that love extended to other people, but he's not going to give that to me because, you know, not after what I've done, not after the fact that I have yelled at my children for the 10,000th time, not after I have attempted and yet failed one more time to quit alcohol or drugs or pornography. Or after I have had the abuse that I have in my past. He can't love me there. He can't. And so instead of resting in his love, what we do when we put up that wall that says he can't get into those down, dark, dirty places with us is we start striving to earn love in other places. We have somehow to prove to others around us that we're lovable, that we're worthy of the love that he has or that somebody else has. I'm lovable. If I just keep doing, if I keep striving, if I keep somehow, somebody's going to think that I'm worthy. But when we doubt, when we doubt, when we strive, it doesn't do us any good. And in actuality, it makes us poor lovers of the people around us. He calls us to love others the way that he's loved us. But if we're striving to get that love from other people and from other places, then we are in a place where we have no capacity to give love if we're always striving to try to grab it from something. And when we doubt that we're loved, we tend to withhold our love from those around us. Because you know what? It took me an awful lot to feel this little bit of love that I've got right now. I'm not ready to give that up. And so we hold on and we're not doing a good job in loving other people. And so when you look at how Christ loved, we go back to where he was when he gave this commandment. He's in the upper room. It's the night before he's to go to the cross. The night before he makes the sacrifice of his life where he takes on your sin, my sin, your neighbor's sin, past, present, and future. So that we can have a relationship with him and that we can in turn be with him forever. So it's the night before he's getting ready to do that for us. He's sitting in a room with his 12 best friends and he knows already that Judas is about to betray him. He knows that Peter will deny him and he knows that by the time that the sun rises, all of the disciples will have scattered. He knows that. And yet he makes a very conscious choice to kneel down and to wash their feet. Y'all, if that was me and my humanness, that would not have been my response. Think about it. I might've been angry. I could have been, you know, or like, like, just not going to talk about this. You're going to be hateful, ugly people to me here in about 12 hours. I'm done with you. But that's not how he chooses to respond. He chooses with love and action. He chooses to serve when it is the least deserved. And he chooses to move towards those who are failing him. He knows it. And that's what he does for us too, right? He moves towards us in those places where he knows we're going to fail him, where we're not doing what we feel or what we should be doing. And then he continues on and he says to them, as I have loved you, so you must love one another. So he's just knelt down. He's just given them that love that they didn't deserve, that love that met them in this place of complete and total failure. And he says, have to receive it before you can give it because love starts with receiving before it becomes doing. We get that backward all the time in our humanness. We get that backward all the time. When we're not anchored in his love for us, all we end up doing is making ourselves exhausted making ourselves defensive and disappointed I said before that I am a people pleaser and one of the things that people pleasers do so beautifully is they put others before themselves quite often to your detriment. Many of you guys know that my parents passed away within 17 months of each other, and sandwiched in between there, there was lots of running back and forth to Pinehurst, lots of hospital visits, lots of taking on responsibility and helping my dad and aunt. There was a whole litany of things that I could add in there. In there also, I was trying to be a good wife. I was trying to be a good mom. I was trying to be a good pastor here at Grace. And I can stand before you and tell you I failed miserably at all of that during that period of time. It wasn't pretty. I was short with my family. I know I let people here down. I let my coworkers down. It wasn't pretty. And I know it. And I was constantly running. I had my kids later admit to me that there were things that they didn't tell me during that time because they didn't want to add anything else to my plate. And as a mama, for those of the other mamas in the room, you know that just breaks your heart to think that they just can't come to you. I just was not a good human at that moment or during this time. And I can also admit to the fact that I would get phone calls periodically from my dad after my mom had passed. And I remember seeing his name pop up on the screen and literally just staring at the phone and in moments dreading answering it. I love my dad to my core, but I knew to answer it there would be questions and he was very needy at those moments and I didn't have anything left to give. I was done. I was exhausted. I did answer it, by the way. But still, in that moment, there was always that thought and that hesitation as I looked at the screen because I was like, oh, no. And the thing is, I neglected myself, and I realize now that we can't, you can't pour out what you haven't first received. I was working from an empty cup, a very empty shell, because I was running myself absolutely ragged. And this goes back to the fact that we can't love like Jesus if we don't trust that we're loved by Jesus. If I'm not filled up by Jesus because I trust that he loves me, I am not loving others well. And I think that there's a lot of us in the world like this today. And I think that this emptiness or this constant striving and this constant motion trying to earn something, trying to pour ourselves out from empty cups is why the world can feel like it does sometimes, where we're living in this place where we're quick to divide and quick to assume things and slow to forgive. And we see that often sliding into the church as well because the church is made up of a lot of humans, right? And it slides into the church as well. You don't need me to tell you that. You all have seen it at some point in time. All you have to do is look online. And it makes you sad. And I think back to what Jesus said about his disciples loving others. And I wonder to us too, if we classify our followers, ourselves as followers of Jesus, what would it be like if the people of Jesus were known not for being right or righteous or all the things you could add there, but for being rooted. Being so secure in his love that we freely give out our love to others. That we are so rooted in his love that we no longer compete, but we serve, that we're so rooted in his love that we no longer compare ourselves to others, but we celebrate each other, and that somehow when we're so rooted that we no longer condemn, but we just choose to forgive and to offer grace. Because I think then the world will start to take notice. And the world's going to recognize us as Jesus followers by our love for one another. Our love, this love that is so rooted deep inside of us, is meant to be living evidence of who he is. It's meant to be that living evidence to the rest of the world that he is real and he is love. Not our striving love, not our performing love. That's not the kind of love that we need here. What we need here is that secure love, the love that is flowing from a heart that is rooted and anchored in grace. And I know some of you all are now looking at me going, okay, that sounds really good. And you've not met my mother-in-law or my father-in-law or whoever it may be, my coworker, my brother, my sister, whoever it may be that says, and you're going, but loving like Jesus is going to be really hard in those circumstances. Yeah, it is because we're human and we run out of patience and we run out of kindness and we run out of, in a lot of cases, just run out of ourselves. But I go back to that commandment that he gave us. And I don't think he gave it to us to be impossible. I think he gave it to us as a reminder and an invitation to draw us back to him and to remind us that that same love that he gives and that same love that saved us is now going to be the love that empowers us to love others. And that that love and that grace that he met us with in the middle of our messy, stinky mess is now going to be the love and grace that helps us to meet others in their mess. It's an invitation and a reminder that even with those that are super hard to love, we can't work it up sometimes. We can't just walk into the situation going, I'm going to love them better today. I am. I'm going to love them better today. It doesn't always work that way because our ability to love doesn't come from some sort of willpower. I truly believe that it comes from being willing to be loved. I had the opportunity last week to hang out with some sorority sisters. We did this the year before. It's just a sweet time. We get to reconnect. This year, my old roommate got to join us, and I was so excited. I had not seen her in probably seven or eight years. And Shelly and I got to actually room together again on this trip, and we spent many nights just chatting and talking and catching up. And I asked her about her sister and how things were going. Shelly had a sister who about 15 years ago had a brain tumor, multiple surgeries, etc. Left her sister with basically some traumatic brain injury. She had short-term memory issues. Long-term memory was very much intact. Her physical ability is very much intact. So she could live somewhat independently. It was always nice just to have some people around to check on her. And about seven years ago, she moved up to be close to Shelly and her family. Lived a couple houses away, so very involved in her life, constantly looking after, checking in on her, and all the things. In 2022, her sister caught COVID, and because of her compromised health, landed her in the hospital for a great deal of time. It accelerated some of her decline. And because of that, she ended up in a rehab facility. And Shelly's comment in all of this to me was, I don't understand why it's her and it's not me. There was a lot of guilt in that respect. And, you know, we talked about it, and she's a believer as well. And I'm like, I don't have an answer for you on that one. There isn't an answer for why it's her and not you. And then she went on to say that one of the things recently that Amy has started to do is that every time they go to visit, Amy just looks at her and says, God has been so good to me. And it's at every visit. And Shelly looked at me and she said, I don't know how she can say that. After 15 years and all she's gone through and all the struggles and all the things, I don't know sometimes how she can say that. But this time I knew I could look at Shelly right in the face and go, I know exactly why she says that. Because of you. You are her personal representative of God's love. You who shows up and loves on her unconditionally. You who takes her out. You who does all the things for her and with her. To her, you represent God's love. So when she says, God has been so good to me, she can say it because of the way that you love her. And I hope, Grace, that we can be that to other people as well. Nate often states that we can't be the big C church, but we can be Grace. And we as individual people can impact, we can work on ourselves, we can impact our families, we can also then impact this body and the communities around us. And so when you think about Shelly and you think about her willingness to love so unconditionally the way she did. I think about us and myself. This is me talking to myself too. But what would it be like if we chose to believe the best about one another because we know that that's what love does? What would it be like if we showed up for people who were hurting? Even when we didn't want to because their hurting is hard. But we did it because we know that that's what Jesus would do. What would it look like if we were forgiving before it's earned? Because we know that that's what grace would do. And what would it be like if we had all the patience with those that are just new or learning? Because again, we know what grace and love would do. Because I think every act of love then becomes this small reflection of the greater love that we've received. Because we can only do that, however, when we're sure of his love for us. And when we're secure in his love, we stop striving to earn it and we start living to spread it. And so today, I don't believe in my being that this is an invitation for us to walk out these doors and try to love better. I don't think that that's what this is. I think what this is is an invitation to us to let ourselves be loved deeper. To receive his love for us. All that Aaron and the team sang about. How much he loves us. That's what we have to receive first. And when we truly trust that we're loved by him. Freely, fully, without any condition. That will be the moment that we will turn and love others like he loves us. So we can't love others like Jesus until we trust that we're loved by Jesus. And so what is it, Grace, that you guys can do this week as you walk out these doors to root yourself deeper in the love that he has for you today? And will y'all pray with me? Thank you. Thank you, Lord, that you love us. Thank you, Lord, that you give so freely of your love. We just ask that we are willing to receive that, that we put down ourselves, that we quit striving to earn our love from someplace else and quit striving to earn your love. But somehow, by staying rooted in you, that we learn how very deeply you love us. That down deep in our core and our soul, that you love us that down deep in our core and our soul that you love us that much and by doing so challenging us to then take that love and spread it to those around us thank you Lord for your love thank for your son. And it's in your name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Welcome to Grace. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. If you're joining us online, thank you for doing that as well. Just a little disclaimer. Panthers fans, it's a total accident that on the day that my Falcons play your weak-willed Panthers that I brought this cup and then face the Falcon towards you. I didn't mean to do that. Here, I'll do this so it doesn't distract you. But you know. We are in the third part of our series called Gentle and Lowly where we're looking at the character of our Savior. And we're seeking to learn more about him. By going through, this is a book, Gentleman Lily is a book by an author and pastor named Dane Ortlund. We had 60 copies. You guys took all of those, which is wonderful. And when I say took, I don't mean steal. I mean, you took them, and I presume you paid for them. I have not looked into the numbers because I don't know how. But if you would like to get a book and read along with us, there's a reading plan for the book and it's available. And if you don't know how to find it, let me know or let us know and we'll help you find it. But before I just jump into what we learned about Christ this week, I wanted to approach it this way. Sorry, now every time I do that, you're going to remember my dumb joke at the beginning of the sermon. I wanted to approach it this way. I think one of the things in life that's really fun to think about is the things that you find to be underrated. I think car rides and silence when you're by yourself, not like with other people, because that's weird, although that is also underrated, because you don't have to talk the whole time, you know. But car rides and silence are underrated. I drove from Atlanta to Raleigh one time without listening to a single thing, and it was actually pretty nice. I think not owning a pet is underrated. I think we overvalue that. But here's one of the things I realized, Jen and I realized was vastly underrated a few weeks ago. Chili's. Chili's, as a restaurant, is crazy underrated. So when Jen and I were in college, any time we would want to go on a date, and this was like 2001, 2002, when we met, when we wanted to go on a date, Jen, where do you want to go? Chili's. And she'd get the same thing every time. And I'm trying to bounce around the menu, and we went enough times that A, I knew her answer. B, please don't make me go to Chili's. I hated it. Just like now, as a grown-up, I hate sushi. I didn't used to hate sushi, but it's what Jen chooses every time, and it may as well just be a tasteless nutrition brick for me. I don't care for it anymore. But I think it was during the summer. Jen had the kids, and we were texting back and forth. We're like, let's meet for lunch. And so I said, where do you want to go? We were kind of bouncing ideas. And you know that exercise when you're trying to decide where to go with your spouse. I don't care. Yes, you do. What you'd like for me to do is play the game of guess the places you don't want to go. And I don't want to play that game. So eventually, one of us said, how about Chili's? And we said, fine. So we go to Chili's, and we get our normal order there, which is chips and queso, a triple dipper with Southwestern egg rolls, sliders, and boneless buffalo rings, hot sauce, sometimes honey chipotle if we're feeling crazy. The kids get their thing. Then all four of us share a molten chocolate lava cake. We get out of there for like $40, $ bucks. Everybody ate everything. And then here's one of my favorite parts about Chili's is they have the kiosk on the table now because my least favorite part of any meal when I'm out to eat is waiting for the check and then waiting for the check to be brought back to me. Because when I, when I ask for the check, when I swipe the card, I am, I'm. I'm a fast leaver. People sometimes offer me rides places. Hey, we're going to the same place. Do you want to ride? No, thanks. Because I don't want to leave when you want to leave. I want to leave before you do. So I'm a fast leaver. So when the check comes, I'm ready to go. And if it's slow service during the apps, when you bring the mains, I will ask for the check right then. Because I don't want to wait on you at the end of the meal when I'm full. Anyways, they've got a kiosk. You swipe your card whenever you want. You get to decide when you leave. You don't have to wait on anyone else's permission to go get in your car. It's great. So then after this Chili's experience, Jen and I looked at each other in the car as we were leaving and she was like, you know what? Chili's is always good. And I was like, it is. It always satisfies. Then, like a month later, we went on a date. Or a couple weeks, I don't know. And when you go on dates, you do the thing where you look around, you find the locally owned, you do the Yelp, Raleigh's Top Restaurant. You find somewhere fancy and nice and worthy of the occasion, and you go. And so we went to some restaurant, I don't remember where. And it cost twice what Chili's did for two people, not four. And we get in the car and we're driving home and I was like, how was that? And she's like, it was good. It's fine. And I was like, yeah, mine was fine too. It was good. It wasn't twice as good as Chili's. And so now, when we go out to eat, should we go someplace fancy? Maybe try Chili's. I would encourage you. There's one right across the street, Triangle Mall. Go there for lunch. Tell me I'm wrong. You're going to have a great experience, okay? I just think it's underrated and that we're too fancy for it, and I think that's funny. And I wanted to introduce this idea of things that we underrate because as we sit here in this series and we focus on the character of Christ, we focus on the theology of Christ, and we try to get to know our Jesus a little bit better. I think that there is a thing about the theology of Christ, about the character of Christ, about the miraculous experience and life of Christ that we as believers deeply undervalue. And I think it's this. We do not properly value the condescension of Christ. I do not believe that we properly value the condescension of Christ. I do not believe that we properly value the condescension of Christ from heaven to earth. And when we hear that word condescension, I think we tend to think of it in negative terms. I try to never ever preach in a way where you're condescended to, where I've put myself on some level that you're not yet at, although that's a little bit difficult to say since I'm literally on a level that you are not right now. But figuratively, I work really hard to never condescend to you, which is super easy because I really don't think I'm better than anyone in this room. As a matter of fact, I think there's plenty of ways in which I'm worse than a lot of you. And we as a church do not condescend to each other. We're all humans. We're all equal. We all have our strengths and our weaknesses. We all have our triumphs and our failures. We do not value person to person condescension. And when someone condescends to you, it ticks you off. And when you see someone else being condescending, you think they're a jerk, and you're right. But this word is good when we apply it to Christ, because he literally did condescend. He went from heaven to earth. He went from deity to human. He gave up his divine being to take on human nature. And I intentionally didn't say he gave up his divine nature to take on human being, human nature, because he did not give up his divine nature. Because we believe in our theology, whether you know this or not, we, Grace, would embrace a theology that says Jesus was 100% man and 100% God and the same being while he was here. This, if you like fancy words, is referred to as the hypostatic union. So he never gave up his divine nature, but he did give up his divine being to come and be with us. And I think it's important to choose the word condescend because it kind of arrests our attention because of the negative connotation we give it. But it forces us to deal with the reality, no, no, no, he really did. He really did give up a great deal to be placed on par and live as equals, as an equal with us. And I think that there's two big reasons, maybe even three, why we don't properly value the condescension of Christ. And the first I want to point out this morning is I think we fail to think about what it cost him to come down here. I think we fail to think about what did Jesus give up to become human? And he gave up his divine being, at least for a time. He gave up being in heaven forever. He's the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. He holds the keys to death and Hades. He lived in heaven in a perfect union with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, surrounded by angels. In Isaiah chapter 6, we have a description of the throne room of God in which seraphim are flying around the throne, and there is no roof, and the robes of God fill the temple with glory, and we are told that Jesus sits at his right hand, and the angels are singing, holy, holy, holy, glory to God in the highest. He left that for Nazareth. And I was trying to think, what did Jesus give up to come be with us and live in our squalor? And there was no apt comparison. And the reality of it is, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what heaven is like. But here's what I'm certain of. That if one day, if we believe in Jesus and we go to heaven, when we get there, we will marvel at the fact that our Savior gave up this to come to this. And I don't think that we often enough reflect upon, as believers, what it meant for Jesus to give up divine being to take on ours. And I'll tell you, I tried to think of an example or an illustration of this, and they all fell so woefully short and fell apart so easily that I thought, I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to say we don't know, but it's a lot. I think we fail to consider what Jesus gave up to condescend to us. I also think we fail to consider what we gain by his condescension. Because I think, we think, we immediately go to the cross. We immediately go to, well, yeah, Jesus was supposed to do this because that's the story of the Bible. As Christians, we encounter scripture and we're told the story of the Bible and it's very quickly within this story that we realize God had sent his son Jesus and so we just kind of accept it as reality. I think it's the same way that we think about being born in the United States versus being born in Afghanistan. Do you realize how much better your life is because you were born in the United States than if you were born in Afghanistan and how random that lottery has to be? Like, I don't think any of us, maybe July 4th. What a good country. But other than that, we don't walk around in gratitude for it. I'm not saying that we should. I'm not being an advocate for that right now. I'm just saying, comparatively speaking, our lives are easier than people who were born in less fortunate countries. And we were born in the fortunate country of Christianity, and we just accept the facts and truths of Christianity without ever considering how fortunate we are to exist in them. And the place that we miss that the most is what do we gain from the remarkable condescension of Jesus Christ to take on humanity? And I think that the answer to this question is best summed up in Hebrews chapter 4 verse 15, where the author of Hebrews writes, for we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are, yet he did not sin. And I'm going to read 16 too, because we're going to come back to it later. Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. So in this verse, two things I see that we gain. The first thing we gain is that statement, he's able to empathize for our weakness, for he has been tempted in every way, just as we are. Do you understand that his temptation is just the same as ours? There's this famous story in the Gospels where Jesus is tempted by Satan. He's fasted in the desert for 40 days, and Satan comes to him, and he says, you're pretty hungry. This is paraphrase. He says, you're pretty hungry. Why don't you see that rock? Why don't you just turn it into bread and eat it? Satiate your hunger. And Jesus refuses to do that because he's going to honor God and he's going to keep his commitment. And this temptation is probably more ubiquitous to us because none of us, I don't think, have fasted for 40 days. We fasted for a day or two and we understand the pangs of hunger. But we might look at that and we go, I can't relate. But here's how you can. What Jesus did in that moment is choose holiness over his appetite, is choose discipline over what he wanted. He refused to be led by his appetite. Instead, he chose to continue in his service to the Father. And in Philippians, Paul is condemning people. And the way that he condemns them is he says their God is their appetite. Their God is their belly. And what he means is whatever their little heart wants, it gets. They're like, we're like spoiled children with rich parents who give us whatever we want so we'll be quiet. And what that verse means is they gave way to their desires, whatever they were. They wanted more drink, they had more drink. They wanted more food, they had more food. They want to experience that pleasure, they will experience it. They want to be tempted by this person or by that person, they will give in to that temptation. They want to be lazy, they will do that. And as humans, we know. We constantly give in to our appetites. We constantly give in to whatever our little heart desires. And in Jesus, we have an example of someone who fought that temptation, representative of myriad things. Then, Satan says, bow down to me, and I'll give you the kingdoms of the earth. He tempts Jesus with power. Compromise yourself in this way and I'll grease the skids of success over here. Compromise yourself in this way and life will go a little easier. Compromise yourself in this way and you'll save a little bit of money. Do I need more examples? Where we're tempted to compromise ourselves in such a way, compromise our morals and our standards and what we believe God wants us to do and even things that we told God we would do so that we might have things easier on the other side, right? Then in the last one, he says, you're God. Throw yourself off this cliff and let the angels come and rescue you. He tempts him with ego. Oh, you think you're God? Prove it. Right? Someone condescends to you. What do you want to do? You want to get them right back. Someone sends you an email, a customer, a client, a co-worker, a family member, sends you an email that condescends that you don't really appreciate, what do you want to do? Right? And I'll confess, sometimes I type those out. I just get it out. And then I look at it, and I send it. No, I'm just kidding. I press delete. I press delete, and then I give it 24 hours and I type it again. We are familiar with this temptation. In word and action indeed. Jesus faced all the temptations we do. To put a finer point on it. I know this is weird to think about Jesus in this way. But Jesus was a single man. Jesus was a powerful man. Jesus was a man that a lot of people liked. You don't think he ever thought about talking to a woman? You don't think that never occurred to him? He was around wine. He likely consumed wine. You don't think he thought about one night just giving in? Having more than he should? Or maybe he abstained totally, but he was around it. You don't think he ever considered it? You don't think he ever considered when the crowds thronged around him and he was exhausted? You don't think he ever considered going, get away from me. Do you understand I'm the savior of the world? Do you understand I don't have time for this? I'm exhausted. Can you just talk to my assistant? Talk to Andrew and he'll set up an appointment for you. Will you leave me alone? You don't think he ever considered being rude or impatient? Here's one that just occurred to me. If I were Jesus, I'd be tempted when everybody around me was hungry to just be like steaks, you know? You don't think he was ever tempted to do stuff like that? Of course, of course he was tempted. Of course he was. And here's why that's such a powerful truth. Have you ever been in a room, a group of friends, a small group, and watched someone confess something that was hard, that was embarrassing, that was private and in the shadows, and they brought it into the light? Have you ever watched someone do that? And then every time I've seen that happen, which has always been people confessing things to me. I'd never have anything to confess to others. But every time I've seen that happen, I've never, I've never, ever seen it not met with comfort and grace. And what's the most powerful thing that can happen in that situation? Even if there's someone who doesn't struggle with that, but they meet you with comfort and grace, how much more comforting is it when they go, I know I struggle with that too. I've watched in groups of men and in circles, small and relatively large, where someone will say, can you just pray for me and my wife right now? We're in a really difficult season. This and this are happening and we're two ships passing right now. And it's not good. And then watch someone else in that circle go, brother, us too. We are too. Or somebody goes, we did that two years ago. We did that five years ago. I've walked that path, man. I understand. And, and the whole space is washed with grace and comfort. You've seen that happen. I think with women, it's, it's more typical that typical that one of them would finally let their mom guilt break through and say, kids suck. And I don't know if I even like mine or want them. I heard John yell one time, I hate having a sister. And I was like, I don't understand that. Sometimes the family is hard. And then there's this sense when a mom will say that, I feel like a terrible mom. I feel like I'm not doing a good job. I feel like I don't enjoy my kids enough. That someone else will heap their mom guilt out too. And then there's this message of grace and comfort that washes over the room. And the reality is marriage is hard and parenting is hard. It's just true. But there's a special thing that happens when we can share with someone else that's had our experience. One of the things I say, and I'm sure it's true of your industries as well, but when I get to talk with another senior pastor, it's just a different conversation. Because they understand things in a way that if you haven't done this, you just don't know. That's not condescending, that's just true. When you talk to someone who has shared your temptations, that's just comforting in a way that can't be expressed. Hebrews tells us that we have a Savior that has. And even though he hasn't given in to them, he understands what they are. And so in his temptation, he offers us grace and compassion. Because of his temptations and because he's faced them and because he's born with us in our weaknesses, we can go to the throne of God. Now here's what else is implied in this about the wonderful condescension of Christ as far as what do we gain from it. It's implied in this verse, I think. It's implicit. And it's explicit throughout many scriptures. Namely, Isaiah 53, calling him Emmanuel, God with us. What we gain from his condescension is his humanity. The fact that he became human at all. Because in his humanity, he offers empathy, condolence, and comfort. In his humanity, he offers us empathy, condolence, and comfort. I pointed out to you the verse John 11, 35 to highlight his compassion. He weeps with us. He's present with us. He's human with us. I've watched people experience great loss. And in that great loss, maybe a wife loses a husband. And it's far too soon. And so she's experiencing this depth of grief. And I've seen people, I've heard people offer her comfort. And it's well-meaning and it's wonderful and it's good and she receives it and she's gracious. But then I've watched somebody come up to her and say, I've walked that path too. I've been a widow for a decade. That's a different level of connection and comfort. Jesus has experienced our grief. Jesus experienced loss. I don't know if you've thought about this. Jesus had a stepdad. So either his dad Joseph, his earthly father Joseph, passed away, or he had an earthly stepdad. Which, by the way, it occurs to me that maybe there was a time when Jesus' stepdad said, look, I know I'm not your dad. And Jesus thought to himself, you have no idea how layered that is. There you go. But if you've lost a dad, or you've had parents divorced, or if you grew up with a stepdad, maybe it was wonderful, maybe it was painful, I don't know. But what I do know is that Jesus has experienced that. Jesus had half-brothers. One of them wrote a book of the Bible, which may be the greatest proof there is of all time that Jesus was who he says he was. Because what would you have to do to get your half-brother to write a book about your deity? He's experienced our pain and our grief and our sorrow and our loss. He's experienced joy. He's experienced triumph. He's walked through all those things. He lived as a human just as we did. And in those things he shares with us. That's what we gain from his condescension, is we gain the fact that he's faced temptation similar to us. We gain the fact that he was a human just like us. And so all the things and all the emotions that go along with humanity and all the ailments that we could experience that go along with humanity, he has too. That's the miracle of his condescension. That's what we gain. Here's another thing that we gain. He chose to experience death so that we don't have to fear ours. He chose to experience death on the cross so that we don't have to fear ours. No passage, in your notes it says Romans 8.39, but after I sent in the notes, I was considering it, and this passage is so much better. It's 1 Corinthians 15, 55 through 57. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. We're told in response to the death and resurrection of Christ, death, where is your sting? Sin, where is your victory? There's an old song that says, hell has been defeated. The grave could not hold the king. In his death, he defeated our fear of our death. In his death, he unshackled us from sin. He said, we don't have to be fearful of death. Last week, last week on Tuesday, one of our wonderful partners, Mike Schenck, passed away from cancer. And before he did, when he was in hospice and incredibly lucid, I was able to go visit with him and his family. It was a wonderful visit. And one of the things that was remarkable to me was the fearlessness, courage, and faith with which Mike was marching to his grave. He knew what was going to happen. And there was no sense of fear in him. He joked. He was confident. He knows his Savior. Looking forward to meeting him. And then Susie's faith was remarkable too. Because if we're being really honest, and I don't mean to be too crass about it, but she's the one left holding the bag. It's worse for her than him. Because now she has to figure out how to do this life post-Mike. But they both had such faith and peace about the horizon they were approaching because Jesus chose to die so that we didn't have to. And now that in and of itself is a remarkable thought. Because death is a ubiquitous experience of all creation. Everything on this earth that was there and that has existed and that did exist faces a death of some sort. Whether it's the slow erosion of a mountain, the eventual fall of a tree, an animal, a bird falling to the ground, or us. Everything dies. It's an experience of creation. It is not an experience of heaven. And what we know about death is it's all awful. There's ways that we die suddenly and we never knew it, and so maybe that experience wasn't bad, but the people around us mourn. But most ways to die are terrible. Some of us have watched people wither away and so much pain that they wish for death. Jesus chose. This is an experience he never had to have. He didn't have to do it. But he knew that by condescending to become one of us, that he would die. And he knew exactly how he would die, which is one of the worst ways humanity has ever cooked up. And he chose that death when he didn't have to. And I don't know how much we think about the fact that he never had to do it in the first place. He came here not only to experience our temptation and our humanity and live in our squalor when he was in heaven. He chose that life, but then he also chose to take upon himself death. It was a choice that he didn't have to make. It's like if I said, hey, after church today, you've got option A, option B. Option A, you go to lunch with people you like. You do Chili's. Thank you. We go to Chili's. We get triple dippers. Let's flood the place. Option A, you go to a meal with people you like. You go home. you watch football, it's peaceful, or you take a nap, or you read, you do whatever your thing is. And then have dinner with the family, have dinner with people you like, go to bed when you want to. Nice, peaceful day. Or, we're going to put you on a plane, and we're going to go let the Taliban interrogate you for information. Which would you choose? Option A or option B? Jesus chose torture. He chose torture. He could have stayed in heaven and had a meal with people he liked, sat at the banquet table. He chose torture, and he didn't have to. And I don't think that we all the time adequately appreciate what it means for Jesus to have condescended to humanity. Because we don't realize what he gave up, and we don't think about what we gained. And what we gained, what he gave up is his divine being. What he gave up is his peace. And what he chose instead is what we would gain. Which is comfort and empathy and temptation. Condolence and compassion in our humanity, and then the possibility to walk towards death without fear, to walk towards death with courage, to walk towards death with peace, and to no longer be shackled to sin. So the condescension, humanity, and death of Christ are a forever reminder of God's provision. The condescension, humanity, and death of Christ are a forever reminder of God's provision, of the way that God provides for us by sending his only son to become those things for us that we could not be, by sending his only son to redeem creation back to himself so that he might create a pathway back to him. And this is the greatest miracle of his condescension because everything that I've just told you gives us peace and comfort and hope in the 40, 60, 80, 100 years that he gives us on this earth. All of that's temporal provision for a time when Paul describes as but a mist or a vapor. He says that we experience discomfort for a short time. Compared to eternity, it's nothing. So Christ's condescension doesn't just provide for us in the short term and in the temporal. It provides for us for all of eternity. It provides for us because he hung on the cross, because he redeemed creation and made a path back to our Father. That is ultimately what Christ's condescension means, but I don't want us to miss what it means for our life on this earth. And so what this all means, and where I want us to go and what I want us to consider is because of the miraculous condescension of Christ, we can in all things look to him. We can look to him in sin. We can look to him in triumph. We can look to him in grief and sorrow and joy and anguish. We can look to him in all things. When we fail, we can look to Christ. No matter how far down we go, we can look to Jesus. No matter how far high we are, we should know we need to look to Jesus. No matter how stressful things are, we should look to Jesus. No matter how broken our marriage or our children are, we should look to Jesus. No matter how much of a failure we feel like, we should look to Jesus. No matter how successful we might feel like we are, we should remind ourselves to look to Jesus in all things. His condescension reminds us that we can look to him for his provision and for God's provision at all times. That's what that miracle means. Now I'm going to pray for us and we're going to have communion together to celebrate that miracle and understand the bread is what was broken, is what was given in the desert to signify God's provision, and we will celebrate God's provision in that way now. Let's pray. Father, thank you for sharing your son with us. Jesus, thank you for condescending to us, for choosing to become one of us, for being tempted like we are, for being a human like we are, for doing that just so we can run to you. Thank you for breaking the shackles of sin and muting the sting of death. Thank you for everything that you do for us here in this life, but most of all, Jesus, thank you for what you will do for us in the next and already have done. May we reflect on that and properly appreciate your coming down to earth and taking on human form. May we walk in gratitude to you with an appreciation of this important part of your character. In Jesus' name, amen.