Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here as just a little point of order. If you received a bulletin when you came in and you're someone who fills out the notes, I would direct you to the back of the bulletin. In the middle of the notes is a point that starts out. I think the local church is the blank thing to which we are all called. You can cross that out. Okay, I'm not going to get to that. The word there was bigger, so if you really just want to fill it in, there you go. But we're not going to include that. So I don't want to get to that point of the notes and you guys think, oh, no, he forgot it. No, I didn't. I'm leaving it out on purpose. Also, some of you have asked, Nate, why are you wearing your Crocs? Do you have a gout flare-up? No, jerks. I know that you would love that, but I did not. I did not. I also, before I'm telling you why I'm wearing them, have promised my sweet wife that I would communicate to you that she loathes them. They are the least favorite thing of hers that I own, and it is to her great dismay that I continue to wear them every day. I'm wearing these because these are my friend's shoes. These are the shoes that you only see when I am your friend. If you come to my house, and I knew you were coming, if you come to my house and I didn't know you were coming, come on, man, what are you doing? But if I do know you're coming and I'm still by choice wearing these, it's because I'm totally comfortable with you and we're friends. If you invite me over and I'm wearing sweats and Crocs, it's because we're pals, all right? Only my close friends see these because they are shameful. And when I come to church early, I get here early on Sunday mornings, and usually I just throw these on just to be comfortable until I need to put on my church shoes, my preaching shoes. And as I was pacing, thinking through what I was saying this morning, I just realized that what I'm going to say to you this morning is hard. It's hard for me to say. It's going to be hard for some of y'all to hear. And as I say it, I want these to remind me and you that I'm coming to you as a friend. I'm saying these things to you because I love you. Because I feel like Grace is collectively my pal. And so I want you to know up front that I have been praying this week and this morning for courage and gentleness. And so these Crocs are a little bit more gentle than my preaching boots. So I'm wearing these today. Years ago, there was a show called 24. I don't know if you guys have ever seen it. If you have, your life is better for it. But 24 was released, I don't know if you remember this, right on the cusp of like DVD series and then live series. For those of you, I don't know how young you have to be to appreciate series that are on DVDs, but we used to buy whole volumes of series that now you get on Netflix. But 24 is right on the cusp of that. And so when I heard about it, my friends were watching it and they were like a couple seasons in, I think they were on season four. And they had this tradition of every Monday night, they would go over to my one friend's house and they would all watch it with rapt attention and then talk about it during the commercials. And then when it started again, total silence and they were very committed to it. And then they would kind of talk about the episode afterwards. And I really wanted to go to this. I was having serious FOMO, which for old people, that's fear of missing out. I was having some serious FOMO of my friends are having this fun and I can't have this fun because I'm not caught up on the series. So I tracked down the DVDs and got caught up on the series. And I don't know if any of you have had this experience. Raise your hand if you watch 24 on DVD. Okay, you are my friends and you know what I'm talking about. The end of the episode always, without fail, ends on a cliffhanger. And then there's that countdown, the beep, boop, beep, boop. And you're like, no, I got to know what happens to Jack. So then if you're watching the DVD series, it's like play next episode. Yes, of course. And you play the next episode and you just binge that thing. This is when binging started. And it was so satisfying to be able to watch. And this was, let's see, I was probably 19 or 20. So I could watch an ungodly amount of uninterrupted TV at a time. And I mean the word ungodly because it was not spiritual to do what I was doing, but I could watch a ton at one time. And so you power through these seasons, man. And I got through them and I got to go watch with my friend. Now this is the big night. I get to go to my friend's house. There's like 15, 20 of us there. This is great. I'm going to consume this content this way. And as I was doing it, I was like, this stinks because it ended. First of all, I had to watch commercials. That's a bummer. I don't want to watch commercials. I'm into the story. I don't want to hear about Claritin again. And then it ends. There's the beeps. And it's like, let's watch the next episode, guys. And you can't. You've got to wait a whole week. And by the time the next week rolled around, I really wasn't very much into it. And I realized within a couple of weeks, you know what? I don't really like consuming this this way. I like it better on the DVDs. So I waited and just watched it all at once on the DVDs. And I bring that up because this is when content really began to make it very clear that it was a product and we are the consumers. We can watch whatever we want to watch. We have all kinds of streaming services. We have everything available at the tip of our fingers. We can choose the content that we want to watch whenever we want to watch it. This is 24 to me illustrates when it became very clear in our culture that there's all kinds of content out there that we can consume when we want it, where we want it, and when we actually have a desire for it. When we think it's what's going to be best for us, when we feel like it's what we want in the moment, it's right there and we can consume it. I'm bringing that up because I feel like I've seen church become that for many of us too. I feel like in Christian culture, in church people, and then most pointedly at grace, I have watched a slide over the years that the pandemic has accelerated where we are now in ways consumers of church. Church, to some of us, in our mindset and in our families, has become a product that we consume. Sunday morning is something that if I have time, I'll go. If we don't have other plans, I'll attend. If there's not just one more inconsequential thing, and when I say inconsequential, I mean something that we allow to take Sunday morning away from us that isn't gonna matter one little bit in 20 years, then we'll just do that thing and I'll catch up with church during the week. I'll watch it on Tuesday. I'll binge it. I'll listen to the whole series. And it's not easy or fun to say this because normally when I come to you as the church and I say convicting things, I'm right there with you. I always put myself first and say, this is my conviction, join me in it if it applies. Well, this one's different because I get paid to do this. I don't have the perspective that church partners have. But I do have the perspective of a pastor. And I can tell you what I see from my perspective. And what I see from my perspective, as someone who leads a church, as someone who I think is pretty tapped into Christian culture, as someone who talks to other pastors regularly, I see a slide in our culture towards consumerism as it relates to churches. That for many of us, church has become a commodity or a product that I will include in my life when and where I want to, when and how I want to. And I know that none of us would cop to that out loud. None of us would say, yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm a consumer, church is the product, that's how it is. But in our practices and in our patterns, that's what we make it. I'll get to it when I can. I'll include it when I want to. I'll catch up with it on my jog. Revelation really is not very interesting of a series for me. I'll catch it at Christmas. Or, Revelation is super interesting to me. I'm going to totally pay attention to this one. Last one, I wasn't really there for it. I've seen us become consumers in the way that we volunteer, which is less and less, which is a good indicator that in my mind, church exists for me to make my life better. It's a product that's there for me to grab and to consume when I want it. And this is something that I have seen and noticed for several months. And something that I've wanted to put in front of you for several months. But I didn't know the best way to do it. I didn't know how. And I wanted to be really sure when I did it. Because I know that I'm stepping on toes right now. And here's how I've been complicit in it. Is I've allowed that mindset to reduce my role to a producer of content. There are many a week in the last two years when I viewed my role as literally nothing more than just giving you something worth consuming on a Sunday morning and forgetting about the pastoring and the leading that has to happen during the week. I have been complicit in reducing my own role as the pastor of a church to simply producing content that's good for you that you'll choose to consume again. And I'm just, I'm telling you guys, we're wrong about that. It is a dangerous thing when church gets reduced to a commodity to consume. And I'm convinced that that's true and that it's right and good for me to take a Sunday morning and talk about it and that it's worth stepping on some toes because Jesus's attitude towards the church is so vastly different than the attitude of someone who consumes the church. Jesus didn't for one second think that the church was a commodity to be consumed. Jesus for one second was not interested in putting out a product that people would want to come back to. He wasn't interested at all in commodifying and making us comfortable in the way we choose to consume his body. The New Testament does not talk about the church as something to be consumed. It does not talk about the church as if it's something that's optional for us, that we can include in our life when we feel like it, that we can include in our life when we feel like we have time or effort or energy or space. And so for me as a pastor to watch this slide in my church and say nothing about it is a dereliction of duty. It is irresponsible. So we've got to talk about it. Again, we've got to talk about it because as I thought about communicating this idea this week and what passage to use, I was thinking through the New Testament and how the church is talked about and it dawned on me, there's not like a single passage to use because the whole New Testament is about the local church. The whole New Testament assumes that you are a part of the local church. The New Testament teaches us that the moment you get saved, that when you accept Christ as your Savior, that you are now a member of the big C universal church. And it is incumbent upon you to express that membership within the body of the local church. The one book, the biggest portion of the New Testament that's written to an individual is written to a guy named Theophilus by Luke, probably on behalf of Peter. And he writes to Theophilus so that he can understand who Jesus was and what he came to do, which is to begin the local church. The one big major book that's written to an individual to explain things in the New Testament is written so that that individual could understand the local church and how it came about. Then Paul writes letters to churches. And every directive in the Bible that's given is given to us communally. There is nothing, nothing about individual spirituality in here. It all, the whole thing, cover to cover, assumes that you know and understand that you are functioning within a body. That you are functioning within the local church. And so it's difficult to pinpoint one place where this is clarified because it's assumed all throughout the New Testament. And I don't know if you've ever thought of this, but do you realize, and I believe this with all my heart, that the local church, this expression of grace that we sit in this morning, is the reason that Jesus stayed some extra years to do ministry? I don't know if you've ever wondered this, but Jesus was 33 when he was crucified. If all he came to do, if all of his marching orders were to become flesh, live a perfect life, die for the sins of the world, why didn't he just get crucified at 30? Or 25? Or 17? What was he doing? Hanging around, putting up with us? He was building the church. He was training the leaders. He was preparing the world for his kingdom. Jesus stayed those extra years and put up with us so that he could call the disciples to him and train them and show them. He taught them how to teach. He taught them how to perform miracles. He taught them how to cast out demons. He taught them how to lead. He taught them how to love. He showed them how to do ministry to one another. And then he died. And then he came back and he left. And when he left, he said, now go do all the things that I've been showing you to the ends of the earth. Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. He said, go and do what I told you to do. And how did they respond to that? They huddled up in Jerusalem. And they said, what do we do? And then they got the gift of the Holy Spirit and they started a church, man. And its numbers grew day by day. Acts 2, 42 through 47, you can find it there. And then the rest of the book of Acts is about the disciples' effort to go and to plant more local churches. All of Paul's life was dedicated to planting local churches. When Jesus left and said, you, I've given you the keys to the kingdom. I've spent these years and I've trained you and now I'm going to leave and you've got the Holy Spirit. Go do my ministry. What did lost and broken world, and there is no plan B. That's not my idea. I stole that from another pastor. I don't remember who. But the local church, this expression, this Grace Raleigh is God's plan to reach this community. And there's no plan B. We have got to do our part. We are a part of God's divine strategy, of God's divine plan. This is not something to be flippantly participated in. That's not the point. There's something bigger going on here. The New Testament teaches us that we are the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians chapter 12. We're the body of Christ. We are his different members. We're going to talk more about this next week. But the New Testament also preaches this. And this was one of the more convicting things to think about this week as I think about our attitude with how we approach church. It is admittedly an odd passage to land on for the sermon this morning, but it's Ephesians chapter 5, verses 25 through 32. This is a marriage roles passage. This is usually talked about in weddings. And when we read it, that's where our mind goes. And one day, hopefully sooner than later, I would love to walk through this passage with you as a church body and walk you through kind of how my understanding of this passage has changed over the years. But this is not what I want us to highlight this morning. As I read it to you and you read along with me, I want you guys to pay attention to the relationship between Jesus and the local church. I want you to notice the dynamic that's going on there, and then we're going to talk about it just a little bit. Ephesians chapter 5, beginning in verse 25. He says this in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. and cherishes it just as Jesus does the church because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. The church, Christians, we are the bride of Christ. That is our divine identity. We are the body that he came and died for. We are the body that he's going to come back and rescue. We are the body that he intentionally started. We are the body that was prophesied about in the Old Testament. We are the love of Jesus's life. We are the bride of Christ. And what I'm saying to you this morning is being Christ's bride should be wholly consuming, not flippantly consumed. Being the very bride of Christ should be an identity that is wholly consuming to us, not flippantly consumed. Nothing about that passage and nothing about that role says to us that there's any space whatsoever to simply be consumers of the product that church puts out. No, we are called to be a part of what the church is doing. This is where the whole idea of this series came from when I was thinking about it last fall, is this idea of doing what I can to transition us from sliding towards consumerism and push us back towards being consumed. The church was not created for us to consume it. It was created so that it could consume you. It was created for your whole devotion. It was created for you to be all in. It was created to give you a new life completely separate from your old life and give you something bigger to be a part of that we all long for. Being the bride of Christ deserves our full attention. It deserves our fanaticism. It deserves to consume us. To drive this home just a little bit, I want you to think about something with me. What would your marriage look like if you decide that you were simply going to be a consumer of it? What would my marriage with Jen look like if I decided, you know what, I know she wants to talk about her day-to-day, but I'm not really feeling it. I don't really want to do that. I want to watch football. And also, I've never done this. What would it look like if all the time my interactions with her, I only thought about, well, how does this benefit me? Is this something that I really want to do right now? Why don't I just schedule something over what's happening? What would it look like if in our marriages we simply became consumers and when we were asked to volunteer our time to make the house better, we said, what's in it for me? What are you gonna do if I clean clean the garage? You make meatloaf? All right, I'll clean it. How dead would our marriages be if we became consumers within them? And we saw our marriage as something that just produced a product that was there for me to consume if I wanted it or not. If that analogy holds true, and Ephesians tells me that it does, is it any wonder why some of us just don't feel like our spiritual life is clicking like it should be? Is it any wonder why we just don't feel like we're in sync with God? Is it possible that maybe we don't feel a spiritual vibrancy in our life because we've reduced the things of God to things to be consumed to improve our life when we feel like we need them? You know, it's funny, and it's worth mentioning. Over my years as a pastor, and Grayson at previous church, I've sat down with parents of teenagers, and they've said, we just can't get our kid to come to youth group, and we don't know what to do. And I can't say it, but I think it. Well, if you want to do anything right now, you need to get in the time machine and go back 10 years and quit treating the church like it's something to be consumed for you. You have modeled this method of consumption to your children for 10 years and now is it any wonder that when they get to make their own choices, they're consumers too? Is it any wonder that maybe we don't feel as close to God as we could when we don't treat the things of God as they deserve to be treated. I thought of this as well. Paul is at the end of his ministry and he's writing a letter to Timothy. It's one of the few things written to an individual in the New Testament. And guess what? It's about how to lead the local church. Anyways. In already being poured out as a drink offering. And the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. What a remarkable statement to make. Now I'm about to ask you a question. It's an unfair question. It's a gotcha question. And I'm admitting that up front. So this isn't to make anyone feel bad. This is just to help you think along with me, okay? Did any of us on December 31st, a few days ago, kneel and pray and say, God, thank you for 2021. I was poured out for you like a drink offering. Now, listen, you may have gotten to the end of 2021 and felt like you were poured out like a drink offering. We may have gotten to the end of that year and said, I got nothing left. But were you poured out for the right things? Were you poured out for the things of God? Were you poured out because you were consumed with your identity as the bride of Christ? So, either you're just mad at me and you want the sermon to be over. I get that. Or you're with me and you're okay. I want to be all in. I want to be consumed by the church. What do I do? Well, the very simple answer is this. You give of your time, talents, and treasures. A very simple answer to think about how can I be consumed by the local church is to give of your time, talents, and treasures. And as I was prepping this sermon, I lamented that when I got to this point in the sermon, I've been preaching for too long to really adequately do justice to what that means to give of our time, talents, and treasures. And then it occurred to me, dude, you're in charge of the series. You can do whatever you want. So next week, we're going to talk about that in detail. We're going to come back. Those of you who remain with us are going to come back and we'll go, here's how we can be all in together. Here's what it means and looks like to give of our time, talents, and treasures. But for this morning and for 2022, this is the message and the challenge that I wanted to issue to us as a church. If you're at Grace, be all in. If you're here, mean it with everything you got. You'll notice through this whole sermon, I've not talked about grace as far as what God calls us to. I've talked about the local church. And so I say this with all humility and candor. If you can't be all in at grace because you're not all about what's happening here, that's fine. There are a lot of churches. And with only kindness and love in my heart, I'm admonishing you that if grace isn't it for you, find a church you can be fanatical about. Find a church that you love what's going on there. Find a church that you can be all in, and that you can be consumed by, and you want to pour yourself out for. I hope that's grace, and I hope that what we're doing here is something that matters deeply to you. But if it's not, as just your friend, as a pastor, as a Christian, I'm telling you, we need to be consumed by the local church. So find one to consume you. And this is why I think it's so important to preach this message. And why I wanted to do it at the beginning of this year. Because I know that the cloud of the pandemic still looms over our culture. But I've got to believe that the sun's going to break sometime soon. And I don't want to tread water in 2022. I don't want to just cling on and try to exist this year as a church. I am praying and hoping that Jesus will eagerly and earnestly move in this place. I want to see Jesus show up this year. I want to see children fill that baptistry. I want to just dunk them and I want their friends to be in here celebrating it with them. I want to baptize you guys. I want to see your friends and your family and your coworkers begin to come to church with you and for you to experience the joy of watching them move into a faith because God used you in their life. I want to see you guys take steps of obedience that are far beyond what you thought you would be capable of sacrificing before. I want to see a church with their hair lit on fire for Jesus and begging him every week that his kingdom would come here and that he would move here and that he would do great things here. And that starts with our individual decision to be consumed by the body of Christ and by the identity of being his bride, and then it culminates in a corporate culture of pursuing him and of prizing him and of doing the things of Jesus because we love him and because it's our identity and because we're consumed by him. I don't want to tread water anymore. I want to move. I want to do ministry. I want to see salvations. I want to see people come to know Jesus. I want to see marriages rescued. I want to see children discipled. I want to see hurt people cared for. I want to see people prayed for. I want to see small groups blossom and multiply. I want to see discipleship happen intentionally. I want to see the great friendships that God has planted in this church do more than just make us feel good about ourselves, but point us back towards our Father and enhance our spiritual walks. And how can any, and here, you're all looking at me and I know that you want that too. And how can it happen if we're consumers? If we continue to just slide towards thinking of church as a commodity to be consumed? It can only happen if we say, here I am, Lord, and allow ourselves to be consumed for His purposes. So if you're at grace, be all in. And listen, I say that knowing and being humbled by the fact that we have a bunch of people who are all in. I know that we do. I'm humbled by your service every week. And we have people who have watched online faithfully for two years who simply have health issues that will not allow them to come and be a part of us. And I know you're all in. I know it. And so my prayer has been that the Holy Spirit would be whispering in each of your ears. And if you are someone who is all in, and if you are someone who has been consumed by the local church, that the Holy Spirit would be whispering into your ear right now, and he would be telling you, hey, this is not for you. This is to bring you some help. You don't need to feel convicted by this. Similarly, my prayer for the rest of us is that the Holy Spirit would whisper to us too. And he would be telling you right now how you need to listen. You need to hear this. For the sake of your marriage and your kids, you need to hear this. For the sake of your anxiety and your peace and your joy and your angst, you need to hear this. For the sake of being swept up and knowing how much I love you and experiencing my goodness as being part of a kingdom, part of my kingdom on earth before eternity, you need to hear this. So next week, we're going to come back and we're going to talk about what it looks like to be all in. I hope that if the Holy Spirit is telling you right now, hey, this is not you, that you will pray with me this week. For those to whom it may apply a little more. If the Holy Spirit is talking to you right now and telling you that you need to listen, I pray that you will. And if any of you are mad at me, my door is open. I'd love to chat. But next week, we're moving forward with who we got and we're gonna do some cool things this year. I believe it with all my heart. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the church. Thank you that we are invited to participate in it. Thank you for the way that it wraps its arms around us. Thank you for the way that it is your presence in our life. Thank you for how it trains our children. Thank you for how it strengthens our marriage. Thank you for how it points us towards you. God, we pray that grace would be the church that you want it to be. We pray that we would be consumed by building your kingdom here. We pray that we would understand in our bones what it means more and more to be your bride and to be your body. God, if I've said clumsy things, I just pray that you would grant grace and forgiveness where it's needed. God, we offer you ourselves. We offer you this place. We thank you for creating it. And we just ask that you would give us the faith and courage to serve you and to be consumed by you as we move through this year. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.
Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here as just a little point of order. If you received a bulletin when you came in and you're someone who fills out the notes, I would direct you to the back of the bulletin. In the middle of the notes is a point that starts out. I think the local church is the blank thing to which we are all called. You can cross that out. Okay, I'm not going to get to that. The word there was bigger, so if you really just want to fill it in, there you go. But we're not going to include that. So I don't want to get to that point of the notes and you guys think, oh, no, he forgot it. No, I didn't. I'm leaving it out on purpose. Also, some of you have asked, Nate, why are you wearing your Crocs? Do you have a gout flare-up? No, jerks. I know that you would love that, but I did not. I did not. I also, before I'm telling you why I'm wearing them, have promised my sweet wife that I would communicate to you that she loathes them. They are the least favorite thing of hers that I own, and it is to her great dismay that I continue to wear them every day. I'm wearing these because these are my friend's shoes. These are the shoes that you only see when I am your friend. If you come to my house, and I knew you were coming, if you come to my house and I didn't know you were coming, come on, man, what are you doing? But if I do know you're coming and I'm still by choice wearing these, it's because I'm totally comfortable with you and we're friends. If you invite me over and I'm wearing sweats and Crocs, it's because we're pals, all right? Only my close friends see these because they are shameful. And when I come to church early, I get here early on Sunday mornings, and usually I just throw these on just to be comfortable until I need to put on my church shoes, my preaching shoes. And as I was pacing, thinking through what I was saying this morning, I just realized that what I'm going to say to you this morning is hard. It's hard for me to say. It's going to be hard for some of y'all to hear. And as I say it, I want these to remind me and you that I'm coming to you as a friend. I'm saying these things to you because I love you. Because I feel like Grace is collectively my pal. And so I want you to know up front that I have been praying this week and this morning for courage and gentleness. And so these Crocs are a little bit more gentle than my preaching boots. So I'm wearing these today. Years ago, there was a show called 24. I don't know if you guys have ever seen it. If you have, your life is better for it. But 24 was released, I don't know if you remember this, right on the cusp of like DVD series and then live series. For those of you, I don't know how young you have to be to appreciate series that are on DVDs, but we used to buy whole volumes of series that now you get on Netflix. But 24 is right on the cusp of that. And so when I heard about it, my friends were watching it and they were like a couple seasons in, I think they were on season four. And they had this tradition of every Monday night, they would go over to my one friend's house and they would all watch it with rapt attention and then talk about it during the commercials. And then when it started again, total silence and they were very committed to it. And then they would kind of talk about the episode afterwards. And I really wanted to go to this. I was having serious FOMO, which for old people, that's fear of missing out. I was having some serious FOMO of my friends are having this fun and I can't have this fun because I'm not caught up on the series. So I tracked down the DVDs and got caught up on the series. And I don't know if any of you have had this experience. Raise your hand if you watch 24 on DVD. Okay, you are my friends and you know what I'm talking about. The end of the episode always, without fail, ends on a cliffhanger. And then there's that countdown, the beep, boop, beep, boop. And you're like, no, I got to know what happens to Jack. So then if you're watching the DVD series, it's like play next episode. Yes, of course. And you play the next episode and you just binge that thing. This is when binging started. And it was so satisfying to be able to watch. And this was, let's see, I was probably 19 or 20. So I could watch an ungodly amount of uninterrupted TV at a time. And I mean the word ungodly because it was not spiritual to do what I was doing, but I could watch a ton at one time. And so you power through these seasons, man. And I got through them and I got to go watch with my friend. Now this is the big night. I get to go to my friend's house. There's like 15, 20 of us there. This is great. I'm going to consume this content this way. And as I was doing it, I was like, this stinks because it ended. First of all, I had to watch commercials. That's a bummer. I don't want to watch commercials. I'm into the story. I don't want to hear about Claritin again. And then it ends. There's the beeps. And it's like, let's watch the next episode, guys. And you can't. You've got to wait a whole week. And by the time the next week rolled around, I really wasn't very much into it. And I realized within a couple of weeks, you know what? I don't really like consuming this this way. I like it better on the DVDs. So I waited and just watched it all at once on the DVDs. And I bring that up because this is when content really began to make it very clear that it was a product and we are the consumers. We can watch whatever we want to watch. We have all kinds of streaming services. We have everything available at the tip of our fingers. We can choose the content that we want to watch whenever we want to watch it. This is 24 to me illustrates when it became very clear in our culture that there's all kinds of content out there that we can consume when we want it, where we want it, and when we actually have a desire for it. When we think it's what's going to be best for us, when we feel like it's what we want in the moment, it's right there and we can consume it. I'm bringing that up because I feel like I've seen church become that for many of us too. I feel like in Christian culture, in church people, and then most pointedly at grace, I have watched a slide over the years that the pandemic has accelerated where we are now in ways consumers of church. Church, to some of us, in our mindset and in our families, has become a product that we consume. Sunday morning is something that if I have time, I'll go. If we don't have other plans, I'll attend. If there's not just one more inconsequential thing, and when I say inconsequential, I mean something that we allow to take Sunday morning away from us that isn't gonna matter one little bit in 20 years, then we'll just do that thing and I'll catch up with church during the week. I'll watch it on Tuesday. I'll binge it. I'll listen to the whole series. And it's not easy or fun to say this because normally when I come to you as the church and I say convicting things, I'm right there with you. I always put myself first and say, this is my conviction, join me in it if it applies. Well, this one's different because I get paid to do this. I don't have the perspective that church partners have. But I do have the perspective of a pastor. And I can tell you what I see from my perspective. And what I see from my perspective, as someone who leads a church, as someone who I think is pretty tapped into Christian culture, as someone who talks to other pastors regularly, I see a slide in our culture towards consumerism as it relates to churches. That for many of us, church has become a commodity or a product that I will include in my life when and where I want to, when and how I want to. And I know that none of us would cop to that out loud. None of us would say, yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm a consumer, church is the product, that's how it is. But in our practices and in our patterns, that's what we make it. I'll get to it when I can. I'll include it when I want to. I'll catch up with it on my jog. Revelation really is not very interesting of a series for me. I'll catch it at Christmas. Or, Revelation is super interesting to me. I'm going to totally pay attention to this one. Last one, I wasn't really there for it. I've seen us become consumers in the way that we volunteer, which is less and less, which is a good indicator that in my mind, church exists for me to make my life better. It's a product that's there for me to grab and to consume when I want it. And this is something that I have seen and noticed for several months. And something that I've wanted to put in front of you for several months. But I didn't know the best way to do it. I didn't know how. And I wanted to be really sure when I did it. Because I know that I'm stepping on toes right now. And here's how I've been complicit in it. Is I've allowed that mindset to reduce my role to a producer of content. There are many a week in the last two years when I viewed my role as literally nothing more than just giving you something worth consuming on a Sunday morning and forgetting about the pastoring and the leading that has to happen during the week. I have been complicit in reducing my own role as the pastor of a church to simply producing content that's good for you that you'll choose to consume again. And I'm just, I'm telling you guys, we're wrong about that. It is a dangerous thing when church gets reduced to a commodity to consume. And I'm convinced that that's true and that it's right and good for me to take a Sunday morning and talk about it and that it's worth stepping on some toes because Jesus's attitude towards the church is so vastly different than the attitude of someone who consumes the church. Jesus didn't for one second think that the church was a commodity to be consumed. Jesus for one second was not interested in putting out a product that people would want to come back to. He wasn't interested at all in commodifying and making us comfortable in the way we choose to consume his body. The New Testament does not talk about the church as something to be consumed. It does not talk about the church as if it's something that's optional for us, that we can include in our life when we feel like it, that we can include in our life when we feel like we have time or effort or energy or space. And so for me as a pastor to watch this slide in my church and say nothing about it is a dereliction of duty. It is irresponsible. So we've got to talk about it. Again, we've got to talk about it because as I thought about communicating this idea this week and what passage to use, I was thinking through the New Testament and how the church is talked about and it dawned on me, there's not like a single passage to use because the whole New Testament is about the local church. The whole New Testament assumes that you are a part of the local church. The New Testament teaches us that the moment you get saved, that when you accept Christ as your Savior, that you are now a member of the big C universal church. And it is incumbent upon you to express that membership within the body of the local church. The one book, the biggest portion of the New Testament that's written to an individual is written to a guy named Theophilus by Luke, probably on behalf of Peter. And he writes to Theophilus so that he can understand who Jesus was and what he came to do, which is to begin the local church. The one big major book that's written to an individual to explain things in the New Testament is written so that that individual could understand the local church and how it came about. Then Paul writes letters to churches. And every directive in the Bible that's given is given to us communally. There is nothing, nothing about individual spirituality in here. It all, the whole thing, cover to cover, assumes that you know and understand that you are functioning within a body. That you are functioning within the local church. And so it's difficult to pinpoint one place where this is clarified because it's assumed all throughout the New Testament. And I don't know if you've ever thought of this, but do you realize, and I believe this with all my heart, that the local church, this expression of grace that we sit in this morning, is the reason that Jesus stayed some extra years to do ministry? I don't know if you've ever wondered this, but Jesus was 33 when he was crucified. If all he came to do, if all of his marching orders were to become flesh, live a perfect life, die for the sins of the world, why didn't he just get crucified at 30? Or 25? Or 17? What was he doing? Hanging around, putting up with us? He was building the church. He was training the leaders. He was preparing the world for his kingdom. Jesus stayed those extra years and put up with us so that he could call the disciples to him and train them and show them. He taught them how to teach. He taught them how to perform miracles. He taught them how to cast out demons. He taught them how to lead. He taught them how to love. He showed them how to do ministry to one another. And then he died. And then he came back and he left. And when he left, he said, now go do all the things that I've been showing you to the ends of the earth. Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. He said, go and do what I told you to do. And how did they respond to that? They huddled up in Jerusalem. And they said, what do we do? And then they got the gift of the Holy Spirit and they started a church, man. And its numbers grew day by day. Acts 2, 42 through 47, you can find it there. And then the rest of the book of Acts is about the disciples' effort to go and to plant more local churches. All of Paul's life was dedicated to planting local churches. When Jesus left and said, you, I've given you the keys to the kingdom. I've spent these years and I've trained you and now I'm going to leave and you've got the Holy Spirit. Go do my ministry. What did lost and broken world, and there is no plan B. That's not my idea. I stole that from another pastor. I don't remember who. But the local church, this expression, this Grace Raleigh is God's plan to reach this community. And there's no plan B. We have got to do our part. We are a part of God's divine strategy, of God's divine plan. This is not something to be flippantly participated in. That's not the point. There's something bigger going on here. The New Testament teaches us that we are the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians chapter 12. We're the body of Christ. We are his different members. We're going to talk more about this next week. But the New Testament also preaches this. And this was one of the more convicting things to think about this week as I think about our attitude with how we approach church. It is admittedly an odd passage to land on for the sermon this morning, but it's Ephesians chapter 5, verses 25 through 32. This is a marriage roles passage. This is usually talked about in weddings. And when we read it, that's where our mind goes. And one day, hopefully sooner than later, I would love to walk through this passage with you as a church body and walk you through kind of how my understanding of this passage has changed over the years. But this is not what I want us to highlight this morning. As I read it to you and you read along with me, I want you guys to pay attention to the relationship between Jesus and the local church. I want you to notice the dynamic that's going on there, and then we're going to talk about it just a little bit. Ephesians chapter 5, beginning in verse 25. He says this in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. and cherishes it just as Jesus does the church because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. The church, Christians, we are the bride of Christ. That is our divine identity. We are the body that he came and died for. We are the body that he's going to come back and rescue. We are the body that he intentionally started. We are the body that was prophesied about in the Old Testament. We are the love of Jesus's life. We are the bride of Christ. And what I'm saying to you this morning is being Christ's bride should be wholly consuming, not flippantly consumed. Being the very bride of Christ should be an identity that is wholly consuming to us, not flippantly consumed. Nothing about that passage and nothing about that role says to us that there's any space whatsoever to simply be consumers of the product that church puts out. No, we are called to be a part of what the church is doing. This is where the whole idea of this series came from when I was thinking about it last fall, is this idea of doing what I can to transition us from sliding towards consumerism and push us back towards being consumed. The church was not created for us to consume it. It was created so that it could consume you. It was created for your whole devotion. It was created for you to be all in. It was created to give you a new life completely separate from your old life and give you something bigger to be a part of that we all long for. Being the bride of Christ deserves our full attention. It deserves our fanaticism. It deserves to consume us. To drive this home just a little bit, I want you to think about something with me. What would your marriage look like if you decide that you were simply going to be a consumer of it? What would my marriage with Jen look like if I decided, you know what, I know she wants to talk about her day-to-day, but I'm not really feeling it. I don't really want to do that. I want to watch football. And also, I've never done this. What would it look like if all the time my interactions with her, I only thought about, well, how does this benefit me? Is this something that I really want to do right now? Why don't I just schedule something over what's happening? What would it look like if in our marriages we simply became consumers and when we were asked to volunteer our time to make the house better, we said, what's in it for me? What are you gonna do if I clean clean the garage? You make meatloaf? All right, I'll clean it. How dead would our marriages be if we became consumers within them? And we saw our marriage as something that just produced a product that was there for me to consume if I wanted it or not. If that analogy holds true, and Ephesians tells me that it does, is it any wonder why some of us just don't feel like our spiritual life is clicking like it should be? Is it any wonder why we just don't feel like we're in sync with God? Is it possible that maybe we don't feel a spiritual vibrancy in our life because we've reduced the things of God to things to be consumed to improve our life when we feel like we need them? You know, it's funny, and it's worth mentioning. Over my years as a pastor, and Grayson at previous church, I've sat down with parents of teenagers, and they've said, we just can't get our kid to come to youth group, and we don't know what to do. And I can't say it, but I think it. Well, if you want to do anything right now, you need to get in the time machine and go back 10 years and quit treating the church like it's something to be consumed for you. You have modeled this method of consumption to your children for 10 years and now is it any wonder that when they get to make their own choices, they're consumers too? Is it any wonder that maybe we don't feel as close to God as we could when we don't treat the things of God as they deserve to be treated. I thought of this as well. Paul is at the end of his ministry and he's writing a letter to Timothy. It's one of the few things written to an individual in the New Testament. And guess what? It's about how to lead the local church. Anyways. In already being poured out as a drink offering. And the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. What a remarkable statement to make. Now I'm about to ask you a question. It's an unfair question. It's a gotcha question. And I'm admitting that up front. So this isn't to make anyone feel bad. This is just to help you think along with me, okay? Did any of us on December 31st, a few days ago, kneel and pray and say, God, thank you for 2021. I was poured out for you like a drink offering. Now, listen, you may have gotten to the end of 2021 and felt like you were poured out like a drink offering. We may have gotten to the end of that year and said, I got nothing left. But were you poured out for the right things? Were you poured out for the things of God? Were you poured out because you were consumed with your identity as the bride of Christ? So, either you're just mad at me and you want the sermon to be over. I get that. Or you're with me and you're okay. I want to be all in. I want to be consumed by the church. What do I do? Well, the very simple answer is this. You give of your time, talents, and treasures. A very simple answer to think about how can I be consumed by the local church is to give of your time, talents, and treasures. And as I was prepping this sermon, I lamented that when I got to this point in the sermon, I've been preaching for too long to really adequately do justice to what that means to give of our time, talents, and treasures. And then it occurred to me, dude, you're in charge of the series. You can do whatever you want. So next week, we're going to talk about that in detail. We're going to come back. Those of you who remain with us are going to come back and we'll go, here's how we can be all in together. Here's what it means and looks like to give of our time, talents, and treasures. But for this morning and for 2022, this is the message and the challenge that I wanted to issue to us as a church. If you're at Grace, be all in. If you're here, mean it with everything you got. You'll notice through this whole sermon, I've not talked about grace as far as what God calls us to. I've talked about the local church. And so I say this with all humility and candor. If you can't be all in at grace because you're not all about what's happening here, that's fine. There are a lot of churches. And with only kindness and love in my heart, I'm admonishing you that if grace isn't it for you, find a church you can be fanatical about. Find a church that you love what's going on there. Find a church that you can be all in, and that you can be consumed by, and you want to pour yourself out for. I hope that's grace, and I hope that what we're doing here is something that matters deeply to you. But if it's not, as just your friend, as a pastor, as a Christian, I'm telling you, we need to be consumed by the local church. So find one to consume you. And this is why I think it's so important to preach this message. And why I wanted to do it at the beginning of this year. Because I know that the cloud of the pandemic still looms over our culture. But I've got to believe that the sun's going to break sometime soon. And I don't want to tread water in 2022. I don't want to just cling on and try to exist this year as a church. I am praying and hoping that Jesus will eagerly and earnestly move in this place. I want to see Jesus show up this year. I want to see children fill that baptistry. I want to just dunk them and I want their friends to be in here celebrating it with them. I want to baptize you guys. I want to see your friends and your family and your coworkers begin to come to church with you and for you to experience the joy of watching them move into a faith because God used you in their life. I want to see you guys take steps of obedience that are far beyond what you thought you would be capable of sacrificing before. I want to see a church with their hair lit on fire for Jesus and begging him every week that his kingdom would come here and that he would move here and that he would do great things here. And that starts with our individual decision to be consumed by the body of Christ and by the identity of being his bride, and then it culminates in a corporate culture of pursuing him and of prizing him and of doing the things of Jesus because we love him and because it's our identity and because we're consumed by him. I don't want to tread water anymore. I want to move. I want to do ministry. I want to see salvations. I want to see people come to know Jesus. I want to see marriages rescued. I want to see children discipled. I want to see hurt people cared for. I want to see people prayed for. I want to see small groups blossom and multiply. I want to see discipleship happen intentionally. I want to see the great friendships that God has planted in this church do more than just make us feel good about ourselves, but point us back towards our Father and enhance our spiritual walks. And how can any, and here, you're all looking at me and I know that you want that too. And how can it happen if we're consumers? If we continue to just slide towards thinking of church as a commodity to be consumed? It can only happen if we say, here I am, Lord, and allow ourselves to be consumed for His purposes. So if you're at grace, be all in. And listen, I say that knowing and being humbled by the fact that we have a bunch of people who are all in. I know that we do. I'm humbled by your service every week. And we have people who have watched online faithfully for two years who simply have health issues that will not allow them to come and be a part of us. And I know you're all in. I know it. And so my prayer has been that the Holy Spirit would be whispering in each of your ears. And if you are someone who is all in, and if you are someone who has been consumed by the local church, that the Holy Spirit would be whispering into your ear right now, and he would be telling you, hey, this is not for you. This is to bring you some help. You don't need to feel convicted by this. Similarly, my prayer for the rest of us is that the Holy Spirit would whisper to us too. And he would be telling you right now how you need to listen. You need to hear this. For the sake of your marriage and your kids, you need to hear this. For the sake of your anxiety and your peace and your joy and your angst, you need to hear this. For the sake of being swept up and knowing how much I love you and experiencing my goodness as being part of a kingdom, part of my kingdom on earth before eternity, you need to hear this. So next week, we're going to come back and we're going to talk about what it looks like to be all in. I hope that if the Holy Spirit is telling you right now, hey, this is not you, that you will pray with me this week. For those to whom it may apply a little more. If the Holy Spirit is talking to you right now and telling you that you need to listen, I pray that you will. And if any of you are mad at me, my door is open. I'd love to chat. But next week, we're moving forward with who we got and we're gonna do some cool things this year. I believe it with all my heart. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the church. Thank you that we are invited to participate in it. Thank you for the way that it wraps its arms around us. Thank you for the way that it is your presence in our life. Thank you for how it trains our children. Thank you for how it strengthens our marriage. Thank you for how it points us towards you. God, we pray that grace would be the church that you want it to be. We pray that we would be consumed by building your kingdom here. We pray that we would understand in our bones what it means more and more to be your bride and to be your body. God, if I've said clumsy things, I just pray that you would grant grace and forgiveness where it's needed. God, we offer you ourselves. We offer you this place. We thank you for creating it. And we just ask that you would give us the faith and courage to serve you and to be consumed by you as we move through this year. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.
Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here as just a little point of order. If you received a bulletin when you came in and you're someone who fills out the notes, I would direct you to the back of the bulletin. In the middle of the notes is a point that starts out. I think the local church is the blank thing to which we are all called. You can cross that out. Okay, I'm not going to get to that. The word there was bigger, so if you really just want to fill it in, there you go. But we're not going to include that. So I don't want to get to that point of the notes and you guys think, oh, no, he forgot it. No, I didn't. I'm leaving it out on purpose. Also, some of you have asked, Nate, why are you wearing your Crocs? Do you have a gout flare-up? No, jerks. I know that you would love that, but I did not. I did not. I also, before I'm telling you why I'm wearing them, have promised my sweet wife that I would communicate to you that she loathes them. They are the least favorite thing of hers that I own, and it is to her great dismay that I continue to wear them every day. I'm wearing these because these are my friend's shoes. These are the shoes that you only see when I am your friend. If you come to my house, and I knew you were coming, if you come to my house and I didn't know you were coming, come on, man, what are you doing? But if I do know you're coming and I'm still by choice wearing these, it's because I'm totally comfortable with you and we're friends. If you invite me over and I'm wearing sweats and Crocs, it's because we're pals, all right? Only my close friends see these because they are shameful. And when I come to church early, I get here early on Sunday mornings, and usually I just throw these on just to be comfortable until I need to put on my church shoes, my preaching shoes. And as I was pacing, thinking through what I was saying this morning, I just realized that what I'm going to say to you this morning is hard. It's hard for me to say. It's going to be hard for some of y'all to hear. And as I say it, I want these to remind me and you that I'm coming to you as a friend. I'm saying these things to you because I love you. Because I feel like Grace is collectively my pal. And so I want you to know up front that I have been praying this week and this morning for courage and gentleness. And so these Crocs are a little bit more gentle than my preaching boots. So I'm wearing these today. Years ago, there was a show called 24. I don't know if you guys have ever seen it. If you have, your life is better for it. But 24 was released, I don't know if you remember this, right on the cusp of like DVD series and then live series. For those of you, I don't know how young you have to be to appreciate series that are on DVDs, but we used to buy whole volumes of series that now you get on Netflix. But 24 is right on the cusp of that. And so when I heard about it, my friends were watching it and they were like a couple seasons in, I think they were on season four. And they had this tradition of every Monday night, they would go over to my one friend's house and they would all watch it with rapt attention and then talk about it during the commercials. And then when it started again, total silence and they were very committed to it. And then they would kind of talk about the episode afterwards. And I really wanted to go to this. I was having serious FOMO, which for old people, that's fear of missing out. I was having some serious FOMO of my friends are having this fun and I can't have this fun because I'm not caught up on the series. So I tracked down the DVDs and got caught up on the series. And I don't know if any of you have had this experience. Raise your hand if you watch 24 on DVD. Okay, you are my friends and you know what I'm talking about. The end of the episode always, without fail, ends on a cliffhanger. And then there's that countdown, the beep, boop, beep, boop. And you're like, no, I got to know what happens to Jack. So then if you're watching the DVD series, it's like play next episode. Yes, of course. And you play the next episode and you just binge that thing. This is when binging started. And it was so satisfying to be able to watch. And this was, let's see, I was probably 19 or 20. So I could watch an ungodly amount of uninterrupted TV at a time. And I mean the word ungodly because it was not spiritual to do what I was doing, but I could watch a ton at one time. And so you power through these seasons, man. And I got through them and I got to go watch with my friend. Now this is the big night. I get to go to my friend's house. There's like 15, 20 of us there. This is great. I'm going to consume this content this way. And as I was doing it, I was like, this stinks because it ended. First of all, I had to watch commercials. That's a bummer. I don't want to watch commercials. I'm into the story. I don't want to hear about Claritin again. And then it ends. There's the beeps. And it's like, let's watch the next episode, guys. And you can't. You've got to wait a whole week. And by the time the next week rolled around, I really wasn't very much into it. And I realized within a couple of weeks, you know what? I don't really like consuming this this way. I like it better on the DVDs. So I waited and just watched it all at once on the DVDs. And I bring that up because this is when content really began to make it very clear that it was a product and we are the consumers. We can watch whatever we want to watch. We have all kinds of streaming services. We have everything available at the tip of our fingers. We can choose the content that we want to watch whenever we want to watch it. This is 24 to me illustrates when it became very clear in our culture that there's all kinds of content out there that we can consume when we want it, where we want it, and when we actually have a desire for it. When we think it's what's going to be best for us, when we feel like it's what we want in the moment, it's right there and we can consume it. I'm bringing that up because I feel like I've seen church become that for many of us too. I feel like in Christian culture, in church people, and then most pointedly at grace, I have watched a slide over the years that the pandemic has accelerated where we are now in ways consumers of church. Church, to some of us, in our mindset and in our families, has become a product that we consume. Sunday morning is something that if I have time, I'll go. If we don't have other plans, I'll attend. If there's not just one more inconsequential thing, and when I say inconsequential, I mean something that we allow to take Sunday morning away from us that isn't gonna matter one little bit in 20 years, then we'll just do that thing and I'll catch up with church during the week. I'll watch it on Tuesday. I'll binge it. I'll listen to the whole series. And it's not easy or fun to say this because normally when I come to you as the church and I say convicting things, I'm right there with you. I always put myself first and say, this is my conviction, join me in it if it applies. Well, this one's different because I get paid to do this. I don't have the perspective that church partners have. But I do have the perspective of a pastor. And I can tell you what I see from my perspective. And what I see from my perspective, as someone who leads a church, as someone who I think is pretty tapped into Christian culture, as someone who talks to other pastors regularly, I see a slide in our culture towards consumerism as it relates to churches. That for many of us, church has become a commodity or a product that I will include in my life when and where I want to, when and how I want to. And I know that none of us would cop to that out loud. None of us would say, yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm a consumer, church is the product, that's how it is. But in our practices and in our patterns, that's what we make it. I'll get to it when I can. I'll include it when I want to. I'll catch up with it on my jog. Revelation really is not very interesting of a series for me. I'll catch it at Christmas. Or, Revelation is super interesting to me. I'm going to totally pay attention to this one. Last one, I wasn't really there for it. I've seen us become consumers in the way that we volunteer, which is less and less, which is a good indicator that in my mind, church exists for me to make my life better. It's a product that's there for me to grab and to consume when I want it. And this is something that I have seen and noticed for several months. And something that I've wanted to put in front of you for several months. But I didn't know the best way to do it. I didn't know how. And I wanted to be really sure when I did it. Because I know that I'm stepping on toes right now. And here's how I've been complicit in it. Is I've allowed that mindset to reduce my role to a producer of content. There are many a week in the last two years when I viewed my role as literally nothing more than just giving you something worth consuming on a Sunday morning and forgetting about the pastoring and the leading that has to happen during the week. I have been complicit in reducing my own role as the pastor of a church to simply producing content that's good for you that you'll choose to consume again. And I'm just, I'm telling you guys, we're wrong about that. It is a dangerous thing when church gets reduced to a commodity to consume. And I'm convinced that that's true and that it's right and good for me to take a Sunday morning and talk about it and that it's worth stepping on some toes because Jesus's attitude towards the church is so vastly different than the attitude of someone who consumes the church. Jesus didn't for one second think that the church was a commodity to be consumed. Jesus for one second was not interested in putting out a product that people would want to come back to. He wasn't interested at all in commodifying and making us comfortable in the way we choose to consume his body. The New Testament does not talk about the church as something to be consumed. It does not talk about the church as if it's something that's optional for us, that we can include in our life when we feel like it, that we can include in our life when we feel like we have time or effort or energy or space. And so for me as a pastor to watch this slide in my church and say nothing about it is a dereliction of duty. It is irresponsible. So we've got to talk about it. Again, we've got to talk about it because as I thought about communicating this idea this week and what passage to use, I was thinking through the New Testament and how the church is talked about and it dawned on me, there's not like a single passage to use because the whole New Testament is about the local church. The whole New Testament assumes that you are a part of the local church. The New Testament teaches us that the moment you get saved, that when you accept Christ as your Savior, that you are now a member of the big C universal church. And it is incumbent upon you to express that membership within the body of the local church. The one book, the biggest portion of the New Testament that's written to an individual is written to a guy named Theophilus by Luke, probably on behalf of Peter. And he writes to Theophilus so that he can understand who Jesus was and what he came to do, which is to begin the local church. The one big major book that's written to an individual to explain things in the New Testament is written so that that individual could understand the local church and how it came about. Then Paul writes letters to churches. And every directive in the Bible that's given is given to us communally. There is nothing, nothing about individual spirituality in here. It all, the whole thing, cover to cover, assumes that you know and understand that you are functioning within a body. That you are functioning within the local church. And so it's difficult to pinpoint one place where this is clarified because it's assumed all throughout the New Testament. And I don't know if you've ever thought of this, but do you realize, and I believe this with all my heart, that the local church, this expression of grace that we sit in this morning, is the reason that Jesus stayed some extra years to do ministry? I don't know if you've ever wondered this, but Jesus was 33 when he was crucified. If all he came to do, if all of his marching orders were to become flesh, live a perfect life, die for the sins of the world, why didn't he just get crucified at 30? Or 25? Or 17? What was he doing? Hanging around, putting up with us? He was building the church. He was training the leaders. He was preparing the world for his kingdom. Jesus stayed those extra years and put up with us so that he could call the disciples to him and train them and show them. He taught them how to teach. He taught them how to perform miracles. He taught them how to cast out demons. He taught them how to lead. He taught them how to love. He showed them how to do ministry to one another. And then he died. And then he came back and he left. And when he left, he said, now go do all the things that I've been showing you to the ends of the earth. Go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. He said, go and do what I told you to do. And how did they respond to that? They huddled up in Jerusalem. And they said, what do we do? And then they got the gift of the Holy Spirit and they started a church, man. And its numbers grew day by day. Acts 2, 42 through 47, you can find it there. And then the rest of the book of Acts is about the disciples' effort to go and to plant more local churches. All of Paul's life was dedicated to planting local churches. When Jesus left and said, you, I've given you the keys to the kingdom. I've spent these years and I've trained you and now I'm going to leave and you've got the Holy Spirit. Go do my ministry. What did lost and broken world, and there is no plan B. That's not my idea. I stole that from another pastor. I don't remember who. But the local church, this expression, this Grace Raleigh is God's plan to reach this community. And there's no plan B. We have got to do our part. We are a part of God's divine strategy, of God's divine plan. This is not something to be flippantly participated in. That's not the point. There's something bigger going on here. The New Testament teaches us that we are the body of Christ. 1 Corinthians chapter 12. We're the body of Christ. We are his different members. We're going to talk more about this next week. But the New Testament also preaches this. And this was one of the more convicting things to think about this week as I think about our attitude with how we approach church. It is admittedly an odd passage to land on for the sermon this morning, but it's Ephesians chapter 5, verses 25 through 32. This is a marriage roles passage. This is usually talked about in weddings. And when we read it, that's where our mind goes. And one day, hopefully sooner than later, I would love to walk through this passage with you as a church body and walk you through kind of how my understanding of this passage has changed over the years. But this is not what I want us to highlight this morning. As I read it to you and you read along with me, I want you guys to pay attention to the relationship between Jesus and the local church. I want you to notice the dynamic that's going on there, and then we're going to talk about it just a little bit. Ephesians chapter 5, beginning in verse 25. He says this in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. and cherishes it just as Jesus does the church because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. The church, Christians, we are the bride of Christ. That is our divine identity. We are the body that he came and died for. We are the body that he's going to come back and rescue. We are the body that he intentionally started. We are the body that was prophesied about in the Old Testament. We are the love of Jesus's life. We are the bride of Christ. And what I'm saying to you this morning is being Christ's bride should be wholly consuming, not flippantly consumed. Being the very bride of Christ should be an identity that is wholly consuming to us, not flippantly consumed. Nothing about that passage and nothing about that role says to us that there's any space whatsoever to simply be consumers of the product that church puts out. No, we are called to be a part of what the church is doing. This is where the whole idea of this series came from when I was thinking about it last fall, is this idea of doing what I can to transition us from sliding towards consumerism and push us back towards being consumed. The church was not created for us to consume it. It was created so that it could consume you. It was created for your whole devotion. It was created for you to be all in. It was created to give you a new life completely separate from your old life and give you something bigger to be a part of that we all long for. Being the bride of Christ deserves our full attention. It deserves our fanaticism. It deserves to consume us. To drive this home just a little bit, I want you to think about something with me. What would your marriage look like if you decide that you were simply going to be a consumer of it? What would my marriage with Jen look like if I decided, you know what, I know she wants to talk about her day-to-day, but I'm not really feeling it. I don't really want to do that. I want to watch football. And also, I've never done this. What would it look like if all the time my interactions with her, I only thought about, well, how does this benefit me? Is this something that I really want to do right now? Why don't I just schedule something over what's happening? What would it look like if in our marriages we simply became consumers and when we were asked to volunteer our time to make the house better, we said, what's in it for me? What are you gonna do if I clean clean the garage? You make meatloaf? All right, I'll clean it. How dead would our marriages be if we became consumers within them? And we saw our marriage as something that just produced a product that was there for me to consume if I wanted it or not. If that analogy holds true, and Ephesians tells me that it does, is it any wonder why some of us just don't feel like our spiritual life is clicking like it should be? Is it any wonder why we just don't feel like we're in sync with God? Is it possible that maybe we don't feel a spiritual vibrancy in our life because we've reduced the things of God to things to be consumed to improve our life when we feel like we need them? You know, it's funny, and it's worth mentioning. Over my years as a pastor, and Grayson at previous church, I've sat down with parents of teenagers, and they've said, we just can't get our kid to come to youth group, and we don't know what to do. And I can't say it, but I think it. Well, if you want to do anything right now, you need to get in the time machine and go back 10 years and quit treating the church like it's something to be consumed for you. You have modeled this method of consumption to your children for 10 years and now is it any wonder that when they get to make their own choices, they're consumers too? Is it any wonder that maybe we don't feel as close to God as we could when we don't treat the things of God as they deserve to be treated. I thought of this as well. Paul is at the end of his ministry and he's writing a letter to Timothy. It's one of the few things written to an individual in the New Testament. And guess what? It's about how to lead the local church. Anyways. In already being poured out as a drink offering. And the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. What a remarkable statement to make. Now I'm about to ask you a question. It's an unfair question. It's a gotcha question. And I'm admitting that up front. So this isn't to make anyone feel bad. This is just to help you think along with me, okay? Did any of us on December 31st, a few days ago, kneel and pray and say, God, thank you for 2021. I was poured out for you like a drink offering. Now, listen, you may have gotten to the end of 2021 and felt like you were poured out like a drink offering. We may have gotten to the end of that year and said, I got nothing left. But were you poured out for the right things? Were you poured out for the things of God? Were you poured out because you were consumed with your identity as the bride of Christ? So, either you're just mad at me and you want the sermon to be over. I get that. Or you're with me and you're okay. I want to be all in. I want to be consumed by the church. What do I do? Well, the very simple answer is this. You give of your time, talents, and treasures. A very simple answer to think about how can I be consumed by the local church is to give of your time, talents, and treasures. And as I was prepping this sermon, I lamented that when I got to this point in the sermon, I've been preaching for too long to really adequately do justice to what that means to give of our time, talents, and treasures. And then it occurred to me, dude, you're in charge of the series. You can do whatever you want. So next week, we're going to talk about that in detail. We're going to come back. Those of you who remain with us are going to come back and we'll go, here's how we can be all in together. Here's what it means and looks like to give of our time, talents, and treasures. But for this morning and for 2022, this is the message and the challenge that I wanted to issue to us as a church. If you're at Grace, be all in. If you're here, mean it with everything you got. You'll notice through this whole sermon, I've not talked about grace as far as what God calls us to. I've talked about the local church. And so I say this with all humility and candor. If you can't be all in at grace because you're not all about what's happening here, that's fine. There are a lot of churches. And with only kindness and love in my heart, I'm admonishing you that if grace isn't it for you, find a church you can be fanatical about. Find a church that you love what's going on there. Find a church that you can be all in, and that you can be consumed by, and you want to pour yourself out for. I hope that's grace, and I hope that what we're doing here is something that matters deeply to you. But if it's not, as just your friend, as a pastor, as a Christian, I'm telling you, we need to be consumed by the local church. So find one to consume you. And this is why I think it's so important to preach this message. And why I wanted to do it at the beginning of this year. Because I know that the cloud of the pandemic still looms over our culture. But I've got to believe that the sun's going to break sometime soon. And I don't want to tread water in 2022. I don't want to just cling on and try to exist this year as a church. I am praying and hoping that Jesus will eagerly and earnestly move in this place. I want to see Jesus show up this year. I want to see children fill that baptistry. I want to just dunk them and I want their friends to be in here celebrating it with them. I want to baptize you guys. I want to see your friends and your family and your coworkers begin to come to church with you and for you to experience the joy of watching them move into a faith because God used you in their life. I want to see you guys take steps of obedience that are far beyond what you thought you would be capable of sacrificing before. I want to see a church with their hair lit on fire for Jesus and begging him every week that his kingdom would come here and that he would move here and that he would do great things here. And that starts with our individual decision to be consumed by the body of Christ and by the identity of being his bride, and then it culminates in a corporate culture of pursuing him and of prizing him and of doing the things of Jesus because we love him and because it's our identity and because we're consumed by him. I don't want to tread water anymore. I want to move. I want to do ministry. I want to see salvations. I want to see people come to know Jesus. I want to see marriages rescued. I want to see children discipled. I want to see hurt people cared for. I want to see people prayed for. I want to see small groups blossom and multiply. I want to see discipleship happen intentionally. I want to see the great friendships that God has planted in this church do more than just make us feel good about ourselves, but point us back towards our Father and enhance our spiritual walks. And how can any, and here, you're all looking at me and I know that you want that too. And how can it happen if we're consumers? If we continue to just slide towards thinking of church as a commodity to be consumed? It can only happen if we say, here I am, Lord, and allow ourselves to be consumed for His purposes. So if you're at grace, be all in. And listen, I say that knowing and being humbled by the fact that we have a bunch of people who are all in. I know that we do. I'm humbled by your service every week. And we have people who have watched online faithfully for two years who simply have health issues that will not allow them to come and be a part of us. And I know you're all in. I know it. And so my prayer has been that the Holy Spirit would be whispering in each of your ears. And if you are someone who is all in, and if you are someone who has been consumed by the local church, that the Holy Spirit would be whispering into your ear right now, and he would be telling you, hey, this is not for you. This is to bring you some help. You don't need to feel convicted by this. Similarly, my prayer for the rest of us is that the Holy Spirit would whisper to us too. And he would be telling you right now how you need to listen. You need to hear this. For the sake of your marriage and your kids, you need to hear this. For the sake of your anxiety and your peace and your joy and your angst, you need to hear this. For the sake of being swept up and knowing how much I love you and experiencing my goodness as being part of a kingdom, part of my kingdom on earth before eternity, you need to hear this. So next week, we're going to come back and we're going to talk about what it looks like to be all in. I hope that if the Holy Spirit is telling you right now, hey, this is not you, that you will pray with me this week. For those to whom it may apply a little more. If the Holy Spirit is talking to you right now and telling you that you need to listen, I pray that you will. And if any of you are mad at me, my door is open. I'd love to chat. But next week, we're moving forward with who we got and we're gonna do some cool things this year. I believe it with all my heart. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the church. Thank you that we are invited to participate in it. Thank you for the way that it wraps its arms around us. Thank you for the way that it is your presence in our life. Thank you for how it trains our children. Thank you for how it strengthens our marriage. Thank you for how it points us towards you. God, we pray that grace would be the church that you want it to be. We pray that we would be consumed by building your kingdom here. We pray that we would understand in our bones what it means more and more to be your bride and to be your body. God, if I've said clumsy things, I just pray that you would grant grace and forgiveness where it's needed. God, we offer you ourselves. We offer you this place. We thank you for creating it. And we just ask that you would give us the faith and courage to serve you and to be consumed by you as we move through this year. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.
11 years ago, I revealed to my wife that I had been having an affair for a year and a half. She calmly responded, I love you. We can make it through this. Today we're going to be talking about marriage. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace Raleigh, and it's an honor to bring the third message in our series, I Want a Better Life, entitled I Want a Better Marriage. For those of you who are first-time guests with us today, or maybe you're not familiar with my story. Surprise! In addition to being the worship pastor here at Grace, my wife and I also started a non-profit called Side-by-Side Ministry about five years ago, where we share our testimony, our story, our journey from hurt to hope. And it's our mission to inspire and encourage hurting couples to value, nurture, and restore their marriages. Now, to give you a little background, when my wife and I got married, neither one of us was following our childhood religions. I was raised Jewish in Massachusetts, hence the name Goldberg. My wife was raised Lutheran in Wisconsin. Both of us came from broken homes. Lisa's parents divorced when she was two years old. My parents divorced when I was three years old. We did not have good role models for marriage in our lives. And so for me, I just thought that marriage was kind of the next stage in the relationship. And if it worked out, great. If it didn't, well, okay. So it's no surprise that when our marriage started deteriorating after the first few years, I wasn't all that committed. During that time, there was a big void in our marriage. Lisa chose to fill that void by going back to church. She joined an in-depth Bible study. She surrounded herself with Christian women. She rededicated her life to Christ. I, on the other hand, decided to spend as much time away from my marriage and my wife as possible. I filled my life with my friends, my band, and ended up having an affair for a year and a half. During that time when our marriage was not going well at all, before the reveal of my affair, we took a trip to Mexico. Now, to be a little bit more forthright, my wife actually begged me to go to Mexico. I did not want to go. Our friends were getting married at a destination wedding there, and I didn't want to do it. But she begged me, and I said, you know what? Okay, fine. I'll go. So here's a picture from that trip. Now, side note, this was taken a long time ago, okay? I mean, look at that hair. I mean, you know, like, look at the smiles there. Like, this was taken with a digital camera, like a legit digital camera. Like, I'm not saying that we invented the selfie, but like, we were definitely early promoters of it. So, you know, a little credit. So, but this trip was tough. It was very stressful for us. You would never know that this couple in this picture was barely talking to each other, and that in less than six months' time, they would be separated. The truth is that when you look at this picture, it reminds me that not everything is as it seems. And I'd be willing to bet that behind the smiles and the small talk here this morning, there are hurting marriages. Divorce is very common in our society. We know the statistic, half of all marriages end in divorce. People don't have the, they don't put the importance on marriage anymore. It's very much an individualistic society about your own happiness, your own pleasure. But the truth is, is that the fastest growing demographic of divorce is empty nesters, which is shocking. These people have spent their whole marriages, 20, 30 years, focusing on things other than each other. Maybe it's the kids, maybe it's the career, maybe it's something else. And when they get to the point where the kids are out of the house, they say, who are you? They don't have that connection anymore. You know, when Lisa and I went to a marriage intensive, it was run by a Christian ministry called Retrovive, went to this marriage intensive shortly after the reveal of the affair. We were shocked that we were among the youngest people there. Most of the people were in their 50s and 60s. In fact, check this out. There was one couple there that actually, this guy, this guy brought the divorce papers with him to the marriage intensive. And I can only figure that he was like, well, this way I can say I've tried everything, okay? But at the end of the intensive, we rejoiced with them as they tore up the divorce papers. It was an amazing moment, God working through that marriage. But sadly, that's not the case for all marriages. One of the things that we learned during this intensive was that there are four stages of a relationship. This was eye-opening for me. It's been eye-opening for couples that we've talked to over the years, and I think it'll be eye-opening for you today. In a relationship, there are four stages. The first stage is called romance. This otherwise known as the attraction stage, or my personal favorite, the euphoric stage. Okay, you know this stage. This is the stage where you meet someone, you fall in love, everything is perfect. I mean, the birds are singing, the sun's out. You know, this person can't do anything wrong. You can't wait to see them. You have butterflies in your stomach every time you think of them. When Lisa and I met, I was living in Boston, she was living in New York at the time. We met in Orlando at a wedding that was kind of like an extended vacation. I mean, most of the people in our age bracket that went down to this wedding stayed there for three, four days. I will never forget, on the first day, I walked into the room, and there she was, Lisa, right over here. And I remember when I saw her, my stomach sank. I mean, I think I lost my breath. My eyes opened. I just said, wow. Her recount of the situation is a little bit different, but you'll have to ask her about that. We know this stage. We know this stage. This is when you fall in love. This is great. During that stage, there are special hormones, chemicals that are released in our bodies that only happens during that time of that relationship. It will never happen again. And it only lasts for about 18 months to two years. The next stage of marriage, disillusionment. Disillusionment. This got sad quick, didn't it? Disillusionment. This is when our eyes are opened. It's like, wait a second, who is this person? All the things that were cute aren't necessarily cute anymore, right? They start to get on your nerves a little bit. All those things your parents were telling you the whole time, you're just like, oh, okay, I get it. This is disillusionment. Sadly, lots of relationships end in this stage. They're missing that euphoric part of the relationship. It ends. My buddy Dane Joneshill, he's a brilliant songwriter. He wrote a song called We Lie Together about a couple in this stage. And listen to these lyrics. It used to be you thought my faults were funny. We'd laugh at how forgetful I could be. But the last time I forgot about your birthday, you lost the humor for that sort of thing. Sad. That's a couple in the disillusionment stage. If the couple stays together, they move on to misery. The misery stage, also known as the numbness stage. Now, this stage can last a very short time, or it can last years. This is the stage where the couple, where the marriage, is basically like a partnership. Kind of two ships in the night, roommates together. There's no real intimacy in the relationship anymore. In fact, a lot of people say that it's in this stage that they're not sure whether it's better to get a divorce or to stay married. But a lot of people choose on their own convictions to stay married, stick it out until the kids are out of school. Hence the rise in divorce among empty nesters. In this stage, it's very common for people to try to escape their marriage. They can escape their marriage in all kinds of ways. They can focus more on work, focus on the kids, their family, drugs, drinking, gambling. I mean, really, house projects. I had a neighbor once who would do house projects. I mean, like you've never seen. This guy was constantly working on his house. It was exhausting watching him avoid his wife. But listen, this is the stage. It's a fertile ground for affairs to happen. Because what happens when you're in that misery stage or numbness stage? You have no connection with your spouse or very little connection at all. And somebody else comes into the picture. You have that spark again. Remember the euphoric phase, those chemical reactions that only happen with somebody, with that relationship once, that happens. And then all of a sudden we're blinded. We think that, oh, this is the one. This is the one I should be married with. I feel happy again. Affairs can happen. That's what happened to me. And just so we're clear about affairs, an affair doesn't have to be physical. An affair occurs whenever a person other than your spouse is fulfilling a marital need or duty. So affairs can be emotional as well. In fact, I would argue that they're just as common, if not more common, and just as damaging as physical affairs. Sounds pretty bad so far, doesn't it? Well, the next stage, this is the goal to get to. This is the awakening stage. This is when our eyes are open to the reality of what a long-term relationship in marriage looks like. This is the stage when true intimacy and depth can occur. This is the stage when love changes from being just a feeling to being an action and a choice. But listen, no matter what stage your marriage is in, there's good news. It can be better. No matter what stage your marriage is in, it can be better. A marriage is better with God at the center. A marriage is better with God at the center. A marriage is better with God at the center. So if we're going to look at marriage with God at the center, I think it's a good idea that we open up the Bible and take a look at that. If you have a Bible, take it out. We're going to be starting in Genesis 2. If you don't have a Bible, there's probably one on your device, on your phone. You can pull that up. If you'd like to grab the Bible in front of you, there's one in the seat back pocket. Listen, if you don't have a paper Bible at home, take this Bible with you. It's our gift to you. We believe that every home should have a legitimate Bible. Okay. Genesis 2. So God has just created the world, everything in it, right? The heavens, the earth. He's created the oceans, the land, the animals. As our four-year-old Ford said in the Christmas video, the two little donkeys and that big bird. Okay? He's created everything. All right. But he hasn't created a woman yet. So in verse 18, he says, Now before we get caught up on the word helper, a more accurate translation would be companion. I just want to make it, put it out there that in God's eyes, man, woman, completely equal in God's eyes, of equal value. Now in a marriage, we have different strengths, different weaknesses, both of us in different roles. But as far as having value in God's eyes and in the marriage, equally valuable. So God makes a woman. He puts Adam to sleep, makes Eve, and I can picture it, right? Like if this were a movie that we're jumping down to verse 29. If this were a movie, I could see Adam opening his eyes. The song At Last by Etta James is rolling in the background. He his partner for the first time. He's excited. He's excited about this. Of course, this is before the fall. They were naked and unashamed, so that probably helped as well. It goes on to say, therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife. They shall become one flesh. Now, when this was written, the term shall leave his father and mother, I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. Because at the time, families would have family businesses. And so a son who is of marrying age would be married, and they would go live and work on the family business, whether a farmer or something else. So really what this is saying here is that the man shall prioritize his spouse. Prioritize. So the first thing, if we want a God-centered marriage, prioritize your spouse. This is something that I struggled with early on, especially in our marriage, but continue to struggle with it. I would prioritize my parents over my wife. I wouldn't even know I was doing it. My wife knew, but I did not know that I was doing it. But it's important to prioritize your spouse over your parents. This can be incredibly hard for younger people. They've just grown up in the house with their parents. Their parents have been the ones guiding them, leading them, telling them right from wrong, supporting them. And then all of a sudden, they're on a team with someone their own age who barely knows as much as they do. And they're supposed to be the team, the unit together. It's hard. It's hard to prioritize your spouse. But it's a good thing to do if you want a God-centered marriage. I had a friend once who was telling me about how when she was newly married in her younger 20s, she sat down at the table with her new husband and her father, and her father said, let's say your new husband and I have a disagreement. Whose side are you going to be on? And she said, well, my husband's. He said, good. And he said, okay, let's say your husband and I have a disagreement and you know I'm right. Now whose side are you on? And she grabbed her husband's hand and said, my husband's. You guys are a team. You're a unit together. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to love your spouse. Love your spouse. If we want to know what love looks like, we're its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to love your spouse unconditionally. During the time when our marriage was in a really dark place, I was leading a secret life. Lisa had gone back to church. She loved me unconditionally. And it's funny sometimes when we talk to couples and we say, okay, you know, you guys got to try. You got to, you know, put in your best. You got to love them as if they're doing the right things. And somebody, one of the people will say, all right, I'll do everything I can for six months. That's a condition. You're putting a condition on your love. God loves us unconditionally. Now, I should mention, or I want to mention, that abuse has no business being in marriage at all. If you're in an abusive relationship, seek professional help and guidance and get to a safe place. There's no reason that abuse should be there. If you want to have a God-centered marriage, you need to serve your spouse. Serve your can be a tough thing to do. Aaron Keyes, who's the founder of the 10,000 Fathers Worship School that I attended, has a great quote. And he says, everyone loves being a servant until they're treated like one. And it's true. Everyone loves being a servant until they're treated like one. Servants are not treated well. Jesus is washing feet. Like, do you know how nasty feet were? Like, they're nasty now. Like, think about how nasty they were like back then. Like, disgusting. Dirt, grime, everything on their feet. So to wash someone's feet was really a humbling thing. And for Jesus, our Lord and Savior, to do it, set a good example. While I was being terrible to my wife during that time, she would serve me by literally choosing to wake up early in the morning and make me an omelet before work, which is not the sort of thing that she would necessarily do earlier in our marriage. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to forgive your spouse. Forgive your spouse. Ephesians 4, verse 32. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. If you fully understand the amount of what you've been forgiven of, you need to turn around and do that to your spouse. And it's a constant thing, forgiveness. It's not a one-time thing. I felt forgiveness almost immediately or a part of it when my wife said, I love you, we can make it through this. I later went to church with her and three months later gave my life to Christ. We have a thing in our home that helps us is that we actually ask for each other's forgiveness. Not just say, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. But we say, will you forgive me? If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to forgive your spouse. And the last one on the list here, if you want a God-centered marriage, you need to grow with your spouse. Grow with your spouse. 1 Thessalonians 5.11. not tend to it, and expect great results. Nobody would build a house, never maintain it, and expect it to stay in new condition. Just like a garden or a house, we need to constantly work on our marriages and grow in our marriages. If you notice at all there today, I did not mention a passage in Ephesians, which is Ephesians 5, which is the longest passage of Scripture on marriage in the Bible. The reason I didn't mention it today is because my wife and I are starting a marriage small group here at Grace. We're starting on February 9th, and four o'clock in the afternoon, childcare provided, and it's free to attend, the more the merrier. That study that we're going to do is called Love and Respect. We've gone through it four times. We've taught it once, and it's been incredibly beneficial each time. And so I have a little promo for you or significant other, you feel unloved at that moment or disrespected. 83% of the men say they feel disrespected. 72% of the women say they feel unloved. Now, it's very important that I say this. We all need love and respect equally. But the felt need during conflict is as different as pink is from blue, night is from day, male is from female. If you were to ask us to pinpoint one moment where your relationship with one another did a 180, it's absolutely when we did the love and respect. If we knew ahead of time that there was something available like this, it would have made those first 12, 13 years of our marriage so much smoother I think. a workbook for you. The workbook provides additional information that will enable you to apply this simple message. We include discussion questions, stories to read and discuss. There's a couple called Missy and Stu. A devotional for each session and then there's the pertinent information that will be available to you for quick review and reference. Love and Respect really gives you a lot of insight into this is what men think and this is what women think and this is how they thrive. And that perspective had never been explained to us before, especially in such a comical and easy to understand way. It took a biblical approach to a lot of problems that we have. And when you can apply the Bible to marital problems, it always helps. You get a chance to learn how you think as a male and how your spouse thinks as a female and to understand that those differences in thinking are just that. It's not wrong or right, it's just different. It really helped us to decode who we're married to and that's something that I want to share with everybody. They're gonna give you you the tools. They're going to give you what you need. Now what you do with it is up to you. You can walk out the door and you can throw it all away if you want to, or you can take it and you can make it become a part of who you are and begin to have the marriage that you deserve and the marriage that God wants you to have. The last time we led this study, there were 80 people that showed up to it at our last church. There were some young, some old, some newly married, some that were in hurting situations, but most of the people that came to it were in this awakening stage. The thing is, is that those people knew that it's a strength to work on your marriage, not a weakness. It shows strength, not weakness. So as we close up today, we've been talking about marriage is better with God at the center. Marriage is better with God at the center. One last thought. Make no mistake. God doesn't exist to make your marriage good. Your marriage exists to express the goodness of God. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, what an honor it is to be here today to speak about marriage. God, I'm living proof of how miraculous your love is, how you can change us, how the old is gone and the new has come with Jesus at the center of our lives. God, I pray especially for all the marriages here today. Lord, come into them in a powerful way. And God, let us see our spouses as beautiful as you see us. We pray all of this in the matchless name of Jesus. Amen.
11 years ago, I revealed to my wife that I had been having an affair for a year and a half. She calmly responded, I love you. We can make it through this. Today we're going to be talking about marriage. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace Raleigh, and it's an honor to bring the third message in our series, I Want a Better Life, entitled I Want a Better Marriage. For those of you who are first-time guests with us today, or maybe you're not familiar with my story. Surprise! In addition to being the worship pastor here at Grace, my wife and I also started a non-profit called Side-by-Side Ministry about five years ago, where we share our testimony, our story, our journey from hurt to hope. And it's our mission to inspire and encourage hurting couples to value, nurture, and restore their marriages. Now, to give you a little background, when my wife and I got married, neither one of us was following our childhood religions. I was raised Jewish in Massachusetts, hence the name Goldberg. My wife was raised Lutheran in Wisconsin. Both of us came from broken homes. Lisa's parents divorced when she was two years old. My parents divorced when I was three years old. We did not have good role models for marriage in our lives. And so for me, I just thought that marriage was kind of the next stage in the relationship. And if it worked out, great. If it didn't, well, okay. So it's no surprise that when our marriage started deteriorating after the first few years, I wasn't all that committed. During that time, there was a big void in our marriage. Lisa chose to fill that void by going back to church. She joined an in-depth Bible study. She surrounded herself with Christian women. She rededicated her life to Christ. I, on the other hand, decided to spend as much time away from my marriage and my wife as possible. I filled my life with my friends, my band, and ended up having an affair for a year and a half. During that time when our marriage was not going well at all, before the reveal of my affair, we took a trip to Mexico. Now, to be a little bit more forthright, my wife actually begged me to go to Mexico. I did not want to go. Our friends were getting married at a destination wedding there, and I didn't want to do it. But she begged me, and I said, you know what? Okay, fine. I'll go. So here's a picture from that trip. Now, side note, this was taken a long time ago, okay? I mean, look at that hair. I mean, you know, like, look at the smiles there. Like, this was taken with a digital camera, like a legit digital camera. Like, I'm not saying that we invented the selfie, but like, we were definitely early promoters of it. So, you know, a little credit. So, but this trip was tough. It was very stressful for us. You would never know that this couple in this picture was barely talking to each other, and that in less than six months' time, they would be separated. The truth is that when you look at this picture, it reminds me that not everything is as it seems. And I'd be willing to bet that behind the smiles and the small talk here this morning, there are hurting marriages. Divorce is very common in our society. We know the statistic, half of all marriages end in divorce. People don't have the, they don't put the importance on marriage anymore. It's very much an individualistic society about your own happiness, your own pleasure. But the truth is, is that the fastest growing demographic of divorce is empty nesters, which is shocking. These people have spent their whole marriages, 20, 30 years, focusing on things other than each other. Maybe it's the kids, maybe it's the career, maybe it's something else. And when they get to the point where the kids are out of the house, they say, who are you? They don't have that connection anymore. You know, when Lisa and I went to a marriage intensive, it was run by a Christian ministry called Retrovive, went to this marriage intensive shortly after the reveal of the affair. We were shocked that we were among the youngest people there. Most of the people were in their 50s and 60s. In fact, check this out. There was one couple there that actually, this guy, this guy brought the divorce papers with him to the marriage intensive. And I can only figure that he was like, well, this way I can say I've tried everything, okay? But at the end of the intensive, we rejoiced with them as they tore up the divorce papers. It was an amazing moment, God working through that marriage. But sadly, that's not the case for all marriages. One of the things that we learned during this intensive was that there are four stages of a relationship. This was eye-opening for me. It's been eye-opening for couples that we've talked to over the years, and I think it'll be eye-opening for you today. In a relationship, there are four stages. The first stage is called romance. This otherwise known as the attraction stage, or my personal favorite, the euphoric stage. Okay, you know this stage. This is the stage where you meet someone, you fall in love, everything is perfect. I mean, the birds are singing, the sun's out. You know, this person can't do anything wrong. You can't wait to see them. You have butterflies in your stomach every time you think of them. When Lisa and I met, I was living in Boston, she was living in New York at the time. We met in Orlando at a wedding that was kind of like an extended vacation. I mean, most of the people in our age bracket that went down to this wedding stayed there for three, four days. I will never forget, on the first day, I walked into the room, and there she was, Lisa, right over here. And I remember when I saw her, my stomach sank. I mean, I think I lost my breath. My eyes opened. I just said, wow. Her recount of the situation is a little bit different, but you'll have to ask her about that. We know this stage. We know this stage. This is when you fall in love. This is great. During that stage, there are special hormones, chemicals that are released in our bodies that only happens during that time of that relationship. It will never happen again. And it only lasts for about 18 months to two years. The next stage of marriage, disillusionment. Disillusionment. This got sad quick, didn't it? Disillusionment. This is when our eyes are opened. It's like, wait a second, who is this person? All the things that were cute aren't necessarily cute anymore, right? They start to get on your nerves a little bit. All those things your parents were telling you the whole time, you're just like, oh, okay, I get it. This is disillusionment. Sadly, lots of relationships end in this stage. They're missing that euphoric part of the relationship. It ends. My buddy Dane Joneshill, he's a brilliant songwriter. He wrote a song called We Lie Together about a couple in this stage. And listen to these lyrics. It used to be you thought my faults were funny. We'd laugh at how forgetful I could be. But the last time I forgot about your birthday, you lost the humor for that sort of thing. Sad. That's a couple in the disillusionment stage. If the couple stays together, they move on to misery. The misery stage, also known as the numbness stage. Now, this stage can last a very short time, or it can last years. This is the stage where the couple, where the marriage, is basically like a partnership. Kind of two ships in the night, roommates together. There's no real intimacy in the relationship anymore. In fact, a lot of people say that it's in this stage that they're not sure whether it's better to get a divorce or to stay married. But a lot of people choose on their own convictions to stay married, stick it out until the kids are out of school. Hence the rise in divorce among empty nesters. In this stage, it's very common for people to try to escape their marriage. They can escape their marriage in all kinds of ways. They can focus more on work, focus on the kids, their family, drugs, drinking, gambling. I mean, really, house projects. I had a neighbor once who would do house projects. I mean, like you've never seen. This guy was constantly working on his house. It was exhausting watching him avoid his wife. But listen, this is the stage. It's a fertile ground for affairs to happen. Because what happens when you're in that misery stage or numbness stage? You have no connection with your spouse or very little connection at all. And somebody else comes into the picture. You have that spark again. Remember the euphoric phase, those chemical reactions that only happen with somebody, with that relationship once, that happens. And then all of a sudden we're blinded. We think that, oh, this is the one. This is the one I should be married with. I feel happy again. Affairs can happen. That's what happened to me. And just so we're clear about affairs, an affair doesn't have to be physical. An affair occurs whenever a person other than your spouse is fulfilling a marital need or duty. So affairs can be emotional as well. In fact, I would argue that they're just as common, if not more common, and just as damaging as physical affairs. Sounds pretty bad so far, doesn't it? Well, the next stage, this is the goal to get to. This is the awakening stage. This is when our eyes are open to the reality of what a long-term relationship in marriage looks like. This is the stage when true intimacy and depth can occur. This is the stage when love changes from being just a feeling to being an action and a choice. But listen, no matter what stage your marriage is in, there's good news. It can be better. No matter what stage your marriage is in, it can be better. A marriage is better with God at the center. A marriage is better with God at the center. A marriage is better with God at the center. So if we're going to look at marriage with God at the center, I think it's a good idea that we open up the Bible and take a look at that. If you have a Bible, take it out. We're going to be starting in Genesis 2. If you don't have a Bible, there's probably one on your device, on your phone. You can pull that up. If you'd like to grab the Bible in front of you, there's one in the seat back pocket. Listen, if you don't have a paper Bible at home, take this Bible with you. It's our gift to you. We believe that every home should have a legitimate Bible. Okay. Genesis 2. So God has just created the world, everything in it, right? The heavens, the earth. He's created the oceans, the land, the animals. As our four-year-old Ford said in the Christmas video, the two little donkeys and that big bird. Okay? He's created everything. All right. But he hasn't created a woman yet. So in verse 18, he says, Now before we get caught up on the word helper, a more accurate translation would be companion. I just want to make it, put it out there that in God's eyes, man, woman, completely equal in God's eyes, of equal value. Now in a marriage, we have different strengths, different weaknesses, both of us in different roles. But as far as having value in God's eyes and in the marriage, equally valuable. So God makes a woman. He puts Adam to sleep, makes Eve, and I can picture it, right? Like if this were a movie that we're jumping down to verse 29. If this were a movie, I could see Adam opening his eyes. The song At Last by Etta James is rolling in the background. He his partner for the first time. He's excited. He's excited about this. Of course, this is before the fall. They were naked and unashamed, so that probably helped as well. It goes on to say, therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife. They shall become one flesh. Now, when this was written, the term shall leave his father and mother, I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. Because at the time, families would have family businesses. And so a son who is of marrying age would be married, and they would go live and work on the family business, whether a farmer or something else. So really what this is saying here is that the man shall prioritize his spouse. Prioritize. So the first thing, if we want a God-centered marriage, prioritize your spouse. This is something that I struggled with early on, especially in our marriage, but continue to struggle with it. I would prioritize my parents over my wife. I wouldn't even know I was doing it. My wife knew, but I did not know that I was doing it. But it's important to prioritize your spouse over your parents. This can be incredibly hard for younger people. They've just grown up in the house with their parents. Their parents have been the ones guiding them, leading them, telling them right from wrong, supporting them. And then all of a sudden, they're on a team with someone their own age who barely knows as much as they do. And they're supposed to be the team, the unit together. It's hard. It's hard to prioritize your spouse. But it's a good thing to do if you want a God-centered marriage. I had a friend once who was telling me about how when she was newly married in her younger 20s, she sat down at the table with her new husband and her father, and her father said, let's say your new husband and I have a disagreement. Whose side are you going to be on? And she said, well, my husband's. He said, good. And he said, okay, let's say your husband and I have a disagreement and you know I'm right. Now whose side are you on? And she grabbed her husband's hand and said, my husband's. You guys are a team. You're a unit together. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to love your spouse. Love your spouse. If we want to know what love looks like, we're its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to love your spouse unconditionally. During the time when our marriage was in a really dark place, I was leading a secret life. Lisa had gone back to church. She loved me unconditionally. And it's funny sometimes when we talk to couples and we say, okay, you know, you guys got to try. You got to, you know, put in your best. You got to love them as if they're doing the right things. And somebody, one of the people will say, all right, I'll do everything I can for six months. That's a condition. You're putting a condition on your love. God loves us unconditionally. Now, I should mention, or I want to mention, that abuse has no business being in marriage at all. If you're in an abusive relationship, seek professional help and guidance and get to a safe place. There's no reason that abuse should be there. If you want to have a God-centered marriage, you need to serve your spouse. Serve your can be a tough thing to do. Aaron Keyes, who's the founder of the 10,000 Fathers Worship School that I attended, has a great quote. And he says, everyone loves being a servant until they're treated like one. And it's true. Everyone loves being a servant until they're treated like one. Servants are not treated well. Jesus is washing feet. Like, do you know how nasty feet were? Like, they're nasty now. Like, think about how nasty they were like back then. Like, disgusting. Dirt, grime, everything on their feet. So to wash someone's feet was really a humbling thing. And for Jesus, our Lord and Savior, to do it, set a good example. While I was being terrible to my wife during that time, she would serve me by literally choosing to wake up early in the morning and make me an omelet before work, which is not the sort of thing that she would necessarily do earlier in our marriage. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to forgive your spouse. Forgive your spouse. Ephesians 4, verse 32. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. If you fully understand the amount of what you've been forgiven of, you need to turn around and do that to your spouse. And it's a constant thing, forgiveness. It's not a one-time thing. I felt forgiveness almost immediately or a part of it when my wife said, I love you, we can make it through this. I later went to church with her and three months later gave my life to Christ. We have a thing in our home that helps us is that we actually ask for each other's forgiveness. Not just say, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. But we say, will you forgive me? If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to forgive your spouse. And the last one on the list here, if you want a God-centered marriage, you need to grow with your spouse. Grow with your spouse. 1 Thessalonians 5.11. not tend to it, and expect great results. Nobody would build a house, never maintain it, and expect it to stay in new condition. Just like a garden or a house, we need to constantly work on our marriages and grow in our marriages. If you notice at all there today, I did not mention a passage in Ephesians, which is Ephesians 5, which is the longest passage of Scripture on marriage in the Bible. The reason I didn't mention it today is because my wife and I are starting a marriage small group here at Grace. We're starting on February 9th, and four o'clock in the afternoon, childcare provided, and it's free to attend, the more the merrier. That study that we're going to do is called Love and Respect. We've gone through it four times. We've taught it once, and it's been incredibly beneficial each time. And so I have a little promo for you or significant other, you feel unloved at that moment or disrespected. 83% of the men say they feel disrespected. 72% of the women say they feel unloved. Now, it's very important that I say this. We all need love and respect equally. But the felt need during conflict is as different as pink is from blue, night is from day, male is from female. If you were to ask us to pinpoint one moment where your relationship with one another did a 180, it's absolutely when we did the love and respect. If we knew ahead of time that there was something available like this, it would have made those first 12, 13 years of our marriage so much smoother I think. a workbook for you. The workbook provides additional information that will enable you to apply this simple message. We include discussion questions, stories to read and discuss. There's a couple called Missy and Stu. A devotional for each session and then there's the pertinent information that will be available to you for quick review and reference. Love and Respect really gives you a lot of insight into this is what men think and this is what women think and this is how they thrive. And that perspective had never been explained to us before, especially in such a comical and easy to understand way. It took a biblical approach to a lot of problems that we have. And when you can apply the Bible to marital problems, it always helps. You get a chance to learn how you think as a male and how your spouse thinks as a female and to understand that those differences in thinking are just that. It's not wrong or right, it's just different. It really helped us to decode who we're married to and that's something that I want to share with everybody. They're gonna give you you the tools. They're going to give you what you need. Now what you do with it is up to you. You can walk out the door and you can throw it all away if you want to, or you can take it and you can make it become a part of who you are and begin to have the marriage that you deserve and the marriage that God wants you to have. The last time we led this study, there were 80 people that showed up to it at our last church. There were some young, some old, some newly married, some that were in hurting situations, but most of the people that came to it were in this awakening stage. The thing is, is that those people knew that it's a strength to work on your marriage, not a weakness. It shows strength, not weakness. So as we close up today, we've been talking about marriage is better with God at the center. Marriage is better with God at the center. One last thought. Make no mistake. God doesn't exist to make your marriage good. Your marriage exists to express the goodness of God. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, what an honor it is to be here today to speak about marriage. God, I'm living proof of how miraculous your love is, how you can change us, how the old is gone and the new has come with Jesus at the center of our lives. God, I pray especially for all the marriages here today. Lord, come into them in a powerful way. And God, let us see our spouses as beautiful as you see us. We pray all of this in the matchless name of Jesus. Amen.
11 years ago, I revealed to my wife that I had been having an affair for a year and a half. She calmly responded, I love you. We can make it through this. Today we're going to be talking about marriage. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace Raleigh, and it's an honor to bring the third message in our series, I Want a Better Life, entitled I Want a Better Marriage. For those of you who are first-time guests with us today, or maybe you're not familiar with my story. Surprise! In addition to being the worship pastor here at Grace, my wife and I also started a non-profit called Side-by-Side Ministry about five years ago, where we share our testimony, our story, our journey from hurt to hope. And it's our mission to inspire and encourage hurting couples to value, nurture, and restore their marriages. Now, to give you a little background, when my wife and I got married, neither one of us was following our childhood religions. I was raised Jewish in Massachusetts, hence the name Goldberg. My wife was raised Lutheran in Wisconsin. Both of us came from broken homes. Lisa's parents divorced when she was two years old. My parents divorced when I was three years old. We did not have good role models for marriage in our lives. And so for me, I just thought that marriage was kind of the next stage in the relationship. And if it worked out, great. If it didn't, well, okay. So it's no surprise that when our marriage started deteriorating after the first few years, I wasn't all that committed. During that time, there was a big void in our marriage. Lisa chose to fill that void by going back to church. She joined an in-depth Bible study. She surrounded herself with Christian women. She rededicated her life to Christ. I, on the other hand, decided to spend as much time away from my marriage and my wife as possible. I filled my life with my friends, my band, and ended up having an affair for a year and a half. During that time when our marriage was not going well at all, before the reveal of my affair, we took a trip to Mexico. Now, to be a little bit more forthright, my wife actually begged me to go to Mexico. I did not want to go. Our friends were getting married at a destination wedding there, and I didn't want to do it. But she begged me, and I said, you know what? Okay, fine. I'll go. So here's a picture from that trip. Now, side note, this was taken a long time ago, okay? I mean, look at that hair. I mean, you know, like, look at the smiles there. Like, this was taken with a digital camera, like a legit digital camera. Like, I'm not saying that we invented the selfie, but like, we were definitely early promoters of it. So, you know, a little credit. So, but this trip was tough. It was very stressful for us. You would never know that this couple in this picture was barely talking to each other, and that in less than six months' time, they would be separated. The truth is that when you look at this picture, it reminds me that not everything is as it seems. And I'd be willing to bet that behind the smiles and the small talk here this morning, there are hurting marriages. Divorce is very common in our society. We know the statistic, half of all marriages end in divorce. People don't have the, they don't put the importance on marriage anymore. It's very much an individualistic society about your own happiness, your own pleasure. But the truth is, is that the fastest growing demographic of divorce is empty nesters, which is shocking. These people have spent their whole marriages, 20, 30 years, focusing on things other than each other. Maybe it's the kids, maybe it's the career, maybe it's something else. And when they get to the point where the kids are out of the house, they say, who are you? They don't have that connection anymore. You know, when Lisa and I went to a marriage intensive, it was run by a Christian ministry called Retrovive, went to this marriage intensive shortly after the reveal of the affair. We were shocked that we were among the youngest people there. Most of the people were in their 50s and 60s. In fact, check this out. There was one couple there that actually, this guy, this guy brought the divorce papers with him to the marriage intensive. And I can only figure that he was like, well, this way I can say I've tried everything, okay? But at the end of the intensive, we rejoiced with them as they tore up the divorce papers. It was an amazing moment, God working through that marriage. But sadly, that's not the case for all marriages. One of the things that we learned during this intensive was that there are four stages of a relationship. This was eye-opening for me. It's been eye-opening for couples that we've talked to over the years, and I think it'll be eye-opening for you today. In a relationship, there are four stages. The first stage is called romance. This otherwise known as the attraction stage, or my personal favorite, the euphoric stage. Okay, you know this stage. This is the stage where you meet someone, you fall in love, everything is perfect. I mean, the birds are singing, the sun's out. You know, this person can't do anything wrong. You can't wait to see them. You have butterflies in your stomach every time you think of them. When Lisa and I met, I was living in Boston, she was living in New York at the time. We met in Orlando at a wedding that was kind of like an extended vacation. I mean, most of the people in our age bracket that went down to this wedding stayed there for three, four days. I will never forget, on the first day, I walked into the room, and there she was, Lisa, right over here. And I remember when I saw her, my stomach sank. I mean, I think I lost my breath. My eyes opened. I just said, wow. Her recount of the situation is a little bit different, but you'll have to ask her about that. We know this stage. We know this stage. This is when you fall in love. This is great. During that stage, there are special hormones, chemicals that are released in our bodies that only happens during that time of that relationship. It will never happen again. And it only lasts for about 18 months to two years. The next stage of marriage, disillusionment. Disillusionment. This got sad quick, didn't it? Disillusionment. This is when our eyes are opened. It's like, wait a second, who is this person? All the things that were cute aren't necessarily cute anymore, right? They start to get on your nerves a little bit. All those things your parents were telling you the whole time, you're just like, oh, okay, I get it. This is disillusionment. Sadly, lots of relationships end in this stage. They're missing that euphoric part of the relationship. It ends. My buddy Dane Joneshill, he's a brilliant songwriter. He wrote a song called We Lie Together about a couple in this stage. And listen to these lyrics. It used to be you thought my faults were funny. We'd laugh at how forgetful I could be. But the last time I forgot about your birthday, you lost the humor for that sort of thing. Sad. That's a couple in the disillusionment stage. If the couple stays together, they move on to misery. The misery stage, also known as the numbness stage. Now, this stage can last a very short time, or it can last years. This is the stage where the couple, where the marriage, is basically like a partnership. Kind of two ships in the night, roommates together. There's no real intimacy in the relationship anymore. In fact, a lot of people say that it's in this stage that they're not sure whether it's better to get a divorce or to stay married. But a lot of people choose on their own convictions to stay married, stick it out until the kids are out of school. Hence the rise in divorce among empty nesters. In this stage, it's very common for people to try to escape their marriage. They can escape their marriage in all kinds of ways. They can focus more on work, focus on the kids, their family, drugs, drinking, gambling. I mean, really, house projects. I had a neighbor once who would do house projects. I mean, like you've never seen. This guy was constantly working on his house. It was exhausting watching him avoid his wife. But listen, this is the stage. It's a fertile ground for affairs to happen. Because what happens when you're in that misery stage or numbness stage? You have no connection with your spouse or very little connection at all. And somebody else comes into the picture. You have that spark again. Remember the euphoric phase, those chemical reactions that only happen with somebody, with that relationship once, that happens. And then all of a sudden we're blinded. We think that, oh, this is the one. This is the one I should be married with. I feel happy again. Affairs can happen. That's what happened to me. And just so we're clear about affairs, an affair doesn't have to be physical. An affair occurs whenever a person other than your spouse is fulfilling a marital need or duty. So affairs can be emotional as well. In fact, I would argue that they're just as common, if not more common, and just as damaging as physical affairs. Sounds pretty bad so far, doesn't it? Well, the next stage, this is the goal to get to. This is the awakening stage. This is when our eyes are open to the reality of what a long-term relationship in marriage looks like. This is the stage when true intimacy and depth can occur. This is the stage when love changes from being just a feeling to being an action and a choice. But listen, no matter what stage your marriage is in, there's good news. It can be better. No matter what stage your marriage is in, it can be better. A marriage is better with God at the center. A marriage is better with God at the center. A marriage is better with God at the center. So if we're going to look at marriage with God at the center, I think it's a good idea that we open up the Bible and take a look at that. If you have a Bible, take it out. We're going to be starting in Genesis 2. If you don't have a Bible, there's probably one on your device, on your phone. You can pull that up. If you'd like to grab the Bible in front of you, there's one in the seat back pocket. Listen, if you don't have a paper Bible at home, take this Bible with you. It's our gift to you. We believe that every home should have a legitimate Bible. Okay. Genesis 2. So God has just created the world, everything in it, right? The heavens, the earth. He's created the oceans, the land, the animals. As our four-year-old Ford said in the Christmas video, the two little donkeys and that big bird. Okay? He's created everything. All right. But he hasn't created a woman yet. So in verse 18, he says, Now before we get caught up on the word helper, a more accurate translation would be companion. I just want to make it, put it out there that in God's eyes, man, woman, completely equal in God's eyes, of equal value. Now in a marriage, we have different strengths, different weaknesses, both of us in different roles. But as far as having value in God's eyes and in the marriage, equally valuable. So God makes a woman. He puts Adam to sleep, makes Eve, and I can picture it, right? Like if this were a movie that we're jumping down to verse 29. If this were a movie, I could see Adam opening his eyes. The song At Last by Etta James is rolling in the background. He his partner for the first time. He's excited. He's excited about this. Of course, this is before the fall. They were naked and unashamed, so that probably helped as well. It goes on to say, therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife. They shall become one flesh. Now, when this was written, the term shall leave his father and mother, I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. Because at the time, families would have family businesses. And so a son who is of marrying age would be married, and they would go live and work on the family business, whether a farmer or something else. So really what this is saying here is that the man shall prioritize his spouse. Prioritize. So the first thing, if we want a God-centered marriage, prioritize your spouse. This is something that I struggled with early on, especially in our marriage, but continue to struggle with it. I would prioritize my parents over my wife. I wouldn't even know I was doing it. My wife knew, but I did not know that I was doing it. But it's important to prioritize your spouse over your parents. This can be incredibly hard for younger people. They've just grown up in the house with their parents. Their parents have been the ones guiding them, leading them, telling them right from wrong, supporting them. And then all of a sudden, they're on a team with someone their own age who barely knows as much as they do. And they're supposed to be the team, the unit together. It's hard. It's hard to prioritize your spouse. But it's a good thing to do if you want a God-centered marriage. I had a friend once who was telling me about how when she was newly married in her younger 20s, she sat down at the table with her new husband and her father, and her father said, let's say your new husband and I have a disagreement. Whose side are you going to be on? And she said, well, my husband's. He said, good. And he said, okay, let's say your husband and I have a disagreement and you know I'm right. Now whose side are you on? And she grabbed her husband's hand and said, my husband's. You guys are a team. You're a unit together. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to love your spouse. Love your spouse. If we want to know what love looks like, we're its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to love your spouse unconditionally. During the time when our marriage was in a really dark place, I was leading a secret life. Lisa had gone back to church. She loved me unconditionally. And it's funny sometimes when we talk to couples and we say, okay, you know, you guys got to try. You got to, you know, put in your best. You got to love them as if they're doing the right things. And somebody, one of the people will say, all right, I'll do everything I can for six months. That's a condition. You're putting a condition on your love. God loves us unconditionally. Now, I should mention, or I want to mention, that abuse has no business being in marriage at all. If you're in an abusive relationship, seek professional help and guidance and get to a safe place. There's no reason that abuse should be there. If you want to have a God-centered marriage, you need to serve your spouse. Serve your can be a tough thing to do. Aaron Keyes, who's the founder of the 10,000 Fathers Worship School that I attended, has a great quote. And he says, everyone loves being a servant until they're treated like one. And it's true. Everyone loves being a servant until they're treated like one. Servants are not treated well. Jesus is washing feet. Like, do you know how nasty feet were? Like, they're nasty now. Like, think about how nasty they were like back then. Like, disgusting. Dirt, grime, everything on their feet. So to wash someone's feet was really a humbling thing. And for Jesus, our Lord and Savior, to do it, set a good example. While I was being terrible to my wife during that time, she would serve me by literally choosing to wake up early in the morning and make me an omelet before work, which is not the sort of thing that she would necessarily do earlier in our marriage. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to forgive your spouse. Forgive your spouse. Ephesians 4, verse 32. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. If you fully understand the amount of what you've been forgiven of, you need to turn around and do that to your spouse. And it's a constant thing, forgiveness. It's not a one-time thing. I felt forgiveness almost immediately or a part of it when my wife said, I love you, we can make it through this. I later went to church with her and three months later gave my life to Christ. We have a thing in our home that helps us is that we actually ask for each other's forgiveness. Not just say, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. But we say, will you forgive me? If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to forgive your spouse. And the last one on the list here, if you want a God-centered marriage, you need to grow with your spouse. Grow with your spouse. 1 Thessalonians 5.11. not tend to it, and expect great results. Nobody would build a house, never maintain it, and expect it to stay in new condition. Just like a garden or a house, we need to constantly work on our marriages and grow in our marriages. If you notice at all there today, I did not mention a passage in Ephesians, which is Ephesians 5, which is the longest passage of Scripture on marriage in the Bible. The reason I didn't mention it today is because my wife and I are starting a marriage small group here at Grace. We're starting on February 9th, and four o'clock in the afternoon, childcare provided, and it's free to attend, the more the merrier. That study that we're going to do is called Love and Respect. We've gone through it four times. We've taught it once, and it's been incredibly beneficial each time. And so I have a little promo for you or significant other, you feel unloved at that moment or disrespected. 83% of the men say they feel disrespected. 72% of the women say they feel unloved. Now, it's very important that I say this. We all need love and respect equally. But the felt need during conflict is as different as pink is from blue, night is from day, male is from female. If you were to ask us to pinpoint one moment where your relationship with one another did a 180, it's absolutely when we did the love and respect. If we knew ahead of time that there was something available like this, it would have made those first 12, 13 years of our marriage so much smoother I think. a workbook for you. The workbook provides additional information that will enable you to apply this simple message. We include discussion questions, stories to read and discuss. There's a couple called Missy and Stu. A devotional for each session and then there's the pertinent information that will be available to you for quick review and reference. Love and Respect really gives you a lot of insight into this is what men think and this is what women think and this is how they thrive. And that perspective had never been explained to us before, especially in such a comical and easy to understand way. It took a biblical approach to a lot of problems that we have. And when you can apply the Bible to marital problems, it always helps. You get a chance to learn how you think as a male and how your spouse thinks as a female and to understand that those differences in thinking are just that. It's not wrong or right, it's just different. It really helped us to decode who we're married to and that's something that I want to share with everybody. They're gonna give you you the tools. They're going to give you what you need. Now what you do with it is up to you. You can walk out the door and you can throw it all away if you want to, or you can take it and you can make it become a part of who you are and begin to have the marriage that you deserve and the marriage that God wants you to have. The last time we led this study, there were 80 people that showed up to it at our last church. There were some young, some old, some newly married, some that were in hurting situations, but most of the people that came to it were in this awakening stage. The thing is, is that those people knew that it's a strength to work on your marriage, not a weakness. It shows strength, not weakness. So as we close up today, we've been talking about marriage is better with God at the center. Marriage is better with God at the center. One last thought. Make no mistake. God doesn't exist to make your marriage good. Your marriage exists to express the goodness of God. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, what an honor it is to be here today to speak about marriage. God, I'm living proof of how miraculous your love is, how you can change us, how the old is gone and the new has come with Jesus at the center of our lives. God, I pray especially for all the marriages here today. Lord, come into them in a powerful way. And God, let us see our spouses as beautiful as you see us. We pray all of this in the matchless name of Jesus. Amen.
11 years ago, I revealed to my wife that I had been having an affair for a year and a half. She calmly responded, I love you. We can make it through this. Today we're going to be talking about marriage. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace Raleigh, and it's an honor to bring the third message in our series, I Want a Better Life, entitled I Want a Better Marriage. For those of you who are first-time guests with us today, or maybe you're not familiar with my story. Surprise! In addition to being the worship pastor here at Grace, my wife and I also started a non-profit called Side-by-Side Ministry about five years ago, where we share our testimony, our story, our journey from hurt to hope. And it's our mission to inspire and encourage hurting couples to value, nurture, and restore their marriages. Now, to give you a little background, when my wife and I got married, neither one of us was following our childhood religions. I was raised Jewish in Massachusetts, hence the name Goldberg. My wife was raised Lutheran in Wisconsin. Both of us came from broken homes. Lisa's parents divorced when she was two years old. My parents divorced when I was three years old. We did not have good role models for marriage in our lives. And so for me, I just thought that marriage was kind of the next stage in the relationship. And if it worked out, great. If it didn't, well, okay. So it's no surprise that when our marriage started deteriorating after the first few years, I wasn't all that committed. During that time, there was a big void in our marriage. Lisa chose to fill that void by going back to church. She joined an in-depth Bible study. She surrounded herself with Christian women. She rededicated her life to Christ. I, on the other hand, decided to spend as much time away from my marriage and my wife as possible. I filled my life with my friends, my band, and ended up having an affair for a year and a half. During that time when our marriage was not going well at all, before the reveal of my affair, we took a trip to Mexico. Now, to be a little bit more forthright, my wife actually begged me to go to Mexico. I did not want to go. Our friends were getting married at a destination wedding there, and I didn't want to do it. But she begged me, and I said, you know what? Okay, fine. I'll go. So here's a picture from that trip. Now, side note, this was taken a long time ago, okay? I mean, look at that hair. I mean, you know, like, look at the smiles there. Like, this was taken with a digital camera, like a legit digital camera. Like, I'm not saying that we invented the selfie, but like, we were definitely early promoters of it. So, you know, a little credit. So, but this trip was tough. It was very stressful for us. You would never know that this couple in this picture was barely talking to each other, and that in less than six months' time, they would be separated. The truth is that when you look at this picture, it reminds me that not everything is as it seems. And I'd be willing to bet that behind the smiles and the small talk here this morning, there are hurting marriages. Divorce is very common in our society. We know the statistic, half of all marriages end in divorce. People don't have the, they don't put the importance on marriage anymore. It's very much an individualistic society about your own happiness, your own pleasure. But the truth is, is that the fastest growing demographic of divorce is empty nesters, which is shocking. These people have spent their whole marriages, 20, 30 years, focusing on things other than each other. Maybe it's the kids, maybe it's the career, maybe it's something else. And when they get to the point where the kids are out of the house, they say, who are you? They don't have that connection anymore. You know, when Lisa and I went to a marriage intensive, it was run by a Christian ministry called Retrovive, went to this marriage intensive shortly after the reveal of the affair. We were shocked that we were among the youngest people there. Most of the people were in their 50s and 60s. In fact, check this out. There was one couple there that actually, this guy, this guy brought the divorce papers with him to the marriage intensive. And I can only figure that he was like, well, this way I can say I've tried everything, okay? But at the end of the intensive, we rejoiced with them as they tore up the divorce papers. It was an amazing moment, God working through that marriage. But sadly, that's not the case for all marriages. One of the things that we learned during this intensive was that there are four stages of a relationship. This was eye-opening for me. It's been eye-opening for couples that we've talked to over the years, and I think it'll be eye-opening for you today. In a relationship, there are four stages. The first stage is called romance. This otherwise known as the attraction stage, or my personal favorite, the euphoric stage. Okay, you know this stage. This is the stage where you meet someone, you fall in love, everything is perfect. I mean, the birds are singing, the sun's out. You know, this person can't do anything wrong. You can't wait to see them. You have butterflies in your stomach every time you think of them. When Lisa and I met, I was living in Boston, she was living in New York at the time. We met in Orlando at a wedding that was kind of like an extended vacation. I mean, most of the people in our age bracket that went down to this wedding stayed there for three, four days. I will never forget, on the first day, I walked into the room, and there she was, Lisa, right over here. And I remember when I saw her, my stomach sank. I mean, I think I lost my breath. My eyes opened. I just said, wow. Her recount of the situation is a little bit different, but you'll have to ask her about that. We know this stage. We know this stage. This is when you fall in love. This is great. During that stage, there are special hormones, chemicals that are released in our bodies that only happens during that time of that relationship. It will never happen again. And it only lasts for about 18 months to two years. The next stage of marriage, disillusionment. Disillusionment. This got sad quick, didn't it? Disillusionment. This is when our eyes are opened. It's like, wait a second, who is this person? All the things that were cute aren't necessarily cute anymore, right? They start to get on your nerves a little bit. All those things your parents were telling you the whole time, you're just like, oh, okay, I get it. This is disillusionment. Sadly, lots of relationships end in this stage. They're missing that euphoric part of the relationship. It ends. My buddy Dane Joneshill, he's a brilliant songwriter. He wrote a song called We Lie Together about a couple in this stage. And listen to these lyrics. It used to be you thought my faults were funny. We'd laugh at how forgetful I could be. But the last time I forgot about your birthday, you lost the humor for that sort of thing. Sad. That's a couple in the disillusionment stage. If the couple stays together, they move on to misery. The misery stage, also known as the numbness stage. Now, this stage can last a very short time, or it can last years. This is the stage where the couple, where the marriage, is basically like a partnership. Kind of two ships in the night, roommates together. There's no real intimacy in the relationship anymore. In fact, a lot of people say that it's in this stage that they're not sure whether it's better to get a divorce or to stay married. But a lot of people choose on their own convictions to stay married, stick it out until the kids are out of school. Hence the rise in divorce among empty nesters. In this stage, it's very common for people to try to escape their marriage. They can escape their marriage in all kinds of ways. They can focus more on work, focus on the kids, their family, drugs, drinking, gambling. I mean, really, house projects. I had a neighbor once who would do house projects. I mean, like you've never seen. This guy was constantly working on his house. It was exhausting watching him avoid his wife. But listen, this is the stage. It's a fertile ground for affairs to happen. Because what happens when you're in that misery stage or numbness stage? You have no connection with your spouse or very little connection at all. And somebody else comes into the picture. You have that spark again. Remember the euphoric phase, those chemical reactions that only happen with somebody, with that relationship once, that happens. And then all of a sudden we're blinded. We think that, oh, this is the one. This is the one I should be married with. I feel happy again. Affairs can happen. That's what happened to me. And just so we're clear about affairs, an affair doesn't have to be physical. An affair occurs whenever a person other than your spouse is fulfilling a marital need or duty. So affairs can be emotional as well. In fact, I would argue that they're just as common, if not more common, and just as damaging as physical affairs. Sounds pretty bad so far, doesn't it? Well, the next stage, this is the goal to get to. This is the awakening stage. This is when our eyes are open to the reality of what a long-term relationship in marriage looks like. This is the stage when true intimacy and depth can occur. This is the stage when love changes from being just a feeling to being an action and a choice. But listen, no matter what stage your marriage is in, there's good news. It can be better. No matter what stage your marriage is in, it can be better. A marriage is better with God at the center. A marriage is better with God at the center. A marriage is better with God at the center. So if we're going to look at marriage with God at the center, I think it's a good idea that we open up the Bible and take a look at that. If you have a Bible, take it out. We're going to be starting in Genesis 2. If you don't have a Bible, there's probably one on your device, on your phone. You can pull that up. If you'd like to grab the Bible in front of you, there's one in the seat back pocket. Listen, if you don't have a paper Bible at home, take this Bible with you. It's our gift to you. We believe that every home should have a legitimate Bible. Okay. Genesis 2. So God has just created the world, everything in it, right? The heavens, the earth. He's created the oceans, the land, the animals. As our four-year-old Ford said in the Christmas video, the two little donkeys and that big bird. Okay? He's created everything. All right. But he hasn't created a woman yet. So in verse 18, he says, Now before we get caught up on the word helper, a more accurate translation would be companion. I just want to make it, put it out there that in God's eyes, man, woman, completely equal in God's eyes, of equal value. Now in a marriage, we have different strengths, different weaknesses, both of us in different roles. But as far as having value in God's eyes and in the marriage, equally valuable. So God makes a woman. He puts Adam to sleep, makes Eve, and I can picture it, right? Like if this were a movie that we're jumping down to verse 29. If this were a movie, I could see Adam opening his eyes. The song At Last by Etta James is rolling in the background. He his partner for the first time. He's excited. He's excited about this. Of course, this is before the fall. They were naked and unashamed, so that probably helped as well. It goes on to say, therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife. They shall become one flesh. Now, when this was written, the term shall leave his father and mother, I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. Because at the time, families would have family businesses. And so a son who is of marrying age would be married, and they would go live and work on the family business, whether a farmer or something else. So really what this is saying here is that the man shall prioritize his spouse. Prioritize. So the first thing, if we want a God-centered marriage, prioritize your spouse. This is something that I struggled with early on, especially in our marriage, but continue to struggle with it. I would prioritize my parents over my wife. I wouldn't even know I was doing it. My wife knew, but I did not know that I was doing it. But it's important to prioritize your spouse over your parents. This can be incredibly hard for younger people. They've just grown up in the house with their parents. Their parents have been the ones guiding them, leading them, telling them right from wrong, supporting them. And then all of a sudden, they're on a team with someone their own age who barely knows as much as they do. And they're supposed to be the team, the unit together. It's hard. It's hard to prioritize your spouse. But it's a good thing to do if you want a God-centered marriage. I had a friend once who was telling me about how when she was newly married in her younger 20s, she sat down at the table with her new husband and her father, and her father said, let's say your new husband and I have a disagreement. Whose side are you going to be on? And she said, well, my husband's. He said, good. And he said, okay, let's say your husband and I have a disagreement and you know I'm right. Now whose side are you on? And she grabbed her husband's hand and said, my husband's. You guys are a team. You're a unit together. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to love your spouse. Love your spouse. If we want to know what love looks like, we're its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to love your spouse unconditionally. During the time when our marriage was in a really dark place, I was leading a secret life. Lisa had gone back to church. She loved me unconditionally. And it's funny sometimes when we talk to couples and we say, okay, you know, you guys got to try. You got to, you know, put in your best. You got to love them as if they're doing the right things. And somebody, one of the people will say, all right, I'll do everything I can for six months. That's a condition. You're putting a condition on your love. God loves us unconditionally. Now, I should mention, or I want to mention, that abuse has no business being in marriage at all. If you're in an abusive relationship, seek professional help and guidance and get to a safe place. There's no reason that abuse should be there. If you want to have a God-centered marriage, you need to serve your spouse. Serve your can be a tough thing to do. Aaron Keyes, who's the founder of the 10,000 Fathers Worship School that I attended, has a great quote. And he says, everyone loves being a servant until they're treated like one. And it's true. Everyone loves being a servant until they're treated like one. Servants are not treated well. Jesus is washing feet. Like, do you know how nasty feet were? Like, they're nasty now. Like, think about how nasty they were like back then. Like, disgusting. Dirt, grime, everything on their feet. So to wash someone's feet was really a humbling thing. And for Jesus, our Lord and Savior, to do it, set a good example. While I was being terrible to my wife during that time, she would serve me by literally choosing to wake up early in the morning and make me an omelet before work, which is not the sort of thing that she would necessarily do earlier in our marriage. If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to forgive your spouse. Forgive your spouse. Ephesians 4, verse 32. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. If you fully understand the amount of what you've been forgiven of, you need to turn around and do that to your spouse. And it's a constant thing, forgiveness. It's not a one-time thing. I felt forgiveness almost immediately or a part of it when my wife said, I love you, we can make it through this. I later went to church with her and three months later gave my life to Christ. We have a thing in our home that helps us is that we actually ask for each other's forgiveness. Not just say, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. But we say, will you forgive me? If you want a God-centered marriage, you need to forgive your spouse. And the last one on the list here, if you want a God-centered marriage, you need to grow with your spouse. Grow with your spouse. 1 Thessalonians 5.11. not tend to it, and expect great results. Nobody would build a house, never maintain it, and expect it to stay in new condition. Just like a garden or a house, we need to constantly work on our marriages and grow in our marriages. If you notice at all there today, I did not mention a passage in Ephesians, which is Ephesians 5, which is the longest passage of Scripture on marriage in the Bible. The reason I didn't mention it today is because my wife and I are starting a marriage small group here at Grace. We're starting on February 9th, and four o'clock in the afternoon, childcare provided, and it's free to attend, the more the merrier. That study that we're going to do is called Love and Respect. We've gone through it four times. We've taught it once, and it's been incredibly beneficial each time. And so I have a little promo for you or significant other, you feel unloved at that moment or disrespected. 83% of the men say they feel disrespected. 72% of the women say they feel unloved. Now, it's very important that I say this. We all need love and respect equally. But the felt need during conflict is as different as pink is from blue, night is from day, male is from female. If you were to ask us to pinpoint one moment where your relationship with one another did a 180, it's absolutely when we did the love and respect. If we knew ahead of time that there was something available like this, it would have made those first 12, 13 years of our marriage so much smoother I think. a workbook for you. The workbook provides additional information that will enable you to apply this simple message. We include discussion questions, stories to read and discuss. There's a couple called Missy and Stu. A devotional for each session and then there's the pertinent information that will be available to you for quick review and reference. Love and Respect really gives you a lot of insight into this is what men think and this is what women think and this is how they thrive. And that perspective had never been explained to us before, especially in such a comical and easy to understand way. It took a biblical approach to a lot of problems that we have. And when you can apply the Bible to marital problems, it always helps. You get a chance to learn how you think as a male and how your spouse thinks as a female and to understand that those differences in thinking are just that. It's not wrong or right, it's just different. It really helped us to decode who we're married to and that's something that I want to share with everybody. They're gonna give you you the tools. They're going to give you what you need. Now what you do with it is up to you. You can walk out the door and you can throw it all away if you want to, or you can take it and you can make it become a part of who you are and begin to have the marriage that you deserve and the marriage that God wants you to have. The last time we led this study, there were 80 people that showed up to it at our last church. There were some young, some old, some newly married, some that were in hurting situations, but most of the people that came to it were in this awakening stage. The thing is, is that those people knew that it's a strength to work on your marriage, not a weakness. It shows strength, not weakness. So as we close up today, we've been talking about marriage is better with God at the center. Marriage is better with God at the center. One last thought. Make no mistake. God doesn't exist to make your marriage good. Your marriage exists to express the goodness of God. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, what an honor it is to be here today to speak about marriage. God, I'm living proof of how miraculous your love is, how you can change us, how the old is gone and the new has come with Jesus at the center of our lives. God, I pray especially for all the marriages here today. Lord, come into them in a powerful way. And God, let us see our spouses as beautiful as you see us. We pray all of this in the matchless name of Jesus. Amen.
Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us, and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. Thank you for joining us for Easter. Everybody looks great in their Easter best. I really do like all the bright colors, and I am of the opinion that Easter is the greatest day in the Christian calendar. It's the greatest holiday. Christmas acknowledges the arrival of our Savior, but it's Easter that acknowledges and signifies the victory of that Savior, of Him doing what He came to do, And it is right and good to be together in church and celebrate this victory. And that's what we're going to talk about this morning. As I was thinking about Easter, I was also thinking about the power of images and how when we see a picture or we see an image or we see a logo, it often carries with it a great amount of emotion for us or at least information from us. There's things that we can see, images that we can see that will immediately conjure up from us stories or nostalgia or emotion or things that we'd like to share or things that make us laugh or whatever. And I think that there is this really remarkable intrinsic power in images. To help you understand my point, I have some for us this morning. Here's a very famous one that all of us have seen before. When we think about images, when you see Mickey Mouse ears, what does it make you think of? It may send you back to your childhood when your dad was wearing short shorts and he took you to Frontier Landing or whatever it is. That's what mine was, mosquitoes and the whole deal and hotlines and everything. And it goes back to my childhood in the 80s. And now more recently, it goes back to taking my daughter Lily. We went earlier this year. We went three years ago. I have great memories there. So when I see those ears, it conjures up with me pages and pages worth of memories that I could share with you. And I'm sure that you do too. Maybe it's just annoyance at Disney World and you don't like that place at all and you wish it would quit showing up in your life. That could be it, but you've got something there with just that image. And there's another, here's another one. Let's look at this one. That's not even a picture, but we all know what that is, right? That's coffee. And when you see that, I don't know where that takes you. It takes me, when I think of coffee, I think of being quiet and being relaxed, often studying, having a book, or just staring out the window in silence. The older I get, the more things I see that make me want to sit somewhere and be still and stare out the window in silence. Maybe it's because I have two young children, but that's what I think of when I see coffee is maybe it takes you to after dinner, to a little dinner and dessert or whatever. But maybe you are a person who has coffee paraphernalia all over your kitchen or your office and coffee is a part of who you are and you feel very seen right now, whatever this image means to you. Speaking of feeling seen, some of you will feel seen with this next one. Yeah, we know what that is. That's the Vince Lombardi trophy. That's the Super Bowl trophy. Now, for some of us, it conjures up memories of great, great success. For others, like me, I'm a Falcons fan, it's great pain that is in that image. For others of you Browns fans, that image means nothing to you. You might not even know what that is. I don't know if you do or not. I probably had to explain it to you. And then lastly, there's this, which is known the world over for excellence, victory, and championships. We can all wholeheartedly agree that Georgia Tech's the greatest at everything. That's such an easy joke because Georgia Tech's the worst. They're the worst at everything. They're the NC State of Georgia. Anyways, whatever the image is, whatever the image is conjures up for us emotions and stories and experiences. And I was learning about the power of visual learning and what images do. And they have this remarkable ability to package and compartmentalize for us knowledge and stories and so much other information that's represented in just that image. And it's funny because God created us that way. He created us to be people who don't learn as well by seeing or by reading or by hearing, but by experiencing and by seeing something and by having an image or an icon that immediately takes our mind to a thing or to a place and immediately begins to unpack all the details that go into that image. And I was thinking about the power of imagery this week because I believe that God designed and created for us an image to last until Jesus comes back to remind us maybe of the most important part of the Bible, which is Easter. It dawned on me that baptism is the image of Easter. The act of baptizing someone is the image of Easter. And so when we had some folks in previous months reach out and say, hey, we think we might be interested in being baptized, I asked them if they would do it on Easter. I mentioned before that the early church would only baptize people on Easter because of the imagery, because of what it meant, because of the symbolism laced into baptism. And so I thought, what better way, what better way to acknowledge Easter than to celebrate Easter than to have baptisms on Easter and talk about the symbolism of those baptisms within, or the symbolism of those baptisms within the act of them themselves. And so as we gather for Easter and we are reminded what it's about, let's also acknowledge that God created for us an image of Easter that we ought to be reminded of as we go throughout our Christian lives and our Christian walk. Baptism is so important, as a matter of fact, that Jesus himself started it. Jesus only started two traditions. The church has a lot of traditions. We're observing Lent right now as a church. I hope that that's been a spiritually nourishing season for you, and I hope that the Lord has spoken to you and moved in your heart and drawn you closer to him. I hope that observing Lent this year has been spiritually beneficial for you. And many churches have many different traditions. Some of you, you're here with friends or you're here with family and your church has different traditions that our church isn't observing this morning. And either I'm sorry for that or you're welcome. I'm not sure how you feel about the traditions that you're not currently experiencing. But the church has a ton of traditions. But only two of them were started by Jesus. The first is communion. Communion celebrates the Last Supper and the breaking of bread and Jesus dying on the cross, which is encapsulated by the image behind me. But the other tradition that he started was baptism. When he left, when he went back up to heaven, his final instructions to the disciples were to go into all the world and make disciples and to baptize them in the name of the Father and great deal to God. And I would argue that it matters a great deal to God because the very act of it, the very image of it is itself a symbol of Easter, which is the greatest victory that is ever won. And this isn't just my idea. I didn't just conjure this up reading scriptures and piecing things together. This comes from Paul himself. The Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the Romans. And in that letter, it says this in chapter 6, beginning in verse 3. So Paul says, in our regular rhythm of faith to remind us of the miraculous victory of Easter. And he walks us through it. And in a few minutes, we're going to have the opportunity to baptize in this service two of our kids, and then in the next service, two of our adults. And I'm very excited about that. And when we do it, when we baptize them, we're going to put them under the water. And when they go under the water, that is a picture of the death of Christ. They are buried with him in death, Paul writes. And so that takes us back, it should take us back to that Friday when Jesus hung on the cross, when hope was lost, when the disciples scattered, when Mary was brokenhearted, when no one knew what to do. And it takes us to the Saturday in that poignant moment before they come back out of the water. It takes us to that sacred Saturday where hope was lost and confusion reigned and disappointment ruled the day. And they didn't know what to do. And they didn't know what to do about their Savior. And they didn't know if he was going to come back. They didn't know what was coming on Sunday. So Saturday they just sat in their sadness and in their depression. And in that moment when they disappear and you can't see them, right before they come back up, that's Friday and Saturday in the baptism imagery in the Easter story. But the story doesn't end there. It doesn't end on that sacred Saturday. It ends on Sunday when Mary goes to the tomb to look for Jesus. And it's that passage that Jordan read to us a little bit earlier in the service. And in that passage, it has to me what is the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. When Mary goes and she's looking for Jesus and the tomb is empty and there's an angel there who looks at her and he says, what are you doing? Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is risen. He's not here, Mary. You're not gonna find him. And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, that's the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has risen. Because without that sentence, without that sentence, nothing else matters. Do you understand? Nothing else in all of Christendom, nothing else in life matters without that sentence. When we have Christmas, we have the arrival of the Savior. That's good. We should celebrate that. That's hopeful. And that's a fulfilled promise that people clung to for thousands of years. But on Easter at the empty tomb, when Jesus conquered sin and death, that is the greatest victory ever won. That is the greatest sentence in the Bible. And if that sentence isn't true, then everything else fades and nothing else matters. All of Christendom and all religion and all faith is just babbling morality without that sentence, without the reality of the resurrected Jesus and the empty tomb where he conquers sin and death finally. And so when we see the baptized person spring up out of those waters, that's the moment that they're capturing. They're capturing the empty tomb. And it says that they are raised to walk in newness of life. And it reminds us of the victory that Jesus won that day. It reminds us of why this is the greatest holiday. It reminds us of the import of that sentence because in that empty tomb, in resurrecting, in raising to walk again in newness of life, Jesus accomplished for us victory over death and victory over sin. Jesus made it true that old prophecy, oh death, where is your sting? I'm reminded of this old gospel song that's ripped out of the scriptures that says, oh sin, where are your shackles? Oh death, where is your sting? Hell has been defeated. The grave could not hold our king. And when we baptize someone and we pull them out of the water, that's where the moment goes. It's to someone springing forward in newness of life. It's to victory over death. Do you realize, do you realize that this, one of the reasons that this is the greatest day on the Christian calendar is that this is the day that conquered death. This is the day that gives us hope. This is the day that we celebrate, that we cling to, that we hope for, so that when we watch someone we love slowly drift into eternity and eventually we say goodbye to them, because of Easter, we say goodbye for now, but not goodbye forever. Because of Easter, we can hold their hand and we can pray with them and we can know with certainty that they really are going to a better place and that they are waiting for us there. Because of Easter, death has no sting. What hurts about death is missing someone for a little while. What hurts about death is not having them in your life, is not being able to pick up the phone and call them like you used to. But what hurts about death is not the finality of it because Jesus took that away when he raised up out of that tomb. And we celebrate that victory when we raise someone up out of the water. That Easter is the greatest victory of all time. And it gives us incredible amounts of hope. And it takes away the fear of the one thing of which we are all the most fearful, which is what happens when we die. And because of Easter, because Jesus died on the cross, because he was buried, because he rose again and was raised to walk in that newness of life. We know that one day we will go to the marriage supper of the Lamb. We know that one day we will be in heaven with Jesus for all of eternity. We know that one day we will see those that we loved again. We know that one day we will be united with our Savior and we can set down the burdens of hope and faith because Jesus will be right there in front of us because of Easter. And not only in that moment where Jesus sprung out of the tomb, where we come up out of the water, not only is there victory over death, but there's victory over sin as well. Sin has no shackles on us anymore. So not only is there hope for the future, for what will happen one day, but there is hope for right now because scripture teaches us that when we are a new creation, that we come up out of the waters to walk in newness of life, that what that newness of life means is we are no longer shackled to the sins that we carried before we knew Jesus. I preached a couple of weeks ago about repentance, and what I said is that after Jesus, after the Holy Spirit, after we know him, after we become Christians, then repentance is possible. Before that, scripture tells us that we are slaves to sin, that we have no choice but to sin. But with the miracle of Easter, it doesn't just give us hope for the future. It gives us hope for the right now, that the sins and the things in our life that we don't want there anymore can actually be defeated. And we find that hope in Jesus. Easter reminds us of that hope. And it reminds us that we're not chained to the sins that we once carried anymore. So not only does Easter point us towards a future hope, but Easter points us to a present hope, victory over death and sin, future and present. And so, in a few minutes, as we do the baptisms, let's see in these baptisms the picture of Easter. When they go under, let's take ourselves to the Friday and to the Saturday and to the waiting and to the confusion. And let's know that that's just God putting to death your old self. And when we see a raising to walk and newness of life, that that is the victory of hope for all of eternity. That is the victory that Jesus has already won and he's going to come and claim again someday. But as you move through life, as you go through Easter, as you attend other services, as you go to other churches, and some of you back to your own churches, my hope for you is that whenever you see a baptism, that it will carry you right back to Easter, right back to this day, right back to the victory that Jesus won for you and for me, and that it will fill you with a hope, not only for the future, but for the present as well. And let's see baptism for what it is, a picture, an image of Easter itself, of the greatest victory ever won and the greatest day on the Christian calendar. Let's pray and then we're going to baptize some people. Father, thank you so much for the miracle of Easter. Thank you for what it is, for what it represents. God, I pray that as we think of Easter and we think of the images that surround it, that it wouldn't just be bunnies and eggs and pastels and baskets and flowers and all the rest, but that the first thing we would see is your victory. The first thing we would see is how you love us. How you sent your son to die for us and how he resurrected on the third day. God, may we be moved with each baptism that we see with the power and the efficacy of Easter and all that today represents. I pray these things in your son's name. Amen.
Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us, and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. Thank you for joining us for Easter. Everybody looks great in their Easter best. I really do like all the bright colors, and I am of the opinion that Easter is the greatest day in the Christian calendar. It's the greatest holiday. Christmas acknowledges the arrival of our Savior, but it's Easter that acknowledges and signifies the victory of that Savior, of Him doing what He came to do, And it is right and good to be together in church and celebrate this victory. And that's what we're going to talk about this morning. As I was thinking about Easter, I was also thinking about the power of images and how when we see a picture or we see an image or we see a logo, it often carries with it a great amount of emotion for us or at least information from us. There's things that we can see, images that we can see that will immediately conjure up from us stories or nostalgia or emotion or things that we'd like to share or things that make us laugh or whatever. And I think that there is this really remarkable intrinsic power in images. To help you understand my point, I have some for us this morning. Here's a very famous one that all of us have seen before. When we think about images, when you see Mickey Mouse ears, what does it make you think of? It may send you back to your childhood when your dad was wearing short shorts and he took you to Frontier Landing or whatever it is. That's what mine was, mosquitoes and the whole deal and hotlines and everything. And it goes back to my childhood in the 80s. And now more recently, it goes back to taking my daughter Lily. We went earlier this year. We went three years ago. I have great memories there. So when I see those ears, it conjures up with me pages and pages worth of memories that I could share with you. And I'm sure that you do too. Maybe it's just annoyance at Disney World and you don't like that place at all and you wish it would quit showing up in your life. That could be it, but you've got something there with just that image. And there's another, here's another one. Let's look at this one. That's not even a picture, but we all know what that is, right? That's coffee. And when you see that, I don't know where that takes you. It takes me, when I think of coffee, I think of being quiet and being relaxed, often studying, having a book, or just staring out the window in silence. The older I get, the more things I see that make me want to sit somewhere and be still and stare out the window in silence. Maybe it's because I have two young children, but that's what I think of when I see coffee is maybe it takes you to after dinner, to a little dinner and dessert or whatever. But maybe you are a person who has coffee paraphernalia all over your kitchen or your office and coffee is a part of who you are and you feel very seen right now, whatever this image means to you. Speaking of feeling seen, some of you will feel seen with this next one. Yeah, we know what that is. That's the Vince Lombardi trophy. That's the Super Bowl trophy. Now, for some of us, it conjures up memories of great, great success. For others, like me, I'm a Falcons fan, it's great pain that is in that image. For others of you Browns fans, that image means nothing to you. You might not even know what that is. I don't know if you do or not. I probably had to explain it to you. And then lastly, there's this, which is known the world over for excellence, victory, and championships. We can all wholeheartedly agree that Georgia Tech's the greatest at everything. That's such an easy joke because Georgia Tech's the worst. They're the worst at everything. They're the NC State of Georgia. Anyways, whatever the image is, whatever the image is conjures up for us emotions and stories and experiences. And I was learning about the power of visual learning and what images do. And they have this remarkable ability to package and compartmentalize for us knowledge and stories and so much other information that's represented in just that image. And it's funny because God created us that way. He created us to be people who don't learn as well by seeing or by reading or by hearing, but by experiencing and by seeing something and by having an image or an icon that immediately takes our mind to a thing or to a place and immediately begins to unpack all the details that go into that image. And I was thinking about the power of imagery this week because I believe that God designed and created for us an image to last until Jesus comes back to remind us maybe of the most important part of the Bible, which is Easter. It dawned on me that baptism is the image of Easter. The act of baptizing someone is the image of Easter. And so when we had some folks in previous months reach out and say, hey, we think we might be interested in being baptized, I asked them if they would do it on Easter. I mentioned before that the early church would only baptize people on Easter because of the imagery, because of what it meant, because of the symbolism laced into baptism. And so I thought, what better way, what better way to acknowledge Easter than to celebrate Easter than to have baptisms on Easter and talk about the symbolism of those baptisms within, or the symbolism of those baptisms within the act of them themselves. And so as we gather for Easter and we are reminded what it's about, let's also acknowledge that God created for us an image of Easter that we ought to be reminded of as we go throughout our Christian lives and our Christian walk. Baptism is so important, as a matter of fact, that Jesus himself started it. Jesus only started two traditions. The church has a lot of traditions. We're observing Lent right now as a church. I hope that that's been a spiritually nourishing season for you, and I hope that the Lord has spoken to you and moved in your heart and drawn you closer to him. I hope that observing Lent this year has been spiritually beneficial for you. And many churches have many different traditions. Some of you, you're here with friends or you're here with family and your church has different traditions that our church isn't observing this morning. And either I'm sorry for that or you're welcome. I'm not sure how you feel about the traditions that you're not currently experiencing. But the church has a ton of traditions. But only two of them were started by Jesus. The first is communion. Communion celebrates the Last Supper and the breaking of bread and Jesus dying on the cross, which is encapsulated by the image behind me. But the other tradition that he started was baptism. When he left, when he went back up to heaven, his final instructions to the disciples were to go into all the world and make disciples and to baptize them in the name of the Father and great deal to God. And I would argue that it matters a great deal to God because the very act of it, the very image of it is itself a symbol of Easter, which is the greatest victory that is ever won. And this isn't just my idea. I didn't just conjure this up reading scriptures and piecing things together. This comes from Paul himself. The Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the Romans. And in that letter, it says this in chapter 6, beginning in verse 3. So Paul says, in our regular rhythm of faith to remind us of the miraculous victory of Easter. And he walks us through it. And in a few minutes, we're going to have the opportunity to baptize in this service two of our kids, and then in the next service, two of our adults. And I'm very excited about that. And when we do it, when we baptize them, we're going to put them under the water. And when they go under the water, that is a picture of the death of Christ. They are buried with him in death, Paul writes. And so that takes us back, it should take us back to that Friday when Jesus hung on the cross, when hope was lost, when the disciples scattered, when Mary was brokenhearted, when no one knew what to do. And it takes us to the Saturday in that poignant moment before they come back out of the water. It takes us to that sacred Saturday where hope was lost and confusion reigned and disappointment ruled the day. And they didn't know what to do. And they didn't know what to do about their Savior. And they didn't know if he was going to come back. They didn't know what was coming on Sunday. So Saturday they just sat in their sadness and in their depression. And in that moment when they disappear and you can't see them, right before they come back up, that's Friday and Saturday in the baptism imagery in the Easter story. But the story doesn't end there. It doesn't end on that sacred Saturday. It ends on Sunday when Mary goes to the tomb to look for Jesus. And it's that passage that Jordan read to us a little bit earlier in the service. And in that passage, it has to me what is the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. When Mary goes and she's looking for Jesus and the tomb is empty and there's an angel there who looks at her and he says, what are you doing? Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is risen. He's not here, Mary. You're not gonna find him. And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, that's the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has risen. Because without that sentence, without that sentence, nothing else matters. Do you understand? Nothing else in all of Christendom, nothing else in life matters without that sentence. When we have Christmas, we have the arrival of the Savior. That's good. We should celebrate that. That's hopeful. And that's a fulfilled promise that people clung to for thousands of years. But on Easter at the empty tomb, when Jesus conquered sin and death, that is the greatest victory ever won. That is the greatest sentence in the Bible. And if that sentence isn't true, then everything else fades and nothing else matters. All of Christendom and all religion and all faith is just babbling morality without that sentence, without the reality of the resurrected Jesus and the empty tomb where he conquers sin and death finally. And so when we see the baptized person spring up out of those waters, that's the moment that they're capturing. They're capturing the empty tomb. And it says that they are raised to walk in newness of life. And it reminds us of the victory that Jesus won that day. It reminds us of why this is the greatest holiday. It reminds us of the import of that sentence because in that empty tomb, in resurrecting, in raising to walk again in newness of life, Jesus accomplished for us victory over death and victory over sin. Jesus made it true that old prophecy, oh death, where is your sting? I'm reminded of this old gospel song that's ripped out of the scriptures that says, oh sin, where are your shackles? Oh death, where is your sting? Hell has been defeated. The grave could not hold our king. And when we baptize someone and we pull them out of the water, that's where the moment goes. It's to someone springing forward in newness of life. It's to victory over death. Do you realize, do you realize that this, one of the reasons that this is the greatest day on the Christian calendar is that this is the day that conquered death. This is the day that gives us hope. This is the day that we celebrate, that we cling to, that we hope for, so that when we watch someone we love slowly drift into eternity and eventually we say goodbye to them, because of Easter, we say goodbye for now, but not goodbye forever. Because of Easter, we can hold their hand and we can pray with them and we can know with certainty that they really are going to a better place and that they are waiting for us there. Because of Easter, death has no sting. What hurts about death is missing someone for a little while. What hurts about death is not having them in your life, is not being able to pick up the phone and call them like you used to. But what hurts about death is not the finality of it because Jesus took that away when he raised up out of that tomb. And we celebrate that victory when we raise someone up out of the water. That Easter is the greatest victory of all time. And it gives us incredible amounts of hope. And it takes away the fear of the one thing of which we are all the most fearful, which is what happens when we die. And because of Easter, because Jesus died on the cross, because he was buried, because he rose again and was raised to walk in that newness of life. We know that one day we will go to the marriage supper of the Lamb. We know that one day we will be in heaven with Jesus for all of eternity. We know that one day we will see those that we loved again. We know that one day we will be united with our Savior and we can set down the burdens of hope and faith because Jesus will be right there in front of us because of Easter. And not only in that moment where Jesus sprung out of the tomb, where we come up out of the water, not only is there victory over death, but there's victory over sin as well. Sin has no shackles on us anymore. So not only is there hope for the future, for what will happen one day, but there is hope for right now because scripture teaches us that when we are a new creation, that we come up out of the waters to walk in newness of life, that what that newness of life means is we are no longer shackled to the sins that we carried before we knew Jesus. I preached a couple of weeks ago about repentance, and what I said is that after Jesus, after the Holy Spirit, after we know him, after we become Christians, then repentance is possible. Before that, scripture tells us that we are slaves to sin, that we have no choice but to sin. But with the miracle of Easter, it doesn't just give us hope for the future. It gives us hope for the right now, that the sins and the things in our life that we don't want there anymore can actually be defeated. And we find that hope in Jesus. Easter reminds us of that hope. And it reminds us that we're not chained to the sins that we once carried anymore. So not only does Easter point us towards a future hope, but Easter points us to a present hope, victory over death and sin, future and present. And so, in a few minutes, as we do the baptisms, let's see in these baptisms the picture of Easter. When they go under, let's take ourselves to the Friday and to the Saturday and to the waiting and to the confusion. And let's know that that's just God putting to death your old self. And when we see a raising to walk and newness of life, that that is the victory of hope for all of eternity. That is the victory that Jesus has already won and he's going to come and claim again someday. But as you move through life, as you go through Easter, as you attend other services, as you go to other churches, and some of you back to your own churches, my hope for you is that whenever you see a baptism, that it will carry you right back to Easter, right back to this day, right back to the victory that Jesus won for you and for me, and that it will fill you with a hope, not only for the future, but for the present as well. And let's see baptism for what it is, a picture, an image of Easter itself, of the greatest victory ever won and the greatest day on the Christian calendar. Let's pray and then we're going to baptize some people. Father, thank you so much for the miracle of Easter. Thank you for what it is, for what it represents. God, I pray that as we think of Easter and we think of the images that surround it, that it wouldn't just be bunnies and eggs and pastels and baskets and flowers and all the rest, but that the first thing we would see is your victory. The first thing we would see is how you love us. How you sent your son to die for us and how he resurrected on the third day. God, may we be moved with each baptism that we see with the power and the efficacy of Easter and all that today represents. I pray these things in your son's name. Amen.
Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us, and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. Thank you for joining us for Easter. Everybody looks great in their Easter best. I really do like all the bright colors, and I am of the opinion that Easter is the greatest day in the Christian calendar. It's the greatest holiday. Christmas acknowledges the arrival of our Savior, but it's Easter that acknowledges and signifies the victory of that Savior, of Him doing what He came to do, And it is right and good to be together in church and celebrate this victory. And that's what we're going to talk about this morning. As I was thinking about Easter, I was also thinking about the power of images and how when we see a picture or we see an image or we see a logo, it often carries with it a great amount of emotion for us or at least information from us. There's things that we can see, images that we can see that will immediately conjure up from us stories or nostalgia or emotion or things that we'd like to share or things that make us laugh or whatever. And I think that there is this really remarkable intrinsic power in images. To help you understand my point, I have some for us this morning. Here's a very famous one that all of us have seen before. When we think about images, when you see Mickey Mouse ears, what does it make you think of? It may send you back to your childhood when your dad was wearing short shorts and he took you to Frontier Landing or whatever it is. That's what mine was, mosquitoes and the whole deal and hotlines and everything. And it goes back to my childhood in the 80s. And now more recently, it goes back to taking my daughter Lily. We went earlier this year. We went three years ago. I have great memories there. So when I see those ears, it conjures up with me pages and pages worth of memories that I could share with you. And I'm sure that you do too. Maybe it's just annoyance at Disney World and you don't like that place at all and you wish it would quit showing up in your life. That could be it, but you've got something there with just that image. And there's another, here's another one. Let's look at this one. That's not even a picture, but we all know what that is, right? That's coffee. And when you see that, I don't know where that takes you. It takes me, when I think of coffee, I think of being quiet and being relaxed, often studying, having a book, or just staring out the window in silence. The older I get, the more things I see that make me want to sit somewhere and be still and stare out the window in silence. Maybe it's because I have two young children, but that's what I think of when I see coffee is maybe it takes you to after dinner, to a little dinner and dessert or whatever. But maybe you are a person who has coffee paraphernalia all over your kitchen or your office and coffee is a part of who you are and you feel very seen right now, whatever this image means to you. Speaking of feeling seen, some of you will feel seen with this next one. Yeah, we know what that is. That's the Vince Lombardi trophy. That's the Super Bowl trophy. Now, for some of us, it conjures up memories of great, great success. For others, like me, I'm a Falcons fan, it's great pain that is in that image. For others of you Browns fans, that image means nothing to you. You might not even know what that is. I don't know if you do or not. I probably had to explain it to you. And then lastly, there's this, which is known the world over for excellence, victory, and championships. We can all wholeheartedly agree that Georgia Tech's the greatest at everything. That's such an easy joke because Georgia Tech's the worst. They're the worst at everything. They're the NC State of Georgia. Anyways, whatever the image is, whatever the image is conjures up for us emotions and stories and experiences. And I was learning about the power of visual learning and what images do. And they have this remarkable ability to package and compartmentalize for us knowledge and stories and so much other information that's represented in just that image. And it's funny because God created us that way. He created us to be people who don't learn as well by seeing or by reading or by hearing, but by experiencing and by seeing something and by having an image or an icon that immediately takes our mind to a thing or to a place and immediately begins to unpack all the details that go into that image. And I was thinking about the power of imagery this week because I believe that God designed and created for us an image to last until Jesus comes back to remind us maybe of the most important part of the Bible, which is Easter. It dawned on me that baptism is the image of Easter. The act of baptizing someone is the image of Easter. And so when we had some folks in previous months reach out and say, hey, we think we might be interested in being baptized, I asked them if they would do it on Easter. I mentioned before that the early church would only baptize people on Easter because of the imagery, because of what it meant, because of the symbolism laced into baptism. And so I thought, what better way, what better way to acknowledge Easter than to celebrate Easter than to have baptisms on Easter and talk about the symbolism of those baptisms within, or the symbolism of those baptisms within the act of them themselves. And so as we gather for Easter and we are reminded what it's about, let's also acknowledge that God created for us an image of Easter that we ought to be reminded of as we go throughout our Christian lives and our Christian walk. Baptism is so important, as a matter of fact, that Jesus himself started it. Jesus only started two traditions. The church has a lot of traditions. We're observing Lent right now as a church. I hope that that's been a spiritually nourishing season for you, and I hope that the Lord has spoken to you and moved in your heart and drawn you closer to him. I hope that observing Lent this year has been spiritually beneficial for you. And many churches have many different traditions. Some of you, you're here with friends or you're here with family and your church has different traditions that our church isn't observing this morning. And either I'm sorry for that or you're welcome. I'm not sure how you feel about the traditions that you're not currently experiencing. But the church has a ton of traditions. But only two of them were started by Jesus. The first is communion. Communion celebrates the Last Supper and the breaking of bread and Jesus dying on the cross, which is encapsulated by the image behind me. But the other tradition that he started was baptism. When he left, when he went back up to heaven, his final instructions to the disciples were to go into all the world and make disciples and to baptize them in the name of the Father and great deal to God. And I would argue that it matters a great deal to God because the very act of it, the very image of it is itself a symbol of Easter, which is the greatest victory that is ever won. And this isn't just my idea. I didn't just conjure this up reading scriptures and piecing things together. This comes from Paul himself. The Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the Romans. And in that letter, it says this in chapter 6, beginning in verse 3. So Paul says, in our regular rhythm of faith to remind us of the miraculous victory of Easter. And he walks us through it. And in a few minutes, we're going to have the opportunity to baptize in this service two of our kids, and then in the next service, two of our adults. And I'm very excited about that. And when we do it, when we baptize them, we're going to put them under the water. And when they go under the water, that is a picture of the death of Christ. They are buried with him in death, Paul writes. And so that takes us back, it should take us back to that Friday when Jesus hung on the cross, when hope was lost, when the disciples scattered, when Mary was brokenhearted, when no one knew what to do. And it takes us to the Saturday in that poignant moment before they come back out of the water. It takes us to that sacred Saturday where hope was lost and confusion reigned and disappointment ruled the day. And they didn't know what to do. And they didn't know what to do about their Savior. And they didn't know if he was going to come back. They didn't know what was coming on Sunday. So Saturday they just sat in their sadness and in their depression. And in that moment when they disappear and you can't see them, right before they come back up, that's Friday and Saturday in the baptism imagery in the Easter story. But the story doesn't end there. It doesn't end on that sacred Saturday. It ends on Sunday when Mary goes to the tomb to look for Jesus. And it's that passage that Jordan read to us a little bit earlier in the service. And in that passage, it has to me what is the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. When Mary goes and she's looking for Jesus and the tomb is empty and there's an angel there who looks at her and he says, what are you doing? Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is risen. He's not here, Mary. You're not gonna find him. And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, that's the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has risen. Because without that sentence, without that sentence, nothing else matters. Do you understand? Nothing else in all of Christendom, nothing else in life matters without that sentence. When we have Christmas, we have the arrival of the Savior. That's good. We should celebrate that. That's hopeful. And that's a fulfilled promise that people clung to for thousands of years. But on Easter at the empty tomb, when Jesus conquered sin and death, that is the greatest victory ever won. That is the greatest sentence in the Bible. And if that sentence isn't true, then everything else fades and nothing else matters. All of Christendom and all religion and all faith is just babbling morality without that sentence, without the reality of the resurrected Jesus and the empty tomb where he conquers sin and death finally. And so when we see the baptized person spring up out of those waters, that's the moment that they're capturing. They're capturing the empty tomb. And it says that they are raised to walk in newness of life. And it reminds us of the victory that Jesus won that day. It reminds us of why this is the greatest holiday. It reminds us of the import of that sentence because in that empty tomb, in resurrecting, in raising to walk again in newness of life, Jesus accomplished for us victory over death and victory over sin. Jesus made it true that old prophecy, oh death, where is your sting? I'm reminded of this old gospel song that's ripped out of the scriptures that says, oh sin, where are your shackles? Oh death, where is your sting? Hell has been defeated. The grave could not hold our king. And when we baptize someone and we pull them out of the water, that's where the moment goes. It's to someone springing forward in newness of life. It's to victory over death. Do you realize, do you realize that this, one of the reasons that this is the greatest day on the Christian calendar is that this is the day that conquered death. This is the day that gives us hope. This is the day that we celebrate, that we cling to, that we hope for, so that when we watch someone we love slowly drift into eternity and eventually we say goodbye to them, because of Easter, we say goodbye for now, but not goodbye forever. Because of Easter, we can hold their hand and we can pray with them and we can know with certainty that they really are going to a better place and that they are waiting for us there. Because of Easter, death has no sting. What hurts about death is missing someone for a little while. What hurts about death is not having them in your life, is not being able to pick up the phone and call them like you used to. But what hurts about death is not the finality of it because Jesus took that away when he raised up out of that tomb. And we celebrate that victory when we raise someone up out of the water. That Easter is the greatest victory of all time. And it gives us incredible amounts of hope. And it takes away the fear of the one thing of which we are all the most fearful, which is what happens when we die. And because of Easter, because Jesus died on the cross, because he was buried, because he rose again and was raised to walk in that newness of life. We know that one day we will go to the marriage supper of the Lamb. We know that one day we will be in heaven with Jesus for all of eternity. We know that one day we will see those that we loved again. We know that one day we will be united with our Savior and we can set down the burdens of hope and faith because Jesus will be right there in front of us because of Easter. And not only in that moment where Jesus sprung out of the tomb, where we come up out of the water, not only is there victory over death, but there's victory over sin as well. Sin has no shackles on us anymore. So not only is there hope for the future, for what will happen one day, but there is hope for right now because scripture teaches us that when we are a new creation, that we come up out of the waters to walk in newness of life, that what that newness of life means is we are no longer shackled to the sins that we carried before we knew Jesus. I preached a couple of weeks ago about repentance, and what I said is that after Jesus, after the Holy Spirit, after we know him, after we become Christians, then repentance is possible. Before that, scripture tells us that we are slaves to sin, that we have no choice but to sin. But with the miracle of Easter, it doesn't just give us hope for the future. It gives us hope for the right now, that the sins and the things in our life that we don't want there anymore can actually be defeated. And we find that hope in Jesus. Easter reminds us of that hope. And it reminds us that we're not chained to the sins that we once carried anymore. So not only does Easter point us towards a future hope, but Easter points us to a present hope, victory over death and sin, future and present. And so, in a few minutes, as we do the baptisms, let's see in these baptisms the picture of Easter. When they go under, let's take ourselves to the Friday and to the Saturday and to the waiting and to the confusion. And let's know that that's just God putting to death your old self. And when we see a raising to walk and newness of life, that that is the victory of hope for all of eternity. That is the victory that Jesus has already won and he's going to come and claim again someday. But as you move through life, as you go through Easter, as you attend other services, as you go to other churches, and some of you back to your own churches, my hope for you is that whenever you see a baptism, that it will carry you right back to Easter, right back to this day, right back to the victory that Jesus won for you and for me, and that it will fill you with a hope, not only for the future, but for the present as well. And let's see baptism for what it is, a picture, an image of Easter itself, of the greatest victory ever won and the greatest day on the Christian calendar. Let's pray and then we're going to baptize some people. Father, thank you so much for the miracle of Easter. Thank you for what it is, for what it represents. God, I pray that as we think of Easter and we think of the images that surround it, that it wouldn't just be bunnies and eggs and pastels and baskets and flowers and all the rest, but that the first thing we would see is your victory. The first thing we would see is how you love us. How you sent your son to die for us and how he resurrected on the third day. God, may we be moved with each baptism that we see with the power and the efficacy of Easter and all that today represents. I pray these things in your son's name. Amen.
