Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Something that many of you know about me, but not everyone knows about me, is that I am saddled with being a Georgia Tech fan, which today doesn't feel like such a burden. I wanted to come up on stage to the fight song, but Jen told me that I couldn't because it says hell in it, and we're not allowed to say that at church unless we're actually talking about hell, then we can't. But anyways, for what it's worth, Go Jackets, I know that our demise is soon, and I'm squeezing all the juice out of this lemon that I possibly can. This is the last part in our series called 27, where we have been moving through the books of the New Testament. And it's our last, really, Sunday of the summer. So thank you for being a part of the summer. Thank you for being here now. Next week, as Michelle mentioned in the announcements, we've got Facelift Sunday, where we're just kind of touching things up and getting things ready for September. To me, in my mind, our ministry year runs from September to summer extreme in the second year of June. We push pretty hard during those months. And so to kick that off, we just want to get the church up and ready to go. And we're expecting visitors, so we want to get our house ready. So if you're in town next week and you'd like to participate in that, we'd love for you to do that. Just a quick note, if you're newer to Gray, so you don't feel very plugged in yet, things like that are a great way to get to know some folks. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. I had not wanted to do 1st and 2nd Corinthians together because I think these books often get short shrifted. They often get, they're misunderstood. They're not deeply appreciated enough because they're part of Paul's letters. And I think in our heads, those of us that know the Bible, we, some of us don't have any opinions at all on first and second Corinthians, but I think for those of us who are kind of familiar with the Bible, we can sometimes equate these books to like, like, like a shorter one, like Philippians or like an Ephesians or Galatians, like just something short and quick that makes a couple of points and we're good to study it. But that's really not the case with the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians. They're long books. They're more like Romans than they are like Ephesians. There's a lot of depth there. And so I had not wanted to do them both in one Sunday, but the schedule demanded that I did. And so I'm not going to do justice to them. But I do think that this morning, what I can give you is a good overview of 1 Corinthians and how it relates so much to us today in the questions and the problems facing our church. Because let's be honest, to be a church in 2024 is fraught with problems and questions, right? Being church, doing church, doing church well, doing church right, existing as a church is a challenge in 2024. What I want to assert this morning is, as a church, we face questions of divisions, standards, policies, and beliefs. As a church in 2024, we face questions of division, things that would seek to divide us, things of standards, personal standards for holiness, of policies, how should we carry out things in the gathering and how should we interact interpersonally, and in our beliefs, what's important to believe, where can we disagree. We face questions of that nature in our church today and have for years. When I say questions of division, I just mean things that would seek to kind of sneak into God's body and God's family and divide it against itself. Because we understand that we are unified in Christ, but that unification is threatened from within and from without constantly. I probably shouldn't tell you this story. I know that if I had asked Jen, hey, I think I'm going to tell a story. I know she would say, please don't do that. Um, so this John was up most of the night. So Jen, Jen, Jen, uh, is home with them. If your husband preached every week, you wouldn't keep up online either. Okay. So she's not going to watch this. All right. So we don't, she doesn't have to know what I'm about to say. All right. And, uh, and, and please don't mention this to Lily because she is embarrassed by this. It was something that happened this week that in some ways is objectively funny. At our house, me personally, I'm just very interested in politics. I'm pretty politically in tune. I consume a lot of news. And so it's something that from time to time is on the television in our house, and that'll cause Lily to ask questions about the different candidates in the election and things like that. And I'm very careful. Jen doesn't have to be very careful with this. I do. I'm very careful around, especially around Lily to never, ever talk down about any of the candidates running for any office or either of the political parties or people who vote for those parties. I'm very, very careful to always try to be as positive as I can and uplifting as I can, because by the way, this is just an aside. This is not part of the sermon. I'm just saying this in general. This is my opinion as a pastor that when we participate in the world's degradation of the opposing team, all we do is act like the world and model nothing that looks like Christianity to the people around us. Okay. So we talk about it sometimes, but I'm very careful to be aboveboard I don't because I don't want her parenting something clumsy and thoughtless to her classmates or to one of your kids over there or to one of you Okay, so I'm careful apparently the other parents that send their kids to Lily's school are not as careful. And so, at their desk or at lunch or something this week, the little girl that was sitting across from Lily said, Kamala Harris is stupid. Great. I don't know what Lily said. I do know that Lily has told me that if she could vote, she would vote for Kamala because Kamala's a girl and she's a girl. Fine. Fine. Don't care. You're eight. That'll get, needs to be more nuanced than that when you're 18, but that's, you're eight. So I don't know what she said, but apparently she defended Mrs. Harris. And that little girl, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, went and told all the classmates that Lilly is a Democrat. And I know, it's particularly funny because I also grew up in a private Christian school where the word Democrat was a cuss word. And so like that got around, news got around the third grade and now Lilly is labeled, man. And it's funny. It's funny. But the more I thought about it, I thought I need to write an email. And I did. I wrote an email to the teacher and the administrator. And I was very kind in my email. I did not fault anyone for anything. As a matter of fact, the next day, Jen saw the principal in the car line. And the principal came over and told her how much she appreciated the email and tone up and whatever. So I was very nice. All right, don't worry. But what I said is, hey, maybe this year in particular, it would be good to have a policy in the classrooms that we don't talk about, we don't have political discussions that are not moderated by a teacher or a faculty member. Because maybe these kids don't need to be just parroting their parents' views back and forth to each other. And the reason is, the reason is, and here's why I was concerned. I said it would be a shame if we allowed the division of the world to slither into God's family of faith that is unified in Christ and allowed that division to begin to tear apart our unity in such a way that kids are isolated and mocked. If that's happening in the third grade at NRCA, it's happening everywhere. It's happening everywhere where the enemy is trying to sneak in and divide and sow discord and make us forget that we are unified in Christ first. So we face questions of division. We face questions of standards all the time. Should I drink this? Can I have one more? Is that bad? Is it bad to watch this thing? Is it bad to go to this place? It's a question that the church has asked through the centuries. Every generation of Christian has asked this question, is blank a sin? Is it okay to do this? Is it okay to go there? Is it okay to see this? Is it okay to stay there? We are always constantly asking, is this a sin? And when we're asking that, what we're really asking is, what should a Christian's standard of holiness be? That's what we're asking. So we face questions of standards of holiness, and we have throughout the generations. We face questions of policies. What should I do when I'm around other people? How should I handle myself? What kind of rules should we have in the church? Who's allowed to serve here and serve there? And when just this week I had what is essentially a policy conversation with someone when they said, hey, I don't have any problems with it, but I'm just wondering how did the church decide to do communion once a month? Why don't we do it more or less? And so we talked about that. That's a policy conversation. How do we make this decision about this thing? And then we face questions of belief. Just in the spring, I preached a sermon about unity in Christ, and that being Christ's prayer for us in John 17, the high priestly prayer. And I talked about the things that threaten that unity. And I talked about how Jesus, that was the primary thing that he wanted for us is, is that we would be unified. And I said that we cannot be unified if we insist on a homogeny of doctrinal thought, if we have to believe all the same things about all the same things, right? And so what we said is there's secondary and tertiary issues. And on those things, we don't have to agree to be in fellowship together, but there are primary issues on which we do need to agree if we're going to exist in fellowship together and move forward as a body of Christ. And so when we say that we have questions of belief, really it's okay, that's great. What are the primary issues? What are the non-negotiables? What do we absolutely have to believe and what are the things about which we can disagree and have conversations? So we have questions of belief. These same questions are the same questions that was facing the church in Corinth. They're the questions that Paul actually writes the letter to specifically address. Paul writes the letter to Corinth because he had heard some stuff was going on there. Paul spent about a year and a half in Corinth planting this church. That's more time, to my knowledge, than he spends anywhere else. For him to spend a year and a half during this season of his life in one place planting one church is a big deal. It was a lot of work and it was hard work. And so this church is near and dear to his heart. And as he goes and he's going around Asia Minor planting the other churches, he starts hearing that there's some stuff going on in Corinthians, in the church in Corinth. And so he writes this very long letter, this 15-chapter letter of 1 Corinthians back to the church in Corinth and says, hey, I've heard this stuff is going on. I heard that you're facing some questions. Let me tell you how I want you to address those things. And what I want us to see is that the answer to each question in the church in Corinth is the gospel. The answer to each question facing the church in Corinth is the gospel. No matter what they're dealing with, he takes their collective attention and he focuses it on the gospel. The first thing he does, the first thing he does is in chapters one through four, you can kind of break it out this way. In chapters one through four, they are facing questions of division. What had happened is after Paul left, other apostles came around and preached in Corinth. Peter came and preached. Apollos came and preached. And what he finds out is there is disunity amongst the body of the church in Corinth around which apostle they prefer. Some prefer Apollos. Apollos was an eloquent speaker. Paul was not a very good speaker. They said, Paul writes a heck of a letter, but his sermons aren't very good. And so they were arguing over who their favorite pastor was, is what they were doing, which is a very human thing to do. It's been happening since the church started. And so now we still do that. We go to this church because we like this pastor, that church because we like that pastor. And honestly, I think all of that is really silly. Whenever I'm talking to anybody who's looking for a church, I always tell them people vastly overemphasize the importance of the senior pastor. You can download the best sermons in the world every Wednesday. You cannot download worship and you cannot download community. So if the sermons are passable, but it feels like your people go there, which is really all we're going for here. They were choosing their favorite pastor and Paul writes back and he points them to the gospel. He says, Hey, that's not what you need to do. And so one of the reasons he points to the gospel is that, and what I want you to see is that we are unified by the gospel. Paul goes, you don't need to be doing this. You don't need to be having these divisions. We are unified in the gospel. I have these verses notated in your notes. So you see the references there, but I'm not going to pull them, put them up on the screen because we'd just be looking up and down for the next 10 minutes. But this is how Paul answers that question of division in 1 Corinthians 4, verse 1. He writes this, This, then, is how you ought to regard us, as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. So this is what he says. You prefer Apollos. You prefer Peter. You say you prefer me. You prefer this pastor or that pastor. Nobody cares. All of us. Me, Peter, Apollos, and anyone else that you might prefer. We are children of God. We are tools in the hands of the creator. We are instruments to bring you to him. We do not care who you follow. We do not care who you listen to. We care that you grow closer to Jesus. That's what we care about. I had an honest conversation with a pastor friend of mine this week who was meeting with someone who was, that person was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to come to his church, and so they wanted to meet with him. And when you do that, it's in some ways like a job interview. I'm visiting around, I'm interviewing different candidates for the role of being my pastor, and I'd like to see if you are going to fit the bill. Every now and again, you get into those, and my buddy said, I wish I could just tell him, come to Journey or don't. I know you're going to land somewhere. We'd love to have you, but I'm too exhausted to try to figure out what you want me to say. That's what Paul is saying. Listen to whomever you want to listen to. We are tools in the hands of our maker. It is our job to point you to Christ. It is not our job to be your favorite. And I'll tell you who does this really well week in and week out is Aaron, our worship pastor. Week in and week out as we worship, there are times, there are moments when he backs away and he lets you sing. And he doesn't put his voice over top of ours. He does this when he could belt it, when he could do solos, when he could carry on, when he could use this as an opportunity to show off and to show out and to show how talented he is. He backs up and he gets small because he understands that Sunday morning, his opportunity to lead worship is not about impressing you with his voice. It's about compelling you to raise your voice. And so he backs away because it's his job to bring you to Jesus. It's not his job to get in the way and impress you with what he does. This is what Paul says here. So he says, listen, it doesn't matter which pastor you prefer. We are all servants of Christ. So he takes the gospel and he puts that front and center and he says, think about who you follow in light of the gospel. And just so we're clear, when I say the gospel, because that's what we're talking about a lot this morning, the way that we define the gospel of grace, the way that I say it when I say it, is that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, believe that he did what he said he did, and believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's the son of God. He died and he rose again on the third day and he ascended into heaven and one day he's going to come back and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he's going to take his family where we belong. That's what we believe. That's, that's the gospel. It's the, it's the, it's the miraculous work and reality of Jesus Christ. And so to the questions of division and disunity, Jesus take, or Paul takes our attention and he focuses it squarely on the gospel. You need the gospel to fix this situation. So that was the first time. That's divisions. Next is the standards of holiness. He heard that there was an issue going on in the church in Corinth. It's one of the more salacious passages in all the Bible where it comes to Paul's, it occurs to him, it came to his knowledge that there was a man in the church who was being intimate with his mother-in-law. And everybody just kind of knew that this was happening and nobody was correcting it. And he was just still in the back, shaking hands, collecting money every week, working as an usher. They were just cool with it. And Paul has to go, Hey, Hey, I know that you live in a city that has these standards of sexual purity that are incredibly low and that this doesn't seem like it's a big deal, but it's a big deal. You can't do that. You need to tell him that he can't do that. And so in questions of holiness, what we see is that we are compelled by the gospel. We are compelled towards holiness by the gospel. And here's what I mean. In chapter 6, verses 19 and 20, Paul says this, Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought with a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. Paul says, I've heard that this sexual immorality, this impurity is going on in the church. We need to knock it off. And here's why we need to knock it off. Because your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It was bought with a price. It is not your own. And I want to pause and talk about what that verse means a little bit, because I think it's important. The temple in the Old Testament was the place of sacrifice and worship. You went there to worship your God. You went there to make sacrifices to your God. And so in the New Testament, when it says the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that means that once you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit dwells in you. You are the primary dwelling place of the Spirit. And as such, it is your job to make sure that there is nothing that happens with your body that prevents you from worshiping and prevents you from living as a living sacrifice. Does that make sense? Your body is the primary vessel through which we worship and we sacrifice. And so what that verse means is that body no longer belongs to you. You can't do whatever you want to with it. You can't sully it however you want to. Wherever you go, you take the Holy Spirit. Whatever you watch, the Holy Spirit watches with you. When we do things that harm ourselves, we grieve the Spirit. We grieve Christ. Your bodies are bought with a price. That price is the gospel. It's the death of Christ. Reminds you that he did what he said he did. That he died for those sins. And now you belong to him. So you cannot use your bodies as recreational vehicles. They are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And so what Paul does in an issue of immorality and a lack of holiness, poor standards, is he takes the attention of the church and he focuses it on the cross, on the gospel, and he says, in light of the gospel, you cannot go on like that. I don't know what your standards are for your personal holiness. I don't know what you allow in your life and in your private thoughts. But I'd be willing to bet that most of us, if not all of us, could step it up a little bit in our standards of personal holiness. I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out. We need to tighten it up a little bit and our standards of personal holiness I bet I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out when you tighten it up when we do that it's hard you guys have taken steps towards holding this before you've set new standards for yourself before you've said I'm not gonna do this I am gonna do this I'm not gonna think this I am gonna think this you, and then you've fallen short. Pursuing holiness is hard. And so what is it that gets us up and gets us focused and gets us willing to continue to pursue that holiness? By focusing ourselves on the gospel. By being overwhelmed with our gratitude for Christ that he died to save our sins. That he's fought that battle and he's already won that battle. Belting that song out loudly, reminding ourselves that Jesus has won this. We remind ourselves of the gospel and out of gratitude for the gospel, we pursue holiness. Then in chapters 8 through 14, Paul gets into some discourse. There's some different questions of policies happening. What should we do about this? What should our standards be about this? There's one about interpersonal relationships. There's one about standards of the church and of the gathering. The interpersonal relationship one is interesting because a portion of the congregation was made up of Jewish people. The rest of the congregation was made up of Gentiles. Well, Jews famously have much more restricting dietary laws and standards than Gentiles do. So the question came up in the church, what are we allowed to eat? Can we have bacon? And the Gentiles said, God's made everything. Everything's fine. We can eat it. And the Jews said, yeah, but that's still deeply offensive. Maybe not around us. And then other Jews said, no, no, no. You need to follow. You need to adopt our standards for holiness. You need to adopt our policies. And to this, Paul infuses this idea. He says, hey, listen. You need to act in ways where you love the other person more than yourself. And in this way, we are pointed to love by the gospel. When he answers this question with the gospel, we are pointed to love by the gospel. Here's what I mean in 1 Corinthians 9, 22. To the weak, I became weak to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel that I may share in its blessings. So Paul's going through this long diatribe. And he says, listen, those of you who say God made everything, I can eat everything, it's holy and blessed in his name, you're right. Bon appetit, live it up. But when you're around someone who will be offended or misled by your consumption of that thing, love them more than you love your freedom. Love them more than you love eating that thing. Love them more than you love yourself. Be all things to all people so that by all means you might win one. I've said many times from this stage, what is the only reason that the very second we are saved and accept Christ as our Savior and in God's family, what is the only reason that the very second we receive salvation, God doesn't immediately take us up to heaven so that we can be with him for all of eternity? The only reason you and I are still here on this side of Christendom and not yet in eternity is so that on our way to Jesus, we can bring as many people as we possibly can with us. It's the only reason we exist is to take people to the throne with us. And so what Paul is saying is, if your freedoms, if what you allow yourself, if your standards of holiness that you're fine with before the spirit, they don't prohibit your temple from being a place of worship and a place of sacrifice. If those standards, when you are around others, cause other people to stumble, cause other people to have issues in their hearts, to think of you as someone who is a sinner and possibly a hypocrite, then you need to raise your standards to their standards. If they're weak in their faith and this thing causes them to struggle, then you be weak with them. Love others to the idea of policies. How do we interact interpersonally with one another? Paul says, love other people more than you love yourself and more than you love your freedom. Love them as Jesus did, and he points this to the gospel. He also does it corporately because their worship was a little bit disheveled. They were having issues in their worship where people were talking over one another. I don't think just one person would get up and preach. You guys all know the drill. You come in, you sit down, you sing. Then you stand up, you sing, you sit down. Nate's going to talk for a while. It's rude to talk. I'm not going to talk while Nate's talking. No matter how bad or boring it gets, we just sit here and endure until we can go to lunch. Then we sing and we go home. They didn't have that order. They didn't know that. And so they had the gifts of tongues and people are standing up speaking in other languages or unidentifiable languages. They're teaching over one another. They're having faith movements and moments over one another, and it was very disordered. And so Paul, to address this problem of policy, what's our policy around the gathering? He says, listen, everybody has their part to play. This is famous chapter of 1 Corinthians 12 when he talks about the gifts of the Spirit and the body of Christ. Everybody has their parts to play. Everybody has their things to do. The body is made up of many parts and without those parts, the body cannot function. We just need to know our role and stay in our lane and do what we've been asked to do. And so he talks about order within the body. And then he caps off everything. He talks about the spiritual gifts and what they're for and how they should be used. And he caps off everything with this wonderful, wonderful discourse on love. And he says this in chapter 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Everything that happens on Sunday, everything that happens in the body, all the things that you experience, all the gifts, all the roles, all the things, it all boils down to these three things, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these, the greatest of these virtues is love. And what is the single greatest act of love in the history of history? Christ's sacrifice on the cross. He again, to the question of policies, points us to the gospel. Love other people more than you love yourself. And then finally, in chapter 15, there's a question of beliefs. There was a group of people within the church who did not believe that the resurrection was a real thing. They thought it was a fable, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead, that people made it up and now they're evangelizing that truth, but that's not true, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead. And Paul writes and addresses that. And he says, listen, listen, that can't be right because if that's true and the resurrection's not real and it didn't happen, then we may as well just be a glee club. We're totally wasting our time. And that's true. If we don't celebrate Easter every year, if Easter's not a real thing that acknowledges a real event that happened in real history, then we're wasting our time. And we should find something else to do on Sunday mornings. And that's what he told them. He said, no, the resurrection is a non-negotiable. It is a non-negotiable of our faith. We Jesus has already secured our future. Because Jesus is going to do what he says he's going to do. And he's going to come crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh. And he's going to rescue his bride, the church back up to heaven. He's going to do that. And that's impossible without the resurrection. So when we talk about these questions of what do we believe, what are the primary and secondary and tertiary issues? On what things are we allowed to disagree? Paul points them and us to the gospel. He says, here are the primary issues that you must agree upon in the church. That Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. And because of the way he frames it up, we know that Jesus is the son of God. And when I say Son of God, I mean the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creator God. John tells us at the beginning of his gospel that Jesus was the Word. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing is made. In the first three verses of the Bible, we see that the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is hovering over the surface of the deep, and we see the words of God come in the form of Christ to bring about creation. So when I say Jesus is who he says he is, that's what I'm talking about, the Son of the Triune God. He did what he said he did. He came, he lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, he rose again on the third day after offering propitiation for our sins. And he ascended into heaven where he exists and he waits until one day he's going to come back down to get us. Those are the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Every mainline Protestant church, every Catholic church agrees with those fundamentals of the Christian faith. They are the absolute non-negotiables. So when we talk about beliefs in our modern day church, what do we believe about this or about that? Here's what we believe. We believe in the gospel. We believe in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. That's what we believe. That's what we're centered on. That's what we're focused on. And it's true that every Sunday morning should bring your focus back to this. It's true that every time we read the Bible, our focus should be taken at some point or another to Christ. It's true that that is the central figure and moment and belief of the Christian life and of the Christian faith. And I love the consistency of Paul in all of these questions, all of the issues facing the ancient church, all of the issues facing the modern church. What do we do about this? How do we fix this? Here's an issue that's happening in our church or in our life. What's the answer? Jesus. Where do we look? The cross. What do we remind ourselves of? The gospel and the miraculous work that is. And I love that this is really the point of the letter to the church in 1 Corinthians. The point is to point them towards the gospel. And I love that we're ending our series on the New Testament with this message. Because the whole point of the New Testament is to point us towards the gospel. Really the whole point of the Bible is to point us towards the gospel. And what is true is that just like they were then, we are still unified, compelled, engendered, and reminded by the same marvelous, miraculous, and mysterious gospel today. The same truths to which Paul pointed the collective attention of the church in Corinth. He grabs our head and he points us towards those truths today. We are still walking in light of this beautiful gospel. And as we wrap up today, just a little touch on 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians really is a letter that shows the church what happens when they do and they do not live in light of the gospel. And one of the beautiful things that happens when we live our lives in light of the gospel, when we solve our problems in light and in view of the gospel, is this thing that Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 5, where he says, and I love this verse. He says, for we are led in triumphal procession by Christ, and through us, listen to this phrase, and through us is spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God. It's this idea that Jesus is a triumphant conqueror of us and of our souls, and he leads us through this life in procession behind him. And without our even saying a word, through us passively spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. That the people who interact with us in our life are somehow drawn closer, more nearly to Jesus because of our simple presence, because of the fragrance of the knowledge of God that our life and our love emits. Do you know how you live life emitting the fragrance of the knowledge of God? You view all questions and all problems and all your days and all reality through the lens of the gospel. And we live out of gratitude for the gospel. So I'm going to pray. And then Michelle's going to come up and lead us in communion as we continue to celebrate this miraculous gospel in our lives. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you've loved us. God, thank you for the gospel, for the truth of it. Thank you for sending your son to die for us, for being willing to watch him die. God, I pray that in every situation, in every moment, in every predicament, that we would ask how the gospel informs what our response or behavior or prayer should be. Help us live in light of that and fueled by gratitude for that incredible miracle. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Something that many of you know about me, but not everyone knows about me, is that I am saddled with being a Georgia Tech fan, which today doesn't feel like such a burden. I wanted to come up on stage to the fight song, but Jen told me that I couldn't because it says hell in it, and we're not allowed to say that at church unless we're actually talking about hell, then we can't. But anyways, for what it's worth, Go Jackets, I know that our demise is soon, and I'm squeezing all the juice out of this lemon that I possibly can. This is the last part in our series called 27, where we have been moving through the books of the New Testament. And it's our last, really, Sunday of the summer. So thank you for being a part of the summer. Thank you for being here now. Next week, as Michelle mentioned in the announcements, we've got Facelift Sunday, where we're just kind of touching things up and getting things ready for September. To me, in my mind, our ministry year runs from September to summer extreme in the second year of June. We push pretty hard during those months. And so to kick that off, we just want to get the church up and ready to go. And we're expecting visitors, so we want to get our house ready. So if you're in town next week and you'd like to participate in that, we'd love for you to do that. Just a quick note, if you're newer to Gray, so you don't feel very plugged in yet, things like that are a great way to get to know some folks. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. I had not wanted to do 1st and 2nd Corinthians together because I think these books often get short shrifted. They often get, they're misunderstood. They're not deeply appreciated enough because they're part of Paul's letters. And I think in our heads, those of us that know the Bible, we, some of us don't have any opinions at all on first and second Corinthians, but I think for those of us who are kind of familiar with the Bible, we can sometimes equate these books to like, like, like a shorter one, like Philippians or like an Ephesians or Galatians, like just something short and quick that makes a couple of points and we're good to study it. But that's really not the case with the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians. They're long books. They're more like Romans than they are like Ephesians. There's a lot of depth there. And so I had not wanted to do them both in one Sunday, but the schedule demanded that I did. And so I'm not going to do justice to them. But I do think that this morning, what I can give you is a good overview of 1 Corinthians and how it relates so much to us today in the questions and the problems facing our church. Because let's be honest, to be a church in 2024 is fraught with problems and questions, right? Being church, doing church, doing church well, doing church right, existing as a church is a challenge in 2024. What I want to assert this morning is, as a church, we face questions of divisions, standards, policies, and beliefs. As a church in 2024, we face questions of division, things that would seek to divide us, things of standards, personal standards for holiness, of policies, how should we carry out things in the gathering and how should we interact interpersonally, and in our beliefs, what's important to believe, where can we disagree. We face questions of that nature in our church today and have for years. When I say questions of division, I just mean things that would seek to kind of sneak into God's body and God's family and divide it against itself. Because we understand that we are unified in Christ, but that unification is threatened from within and from without constantly. I probably shouldn't tell you this story. I know that if I had asked Jen, hey, I think I'm going to tell a story. I know she would say, please don't do that. Um, so this John was up most of the night. So Jen, Jen, Jen, uh, is home with them. If your husband preached every week, you wouldn't keep up online either. Okay. So she's not going to watch this. All right. So we don't, she doesn't have to know what I'm about to say. All right. And, uh, and, and please don't mention this to Lily because she is embarrassed by this. It was something that happened this week that in some ways is objectively funny. At our house, me personally, I'm just very interested in politics. I'm pretty politically in tune. I consume a lot of news. And so it's something that from time to time is on the television in our house, and that'll cause Lily to ask questions about the different candidates in the election and things like that. And I'm very careful. Jen doesn't have to be very careful with this. I do. I'm very careful around, especially around Lily to never, ever talk down about any of the candidates running for any office or either of the political parties or people who vote for those parties. I'm very, very careful to always try to be as positive as I can and uplifting as I can, because by the way, this is just an aside. This is not part of the sermon. I'm just saying this in general. This is my opinion as a pastor that when we participate in the world's degradation of the opposing team, all we do is act like the world and model nothing that looks like Christianity to the people around us. Okay. So we talk about it sometimes, but I'm very careful to be aboveboard I don't because I don't want her parenting something clumsy and thoughtless to her classmates or to one of your kids over there or to one of you Okay, so I'm careful apparently the other parents that send their kids to Lily's school are not as careful. And so, at their desk or at lunch or something this week, the little girl that was sitting across from Lily said, Kamala Harris is stupid. Great. I don't know what Lily said. I do know that Lily has told me that if she could vote, she would vote for Kamala because Kamala's a girl and she's a girl. Fine. Fine. Don't care. You're eight. That'll get, needs to be more nuanced than that when you're 18, but that's, you're eight. So I don't know what she said, but apparently she defended Mrs. Harris. And that little girl, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, went and told all the classmates that Lilly is a Democrat. And I know, it's particularly funny because I also grew up in a private Christian school where the word Democrat was a cuss word. And so like that got around, news got around the third grade and now Lilly is labeled, man. And it's funny. It's funny. But the more I thought about it, I thought I need to write an email. And I did. I wrote an email to the teacher and the administrator. And I was very kind in my email. I did not fault anyone for anything. As a matter of fact, the next day, Jen saw the principal in the car line. And the principal came over and told her how much she appreciated the email and tone up and whatever. So I was very nice. All right, don't worry. But what I said is, hey, maybe this year in particular, it would be good to have a policy in the classrooms that we don't talk about, we don't have political discussions that are not moderated by a teacher or a faculty member. Because maybe these kids don't need to be just parroting their parents' views back and forth to each other. And the reason is, the reason is, and here's why I was concerned. I said it would be a shame if we allowed the division of the world to slither into God's family of faith that is unified in Christ and allowed that division to begin to tear apart our unity in such a way that kids are isolated and mocked. If that's happening in the third grade at NRCA, it's happening everywhere. It's happening everywhere where the enemy is trying to sneak in and divide and sow discord and make us forget that we are unified in Christ first. So we face questions of division. We face questions of standards all the time. Should I drink this? Can I have one more? Is that bad? Is it bad to watch this thing? Is it bad to go to this place? It's a question that the church has asked through the centuries. Every generation of Christian has asked this question, is blank a sin? Is it okay to do this? Is it okay to go there? Is it okay to see this? Is it okay to stay there? We are always constantly asking, is this a sin? And when we're asking that, what we're really asking is, what should a Christian's standard of holiness be? That's what we're asking. So we face questions of standards of holiness, and we have throughout the generations. We face questions of policies. What should I do when I'm around other people? How should I handle myself? What kind of rules should we have in the church? Who's allowed to serve here and serve there? And when just this week I had what is essentially a policy conversation with someone when they said, hey, I don't have any problems with it, but I'm just wondering how did the church decide to do communion once a month? Why don't we do it more or less? And so we talked about that. That's a policy conversation. How do we make this decision about this thing? And then we face questions of belief. Just in the spring, I preached a sermon about unity in Christ, and that being Christ's prayer for us in John 17, the high priestly prayer. And I talked about the things that threaten that unity. And I talked about how Jesus, that was the primary thing that he wanted for us is, is that we would be unified. And I said that we cannot be unified if we insist on a homogeny of doctrinal thought, if we have to believe all the same things about all the same things, right? And so what we said is there's secondary and tertiary issues. And on those things, we don't have to agree to be in fellowship together, but there are primary issues on which we do need to agree if we're going to exist in fellowship together and move forward as a body of Christ. And so when we say that we have questions of belief, really it's okay, that's great. What are the primary issues? What are the non-negotiables? What do we absolutely have to believe and what are the things about which we can disagree and have conversations? So we have questions of belief. These same questions are the same questions that was facing the church in Corinth. They're the questions that Paul actually writes the letter to specifically address. Paul writes the letter to Corinth because he had heard some stuff was going on there. Paul spent about a year and a half in Corinth planting this church. That's more time, to my knowledge, than he spends anywhere else. For him to spend a year and a half during this season of his life in one place planting one church is a big deal. It was a lot of work and it was hard work. And so this church is near and dear to his heart. And as he goes and he's going around Asia Minor planting the other churches, he starts hearing that there's some stuff going on in Corinthians, in the church in Corinth. And so he writes this very long letter, this 15-chapter letter of 1 Corinthians back to the church in Corinth and says, hey, I've heard this stuff is going on. I heard that you're facing some questions. Let me tell you how I want you to address those things. And what I want us to see is that the answer to each question in the church in Corinth is the gospel. The answer to each question facing the church in Corinth is the gospel. No matter what they're dealing with, he takes their collective attention and he focuses it on the gospel. The first thing he does, the first thing he does is in chapters one through four, you can kind of break it out this way. In chapters one through four, they are facing questions of division. What had happened is after Paul left, other apostles came around and preached in Corinth. Peter came and preached. Apollos came and preached. And what he finds out is there is disunity amongst the body of the church in Corinth around which apostle they prefer. Some prefer Apollos. Apollos was an eloquent speaker. Paul was not a very good speaker. They said, Paul writes a heck of a letter, but his sermons aren't very good. And so they were arguing over who their favorite pastor was, is what they were doing, which is a very human thing to do. It's been happening since the church started. And so now we still do that. We go to this church because we like this pastor, that church because we like that pastor. And honestly, I think all of that is really silly. Whenever I'm talking to anybody who's looking for a church, I always tell them people vastly overemphasize the importance of the senior pastor. You can download the best sermons in the world every Wednesday. You cannot download worship and you cannot download community. So if the sermons are passable, but it feels like your people go there, which is really all we're going for here. They were choosing their favorite pastor and Paul writes back and he points them to the gospel. He says, Hey, that's not what you need to do. And so one of the reasons he points to the gospel is that, and what I want you to see is that we are unified by the gospel. Paul goes, you don't need to be doing this. You don't need to be having these divisions. We are unified in the gospel. I have these verses notated in your notes. So you see the references there, but I'm not going to pull them, put them up on the screen because we'd just be looking up and down for the next 10 minutes. But this is how Paul answers that question of division in 1 Corinthians 4, verse 1. He writes this, This, then, is how you ought to regard us, as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. So this is what he says. You prefer Apollos. You prefer Peter. You say you prefer me. You prefer this pastor or that pastor. Nobody cares. All of us. Me, Peter, Apollos, and anyone else that you might prefer. We are children of God. We are tools in the hands of the creator. We are instruments to bring you to him. We do not care who you follow. We do not care who you listen to. We care that you grow closer to Jesus. That's what we care about. I had an honest conversation with a pastor friend of mine this week who was meeting with someone who was, that person was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to come to his church, and so they wanted to meet with him. And when you do that, it's in some ways like a job interview. I'm visiting around, I'm interviewing different candidates for the role of being my pastor, and I'd like to see if you are going to fit the bill. Every now and again, you get into those, and my buddy said, I wish I could just tell him, come to Journey or don't. I know you're going to land somewhere. We'd love to have you, but I'm too exhausted to try to figure out what you want me to say. That's what Paul is saying. Listen to whomever you want to listen to. We are tools in the hands of our maker. It is our job to point you to Christ. It is not our job to be your favorite. And I'll tell you who does this really well week in and week out is Aaron, our worship pastor. Week in and week out as we worship, there are times, there are moments when he backs away and he lets you sing. And he doesn't put his voice over top of ours. He does this when he could belt it, when he could do solos, when he could carry on, when he could use this as an opportunity to show off and to show out and to show how talented he is. He backs up and he gets small because he understands that Sunday morning, his opportunity to lead worship is not about impressing you with his voice. It's about compelling you to raise your voice. And so he backs away because it's his job to bring you to Jesus. It's not his job to get in the way and impress you with what he does. This is what Paul says here. So he says, listen, it doesn't matter which pastor you prefer. We are all servants of Christ. So he takes the gospel and he puts that front and center and he says, think about who you follow in light of the gospel. And just so we're clear, when I say the gospel, because that's what we're talking about a lot this morning, the way that we define the gospel of grace, the way that I say it when I say it, is that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, believe that he did what he said he did, and believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's the son of God. He died and he rose again on the third day and he ascended into heaven and one day he's going to come back and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he's going to take his family where we belong. That's what we believe. That's, that's the gospel. It's the, it's the, it's the miraculous work and reality of Jesus Christ. And so to the questions of division and disunity, Jesus take, or Paul takes our attention and he focuses it squarely on the gospel. You need the gospel to fix this situation. So that was the first time. That's divisions. Next is the standards of holiness. He heard that there was an issue going on in the church in Corinth. It's one of the more salacious passages in all the Bible where it comes to Paul's, it occurs to him, it came to his knowledge that there was a man in the church who was being intimate with his mother-in-law. And everybody just kind of knew that this was happening and nobody was correcting it. And he was just still in the back, shaking hands, collecting money every week, working as an usher. They were just cool with it. And Paul has to go, Hey, Hey, I know that you live in a city that has these standards of sexual purity that are incredibly low and that this doesn't seem like it's a big deal, but it's a big deal. You can't do that. You need to tell him that he can't do that. And so in questions of holiness, what we see is that we are compelled by the gospel. We are compelled towards holiness by the gospel. And here's what I mean. In chapter 6, verses 19 and 20, Paul says this, Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought with a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. Paul says, I've heard that this sexual immorality, this impurity is going on in the church. We need to knock it off. And here's why we need to knock it off. Because your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It was bought with a price. It is not your own. And I want to pause and talk about what that verse means a little bit, because I think it's important. The temple in the Old Testament was the place of sacrifice and worship. You went there to worship your God. You went there to make sacrifices to your God. And so in the New Testament, when it says the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that means that once you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit dwells in you. You are the primary dwelling place of the Spirit. And as such, it is your job to make sure that there is nothing that happens with your body that prevents you from worshiping and prevents you from living as a living sacrifice. Does that make sense? Your body is the primary vessel through which we worship and we sacrifice. And so what that verse means is that body no longer belongs to you. You can't do whatever you want to with it. You can't sully it however you want to. Wherever you go, you take the Holy Spirit. Whatever you watch, the Holy Spirit watches with you. When we do things that harm ourselves, we grieve the Spirit. We grieve Christ. Your bodies are bought with a price. That price is the gospel. It's the death of Christ. Reminds you that he did what he said he did. That he died for those sins. And now you belong to him. So you cannot use your bodies as recreational vehicles. They are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And so what Paul does in an issue of immorality and a lack of holiness, poor standards, is he takes the attention of the church and he focuses it on the cross, on the gospel, and he says, in light of the gospel, you cannot go on like that. I don't know what your standards are for your personal holiness. I don't know what you allow in your life and in your private thoughts. But I'd be willing to bet that most of us, if not all of us, could step it up a little bit in our standards of personal holiness. I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out. We need to tighten it up a little bit and our standards of personal holiness I bet I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out when you tighten it up when we do that it's hard you guys have taken steps towards holding this before you've set new standards for yourself before you've said I'm not gonna do this I am gonna do this I'm not gonna think this I am gonna think this you, and then you've fallen short. Pursuing holiness is hard. And so what is it that gets us up and gets us focused and gets us willing to continue to pursue that holiness? By focusing ourselves on the gospel. By being overwhelmed with our gratitude for Christ that he died to save our sins. That he's fought that battle and he's already won that battle. Belting that song out loudly, reminding ourselves that Jesus has won this. We remind ourselves of the gospel and out of gratitude for the gospel, we pursue holiness. Then in chapters 8 through 14, Paul gets into some discourse. There's some different questions of policies happening. What should we do about this? What should our standards be about this? There's one about interpersonal relationships. There's one about standards of the church and of the gathering. The interpersonal relationship one is interesting because a portion of the congregation was made up of Jewish people. The rest of the congregation was made up of Gentiles. Well, Jews famously have much more restricting dietary laws and standards than Gentiles do. So the question came up in the church, what are we allowed to eat? Can we have bacon? And the Gentiles said, God's made everything. Everything's fine. We can eat it. And the Jews said, yeah, but that's still deeply offensive. Maybe not around us. And then other Jews said, no, no, no. You need to follow. You need to adopt our standards for holiness. You need to adopt our policies. And to this, Paul infuses this idea. He says, hey, listen. You need to act in ways where you love the other person more than yourself. And in this way, we are pointed to love by the gospel. When he answers this question with the gospel, we are pointed to love by the gospel. Here's what I mean in 1 Corinthians 9, 22. To the weak, I became weak to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel that I may share in its blessings. So Paul's going through this long diatribe. And he says, listen, those of you who say God made everything, I can eat everything, it's holy and blessed in his name, you're right. Bon appetit, live it up. But when you're around someone who will be offended or misled by your consumption of that thing, love them more than you love your freedom. Love them more than you love eating that thing. Love them more than you love yourself. Be all things to all people so that by all means you might win one. I've said many times from this stage, what is the only reason that the very second we are saved and accept Christ as our Savior and in God's family, what is the only reason that the very second we receive salvation, God doesn't immediately take us up to heaven so that we can be with him for all of eternity? The only reason you and I are still here on this side of Christendom and not yet in eternity is so that on our way to Jesus, we can bring as many people as we possibly can with us. It's the only reason we exist is to take people to the throne with us. And so what Paul is saying is, if your freedoms, if what you allow yourself, if your standards of holiness that you're fine with before the spirit, they don't prohibit your temple from being a place of worship and a place of sacrifice. If those standards, when you are around others, cause other people to stumble, cause other people to have issues in their hearts, to think of you as someone who is a sinner and possibly a hypocrite, then you need to raise your standards to their standards. If they're weak in their faith and this thing causes them to struggle, then you be weak with them. Love others to the idea of policies. How do we interact interpersonally with one another? Paul says, love other people more than you love yourself and more than you love your freedom. Love them as Jesus did, and he points this to the gospel. He also does it corporately because their worship was a little bit disheveled. They were having issues in their worship where people were talking over one another. I don't think just one person would get up and preach. You guys all know the drill. You come in, you sit down, you sing. Then you stand up, you sing, you sit down. Nate's going to talk for a while. It's rude to talk. I'm not going to talk while Nate's talking. No matter how bad or boring it gets, we just sit here and endure until we can go to lunch. Then we sing and we go home. They didn't have that order. They didn't know that. And so they had the gifts of tongues and people are standing up speaking in other languages or unidentifiable languages. They're teaching over one another. They're having faith movements and moments over one another, and it was very disordered. And so Paul, to address this problem of policy, what's our policy around the gathering? He says, listen, everybody has their part to play. This is famous chapter of 1 Corinthians 12 when he talks about the gifts of the Spirit and the body of Christ. Everybody has their parts to play. Everybody has their things to do. The body is made up of many parts and without those parts, the body cannot function. We just need to know our role and stay in our lane and do what we've been asked to do. And so he talks about order within the body. And then he caps off everything. He talks about the spiritual gifts and what they're for and how they should be used. And he caps off everything with this wonderful, wonderful discourse on love. And he says this in chapter 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Everything that happens on Sunday, everything that happens in the body, all the things that you experience, all the gifts, all the roles, all the things, it all boils down to these three things, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these, the greatest of these virtues is love. And what is the single greatest act of love in the history of history? Christ's sacrifice on the cross. He again, to the question of policies, points us to the gospel. Love other people more than you love yourself. And then finally, in chapter 15, there's a question of beliefs. There was a group of people within the church who did not believe that the resurrection was a real thing. They thought it was a fable, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead, that people made it up and now they're evangelizing that truth, but that's not true, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead. And Paul writes and addresses that. And he says, listen, listen, that can't be right because if that's true and the resurrection's not real and it didn't happen, then we may as well just be a glee club. We're totally wasting our time. And that's true. If we don't celebrate Easter every year, if Easter's not a real thing that acknowledges a real event that happened in real history, then we're wasting our time. And we should find something else to do on Sunday mornings. And that's what he told them. He said, no, the resurrection is a non-negotiable. It is a non-negotiable of our faith. We Jesus has already secured our future. Because Jesus is going to do what he says he's going to do. And he's going to come crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh. And he's going to rescue his bride, the church back up to heaven. He's going to do that. And that's impossible without the resurrection. So when we talk about these questions of what do we believe, what are the primary and secondary and tertiary issues? On what things are we allowed to disagree? Paul points them and us to the gospel. He says, here are the primary issues that you must agree upon in the church. That Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. And because of the way he frames it up, we know that Jesus is the son of God. And when I say Son of God, I mean the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creator God. John tells us at the beginning of his gospel that Jesus was the Word. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing is made. In the first three verses of the Bible, we see that the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is hovering over the surface of the deep, and we see the words of God come in the form of Christ to bring about creation. So when I say Jesus is who he says he is, that's what I'm talking about, the Son of the Triune God. He did what he said he did. He came, he lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, he rose again on the third day after offering propitiation for our sins. And he ascended into heaven where he exists and he waits until one day he's going to come back down to get us. Those are the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Every mainline Protestant church, every Catholic church agrees with those fundamentals of the Christian faith. They are the absolute non-negotiables. So when we talk about beliefs in our modern day church, what do we believe about this or about that? Here's what we believe. We believe in the gospel. We believe in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. That's what we believe. That's what we're centered on. That's what we're focused on. And it's true that every Sunday morning should bring your focus back to this. It's true that every time we read the Bible, our focus should be taken at some point or another to Christ. It's true that that is the central figure and moment and belief of the Christian life and of the Christian faith. And I love the consistency of Paul in all of these questions, all of the issues facing the ancient church, all of the issues facing the modern church. What do we do about this? How do we fix this? Here's an issue that's happening in our church or in our life. What's the answer? Jesus. Where do we look? The cross. What do we remind ourselves of? The gospel and the miraculous work that is. And I love that this is really the point of the letter to the church in 1 Corinthians. The point is to point them towards the gospel. And I love that we're ending our series on the New Testament with this message. Because the whole point of the New Testament is to point us towards the gospel. Really the whole point of the Bible is to point us towards the gospel. And what is true is that just like they were then, we are still unified, compelled, engendered, and reminded by the same marvelous, miraculous, and mysterious gospel today. The same truths to which Paul pointed the collective attention of the church in Corinth. He grabs our head and he points us towards those truths today. We are still walking in light of this beautiful gospel. And as we wrap up today, just a little touch on 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians really is a letter that shows the church what happens when they do and they do not live in light of the gospel. And one of the beautiful things that happens when we live our lives in light of the gospel, when we solve our problems in light and in view of the gospel, is this thing that Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 5, where he says, and I love this verse. He says, for we are led in triumphal procession by Christ, and through us, listen to this phrase, and through us is spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God. It's this idea that Jesus is a triumphant conqueror of us and of our souls, and he leads us through this life in procession behind him. And without our even saying a word, through us passively spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. That the people who interact with us in our life are somehow drawn closer, more nearly to Jesus because of our simple presence, because of the fragrance of the knowledge of God that our life and our love emits. Do you know how you live life emitting the fragrance of the knowledge of God? You view all questions and all problems and all your days and all reality through the lens of the gospel. And we live out of gratitude for the gospel. So I'm going to pray. And then Michelle's going to come up and lead us in communion as we continue to celebrate this miraculous gospel in our lives. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you've loved us. God, thank you for the gospel, for the truth of it. Thank you for sending your son to die for us, for being willing to watch him die. God, I pray that in every situation, in every moment, in every predicament, that we would ask how the gospel informs what our response or behavior or prayer should be. Help us live in light of that and fueled by gratitude for that incredible miracle. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Something that many of you know about me, but not everyone knows about me, is that I am saddled with being a Georgia Tech fan, which today doesn't feel like such a burden. I wanted to come up on stage to the fight song, but Jen told me that I couldn't because it says hell in it, and we're not allowed to say that at church unless we're actually talking about hell, then we can't. But anyways, for what it's worth, Go Jackets, I know that our demise is soon, and I'm squeezing all the juice out of this lemon that I possibly can. This is the last part in our series called 27, where we have been moving through the books of the New Testament. And it's our last, really, Sunday of the summer. So thank you for being a part of the summer. Thank you for being here now. Next week, as Michelle mentioned in the announcements, we've got Facelift Sunday, where we're just kind of touching things up and getting things ready for September. To me, in my mind, our ministry year runs from September to summer extreme in the second year of June. We push pretty hard during those months. And so to kick that off, we just want to get the church up and ready to go. And we're expecting visitors, so we want to get our house ready. So if you're in town next week and you'd like to participate in that, we'd love for you to do that. Just a quick note, if you're newer to Gray, so you don't feel very plugged in yet, things like that are a great way to get to know some folks. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. I had not wanted to do 1st and 2nd Corinthians together because I think these books often get short shrifted. They often get, they're misunderstood. They're not deeply appreciated enough because they're part of Paul's letters. And I think in our heads, those of us that know the Bible, we, some of us don't have any opinions at all on first and second Corinthians, but I think for those of us who are kind of familiar with the Bible, we can sometimes equate these books to like, like, like a shorter one, like Philippians or like an Ephesians or Galatians, like just something short and quick that makes a couple of points and we're good to study it. But that's really not the case with the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians. They're long books. They're more like Romans than they are like Ephesians. There's a lot of depth there. And so I had not wanted to do them both in one Sunday, but the schedule demanded that I did. And so I'm not going to do justice to them. But I do think that this morning, what I can give you is a good overview of 1 Corinthians and how it relates so much to us today in the questions and the problems facing our church. Because let's be honest, to be a church in 2024 is fraught with problems and questions, right? Being church, doing church, doing church well, doing church right, existing as a church is a challenge in 2024. What I want to assert this morning is, as a church, we face questions of divisions, standards, policies, and beliefs. As a church in 2024, we face questions of division, things that would seek to divide us, things of standards, personal standards for holiness, of policies, how should we carry out things in the gathering and how should we interact interpersonally, and in our beliefs, what's important to believe, where can we disagree. We face questions of that nature in our church today and have for years. When I say questions of division, I just mean things that would seek to kind of sneak into God's body and God's family and divide it against itself. Because we understand that we are unified in Christ, but that unification is threatened from within and from without constantly. I probably shouldn't tell you this story. I know that if I had asked Jen, hey, I think I'm going to tell a story. I know she would say, please don't do that. Um, so this John was up most of the night. So Jen, Jen, Jen, uh, is home with them. If your husband preached every week, you wouldn't keep up online either. Okay. So she's not going to watch this. All right. So we don't, she doesn't have to know what I'm about to say. All right. And, uh, and, and please don't mention this to Lily because she is embarrassed by this. It was something that happened this week that in some ways is objectively funny. At our house, me personally, I'm just very interested in politics. I'm pretty politically in tune. I consume a lot of news. And so it's something that from time to time is on the television in our house, and that'll cause Lily to ask questions about the different candidates in the election and things like that. And I'm very careful. Jen doesn't have to be very careful with this. I do. I'm very careful around, especially around Lily to never, ever talk down about any of the candidates running for any office or either of the political parties or people who vote for those parties. I'm very, very careful to always try to be as positive as I can and uplifting as I can, because by the way, this is just an aside. This is not part of the sermon. I'm just saying this in general. This is my opinion as a pastor that when we participate in the world's degradation of the opposing team, all we do is act like the world and model nothing that looks like Christianity to the people around us. Okay. So we talk about it sometimes, but I'm very careful to be aboveboard I don't because I don't want her parenting something clumsy and thoughtless to her classmates or to one of your kids over there or to one of you Okay, so I'm careful apparently the other parents that send their kids to Lily's school are not as careful. And so, at their desk or at lunch or something this week, the little girl that was sitting across from Lily said, Kamala Harris is stupid. Great. I don't know what Lily said. I do know that Lily has told me that if she could vote, she would vote for Kamala because Kamala's a girl and she's a girl. Fine. Fine. Don't care. You're eight. That'll get, needs to be more nuanced than that when you're 18, but that's, you're eight. So I don't know what she said, but apparently she defended Mrs. Harris. And that little girl, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, went and told all the classmates that Lilly is a Democrat. And I know, it's particularly funny because I also grew up in a private Christian school where the word Democrat was a cuss word. And so like that got around, news got around the third grade and now Lilly is labeled, man. And it's funny. It's funny. But the more I thought about it, I thought I need to write an email. And I did. I wrote an email to the teacher and the administrator. And I was very kind in my email. I did not fault anyone for anything. As a matter of fact, the next day, Jen saw the principal in the car line. And the principal came over and told her how much she appreciated the email and tone up and whatever. So I was very nice. All right, don't worry. But what I said is, hey, maybe this year in particular, it would be good to have a policy in the classrooms that we don't talk about, we don't have political discussions that are not moderated by a teacher or a faculty member. Because maybe these kids don't need to be just parroting their parents' views back and forth to each other. And the reason is, the reason is, and here's why I was concerned. I said it would be a shame if we allowed the division of the world to slither into God's family of faith that is unified in Christ and allowed that division to begin to tear apart our unity in such a way that kids are isolated and mocked. If that's happening in the third grade at NRCA, it's happening everywhere. It's happening everywhere where the enemy is trying to sneak in and divide and sow discord and make us forget that we are unified in Christ first. So we face questions of division. We face questions of standards all the time. Should I drink this? Can I have one more? Is that bad? Is it bad to watch this thing? Is it bad to go to this place? It's a question that the church has asked through the centuries. Every generation of Christian has asked this question, is blank a sin? Is it okay to do this? Is it okay to go there? Is it okay to see this? Is it okay to stay there? We are always constantly asking, is this a sin? And when we're asking that, what we're really asking is, what should a Christian's standard of holiness be? That's what we're asking. So we face questions of standards of holiness, and we have throughout the generations. We face questions of policies. What should I do when I'm around other people? How should I handle myself? What kind of rules should we have in the church? Who's allowed to serve here and serve there? And when just this week I had what is essentially a policy conversation with someone when they said, hey, I don't have any problems with it, but I'm just wondering how did the church decide to do communion once a month? Why don't we do it more or less? And so we talked about that. That's a policy conversation. How do we make this decision about this thing? And then we face questions of belief. Just in the spring, I preached a sermon about unity in Christ, and that being Christ's prayer for us in John 17, the high priestly prayer. And I talked about the things that threaten that unity. And I talked about how Jesus, that was the primary thing that he wanted for us is, is that we would be unified. And I said that we cannot be unified if we insist on a homogeny of doctrinal thought, if we have to believe all the same things about all the same things, right? And so what we said is there's secondary and tertiary issues. And on those things, we don't have to agree to be in fellowship together, but there are primary issues on which we do need to agree if we're going to exist in fellowship together and move forward as a body of Christ. And so when we say that we have questions of belief, really it's okay, that's great. What are the primary issues? What are the non-negotiables? What do we absolutely have to believe and what are the things about which we can disagree and have conversations? So we have questions of belief. These same questions are the same questions that was facing the church in Corinth. They're the questions that Paul actually writes the letter to specifically address. Paul writes the letter to Corinth because he had heard some stuff was going on there. Paul spent about a year and a half in Corinth planting this church. That's more time, to my knowledge, than he spends anywhere else. For him to spend a year and a half during this season of his life in one place planting one church is a big deal. It was a lot of work and it was hard work. And so this church is near and dear to his heart. And as he goes and he's going around Asia Minor planting the other churches, he starts hearing that there's some stuff going on in Corinthians, in the church in Corinth. And so he writes this very long letter, this 15-chapter letter of 1 Corinthians back to the church in Corinth and says, hey, I've heard this stuff is going on. I heard that you're facing some questions. Let me tell you how I want you to address those things. And what I want us to see is that the answer to each question in the church in Corinth is the gospel. The answer to each question facing the church in Corinth is the gospel. No matter what they're dealing with, he takes their collective attention and he focuses it on the gospel. The first thing he does, the first thing he does is in chapters one through four, you can kind of break it out this way. In chapters one through four, they are facing questions of division. What had happened is after Paul left, other apostles came around and preached in Corinth. Peter came and preached. Apollos came and preached. And what he finds out is there is disunity amongst the body of the church in Corinth around which apostle they prefer. Some prefer Apollos. Apollos was an eloquent speaker. Paul was not a very good speaker. They said, Paul writes a heck of a letter, but his sermons aren't very good. And so they were arguing over who their favorite pastor was, is what they were doing, which is a very human thing to do. It's been happening since the church started. And so now we still do that. We go to this church because we like this pastor, that church because we like that pastor. And honestly, I think all of that is really silly. Whenever I'm talking to anybody who's looking for a church, I always tell them people vastly overemphasize the importance of the senior pastor. You can download the best sermons in the world every Wednesday. You cannot download worship and you cannot download community. So if the sermons are passable, but it feels like your people go there, which is really all we're going for here. They were choosing their favorite pastor and Paul writes back and he points them to the gospel. He says, Hey, that's not what you need to do. And so one of the reasons he points to the gospel is that, and what I want you to see is that we are unified by the gospel. Paul goes, you don't need to be doing this. You don't need to be having these divisions. We are unified in the gospel. I have these verses notated in your notes. So you see the references there, but I'm not going to pull them, put them up on the screen because we'd just be looking up and down for the next 10 minutes. But this is how Paul answers that question of division in 1 Corinthians 4, verse 1. He writes this, This, then, is how you ought to regard us, as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. So this is what he says. You prefer Apollos. You prefer Peter. You say you prefer me. You prefer this pastor or that pastor. Nobody cares. All of us. Me, Peter, Apollos, and anyone else that you might prefer. We are children of God. We are tools in the hands of the creator. We are instruments to bring you to him. We do not care who you follow. We do not care who you listen to. We care that you grow closer to Jesus. That's what we care about. I had an honest conversation with a pastor friend of mine this week who was meeting with someone who was, that person was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to come to his church, and so they wanted to meet with him. And when you do that, it's in some ways like a job interview. I'm visiting around, I'm interviewing different candidates for the role of being my pastor, and I'd like to see if you are going to fit the bill. Every now and again, you get into those, and my buddy said, I wish I could just tell him, come to Journey or don't. I know you're going to land somewhere. We'd love to have you, but I'm too exhausted to try to figure out what you want me to say. That's what Paul is saying. Listen to whomever you want to listen to. We are tools in the hands of our maker. It is our job to point you to Christ. It is not our job to be your favorite. And I'll tell you who does this really well week in and week out is Aaron, our worship pastor. Week in and week out as we worship, there are times, there are moments when he backs away and he lets you sing. And he doesn't put his voice over top of ours. He does this when he could belt it, when he could do solos, when he could carry on, when he could use this as an opportunity to show off and to show out and to show how talented he is. He backs up and he gets small because he understands that Sunday morning, his opportunity to lead worship is not about impressing you with his voice. It's about compelling you to raise your voice. And so he backs away because it's his job to bring you to Jesus. It's not his job to get in the way and impress you with what he does. This is what Paul says here. So he says, listen, it doesn't matter which pastor you prefer. We are all servants of Christ. So he takes the gospel and he puts that front and center and he says, think about who you follow in light of the gospel. And just so we're clear, when I say the gospel, because that's what we're talking about a lot this morning, the way that we define the gospel of grace, the way that I say it when I say it, is that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, believe that he did what he said he did, and believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's the son of God. He died and he rose again on the third day and he ascended into heaven and one day he's going to come back and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he's going to take his family where we belong. That's what we believe. That's, that's the gospel. It's the, it's the, it's the miraculous work and reality of Jesus Christ. And so to the questions of division and disunity, Jesus take, or Paul takes our attention and he focuses it squarely on the gospel. You need the gospel to fix this situation. So that was the first time. That's divisions. Next is the standards of holiness. He heard that there was an issue going on in the church in Corinth. It's one of the more salacious passages in all the Bible where it comes to Paul's, it occurs to him, it came to his knowledge that there was a man in the church who was being intimate with his mother-in-law. And everybody just kind of knew that this was happening and nobody was correcting it. And he was just still in the back, shaking hands, collecting money every week, working as an usher. They were just cool with it. And Paul has to go, Hey, Hey, I know that you live in a city that has these standards of sexual purity that are incredibly low and that this doesn't seem like it's a big deal, but it's a big deal. You can't do that. You need to tell him that he can't do that. And so in questions of holiness, what we see is that we are compelled by the gospel. We are compelled towards holiness by the gospel. And here's what I mean. In chapter 6, verses 19 and 20, Paul says this, Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought with a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. Paul says, I've heard that this sexual immorality, this impurity is going on in the church. We need to knock it off. And here's why we need to knock it off. Because your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It was bought with a price. It is not your own. And I want to pause and talk about what that verse means a little bit, because I think it's important. The temple in the Old Testament was the place of sacrifice and worship. You went there to worship your God. You went there to make sacrifices to your God. And so in the New Testament, when it says the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that means that once you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit dwells in you. You are the primary dwelling place of the Spirit. And as such, it is your job to make sure that there is nothing that happens with your body that prevents you from worshiping and prevents you from living as a living sacrifice. Does that make sense? Your body is the primary vessel through which we worship and we sacrifice. And so what that verse means is that body no longer belongs to you. You can't do whatever you want to with it. You can't sully it however you want to. Wherever you go, you take the Holy Spirit. Whatever you watch, the Holy Spirit watches with you. When we do things that harm ourselves, we grieve the Spirit. We grieve Christ. Your bodies are bought with a price. That price is the gospel. It's the death of Christ. Reminds you that he did what he said he did. That he died for those sins. And now you belong to him. So you cannot use your bodies as recreational vehicles. They are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And so what Paul does in an issue of immorality and a lack of holiness, poor standards, is he takes the attention of the church and he focuses it on the cross, on the gospel, and he says, in light of the gospel, you cannot go on like that. I don't know what your standards are for your personal holiness. I don't know what you allow in your life and in your private thoughts. But I'd be willing to bet that most of us, if not all of us, could step it up a little bit in our standards of personal holiness. I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out. We need to tighten it up a little bit and our standards of personal holiness I bet I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out when you tighten it up when we do that it's hard you guys have taken steps towards holding this before you've set new standards for yourself before you've said I'm not gonna do this I am gonna do this I'm not gonna think this I am gonna think this you, and then you've fallen short. Pursuing holiness is hard. And so what is it that gets us up and gets us focused and gets us willing to continue to pursue that holiness? By focusing ourselves on the gospel. By being overwhelmed with our gratitude for Christ that he died to save our sins. That he's fought that battle and he's already won that battle. Belting that song out loudly, reminding ourselves that Jesus has won this. We remind ourselves of the gospel and out of gratitude for the gospel, we pursue holiness. Then in chapters 8 through 14, Paul gets into some discourse. There's some different questions of policies happening. What should we do about this? What should our standards be about this? There's one about interpersonal relationships. There's one about standards of the church and of the gathering. The interpersonal relationship one is interesting because a portion of the congregation was made up of Jewish people. The rest of the congregation was made up of Gentiles. Well, Jews famously have much more restricting dietary laws and standards than Gentiles do. So the question came up in the church, what are we allowed to eat? Can we have bacon? And the Gentiles said, God's made everything. Everything's fine. We can eat it. And the Jews said, yeah, but that's still deeply offensive. Maybe not around us. And then other Jews said, no, no, no. You need to follow. You need to adopt our standards for holiness. You need to adopt our policies. And to this, Paul infuses this idea. He says, hey, listen. You need to act in ways where you love the other person more than yourself. And in this way, we are pointed to love by the gospel. When he answers this question with the gospel, we are pointed to love by the gospel. Here's what I mean in 1 Corinthians 9, 22. To the weak, I became weak to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel that I may share in its blessings. So Paul's going through this long diatribe. And he says, listen, those of you who say God made everything, I can eat everything, it's holy and blessed in his name, you're right. Bon appetit, live it up. But when you're around someone who will be offended or misled by your consumption of that thing, love them more than you love your freedom. Love them more than you love eating that thing. Love them more than you love yourself. Be all things to all people so that by all means you might win one. I've said many times from this stage, what is the only reason that the very second we are saved and accept Christ as our Savior and in God's family, what is the only reason that the very second we receive salvation, God doesn't immediately take us up to heaven so that we can be with him for all of eternity? The only reason you and I are still here on this side of Christendom and not yet in eternity is so that on our way to Jesus, we can bring as many people as we possibly can with us. It's the only reason we exist is to take people to the throne with us. And so what Paul is saying is, if your freedoms, if what you allow yourself, if your standards of holiness that you're fine with before the spirit, they don't prohibit your temple from being a place of worship and a place of sacrifice. If those standards, when you are around others, cause other people to stumble, cause other people to have issues in their hearts, to think of you as someone who is a sinner and possibly a hypocrite, then you need to raise your standards to their standards. If they're weak in their faith and this thing causes them to struggle, then you be weak with them. Love others to the idea of policies. How do we interact interpersonally with one another? Paul says, love other people more than you love yourself and more than you love your freedom. Love them as Jesus did, and he points this to the gospel. He also does it corporately because their worship was a little bit disheveled. They were having issues in their worship where people were talking over one another. I don't think just one person would get up and preach. You guys all know the drill. You come in, you sit down, you sing. Then you stand up, you sing, you sit down. Nate's going to talk for a while. It's rude to talk. I'm not going to talk while Nate's talking. No matter how bad or boring it gets, we just sit here and endure until we can go to lunch. Then we sing and we go home. They didn't have that order. They didn't know that. And so they had the gifts of tongues and people are standing up speaking in other languages or unidentifiable languages. They're teaching over one another. They're having faith movements and moments over one another, and it was very disordered. And so Paul, to address this problem of policy, what's our policy around the gathering? He says, listen, everybody has their part to play. This is famous chapter of 1 Corinthians 12 when he talks about the gifts of the Spirit and the body of Christ. Everybody has their parts to play. Everybody has their things to do. The body is made up of many parts and without those parts, the body cannot function. We just need to know our role and stay in our lane and do what we've been asked to do. And so he talks about order within the body. And then he caps off everything. He talks about the spiritual gifts and what they're for and how they should be used. And he caps off everything with this wonderful, wonderful discourse on love. And he says this in chapter 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Everything that happens on Sunday, everything that happens in the body, all the things that you experience, all the gifts, all the roles, all the things, it all boils down to these three things, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these, the greatest of these virtues is love. And what is the single greatest act of love in the history of history? Christ's sacrifice on the cross. He again, to the question of policies, points us to the gospel. Love other people more than you love yourself. And then finally, in chapter 15, there's a question of beliefs. There was a group of people within the church who did not believe that the resurrection was a real thing. They thought it was a fable, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead, that people made it up and now they're evangelizing that truth, but that's not true, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead. And Paul writes and addresses that. And he says, listen, listen, that can't be right because if that's true and the resurrection's not real and it didn't happen, then we may as well just be a glee club. We're totally wasting our time. And that's true. If we don't celebrate Easter every year, if Easter's not a real thing that acknowledges a real event that happened in real history, then we're wasting our time. And we should find something else to do on Sunday mornings. And that's what he told them. He said, no, the resurrection is a non-negotiable. It is a non-negotiable of our faith. We Jesus has already secured our future. Because Jesus is going to do what he says he's going to do. And he's going to come crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh. And he's going to rescue his bride, the church back up to heaven. He's going to do that. And that's impossible without the resurrection. So when we talk about these questions of what do we believe, what are the primary and secondary and tertiary issues? On what things are we allowed to disagree? Paul points them and us to the gospel. He says, here are the primary issues that you must agree upon in the church. That Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. And because of the way he frames it up, we know that Jesus is the son of God. And when I say Son of God, I mean the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creator God. John tells us at the beginning of his gospel that Jesus was the Word. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing is made. In the first three verses of the Bible, we see that the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is hovering over the surface of the deep, and we see the words of God come in the form of Christ to bring about creation. So when I say Jesus is who he says he is, that's what I'm talking about, the Son of the Triune God. He did what he said he did. He came, he lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, he rose again on the third day after offering propitiation for our sins. And he ascended into heaven where he exists and he waits until one day he's going to come back down to get us. Those are the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Every mainline Protestant church, every Catholic church agrees with those fundamentals of the Christian faith. They are the absolute non-negotiables. So when we talk about beliefs in our modern day church, what do we believe about this or about that? Here's what we believe. We believe in the gospel. We believe in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. That's what we believe. That's what we're centered on. That's what we're focused on. And it's true that every Sunday morning should bring your focus back to this. It's true that every time we read the Bible, our focus should be taken at some point or another to Christ. It's true that that is the central figure and moment and belief of the Christian life and of the Christian faith. And I love the consistency of Paul in all of these questions, all of the issues facing the ancient church, all of the issues facing the modern church. What do we do about this? How do we fix this? Here's an issue that's happening in our church or in our life. What's the answer? Jesus. Where do we look? The cross. What do we remind ourselves of? The gospel and the miraculous work that is. And I love that this is really the point of the letter to the church in 1 Corinthians. The point is to point them towards the gospel. And I love that we're ending our series on the New Testament with this message. Because the whole point of the New Testament is to point us towards the gospel. Really the whole point of the Bible is to point us towards the gospel. And what is true is that just like they were then, we are still unified, compelled, engendered, and reminded by the same marvelous, miraculous, and mysterious gospel today. The same truths to which Paul pointed the collective attention of the church in Corinth. He grabs our head and he points us towards those truths today. We are still walking in light of this beautiful gospel. And as we wrap up today, just a little touch on 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians really is a letter that shows the church what happens when they do and they do not live in light of the gospel. And one of the beautiful things that happens when we live our lives in light of the gospel, when we solve our problems in light and in view of the gospel, is this thing that Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 5, where he says, and I love this verse. He says, for we are led in triumphal procession by Christ, and through us, listen to this phrase, and through us is spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God. It's this idea that Jesus is a triumphant conqueror of us and of our souls, and he leads us through this life in procession behind him. And without our even saying a word, through us passively spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. That the people who interact with us in our life are somehow drawn closer, more nearly to Jesus because of our simple presence, because of the fragrance of the knowledge of God that our life and our love emits. Do you know how you live life emitting the fragrance of the knowledge of God? You view all questions and all problems and all your days and all reality through the lens of the gospel. And we live out of gratitude for the gospel. So I'm going to pray. And then Michelle's going to come up and lead us in communion as we continue to celebrate this miraculous gospel in our lives. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you've loved us. God, thank you for the gospel, for the truth of it. Thank you for sending your son to die for us, for being willing to watch him die. God, I pray that in every situation, in every moment, in every predicament, that we would ask how the gospel informs what our response or behavior or prayer should be. Help us live in light of that and fueled by gratitude for that incredible miracle. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Something that many of you know about me, but not everyone knows about me, is that I am saddled with being a Georgia Tech fan, which today doesn't feel like such a burden. I wanted to come up on stage to the fight song, but Jen told me that I couldn't because it says hell in it, and we're not allowed to say that at church unless we're actually talking about hell, then we can't. But anyways, for what it's worth, Go Jackets, I know that our demise is soon, and I'm squeezing all the juice out of this lemon that I possibly can. This is the last part in our series called 27, where we have been moving through the books of the New Testament. And it's our last, really, Sunday of the summer. So thank you for being a part of the summer. Thank you for being here now. Next week, as Michelle mentioned in the announcements, we've got Facelift Sunday, where we're just kind of touching things up and getting things ready for September. To me, in my mind, our ministry year runs from September to summer extreme in the second year of June. We push pretty hard during those months. And so to kick that off, we just want to get the church up and ready to go. And we're expecting visitors, so we want to get our house ready. So if you're in town next week and you'd like to participate in that, we'd love for you to do that. Just a quick note, if you're newer to Gray, so you don't feel very plugged in yet, things like that are a great way to get to know some folks. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. I had not wanted to do 1st and 2nd Corinthians together because I think these books often get short shrifted. They often get, they're misunderstood. They're not deeply appreciated enough because they're part of Paul's letters. And I think in our heads, those of us that know the Bible, we, some of us don't have any opinions at all on first and second Corinthians, but I think for those of us who are kind of familiar with the Bible, we can sometimes equate these books to like, like, like a shorter one, like Philippians or like an Ephesians or Galatians, like just something short and quick that makes a couple of points and we're good to study it. But that's really not the case with the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians. They're long books. They're more like Romans than they are like Ephesians. There's a lot of depth there. And so I had not wanted to do them both in one Sunday, but the schedule demanded that I did. And so I'm not going to do justice to them. But I do think that this morning, what I can give you is a good overview of 1 Corinthians and how it relates so much to us today in the questions and the problems facing our church. Because let's be honest, to be a church in 2024 is fraught with problems and questions, right? Being church, doing church, doing church well, doing church right, existing as a church is a challenge in 2024. What I want to assert this morning is, as a church, we face questions of divisions, standards, policies, and beliefs. As a church in 2024, we face questions of division, things that would seek to divide us, things of standards, personal standards for holiness, of policies, how should we carry out things in the gathering and how should we interact interpersonally, and in our beliefs, what's important to believe, where can we disagree. We face questions of that nature in our church today and have for years. When I say questions of division, I just mean things that would seek to kind of sneak into God's body and God's family and divide it against itself. Because we understand that we are unified in Christ, but that unification is threatened from within and from without constantly. I probably shouldn't tell you this story. I know that if I had asked Jen, hey, I think I'm going to tell a story. I know she would say, please don't do that. Um, so this John was up most of the night. So Jen, Jen, Jen, uh, is home with them. If your husband preached every week, you wouldn't keep up online either. Okay. So she's not going to watch this. All right. So we don't, she doesn't have to know what I'm about to say. All right. And, uh, and, and please don't mention this to Lily because she is embarrassed by this. It was something that happened this week that in some ways is objectively funny. At our house, me personally, I'm just very interested in politics. I'm pretty politically in tune. I consume a lot of news. And so it's something that from time to time is on the television in our house, and that'll cause Lily to ask questions about the different candidates in the election and things like that. And I'm very careful. Jen doesn't have to be very careful with this. I do. I'm very careful around, especially around Lily to never, ever talk down about any of the candidates running for any office or either of the political parties or people who vote for those parties. I'm very, very careful to always try to be as positive as I can and uplifting as I can, because by the way, this is just an aside. This is not part of the sermon. I'm just saying this in general. This is my opinion as a pastor that when we participate in the world's degradation of the opposing team, all we do is act like the world and model nothing that looks like Christianity to the people around us. Okay. So we talk about it sometimes, but I'm very careful to be aboveboard I don't because I don't want her parenting something clumsy and thoughtless to her classmates or to one of your kids over there or to one of you Okay, so I'm careful apparently the other parents that send their kids to Lily's school are not as careful. And so, at their desk or at lunch or something this week, the little girl that was sitting across from Lily said, Kamala Harris is stupid. Great. I don't know what Lily said. I do know that Lily has told me that if she could vote, she would vote for Kamala because Kamala's a girl and she's a girl. Fine. Fine. Don't care. You're eight. That'll get, needs to be more nuanced than that when you're 18, but that's, you're eight. So I don't know what she said, but apparently she defended Mrs. Harris. And that little girl, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, went and told all the classmates that Lilly is a Democrat. And I know, it's particularly funny because I also grew up in a private Christian school where the word Democrat was a cuss word. And so like that got around, news got around the third grade and now Lilly is labeled, man. And it's funny. It's funny. But the more I thought about it, I thought I need to write an email. And I did. I wrote an email to the teacher and the administrator. And I was very kind in my email. I did not fault anyone for anything. As a matter of fact, the next day, Jen saw the principal in the car line. And the principal came over and told her how much she appreciated the email and tone up and whatever. So I was very nice. All right, don't worry. But what I said is, hey, maybe this year in particular, it would be good to have a policy in the classrooms that we don't talk about, we don't have political discussions that are not moderated by a teacher or a faculty member. Because maybe these kids don't need to be just parroting their parents' views back and forth to each other. And the reason is, the reason is, and here's why I was concerned. I said it would be a shame if we allowed the division of the world to slither into God's family of faith that is unified in Christ and allowed that division to begin to tear apart our unity in such a way that kids are isolated and mocked. If that's happening in the third grade at NRCA, it's happening everywhere. It's happening everywhere where the enemy is trying to sneak in and divide and sow discord and make us forget that we are unified in Christ first. So we face questions of division. We face questions of standards all the time. Should I drink this? Can I have one more? Is that bad? Is it bad to watch this thing? Is it bad to go to this place? It's a question that the church has asked through the centuries. Every generation of Christian has asked this question, is blank a sin? Is it okay to do this? Is it okay to go there? Is it okay to see this? Is it okay to stay there? We are always constantly asking, is this a sin? And when we're asking that, what we're really asking is, what should a Christian's standard of holiness be? That's what we're asking. So we face questions of standards of holiness, and we have throughout the generations. We face questions of policies. What should I do when I'm around other people? How should I handle myself? What kind of rules should we have in the church? Who's allowed to serve here and serve there? And when just this week I had what is essentially a policy conversation with someone when they said, hey, I don't have any problems with it, but I'm just wondering how did the church decide to do communion once a month? Why don't we do it more or less? And so we talked about that. That's a policy conversation. How do we make this decision about this thing? And then we face questions of belief. Just in the spring, I preached a sermon about unity in Christ, and that being Christ's prayer for us in John 17, the high priestly prayer. And I talked about the things that threaten that unity. And I talked about how Jesus, that was the primary thing that he wanted for us is, is that we would be unified. And I said that we cannot be unified if we insist on a homogeny of doctrinal thought, if we have to believe all the same things about all the same things, right? And so what we said is there's secondary and tertiary issues. And on those things, we don't have to agree to be in fellowship together, but there are primary issues on which we do need to agree if we're going to exist in fellowship together and move forward as a body of Christ. And so when we say that we have questions of belief, really it's okay, that's great. What are the primary issues? What are the non-negotiables? What do we absolutely have to believe and what are the things about which we can disagree and have conversations? So we have questions of belief. These same questions are the same questions that was facing the church in Corinth. They're the questions that Paul actually writes the letter to specifically address. Paul writes the letter to Corinth because he had heard some stuff was going on there. Paul spent about a year and a half in Corinth planting this church. That's more time, to my knowledge, than he spends anywhere else. For him to spend a year and a half during this season of his life in one place planting one church is a big deal. It was a lot of work and it was hard work. And so this church is near and dear to his heart. And as he goes and he's going around Asia Minor planting the other churches, he starts hearing that there's some stuff going on in Corinthians, in the church in Corinth. And so he writes this very long letter, this 15-chapter letter of 1 Corinthians back to the church in Corinth and says, hey, I've heard this stuff is going on. I heard that you're facing some questions. Let me tell you how I want you to address those things. And what I want us to see is that the answer to each question in the church in Corinth is the gospel. The answer to each question facing the church in Corinth is the gospel. No matter what they're dealing with, he takes their collective attention and he focuses it on the gospel. The first thing he does, the first thing he does is in chapters one through four, you can kind of break it out this way. In chapters one through four, they are facing questions of division. What had happened is after Paul left, other apostles came around and preached in Corinth. Peter came and preached. Apollos came and preached. And what he finds out is there is disunity amongst the body of the church in Corinth around which apostle they prefer. Some prefer Apollos. Apollos was an eloquent speaker. Paul was not a very good speaker. They said, Paul writes a heck of a letter, but his sermons aren't very good. And so they were arguing over who their favorite pastor was, is what they were doing, which is a very human thing to do. It's been happening since the church started. And so now we still do that. We go to this church because we like this pastor, that church because we like that pastor. And honestly, I think all of that is really silly. Whenever I'm talking to anybody who's looking for a church, I always tell them people vastly overemphasize the importance of the senior pastor. You can download the best sermons in the world every Wednesday. You cannot download worship and you cannot download community. So if the sermons are passable, but it feels like your people go there, which is really all we're going for here. They were choosing their favorite pastor and Paul writes back and he points them to the gospel. He says, Hey, that's not what you need to do. And so one of the reasons he points to the gospel is that, and what I want you to see is that we are unified by the gospel. Paul goes, you don't need to be doing this. You don't need to be having these divisions. We are unified in the gospel. I have these verses notated in your notes. So you see the references there, but I'm not going to pull them, put them up on the screen because we'd just be looking up and down for the next 10 minutes. But this is how Paul answers that question of division in 1 Corinthians 4, verse 1. He writes this, This, then, is how you ought to regard us, as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. So this is what he says. You prefer Apollos. You prefer Peter. You say you prefer me. You prefer this pastor or that pastor. Nobody cares. All of us. Me, Peter, Apollos, and anyone else that you might prefer. We are children of God. We are tools in the hands of the creator. We are instruments to bring you to him. We do not care who you follow. We do not care who you listen to. We care that you grow closer to Jesus. That's what we care about. I had an honest conversation with a pastor friend of mine this week who was meeting with someone who was, that person was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to come to his church, and so they wanted to meet with him. And when you do that, it's in some ways like a job interview. I'm visiting around, I'm interviewing different candidates for the role of being my pastor, and I'd like to see if you are going to fit the bill. Every now and again, you get into those, and my buddy said, I wish I could just tell him, come to Journey or don't. I know you're going to land somewhere. We'd love to have you, but I'm too exhausted to try to figure out what you want me to say. That's what Paul is saying. Listen to whomever you want to listen to. We are tools in the hands of our maker. It is our job to point you to Christ. It is not our job to be your favorite. And I'll tell you who does this really well week in and week out is Aaron, our worship pastor. Week in and week out as we worship, there are times, there are moments when he backs away and he lets you sing. And he doesn't put his voice over top of ours. He does this when he could belt it, when he could do solos, when he could carry on, when he could use this as an opportunity to show off and to show out and to show how talented he is. He backs up and he gets small because he understands that Sunday morning, his opportunity to lead worship is not about impressing you with his voice. It's about compelling you to raise your voice. And so he backs away because it's his job to bring you to Jesus. It's not his job to get in the way and impress you with what he does. This is what Paul says here. So he says, listen, it doesn't matter which pastor you prefer. We are all servants of Christ. So he takes the gospel and he puts that front and center and he says, think about who you follow in light of the gospel. And just so we're clear, when I say the gospel, because that's what we're talking about a lot this morning, the way that we define the gospel of grace, the way that I say it when I say it, is that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, believe that he did what he said he did, and believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's the son of God. He died and he rose again on the third day and he ascended into heaven and one day he's going to come back and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he's going to take his family where we belong. That's what we believe. That's, that's the gospel. It's the, it's the, it's the miraculous work and reality of Jesus Christ. And so to the questions of division and disunity, Jesus take, or Paul takes our attention and he focuses it squarely on the gospel. You need the gospel to fix this situation. So that was the first time. That's divisions. Next is the standards of holiness. He heard that there was an issue going on in the church in Corinth. It's one of the more salacious passages in all the Bible where it comes to Paul's, it occurs to him, it came to his knowledge that there was a man in the church who was being intimate with his mother-in-law. And everybody just kind of knew that this was happening and nobody was correcting it. And he was just still in the back, shaking hands, collecting money every week, working as an usher. They were just cool with it. And Paul has to go, Hey, Hey, I know that you live in a city that has these standards of sexual purity that are incredibly low and that this doesn't seem like it's a big deal, but it's a big deal. You can't do that. You need to tell him that he can't do that. And so in questions of holiness, what we see is that we are compelled by the gospel. We are compelled towards holiness by the gospel. And here's what I mean. In chapter 6, verses 19 and 20, Paul says this, Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought with a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. Paul says, I've heard that this sexual immorality, this impurity is going on in the church. We need to knock it off. And here's why we need to knock it off. Because your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It was bought with a price. It is not your own. And I want to pause and talk about what that verse means a little bit, because I think it's important. The temple in the Old Testament was the place of sacrifice and worship. You went there to worship your God. You went there to make sacrifices to your God. And so in the New Testament, when it says the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that means that once you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit dwells in you. You are the primary dwelling place of the Spirit. And as such, it is your job to make sure that there is nothing that happens with your body that prevents you from worshiping and prevents you from living as a living sacrifice. Does that make sense? Your body is the primary vessel through which we worship and we sacrifice. And so what that verse means is that body no longer belongs to you. You can't do whatever you want to with it. You can't sully it however you want to. Wherever you go, you take the Holy Spirit. Whatever you watch, the Holy Spirit watches with you. When we do things that harm ourselves, we grieve the Spirit. We grieve Christ. Your bodies are bought with a price. That price is the gospel. It's the death of Christ. Reminds you that he did what he said he did. That he died for those sins. And now you belong to him. So you cannot use your bodies as recreational vehicles. They are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And so what Paul does in an issue of immorality and a lack of holiness, poor standards, is he takes the attention of the church and he focuses it on the cross, on the gospel, and he says, in light of the gospel, you cannot go on like that. I don't know what your standards are for your personal holiness. I don't know what you allow in your life and in your private thoughts. But I'd be willing to bet that most of us, if not all of us, could step it up a little bit in our standards of personal holiness. I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out. We need to tighten it up a little bit and our standards of personal holiness I bet I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out when you tighten it up when we do that it's hard you guys have taken steps towards holding this before you've set new standards for yourself before you've said I'm not gonna do this I am gonna do this I'm not gonna think this I am gonna think this you, and then you've fallen short. Pursuing holiness is hard. And so what is it that gets us up and gets us focused and gets us willing to continue to pursue that holiness? By focusing ourselves on the gospel. By being overwhelmed with our gratitude for Christ that he died to save our sins. That he's fought that battle and he's already won that battle. Belting that song out loudly, reminding ourselves that Jesus has won this. We remind ourselves of the gospel and out of gratitude for the gospel, we pursue holiness. Then in chapters 8 through 14, Paul gets into some discourse. There's some different questions of policies happening. What should we do about this? What should our standards be about this? There's one about interpersonal relationships. There's one about standards of the church and of the gathering. The interpersonal relationship one is interesting because a portion of the congregation was made up of Jewish people. The rest of the congregation was made up of Gentiles. Well, Jews famously have much more restricting dietary laws and standards than Gentiles do. So the question came up in the church, what are we allowed to eat? Can we have bacon? And the Gentiles said, God's made everything. Everything's fine. We can eat it. And the Jews said, yeah, but that's still deeply offensive. Maybe not around us. And then other Jews said, no, no, no. You need to follow. You need to adopt our standards for holiness. You need to adopt our policies. And to this, Paul infuses this idea. He says, hey, listen. You need to act in ways where you love the other person more than yourself. And in this way, we are pointed to love by the gospel. When he answers this question with the gospel, we are pointed to love by the gospel. Here's what I mean in 1 Corinthians 9, 22. To the weak, I became weak to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel that I may share in its blessings. So Paul's going through this long diatribe. And he says, listen, those of you who say God made everything, I can eat everything, it's holy and blessed in his name, you're right. Bon appetit, live it up. But when you're around someone who will be offended or misled by your consumption of that thing, love them more than you love your freedom. Love them more than you love eating that thing. Love them more than you love yourself. Be all things to all people so that by all means you might win one. I've said many times from this stage, what is the only reason that the very second we are saved and accept Christ as our Savior and in God's family, what is the only reason that the very second we receive salvation, God doesn't immediately take us up to heaven so that we can be with him for all of eternity? The only reason you and I are still here on this side of Christendom and not yet in eternity is so that on our way to Jesus, we can bring as many people as we possibly can with us. It's the only reason we exist is to take people to the throne with us. And so what Paul is saying is, if your freedoms, if what you allow yourself, if your standards of holiness that you're fine with before the spirit, they don't prohibit your temple from being a place of worship and a place of sacrifice. If those standards, when you are around others, cause other people to stumble, cause other people to have issues in their hearts, to think of you as someone who is a sinner and possibly a hypocrite, then you need to raise your standards to their standards. If they're weak in their faith and this thing causes them to struggle, then you be weak with them. Love others to the idea of policies. How do we interact interpersonally with one another? Paul says, love other people more than you love yourself and more than you love your freedom. Love them as Jesus did, and he points this to the gospel. He also does it corporately because their worship was a little bit disheveled. They were having issues in their worship where people were talking over one another. I don't think just one person would get up and preach. You guys all know the drill. You come in, you sit down, you sing. Then you stand up, you sing, you sit down. Nate's going to talk for a while. It's rude to talk. I'm not going to talk while Nate's talking. No matter how bad or boring it gets, we just sit here and endure until we can go to lunch. Then we sing and we go home. They didn't have that order. They didn't know that. And so they had the gifts of tongues and people are standing up speaking in other languages or unidentifiable languages. They're teaching over one another. They're having faith movements and moments over one another, and it was very disordered. And so Paul, to address this problem of policy, what's our policy around the gathering? He says, listen, everybody has their part to play. This is famous chapter of 1 Corinthians 12 when he talks about the gifts of the Spirit and the body of Christ. Everybody has their parts to play. Everybody has their things to do. The body is made up of many parts and without those parts, the body cannot function. We just need to know our role and stay in our lane and do what we've been asked to do. And so he talks about order within the body. And then he caps off everything. He talks about the spiritual gifts and what they're for and how they should be used. And he caps off everything with this wonderful, wonderful discourse on love. And he says this in chapter 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Everything that happens on Sunday, everything that happens in the body, all the things that you experience, all the gifts, all the roles, all the things, it all boils down to these three things, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these, the greatest of these virtues is love. And what is the single greatest act of love in the history of history? Christ's sacrifice on the cross. He again, to the question of policies, points us to the gospel. Love other people more than you love yourself. And then finally, in chapter 15, there's a question of beliefs. There was a group of people within the church who did not believe that the resurrection was a real thing. They thought it was a fable, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead, that people made it up and now they're evangelizing that truth, but that's not true, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead. And Paul writes and addresses that. And he says, listen, listen, that can't be right because if that's true and the resurrection's not real and it didn't happen, then we may as well just be a glee club. We're totally wasting our time. And that's true. If we don't celebrate Easter every year, if Easter's not a real thing that acknowledges a real event that happened in real history, then we're wasting our time. And we should find something else to do on Sunday mornings. And that's what he told them. He said, no, the resurrection is a non-negotiable. It is a non-negotiable of our faith. We Jesus has already secured our future. Because Jesus is going to do what he says he's going to do. And he's going to come crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh. And he's going to rescue his bride, the church back up to heaven. He's going to do that. And that's impossible without the resurrection. So when we talk about these questions of what do we believe, what are the primary and secondary and tertiary issues? On what things are we allowed to disagree? Paul points them and us to the gospel. He says, here are the primary issues that you must agree upon in the church. That Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. And because of the way he frames it up, we know that Jesus is the son of God. And when I say Son of God, I mean the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creator God. John tells us at the beginning of his gospel that Jesus was the Word. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing is made. In the first three verses of the Bible, we see that the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is hovering over the surface of the deep, and we see the words of God come in the form of Christ to bring about creation. So when I say Jesus is who he says he is, that's what I'm talking about, the Son of the Triune God. He did what he said he did. He came, he lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, he rose again on the third day after offering propitiation for our sins. And he ascended into heaven where he exists and he waits until one day he's going to come back down to get us. Those are the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Every mainline Protestant church, every Catholic church agrees with those fundamentals of the Christian faith. They are the absolute non-negotiables. So when we talk about beliefs in our modern day church, what do we believe about this or about that? Here's what we believe. We believe in the gospel. We believe in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. That's what we believe. That's what we're centered on. That's what we're focused on. And it's true that every Sunday morning should bring your focus back to this. It's true that every time we read the Bible, our focus should be taken at some point or another to Christ. It's true that that is the central figure and moment and belief of the Christian life and of the Christian faith. And I love the consistency of Paul in all of these questions, all of the issues facing the ancient church, all of the issues facing the modern church. What do we do about this? How do we fix this? Here's an issue that's happening in our church or in our life. What's the answer? Jesus. Where do we look? The cross. What do we remind ourselves of? The gospel and the miraculous work that is. And I love that this is really the point of the letter to the church in 1 Corinthians. The point is to point them towards the gospel. And I love that we're ending our series on the New Testament with this message. Because the whole point of the New Testament is to point us towards the gospel. Really the whole point of the Bible is to point us towards the gospel. And what is true is that just like they were then, we are still unified, compelled, engendered, and reminded by the same marvelous, miraculous, and mysterious gospel today. The same truths to which Paul pointed the collective attention of the church in Corinth. He grabs our head and he points us towards those truths today. We are still walking in light of this beautiful gospel. And as we wrap up today, just a little touch on 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians really is a letter that shows the church what happens when they do and they do not live in light of the gospel. And one of the beautiful things that happens when we live our lives in light of the gospel, when we solve our problems in light and in view of the gospel, is this thing that Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 5, where he says, and I love this verse. He says, for we are led in triumphal procession by Christ, and through us, listen to this phrase, and through us is spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God. It's this idea that Jesus is a triumphant conqueror of us and of our souls, and he leads us through this life in procession behind him. And without our even saying a word, through us passively spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. That the people who interact with us in our life are somehow drawn closer, more nearly to Jesus because of our simple presence, because of the fragrance of the knowledge of God that our life and our love emits. Do you know how you live life emitting the fragrance of the knowledge of God? You view all questions and all problems and all your days and all reality through the lens of the gospel. And we live out of gratitude for the gospel. So I'm going to pray. And then Michelle's going to come up and lead us in communion as we continue to celebrate this miraculous gospel in our lives. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you've loved us. God, thank you for the gospel, for the truth of it. Thank you for sending your son to die for us, for being willing to watch him die. God, I pray that in every situation, in every moment, in every predicament, that we would ask how the gospel informs what our response or behavior or prayer should be. Help us live in light of that and fueled by gratitude for that incredible miracle. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Something that many of you know about me, but not everyone knows about me, is that I am saddled with being a Georgia Tech fan, which today doesn't feel like such a burden. I wanted to come up on stage to the fight song, but Jen told me that I couldn't because it says hell in it, and we're not allowed to say that at church unless we're actually talking about hell, then we can't. But anyways, for what it's worth, Go Jackets, I know that our demise is soon, and I'm squeezing all the juice out of this lemon that I possibly can. This is the last part in our series called 27, where we have been moving through the books of the New Testament. And it's our last, really, Sunday of the summer. So thank you for being a part of the summer. Thank you for being here now. Next week, as Michelle mentioned in the announcements, we've got Facelift Sunday, where we're just kind of touching things up and getting things ready for September. To me, in my mind, our ministry year runs from September to summer extreme in the second year of June. We push pretty hard during those months. And so to kick that off, we just want to get the church up and ready to go. And we're expecting visitors, so we want to get our house ready. So if you're in town next week and you'd like to participate in that, we'd love for you to do that. Just a quick note, if you're newer to Gray, so you don't feel very plugged in yet, things like that are a great way to get to know some folks. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. I had not wanted to do 1st and 2nd Corinthians together because I think these books often get short shrifted. They often get, they're misunderstood. They're not deeply appreciated enough because they're part of Paul's letters. And I think in our heads, those of us that know the Bible, we, some of us don't have any opinions at all on first and second Corinthians, but I think for those of us who are kind of familiar with the Bible, we can sometimes equate these books to like, like, like a shorter one, like Philippians or like an Ephesians or Galatians, like just something short and quick that makes a couple of points and we're good to study it. But that's really not the case with the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians. They're long books. They're more like Romans than they are like Ephesians. There's a lot of depth there. And so I had not wanted to do them both in one Sunday, but the schedule demanded that I did. And so I'm not going to do justice to them. But I do think that this morning, what I can give you is a good overview of 1 Corinthians and how it relates so much to us today in the questions and the problems facing our church. Because let's be honest, to be a church in 2024 is fraught with problems and questions, right? Being church, doing church, doing church well, doing church right, existing as a church is a challenge in 2024. What I want to assert this morning is, as a church, we face questions of divisions, standards, policies, and beliefs. As a church in 2024, we face questions of division, things that would seek to divide us, things of standards, personal standards for holiness, of policies, how should we carry out things in the gathering and how should we interact interpersonally, and in our beliefs, what's important to believe, where can we disagree. We face questions of that nature in our church today and have for years. When I say questions of division, I just mean things that would seek to kind of sneak into God's body and God's family and divide it against itself. Because we understand that we are unified in Christ, but that unification is threatened from within and from without constantly. I probably shouldn't tell you this story. I know that if I had asked Jen, hey, I think I'm going to tell a story. I know she would say, please don't do that. Um, so this John was up most of the night. So Jen, Jen, Jen, uh, is home with them. If your husband preached every week, you wouldn't keep up online either. Okay. So she's not going to watch this. All right. So we don't, she doesn't have to know what I'm about to say. All right. And, uh, and, and please don't mention this to Lily because she is embarrassed by this. It was something that happened this week that in some ways is objectively funny. At our house, me personally, I'm just very interested in politics. I'm pretty politically in tune. I consume a lot of news. And so it's something that from time to time is on the television in our house, and that'll cause Lily to ask questions about the different candidates in the election and things like that. And I'm very careful. Jen doesn't have to be very careful with this. I do. I'm very careful around, especially around Lily to never, ever talk down about any of the candidates running for any office or either of the political parties or people who vote for those parties. I'm very, very careful to always try to be as positive as I can and uplifting as I can, because by the way, this is just an aside. This is not part of the sermon. I'm just saying this in general. This is my opinion as a pastor that when we participate in the world's degradation of the opposing team, all we do is act like the world and model nothing that looks like Christianity to the people around us. Okay. So we talk about it sometimes, but I'm very careful to be aboveboard I don't because I don't want her parenting something clumsy and thoughtless to her classmates or to one of your kids over there or to one of you Okay, so I'm careful apparently the other parents that send their kids to Lily's school are not as careful. And so, at their desk or at lunch or something this week, the little girl that was sitting across from Lily said, Kamala Harris is stupid. Great. I don't know what Lily said. I do know that Lily has told me that if she could vote, she would vote for Kamala because Kamala's a girl and she's a girl. Fine. Fine. Don't care. You're eight. That'll get, needs to be more nuanced than that when you're 18, but that's, you're eight. So I don't know what she said, but apparently she defended Mrs. Harris. And that little girl, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, went and told all the classmates that Lilly is a Democrat. And I know, it's particularly funny because I also grew up in a private Christian school where the word Democrat was a cuss word. And so like that got around, news got around the third grade and now Lilly is labeled, man. And it's funny. It's funny. But the more I thought about it, I thought I need to write an email. And I did. I wrote an email to the teacher and the administrator. And I was very kind in my email. I did not fault anyone for anything. As a matter of fact, the next day, Jen saw the principal in the car line. And the principal came over and told her how much she appreciated the email and tone up and whatever. So I was very nice. All right, don't worry. But what I said is, hey, maybe this year in particular, it would be good to have a policy in the classrooms that we don't talk about, we don't have political discussions that are not moderated by a teacher or a faculty member. Because maybe these kids don't need to be just parroting their parents' views back and forth to each other. And the reason is, the reason is, and here's why I was concerned. I said it would be a shame if we allowed the division of the world to slither into God's family of faith that is unified in Christ and allowed that division to begin to tear apart our unity in such a way that kids are isolated and mocked. If that's happening in the third grade at NRCA, it's happening everywhere. It's happening everywhere where the enemy is trying to sneak in and divide and sow discord and make us forget that we are unified in Christ first. So we face questions of division. We face questions of standards all the time. Should I drink this? Can I have one more? Is that bad? Is it bad to watch this thing? Is it bad to go to this place? It's a question that the church has asked through the centuries. Every generation of Christian has asked this question, is blank a sin? Is it okay to do this? Is it okay to go there? Is it okay to see this? Is it okay to stay there? We are always constantly asking, is this a sin? And when we're asking that, what we're really asking is, what should a Christian's standard of holiness be? That's what we're asking. So we face questions of standards of holiness, and we have throughout the generations. We face questions of policies. What should I do when I'm around other people? How should I handle myself? What kind of rules should we have in the church? Who's allowed to serve here and serve there? And when just this week I had what is essentially a policy conversation with someone when they said, hey, I don't have any problems with it, but I'm just wondering how did the church decide to do communion once a month? Why don't we do it more or less? And so we talked about that. That's a policy conversation. How do we make this decision about this thing? And then we face questions of belief. Just in the spring, I preached a sermon about unity in Christ, and that being Christ's prayer for us in John 17, the high priestly prayer. And I talked about the things that threaten that unity. And I talked about how Jesus, that was the primary thing that he wanted for us is, is that we would be unified. And I said that we cannot be unified if we insist on a homogeny of doctrinal thought, if we have to believe all the same things about all the same things, right? And so what we said is there's secondary and tertiary issues. And on those things, we don't have to agree to be in fellowship together, but there are primary issues on which we do need to agree if we're going to exist in fellowship together and move forward as a body of Christ. And so when we say that we have questions of belief, really it's okay, that's great. What are the primary issues? What are the non-negotiables? What do we absolutely have to believe and what are the things about which we can disagree and have conversations? So we have questions of belief. These same questions are the same questions that was facing the church in Corinth. They're the questions that Paul actually writes the letter to specifically address. Paul writes the letter to Corinth because he had heard some stuff was going on there. Paul spent about a year and a half in Corinth planting this church. That's more time, to my knowledge, than he spends anywhere else. For him to spend a year and a half during this season of his life in one place planting one church is a big deal. It was a lot of work and it was hard work. And so this church is near and dear to his heart. And as he goes and he's going around Asia Minor planting the other churches, he starts hearing that there's some stuff going on in Corinthians, in the church in Corinth. And so he writes this very long letter, this 15-chapter letter of 1 Corinthians back to the church in Corinth and says, hey, I've heard this stuff is going on. I heard that you're facing some questions. Let me tell you how I want you to address those things. And what I want us to see is that the answer to each question in the church in Corinth is the gospel. The answer to each question facing the church in Corinth is the gospel. No matter what they're dealing with, he takes their collective attention and he focuses it on the gospel. The first thing he does, the first thing he does is in chapters one through four, you can kind of break it out this way. In chapters one through four, they are facing questions of division. What had happened is after Paul left, other apostles came around and preached in Corinth. Peter came and preached. Apollos came and preached. And what he finds out is there is disunity amongst the body of the church in Corinth around which apostle they prefer. Some prefer Apollos. Apollos was an eloquent speaker. Paul was not a very good speaker. They said, Paul writes a heck of a letter, but his sermons aren't very good. And so they were arguing over who their favorite pastor was, is what they were doing, which is a very human thing to do. It's been happening since the church started. And so now we still do that. We go to this church because we like this pastor, that church because we like that pastor. And honestly, I think all of that is really silly. Whenever I'm talking to anybody who's looking for a church, I always tell them people vastly overemphasize the importance of the senior pastor. You can download the best sermons in the world every Wednesday. You cannot download worship and you cannot download community. So if the sermons are passable, but it feels like your people go there, which is really all we're going for here. They were choosing their favorite pastor and Paul writes back and he points them to the gospel. He says, Hey, that's not what you need to do. And so one of the reasons he points to the gospel is that, and what I want you to see is that we are unified by the gospel. Paul goes, you don't need to be doing this. You don't need to be having these divisions. We are unified in the gospel. I have these verses notated in your notes. So you see the references there, but I'm not going to pull them, put them up on the screen because we'd just be looking up and down for the next 10 minutes. But this is how Paul answers that question of division in 1 Corinthians 4, verse 1. He writes this, This, then, is how you ought to regard us, as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. So this is what he says. You prefer Apollos. You prefer Peter. You say you prefer me. You prefer this pastor or that pastor. Nobody cares. All of us. Me, Peter, Apollos, and anyone else that you might prefer. We are children of God. We are tools in the hands of the creator. We are instruments to bring you to him. We do not care who you follow. We do not care who you listen to. We care that you grow closer to Jesus. That's what we care about. I had an honest conversation with a pastor friend of mine this week who was meeting with someone who was, that person was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to come to his church, and so they wanted to meet with him. And when you do that, it's in some ways like a job interview. I'm visiting around, I'm interviewing different candidates for the role of being my pastor, and I'd like to see if you are going to fit the bill. Every now and again, you get into those, and my buddy said, I wish I could just tell him, come to Journey or don't. I know you're going to land somewhere. We'd love to have you, but I'm too exhausted to try to figure out what you want me to say. That's what Paul is saying. Listen to whomever you want to listen to. We are tools in the hands of our maker. It is our job to point you to Christ. It is not our job to be your favorite. And I'll tell you who does this really well week in and week out is Aaron, our worship pastor. Week in and week out as we worship, there are times, there are moments when he backs away and he lets you sing. And he doesn't put his voice over top of ours. He does this when he could belt it, when he could do solos, when he could carry on, when he could use this as an opportunity to show off and to show out and to show how talented he is. He backs up and he gets small because he understands that Sunday morning, his opportunity to lead worship is not about impressing you with his voice. It's about compelling you to raise your voice. And so he backs away because it's his job to bring you to Jesus. It's not his job to get in the way and impress you with what he does. This is what Paul says here. So he says, listen, it doesn't matter which pastor you prefer. We are all servants of Christ. So he takes the gospel and he puts that front and center and he says, think about who you follow in light of the gospel. And just so we're clear, when I say the gospel, because that's what we're talking about a lot this morning, the way that we define the gospel of grace, the way that I say it when I say it, is that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, believe that he did what he said he did, and believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's the son of God. He died and he rose again on the third day and he ascended into heaven and one day he's going to come back and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he's going to take his family where we belong. That's what we believe. That's, that's the gospel. It's the, it's the, it's the miraculous work and reality of Jesus Christ. And so to the questions of division and disunity, Jesus take, or Paul takes our attention and he focuses it squarely on the gospel. You need the gospel to fix this situation. So that was the first time. That's divisions. Next is the standards of holiness. He heard that there was an issue going on in the church in Corinth. It's one of the more salacious passages in all the Bible where it comes to Paul's, it occurs to him, it came to his knowledge that there was a man in the church who was being intimate with his mother-in-law. And everybody just kind of knew that this was happening and nobody was correcting it. And he was just still in the back, shaking hands, collecting money every week, working as an usher. They were just cool with it. And Paul has to go, Hey, Hey, I know that you live in a city that has these standards of sexual purity that are incredibly low and that this doesn't seem like it's a big deal, but it's a big deal. You can't do that. You need to tell him that he can't do that. And so in questions of holiness, what we see is that we are compelled by the gospel. We are compelled towards holiness by the gospel. And here's what I mean. In chapter 6, verses 19 and 20, Paul says this, Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought with a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. Paul says, I've heard that this sexual immorality, this impurity is going on in the church. We need to knock it off. And here's why we need to knock it off. Because your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It was bought with a price. It is not your own. And I want to pause and talk about what that verse means a little bit, because I think it's important. The temple in the Old Testament was the place of sacrifice and worship. You went there to worship your God. You went there to make sacrifices to your God. And so in the New Testament, when it says the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that means that once you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit dwells in you. You are the primary dwelling place of the Spirit. And as such, it is your job to make sure that there is nothing that happens with your body that prevents you from worshiping and prevents you from living as a living sacrifice. Does that make sense? Your body is the primary vessel through which we worship and we sacrifice. And so what that verse means is that body no longer belongs to you. You can't do whatever you want to with it. You can't sully it however you want to. Wherever you go, you take the Holy Spirit. Whatever you watch, the Holy Spirit watches with you. When we do things that harm ourselves, we grieve the Spirit. We grieve Christ. Your bodies are bought with a price. That price is the gospel. It's the death of Christ. Reminds you that he did what he said he did. That he died for those sins. And now you belong to him. So you cannot use your bodies as recreational vehicles. They are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And so what Paul does in an issue of immorality and a lack of holiness, poor standards, is he takes the attention of the church and he focuses it on the cross, on the gospel, and he says, in light of the gospel, you cannot go on like that. I don't know what your standards are for your personal holiness. I don't know what you allow in your life and in your private thoughts. But I'd be willing to bet that most of us, if not all of us, could step it up a little bit in our standards of personal holiness. I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out. We need to tighten it up a little bit and our standards of personal holiness I bet I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out when you tighten it up when we do that it's hard you guys have taken steps towards holding this before you've set new standards for yourself before you've said I'm not gonna do this I am gonna do this I'm not gonna think this I am gonna think this you, and then you've fallen short. Pursuing holiness is hard. And so what is it that gets us up and gets us focused and gets us willing to continue to pursue that holiness? By focusing ourselves on the gospel. By being overwhelmed with our gratitude for Christ that he died to save our sins. That he's fought that battle and he's already won that battle. Belting that song out loudly, reminding ourselves that Jesus has won this. We remind ourselves of the gospel and out of gratitude for the gospel, we pursue holiness. Then in chapters 8 through 14, Paul gets into some discourse. There's some different questions of policies happening. What should we do about this? What should our standards be about this? There's one about interpersonal relationships. There's one about standards of the church and of the gathering. The interpersonal relationship one is interesting because a portion of the congregation was made up of Jewish people. The rest of the congregation was made up of Gentiles. Well, Jews famously have much more restricting dietary laws and standards than Gentiles do. So the question came up in the church, what are we allowed to eat? Can we have bacon? And the Gentiles said, God's made everything. Everything's fine. We can eat it. And the Jews said, yeah, but that's still deeply offensive. Maybe not around us. And then other Jews said, no, no, no. You need to follow. You need to adopt our standards for holiness. You need to adopt our policies. And to this, Paul infuses this idea. He says, hey, listen. You need to act in ways where you love the other person more than yourself. And in this way, we are pointed to love by the gospel. When he answers this question with the gospel, we are pointed to love by the gospel. Here's what I mean in 1 Corinthians 9, 22. To the weak, I became weak to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel that I may share in its blessings. So Paul's going through this long diatribe. And he says, listen, those of you who say God made everything, I can eat everything, it's holy and blessed in his name, you're right. Bon appetit, live it up. But when you're around someone who will be offended or misled by your consumption of that thing, love them more than you love your freedom. Love them more than you love eating that thing. Love them more than you love yourself. Be all things to all people so that by all means you might win one. I've said many times from this stage, what is the only reason that the very second we are saved and accept Christ as our Savior and in God's family, what is the only reason that the very second we receive salvation, God doesn't immediately take us up to heaven so that we can be with him for all of eternity? The only reason you and I are still here on this side of Christendom and not yet in eternity is so that on our way to Jesus, we can bring as many people as we possibly can with us. It's the only reason we exist is to take people to the throne with us. And so what Paul is saying is, if your freedoms, if what you allow yourself, if your standards of holiness that you're fine with before the spirit, they don't prohibit your temple from being a place of worship and a place of sacrifice. If those standards, when you are around others, cause other people to stumble, cause other people to have issues in their hearts, to think of you as someone who is a sinner and possibly a hypocrite, then you need to raise your standards to their standards. If they're weak in their faith and this thing causes them to struggle, then you be weak with them. Love others to the idea of policies. How do we interact interpersonally with one another? Paul says, love other people more than you love yourself and more than you love your freedom. Love them as Jesus did, and he points this to the gospel. He also does it corporately because their worship was a little bit disheveled. They were having issues in their worship where people were talking over one another. I don't think just one person would get up and preach. You guys all know the drill. You come in, you sit down, you sing. Then you stand up, you sing, you sit down. Nate's going to talk for a while. It's rude to talk. I'm not going to talk while Nate's talking. No matter how bad or boring it gets, we just sit here and endure until we can go to lunch. Then we sing and we go home. They didn't have that order. They didn't know that. And so they had the gifts of tongues and people are standing up speaking in other languages or unidentifiable languages. They're teaching over one another. They're having faith movements and moments over one another, and it was very disordered. And so Paul, to address this problem of policy, what's our policy around the gathering? He says, listen, everybody has their part to play. This is famous chapter of 1 Corinthians 12 when he talks about the gifts of the Spirit and the body of Christ. Everybody has their parts to play. Everybody has their things to do. The body is made up of many parts and without those parts, the body cannot function. We just need to know our role and stay in our lane and do what we've been asked to do. And so he talks about order within the body. And then he caps off everything. He talks about the spiritual gifts and what they're for and how they should be used. And he caps off everything with this wonderful, wonderful discourse on love. And he says this in chapter 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Everything that happens on Sunday, everything that happens in the body, all the things that you experience, all the gifts, all the roles, all the things, it all boils down to these three things, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these, the greatest of these virtues is love. And what is the single greatest act of love in the history of history? Christ's sacrifice on the cross. He again, to the question of policies, points us to the gospel. Love other people more than you love yourself. And then finally, in chapter 15, there's a question of beliefs. There was a group of people within the church who did not believe that the resurrection was a real thing. They thought it was a fable, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead, that people made it up and now they're evangelizing that truth, but that's not true, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead. And Paul writes and addresses that. And he says, listen, listen, that can't be right because if that's true and the resurrection's not real and it didn't happen, then we may as well just be a glee club. We're totally wasting our time. And that's true. If we don't celebrate Easter every year, if Easter's not a real thing that acknowledges a real event that happened in real history, then we're wasting our time. And we should find something else to do on Sunday mornings. And that's what he told them. He said, no, the resurrection is a non-negotiable. It is a non-negotiable of our faith. We Jesus has already secured our future. Because Jesus is going to do what he says he's going to do. And he's going to come crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh. And he's going to rescue his bride, the church back up to heaven. He's going to do that. And that's impossible without the resurrection. So when we talk about these questions of what do we believe, what are the primary and secondary and tertiary issues? On what things are we allowed to disagree? Paul points them and us to the gospel. He says, here are the primary issues that you must agree upon in the church. That Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. And because of the way he frames it up, we know that Jesus is the son of God. And when I say Son of God, I mean the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creator God. John tells us at the beginning of his gospel that Jesus was the Word. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing is made. In the first three verses of the Bible, we see that the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is hovering over the surface of the deep, and we see the words of God come in the form of Christ to bring about creation. So when I say Jesus is who he says he is, that's what I'm talking about, the Son of the Triune God. He did what he said he did. He came, he lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, he rose again on the third day after offering propitiation for our sins. And he ascended into heaven where he exists and he waits until one day he's going to come back down to get us. Those are the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Every mainline Protestant church, every Catholic church agrees with those fundamentals of the Christian faith. They are the absolute non-negotiables. So when we talk about beliefs in our modern day church, what do we believe about this or about that? Here's what we believe. We believe in the gospel. We believe in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. That's what we believe. That's what we're centered on. That's what we're focused on. And it's true that every Sunday morning should bring your focus back to this. It's true that every time we read the Bible, our focus should be taken at some point or another to Christ. It's true that that is the central figure and moment and belief of the Christian life and of the Christian faith. And I love the consistency of Paul in all of these questions, all of the issues facing the ancient church, all of the issues facing the modern church. What do we do about this? How do we fix this? Here's an issue that's happening in our church or in our life. What's the answer? Jesus. Where do we look? The cross. What do we remind ourselves of? The gospel and the miraculous work that is. And I love that this is really the point of the letter to the church in 1 Corinthians. The point is to point them towards the gospel. And I love that we're ending our series on the New Testament with this message. Because the whole point of the New Testament is to point us towards the gospel. Really the whole point of the Bible is to point us towards the gospel. And what is true is that just like they were then, we are still unified, compelled, engendered, and reminded by the same marvelous, miraculous, and mysterious gospel today. The same truths to which Paul pointed the collective attention of the church in Corinth. He grabs our head and he points us towards those truths today. We are still walking in light of this beautiful gospel. And as we wrap up today, just a little touch on 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians really is a letter that shows the church what happens when they do and they do not live in light of the gospel. And one of the beautiful things that happens when we live our lives in light of the gospel, when we solve our problems in light and in view of the gospel, is this thing that Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 5, where he says, and I love this verse. He says, for we are led in triumphal procession by Christ, and through us, listen to this phrase, and through us is spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God. It's this idea that Jesus is a triumphant conqueror of us and of our souls, and he leads us through this life in procession behind him. And without our even saying a word, through us passively spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. That the people who interact with us in our life are somehow drawn closer, more nearly to Jesus because of our simple presence, because of the fragrance of the knowledge of God that our life and our love emits. Do you know how you live life emitting the fragrance of the knowledge of God? You view all questions and all problems and all your days and all reality through the lens of the gospel. And we live out of gratitude for the gospel. So I'm going to pray. And then Michelle's going to come up and lead us in communion as we continue to celebrate this miraculous gospel in our lives. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you've loved us. God, thank you for the gospel, for the truth of it. Thank you for sending your son to die for us, for being willing to watch him die. God, I pray that in every situation, in every moment, in every predicament, that we would ask how the gospel informs what our response or behavior or prayer should be. Help us live in light of that and fueled by gratitude for that incredible miracle. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. A lot of you have chosen this morning to make this a part of your Sunday. So many so that Keith had to sit in the front with the good Christians. So this is going to be a great Sunday. I almost said the good Christians except for Alan's up here too. So you guys can be buddies together. Sorry, you're both excellent placeholders for that joke that I wanted to make. And if you're, listen, if you're new here and you're trying to, you're kicking the tires, what just happened in worship is just such a great microcosm for, I think, who we are as a church, where we are worshiping earnestly and singing and getting after it. And it was a sweet moment. And then we start the next song and there's a little whoopsie and then we all laugh at ourselves and we just get right back into it. And I just thought it was great. I actually got on my knees and prayed and I pray before every sermon. And I'm just, I was just praying that I'm just so grateful that I get to be the pastor, one of the pastors of a church that I just love so much. I just, I just, I love this place. I love you guys. I consider it a huge privilege. I've told a couple different people this week. It just came up in conversation that I just don't think there could be an easier church to pastor. You guys are so great to me and my family. But anyways, we're in part two of our series called Big Emotions. I think, is that right, Carly? Is that what we're calling this one? Okay. I never know. I always tell them what it's about and then they just name it and I go, okay. And then I get it wrong. But part two of big emotions. And basically what we're doing is looking at stories, instances in the Bible where the people in the Bible had these big emotions, sometimes a blow up or a blow out. We're looking at that. We're examining it. We're relating to it because we're emotional creatures. We have blow ups and blow outs sometimes. And we're trying to figure out what we can learn from it. And so this week, we're looking at a pretty unique instance in the life of Christ. When I was growing up, I don't have many memories at all that don't involve church. I don't have a memory that goes beyond my church involvement. And so growing up, I heard all the stories. And before I heard the stories about Jesus, I heard about him that he was perfect, right? That he lived a sinless life. That he never did anything wrong, which is remarkable. And so I knew that as a little kid, but there's two stories that I encountered when I was young that gave me pause. Like, wait, are you sure? Because that really feels like sin. That really feels like that guy did stuff he wasn't supposed to do. The first one is in, I think it's Luke, when it records that Mary and Joseph took the family to Jerusalem for Passover, as was their habit. And they left, and Jesus chose to stay behind as a 12-year-old to talk to the rabbis and the scribes and the Pharisees. And I always looked at that story and thought, like, listen, I'm not trying to accuse our Savior of anything. I just know that when I was a kid, pretty high up on the obedience priority list was when your parents say it's time to go, you go. Like you don't just be like, yeah, I opted in to just remain at Six Flags after you guys left. Like I'm just going to, or I guess here it's Bush Gardens. I'm just going to, I'm just going to stay there. You guys go ahead. I'll figure it out. Like that seemed like pretty egregious sin for a 12 year old to just say, you know what you guys go on. I'm going to talk to my new pals in the temple, but obviously he didn't sin. I still not quite sure how that worked out for 12 year old Jesus, just to start making decisions about where he's going to stay. But I don't think that it blemishes his perfect record. The other story that made me go, gosh, that really seems like there's a different way to do that, is the story of Jesus cleansing the temple. And I honestly think that even now, and we'll get into the story in a second, so if you don't know what that is yet, don't worry, we'll get there. But I think even now, if you made us contemporaries of Jesus, and we saw him do what he's about to do when he cleanses the temple, we probably would have pulled him aside and been like, hey, buddy, I don't know that that was the best way to handle that. There's probably a different way to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish. It's pretty untoward to do that. We would probably tell him that he was wrong and that he owed some people some apologies. But we're going to get into the story and actually see why his anger and zeal in this story is pretty warranted. So this story is in all four of the Gospels. I think John gives the best account of it, and we find it in John 2, verses 13 through 16. So I'll read it to you, and then we can talk about what's going on. The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and the money changers sitting there. And then in verse 17, he says, So to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Wherever you were, you needed to get you and your family to Jerusalem to observe the holidays. Passover was one of those times where it's written in God's law and expected as you exercise your faith that you would be obedient and go supposed to go to the temple. And when you got to the temple, you were supposed to offer sacrifices in accordance with just your regular religious maintenance. In Leviticus, we see a ton of laws about what kinds of sacrifices are required for what types of grievances and sins. And so you had to offer those as well as your traditional Passover sacrifices for you and your family. This is all written into the law and required of good religious people. And so good religious people from all over Israel would go to Jerusalem on these high holidays and walk in obedience to those instructions in what we call the Old Testament. They're being obedient and living out their faith well. So if we picture this from the perspective of a family in Nazareth where Jesus was from, to get to Jerusalem, I believe is about 30 miles. Scholars believe that that journey is going to take three to five days depending on who you've got with you. For my family with a seven-year-old and a two-year-old, that's going to take seven days, and I'm going to not have any religion by the time I get to Jerusalem. Or I'll just have some serious sacrificing to do, right? To make things right. So whatever pace you go at, it's a three to five-day journey, a lot of people think. And you get there, you've got to find some place to stay. Maybe you stay in an inn. Maybe, I'm sure they had a commercialization set up and people would take advantage of people needing places to stay. Maybe you had friends or family in Jerusalem and there was one big house that you all got to stay at, but you've got to figure that out. And then you've got to go to the temple, right? But to go into the temple, you had to pay a temple tax. I don't know why you had to pay this temple tax. It feels a little bit like kind of Catholic indulgences, middle ages, like that kind of thing where the leaders of the church are just trying to extract more money from the people who come in. It would be like if I charged you $5 a seat to listen to the sermons and to worship with us. I don't think anything could clear this place out quicker than if I started asking for, that's right, than if I started asking for money to listen to me. But that's what you had to do when you went there. And so these money changers, they had these coins, and this is where the racket comes in. They had these coins that were made in Israel for Hebrews, and they did not bear Caesar's symbol. They had a real issue with coins with Caesar's symbol on them because Caesar claimed to be Lord, and that wasn't good. And so they couldn't accept the Roman currency that was ubiquitous in the country. Far more Roman currency going around than this particular, specifically Israeli currency going around. And so they would ask for you to take your Roman currency and exchange it for that Israeli currency or that Jewish currency. And some people think it's because of the issue with Caesar and other people think it's just that the Jewish coins were minted with more and better silver, and so it was of greater value. But at any rate, you had to take the coins that you had and exchange them. And you know, as well as I do, that the guy who's got the bucket of the Jewish coins at the temple and is exchanging them isn't doing that on good faith. He's making a little off the top because he's got a family to feed too, right? And maybe, maybe the family in Nazareth has its own cash of Jewish coins that are acceptable at the temple, and maybe they don't need that money changer. But my bet is they probably do. And my bet is he's scalping them. He's making some money off of that exchange. And we don't know for sure that the people in the temple who were selling animals and lending money, we don't know for sure that they were price gouging, that they were taking advantage of the populace. But we do know that Jesus said that they had turned his father's house and the other gospel accounts, that they had turned his father's house into a den of thieves or robbers. Which leads me to believe that they were taking advantage of their situation. You're a family from Nazareth. You're traveling three to five days. Who knows how many people are in your caravan. You probably don't want to or have the capacity to bring sheep with you, doves with you for the sacrifice, oxen with you for the sacrifice. You probably don't have that capacity. And even when you get where you're going and you've got to stay at the Hampton Inn, they probably don't allow sheep in there. Maybe you have a house that you can go to and they've got a stable or a barn and you've brought all your sacrificial animals and you're self-sufficient. But I would guess, and research bears this out, that most of the populace did not have that stuff to bring or the capacity to bring it to Jerusalem. So once you get to Jerusalem, to the temple, and you've got to get in the temple with the coin that they accept and you've got to perform the sacrifices that your God demands of you, you have to buy those animals once you get there. Do you see what I'm saying? This is like, this is a North Carolina zoo situation at the junction. This is Disney World. They've got you. You're going to get chicken tenders and you're going to pay $17 and you're going to like it. Nothing you can do about it. And again, we can't say with certainty that they were price gouging, but everything in the text points to the fact that they were. And so Jesus sees this and he's rightly angered by it. Because when you think about it, it's pretty appalling what they're doing. They are leveraging God's laws to line their own pockets. They are commercializing the sacred. And what's more, to me, the high priest is complicit in all of this. Because you don't get to set up shop on the temple grounds. And when we hear this story, please know that when we think about a temple, I think we think about this indoor structure. But at the Temple Mount, there was this outer courtyard that was the size of several football fields, and everyone's allowed in there, Gentiles and Jews alike. You're allowed in there, and that's where all of the tables and the moneylenders are set up. And then you have like this rectangle in the middle, and the rectangle is divided into two squares, and the front square is where Jewish men and women are allowed, and the back square is where Jewish that Jesus goes in and clears out. He goes in there. First of all, he sees what they're doing. And if you read the text, it says he fashioned a whip. He didn't go find one. He sat down and anger wove a whole whip. And then he took it and he started flipping over tables like a madman. And I assume hitting people with the whip. That's one of the scenes in Jesus's life I would have liked to attend. But when you understand what's going on, his anger makes so much sense. And to me, it's so very justifiable. These people are humble people trying to be obedient to their God, trying to do the right thing. And they're going to Jerusalem to take the pilgrimage like good Hebrews should. And listen, we know how faith works. We know how religious cultures work. I think we're kidding ourselves if we think 100% of the Hebrew people are taking a pilgrimage for all three high holidays every year. Some people had opted out. Some people didn't care. Some people couldn't make it. I'm sure a higher percentage of that population went than would go in Christian America in the 80s making some pilgrimage, but not everybody went. So the ones who are going are the faithful ones. They're the committed ones. To them, this faith matters, and they're trying to do the right thing, and they're trying to teach it to their children and their children's children too. And when they get there, they're being taken advantage of. We don't know this for sure, but I'd be willing to proffer a guess that the people exchanging those coins had a higher net value than the people who needed the exchanging done. I bet the people selling oxen had a higher net worth than a majority of the people buying the oxen from them. The rich were likely getting richer while the poor were getting poorer. And the galling thing is it's all in the name of God. They're taking advantage of the sacred to line their own pockets, and it's gross. And Jesus won't have it. He goes in there, flips tables, drives them out, and the disciples are reminded that it was said about him that he would have zeal for his father's house. So there's a lot of things that we can learn from this story as we look at it and we pull it apart and we analyze it. There's a lot of things we can learn from this story. I think one of the things, and I almost preached about it, but I'm just going to set it here and let you guys consider it later in your own time. Maybe you can talk about it in your small groups. But this story pretty heavily indicates that justice matters a lot to Jesus. And fighting against injustice matters a lot to Jesus. I think what galled Jesus was the fact that these people who in good faith were trying to be obedient to their father were being taken advantage of for their very faith. It's remarkably unjust and it ticked them off. But I think more than that, more than that, was what they were turning his father's house into. And what I see glaring like a bullhorn from these passages is that Jesus will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. Our Jesus will not put up with, he will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. I don't know where you draw lines in your life. I don't know what you feel like you can't put up with, what really gets your ire going. I know for me, when I see someone who is, believe it or not, when I see someone who is willfully unkind and hurtful to someone else, I write that person off. I have a really hard time with someone who is willing to be unkind and hurtful to someone else. I just can't tolerate it. I don't know what your thing is. Jesus' thing is, one of them, you will not sully the sacred while I am here. Because the temple, the temple was sacred to the Jew. It was sacred to Jesus. Do you understand that the temple was the place of the presence of God for thousands of years? In that back rectangle where the Holy of Holies sat, in the Holy of Holies behind a veil sat the Ark of the Covenant. And on the Ark of the Covenant, there's two angels, golden angels, and their wings touch in the middle. And where their wings touch is called the mercy seat. And on the mercy seat rests the very presence of God, making that temple and that city and that nation unique in all the world. Do you know that every synagogue built outside of Israel is built to face Jerusalem and that every synagogue in Israel faces Jerusalem. It's all about the Holy of Holies and what's in there and the presence of God being in that place. The temple was a sacred space. A space that when you go into it, it's different than any other experience in your life. A space where you take your children and you teach them the way that you were taught. The space where when you become the matriarch or the patriarch of your family, you sit your grandchildren down and you tell them about the pilgrimages that you used to make. And most importantly, it's a place of worship where we assign worth to God. Not just praise and worship, not singing like what we did a few minutes ago, but worship where you declare with every breath and with every action and with every thought and with every deed that God, you are Lord and I am not. That was a place where you went to lay yourself down prostrate and say, God, you are amazing and to stand in awe of God. The temple was a space for the sacred and they sullied it with their selfishness. And so Jesus said, no, I will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. Now here's why that should matter a lot to you and I, because of what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians chapter 6. In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul tells us this, or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body. The New Testament teaches us that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And I used to hear growing up, I would hear Baptists say that you shouldn't drink because your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and alcohol is not healthy for you. And then you just look at them and be like, do you eat fried chicken? And then that clearly is a misapplication. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Meaning, Paul tells us in other writings, I think it's Ephesians, but I'm not certain on that. But I am certain that what he says is that when you become a Christian, that you receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment on your salvation. And again, to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He came to deliver the world. That he did what he said he did. He died on the cross and he rose again on the third day. And that he is who he says he, that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day and he's going to get us and take us home. To be a Christian is to believe those things. And when we believe those things, the Bible teaches us that God gives us his Holy Spirit in our hearts. And what does that language mean? We don't know. We just kind of feel that language. But he gives us the Holy Spirit in our heart as a seal of the promise that one day he's going to send his son back to take us to him, to take us home. And that because of that, because this is the place where the Holy Spirit dwells, we have now become the temple. Our bodies are the temple. Our bodies are where the presence of God sits in this earthly place. Because when Jesus died on the cross for our sins, many of you know this, the veil that was hung in the Holy of Holies that separated the presence of God from everyone else was torn in two from top to bottom and the presence of God exited that place. And then we learn at the end of the Gospels and at the beginning of Acts that that presence actually returns to us in the form of God's Spirit and that we are the houses of God's Spirit. We are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And what are temples for? Temples are for worship. Temples are sacred. Temples are where we meet with God. And when we talk about temples being places of worship, I am reminded I'm reminded that Paul wrote that we are actually called to be living sacrifices. That going through life as a living sacrifice, Paul calls it, this is our spiritual act of worship, holy and acceptable to God. He tells us as Christians that we are to live our lives as sacrifices. God, we wake up every day, God, what would you have me do today? How would you have me use this instrument for your glory today? And that is our spiritual act of worship. Not praise, but worship. And our spiritual act of worship, if what happens in the temple is every thought, every action, every deed declares implicitly, Lord, you are Lord and I am not, then what he calls us to do, what we are called to do when we understand the theology of the New Testament is to live our lives as the temples of the Holy Spirit, to live our lives as spiritual acts of worship. Meaning, when we go throughout our day, every thought, every word, every action, every deed ought to declare, God, you are God and I am not. Now that is pretty high bar. And I'll be the first to admit to you, I do not think I have yet accumulated a day where every thought, deed, action, emotion, reaction I had that day declared, God, you are God and I am not. But here's what we're not going to do at Grace. We're not going to back off of the high bar that Scripture sets for us to make it more attainable for ourselves so that we become something that we're not supposed to be. We're going to sit in humility and brokenness before the incredibly high bar of Scripture and say, Jesus, I can't. You have to help me. But when we are told that our bodies, the temples of the Holy Spirit, the way to live our lives is living sacrifices. This is our spiritual act of worship within that temple. We are told that every thought and deed and action and word needs to declare that he is Lord and we are not. And that's a very high bar. We are also reminded that Jesus does not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. And Paul has declared us sacred because we are temples. You guys can see where I'm going there. All of you, I'm certain, walked in here this morning with something in your temple that's sullying the sacred. All of us in our lives have trampled on Jesus. All of us in our actions and our thoughts and our deeds and our words have sullied the sacred, have prevented our bodies from being used for worship. And so, to me, the story of Jesus cleansing the temple is in all four Gospels because it is a continuous reminder when we examine it and consider it and reflect on it that we ought to be people of repentance. That we ought to be people who invite Jesus into our life and say, turn over my tables if you need to. Show me where I am sullying the sacred and help me to get rid of those things. I don't need to enumerate the possible sins and the possible attitudes that you walked into this room with. And when I say you, I mean me too. I don't need to list those for you because you already know what they are. Because you have the Holy Spirit and he's getting after you about them right now. So I believe that this story calls us to repentance. Calls us to a moment where we plead with Jesus, would you please clean out this temple? Would you please turn over these tables? And when we talk about repentance, most of us in this room know what repentance is. I've done a sermon or two on it, but just so we're on the same page. Repentance means 180 degree turn. So it's not just confession. Confession is to agree with God about your sin. Yes, I see that. And it definitely was wrong to cuss at that six-year-old in the store. And I'm so sorry. That's wrong. Repentance is to move away from it and never do that again. Okay. So confession is, I'm sorry that I disappointed you in this way. I can see why that was disappointing. I agree, I would be disappointed in me too. But if we just keep doing it, then it doesn't matter. We just stop it, I'm sorry. So repentance is to apologize and then move in the opposite direction, away from sin and back towards the Father. That's what repentance is. And I think that when we think about repentance, we think about repenting of actions, things that we did. And so we repent and we say, God, I'm sorry that I did this. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm sorry that I looked at that. I'm not going to look at that anymore. I'm sorry that I drank too much that time. I'm not going to drink too much anymore. I'm sorry that I lost my temper. I'm not going to lose my temper. I'm sorry that I worried too much. I'm not going to worry. We tend to repent of actions, things that we did. I'm sorry I did blank. I'm not going to do blank anymore. But I would actually put in front of you maybe a new way of thinking or a different way of thinking about repentance that was put in front of me a couple of weeks ago and I'm just so grateful for it. I think that we should repent of what we allow in our hearts, not necessarily how we behave. We should repent of what we allow to take up residence in our heart. The attitudes and the motives behind the behaviors are far more important to repent of than the actions themselves. Can I actually, can I tell you something? I mean, I know I can. That's a stupid question. I'm sorry. I'm gonna. I actually had an interesting conversation recently with a couple of my friends where we were asking, is God really even that interested in our behavior? Does he even really care about our behavior? And I increasingly think the answer is no. I increasingly think it's just he doesn't really care about our behavior, not because it doesn't matter to him what we do, but because out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. Because our behaviors will follow our attitudes and motives. So he's far more worried about cleansing our heart than making our behavior good. And I think that the way it works to repent of attitudes over actions can go something like this. You could pick a sin. I'm not sure what it is you struggle with. I can make some educated guesses, but I know for sure what I struggle with. And I shared one of those with you last week. I got angry. I lost my temper. I slapped the center console. I raised my voice at my daughter. She cried, and it was a moment that I wish I could take back. And I do that. I have a shorter fuse than I'd like. I can get angry or frustrated quickly. Hopefully, I deflate quickly too. But that's one of the things that I deal with. And so last week we talked about how when we lose our temper and we lash out, we looked at the story of Peter in the garden and they were coming to arrest Jesus and he swung his sword and he cut off the ear of one of the guards arresting Jesus. And Jesus picks up the ear and he puts it back on the guard and he mouthing us and he says, go on your way, Peter, stop doing that. And so we kind of talked about this language of sometimes we will lash out and we'll cut off people's ears. And so if anger is a thing that you deal with, like me, then I don't think it's really helpful to say, God, I'm sorry I cut off that person's ear. I'm never going to cut off ears again. I'm going to take a deep breath and count to 10. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm sorry I lost my temper at my daughter. I'm sorry I lost my temper at my coworker, at my wife, at my husband, whatever it is. I'm going to count to 10. I'm not going to do that anymore. I don't think that's super helpful. I think what's more helpful is to stop and think, well, why was I angry? Just in general, I'm going to step over here. This is not biblical, okay? I hesitated to even say anything about this, but when you ask why you're angry, you'll almost always find that you're not entitled to it. And most anger comes from unmet expectations. And some of those aren't very fair. Okay. When I reflect on when I get frustrated, what I find at the root of that, 98% of the time, is just unmitigated selfishness. It's just a bratty nine-year-old kid who doesn't want to do what they don't want to do. I don't want to get up and take the dog outside. I wish we didn't have one. I want to sit on the couch. So I'm angry. A lot of my anger has to do with me just wanting to sit on the couch. I don't want to get up and go do that. I don't want to clean. I don't want to go follow after a two-year-old. I want to sit right here, and I want to watch the Masters. That's what I want to do. I don't want to be going this slowly on 540. I'd like to be going quicker than you, and you're prohibiting that. I don't want to be in this conversation. I don't want to hear that story. I don't want to have to go there. I don't want to have to go stand in a field with sunshine and get my picture taken with my children who will not smile. I don't want to do that. My anger, my frustration in my life almost always is stirred up by poor Nate being made to do something he doesn't want to do. What a baby. You are too. So for me, rather than praying, God, help me not lash out at people anymore. A much better prayer is, God, help me to become a more selfless, patient person so that I might better love those around me. Help me to become, I've identified that I get frustrated because I'm selfish, so help me to be a more patient and selfless person. And here's the best part, so that I might better love those around me. Because those sins and attitudes and actions that exist in your life, who do they hurt the most? They hurt the people you love the most. And when we carry those through our lives, we actually love them more poorly than we could and should. So a helpful thing when we repent is to think, how was this attitude? How was my selfishness? How was my greed? How was my anxiety? How was my stubbornness? How was my pride? How was that hurting the people around me? And then you apologize to them and you repent of that too. But we don't repent by praying that God would take away actions. We pray that he would come into our hearts and take away attitudes. And I think that this mindset of repentance sheds light on what David writes in Psalm 139. It's a passage that's vexed me for most of my life. I'll tell you why in a second. But in Psalm 139, David says, search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. I usually joke when I mention that verse that that's a prayer I've never had to pray. I've never had to be like, dear God, can you just show me where I'm sinning? Because I don't see it. And I would like you to help me. I've never had to pray that prayer. I know where I'm messing up. I see it. And if I don't always see it, I have a wife. She sees it. She'll tell me. She's not here today. I can say that. Lily's sick. She's got a cold. But the more I think about it, I don't really think that's what David meant either. I don't think maybe he did, but David was so very human. David was a terrible father. He had so many cracks in the facade. It's difficult for me to believe that David had a season of his life when he was writing Psalm 139 where he thought, you know what? I know I used to mess up, but I've been pretty much nailing it lately. God, I think I'm perfect for the last month, so if you could just tell me if I'm not, that'd be great. I don't think that's what David was doing. I think what David was doing is what we're talking about this morning. Jesus, can you come in my heart and search out those motives? Can you come in my heart and start flipping over tables? Some of us are people pleasers. We bend over backwards to make everyone around us happy. And sometimes that makes us be people that we're not. It's an interesting prayer to say, God, can you show me why I do that? Can you help me understand why I want those people to like me so much? Can you help me understand why I'm getting so angry? Can you help me understand why I seem to be so motivated by success? Can you help me understand why I don't like many of the people in my life right now and I know it's my problem? We start praying motive prayers, idols in heart prayers, sullying the temple prayers. And true repentance, the kind that we need, really, we can't do that on our own. If we're not repenting of actions, and we can't just white-knuckle our way back to holiness, but we have to repent of attitudes and things that we've allowed to take root in our heart and sully the sacred, then we need the kind of cleansing that only Jesus can offer. We need to pray the prayer of David in light of the story of Jesus cleansing the temple and say, God, wherever the tables have set up in my life, wherever there's money changing going on, wherever I'm taking advantage of people, whatever is in here that's sullying the sacred space of the temple of your Holy Spirit, God, would you show it to me, and would you give me the courage to pray that it leaves? And I'll help you with this too. Maybe you know exactly what it is. I don't need God to divine my attitude. I don't need to go to counseling to help suss this out. I don't need to talk to advisors who love me and can tell me what my attitudes have been. I know exactly what I need to do. But I don't want to do it. I like that sin. I like that sullying. And I'm not going to listen to one sermon by some guy and then walk away from that. Okay? I've been there too. So let me just encourage you to pray this. God, I don't want this to not be in my life. Would you help me to want to want it to go away? I'm not ready to let go of this sin, but God, will you move me closer to wanting to get rid of it, to hating it like you do? Because right now I don't. Right now I like it. Will you just help move the needle a little bit today and tomorrow and next week on not being happy with this in my life? But for a lot of us, the prayer today is a prayer of repentance, which should be a regular thing in our Christian life. God, show me what attitudes and idols I have in my heart and what things I have motivating the sin in my life that you might turn them over and force them out just like you did in the temple that day. Because if Jesus has a zeal for not sullying the sacred in that temple, then I can promise you that he is zealous about your temples too. Let's invite him in and let's be places that are places, let's be people that are places of worship every day as we learn what it is to repent of the things that are sullying the sacred in our lives. Let's pray. Father, God, we love you so much. We thank you that your kindness leads us to repentance, that it's not something you force onto us, that you don't run into our lives with a whip and start turning over tables and just cause all kinds of pain and hurt and dishevelment, but that your kindness, your love, your invitation, your grace, your patience and forbearance with us leads us to repentance. That the more we learn about you, the closer we want to be to you. And the less patience we have for the things that prevent us from worshiping you. God, I pray that we in this room would repent of sins big and little. That we would repent of attitudes egregious and simply unholy and unhelpful. And that God, even today, all of us in this room would take a step towards being cleansed. We pray the prayer of David and invite you into our hearts to clean things out so that we might be instruments of worship for you. We pray these things in your son's name. Amen.
Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. A lot of you have chosen this morning to make this a part of your Sunday. So many so that Keith had to sit in the front with the good Christians. So this is going to be a great Sunday. I almost said the good Christians except for Alan's up here too. So you guys can be buddies together. Sorry, you're both excellent placeholders for that joke that I wanted to make. And if you're, listen, if you're new here and you're trying to, you're kicking the tires, what just happened in worship is just such a great microcosm for, I think, who we are as a church, where we are worshiping earnestly and singing and getting after it. And it was a sweet moment. And then we start the next song and there's a little whoopsie and then we all laugh at ourselves and we just get right back into it. And I just thought it was great. I actually got on my knees and prayed and I pray before every sermon. And I'm just, I was just praying that I'm just so grateful that I get to be the pastor, one of the pastors of a church that I just love so much. I just, I just, I love this place. I love you guys. I consider it a huge privilege. I've told a couple different people this week. It just came up in conversation that I just don't think there could be an easier church to pastor. You guys are so great to me and my family. But anyways, we're in part two of our series called Big Emotions. I think, is that right, Carly? Is that what we're calling this one? Okay. I never know. I always tell them what it's about and then they just name it and I go, okay. And then I get it wrong. But part two of big emotions. And basically what we're doing is looking at stories, instances in the Bible where the people in the Bible had these big emotions, sometimes a blow up or a blow out. We're looking at that. We're examining it. We're relating to it because we're emotional creatures. We have blow ups and blow outs sometimes. And we're trying to figure out what we can learn from it. And so this week, we're looking at a pretty unique instance in the life of Christ. When I was growing up, I don't have many memories at all that don't involve church. I don't have a memory that goes beyond my church involvement. And so growing up, I heard all the stories. And before I heard the stories about Jesus, I heard about him that he was perfect, right? That he lived a sinless life. That he never did anything wrong, which is remarkable. And so I knew that as a little kid, but there's two stories that I encountered when I was young that gave me pause. Like, wait, are you sure? Because that really feels like sin. That really feels like that guy did stuff he wasn't supposed to do. The first one is in, I think it's Luke, when it records that Mary and Joseph took the family to Jerusalem for Passover, as was their habit. And they left, and Jesus chose to stay behind as a 12-year-old to talk to the rabbis and the scribes and the Pharisees. And I always looked at that story and thought, like, listen, I'm not trying to accuse our Savior of anything. I just know that when I was a kid, pretty high up on the obedience priority list was when your parents say it's time to go, you go. Like you don't just be like, yeah, I opted in to just remain at Six Flags after you guys left. Like I'm just going to, or I guess here it's Bush Gardens. I'm just going to, I'm just going to stay there. You guys go ahead. I'll figure it out. Like that seemed like pretty egregious sin for a 12 year old to just say, you know what you guys go on. I'm going to talk to my new pals in the temple, but obviously he didn't sin. I still not quite sure how that worked out for 12 year old Jesus, just to start making decisions about where he's going to stay. But I don't think that it blemishes his perfect record. The other story that made me go, gosh, that really seems like there's a different way to do that, is the story of Jesus cleansing the temple. And I honestly think that even now, and we'll get into the story in a second, so if you don't know what that is yet, don't worry, we'll get there. But I think even now, if you made us contemporaries of Jesus, and we saw him do what he's about to do when he cleanses the temple, we probably would have pulled him aside and been like, hey, buddy, I don't know that that was the best way to handle that. There's probably a different way to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish. It's pretty untoward to do that. We would probably tell him that he was wrong and that he owed some people some apologies. But we're going to get into the story and actually see why his anger and zeal in this story is pretty warranted. So this story is in all four of the Gospels. I think John gives the best account of it, and we find it in John 2, verses 13 through 16. So I'll read it to you, and then we can talk about what's going on. The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and the money changers sitting there. And then in verse 17, he says, So to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Wherever you were, you needed to get you and your family to Jerusalem to observe the holidays. Passover was one of those times where it's written in God's law and expected as you exercise your faith that you would be obedient and go supposed to go to the temple. And when you got to the temple, you were supposed to offer sacrifices in accordance with just your regular religious maintenance. In Leviticus, we see a ton of laws about what kinds of sacrifices are required for what types of grievances and sins. And so you had to offer those as well as your traditional Passover sacrifices for you and your family. This is all written into the law and required of good religious people. And so good religious people from all over Israel would go to Jerusalem on these high holidays and walk in obedience to those instructions in what we call the Old Testament. They're being obedient and living out their faith well. So if we picture this from the perspective of a family in Nazareth where Jesus was from, to get to Jerusalem, I believe is about 30 miles. Scholars believe that that journey is going to take three to five days depending on who you've got with you. For my family with a seven-year-old and a two-year-old, that's going to take seven days, and I'm going to not have any religion by the time I get to Jerusalem. Or I'll just have some serious sacrificing to do, right? To make things right. So whatever pace you go at, it's a three to five-day journey, a lot of people think. And you get there, you've got to find some place to stay. Maybe you stay in an inn. Maybe, I'm sure they had a commercialization set up and people would take advantage of people needing places to stay. Maybe you had friends or family in Jerusalem and there was one big house that you all got to stay at, but you've got to figure that out. And then you've got to go to the temple, right? But to go into the temple, you had to pay a temple tax. I don't know why you had to pay this temple tax. It feels a little bit like kind of Catholic indulgences, middle ages, like that kind of thing where the leaders of the church are just trying to extract more money from the people who come in. It would be like if I charged you $5 a seat to listen to the sermons and to worship with us. I don't think anything could clear this place out quicker than if I started asking for, that's right, than if I started asking for money to listen to me. But that's what you had to do when you went there. And so these money changers, they had these coins, and this is where the racket comes in. They had these coins that were made in Israel for Hebrews, and they did not bear Caesar's symbol. They had a real issue with coins with Caesar's symbol on them because Caesar claimed to be Lord, and that wasn't good. And so they couldn't accept the Roman currency that was ubiquitous in the country. Far more Roman currency going around than this particular, specifically Israeli currency going around. And so they would ask for you to take your Roman currency and exchange it for that Israeli currency or that Jewish currency. And some people think it's because of the issue with Caesar and other people think it's just that the Jewish coins were minted with more and better silver, and so it was of greater value. But at any rate, you had to take the coins that you had and exchange them. And you know, as well as I do, that the guy who's got the bucket of the Jewish coins at the temple and is exchanging them isn't doing that on good faith. He's making a little off the top because he's got a family to feed too, right? And maybe, maybe the family in Nazareth has its own cash of Jewish coins that are acceptable at the temple, and maybe they don't need that money changer. But my bet is they probably do. And my bet is he's scalping them. He's making some money off of that exchange. And we don't know for sure that the people in the temple who were selling animals and lending money, we don't know for sure that they were price gouging, that they were taking advantage of the populace. But we do know that Jesus said that they had turned his father's house and the other gospel accounts, that they had turned his father's house into a den of thieves or robbers. Which leads me to believe that they were taking advantage of their situation. You're a family from Nazareth. You're traveling three to five days. Who knows how many people are in your caravan. You probably don't want to or have the capacity to bring sheep with you, doves with you for the sacrifice, oxen with you for the sacrifice. You probably don't have that capacity. And even when you get where you're going and you've got to stay at the Hampton Inn, they probably don't allow sheep in there. Maybe you have a house that you can go to and they've got a stable or a barn and you've brought all your sacrificial animals and you're self-sufficient. But I would guess, and research bears this out, that most of the populace did not have that stuff to bring or the capacity to bring it to Jerusalem. So once you get to Jerusalem, to the temple, and you've got to get in the temple with the coin that they accept and you've got to perform the sacrifices that your God demands of you, you have to buy those animals once you get there. Do you see what I'm saying? This is like, this is a North Carolina zoo situation at the junction. This is Disney World. They've got you. You're going to get chicken tenders and you're going to pay $17 and you're going to like it. Nothing you can do about it. And again, we can't say with certainty that they were price gouging, but everything in the text points to the fact that they were. And so Jesus sees this and he's rightly angered by it. Because when you think about it, it's pretty appalling what they're doing. They are leveraging God's laws to line their own pockets. They are commercializing the sacred. And what's more, to me, the high priest is complicit in all of this. Because you don't get to set up shop on the temple grounds. And when we hear this story, please know that when we think about a temple, I think we think about this indoor structure. But at the Temple Mount, there was this outer courtyard that was the size of several football fields, and everyone's allowed in there, Gentiles and Jews alike. You're allowed in there, and that's where all of the tables and the moneylenders are set up. And then you have like this rectangle in the middle, and the rectangle is divided into two squares, and the front square is where Jewish men and women are allowed, and the back square is where Jewish that Jesus goes in and clears out. He goes in there. First of all, he sees what they're doing. And if you read the text, it says he fashioned a whip. He didn't go find one. He sat down and anger wove a whole whip. And then he took it and he started flipping over tables like a madman. And I assume hitting people with the whip. That's one of the scenes in Jesus's life I would have liked to attend. But when you understand what's going on, his anger makes so much sense. And to me, it's so very justifiable. These people are humble people trying to be obedient to their God, trying to do the right thing. And they're going to Jerusalem to take the pilgrimage like good Hebrews should. And listen, we know how faith works. We know how religious cultures work. I think we're kidding ourselves if we think 100% of the Hebrew people are taking a pilgrimage for all three high holidays every year. Some people had opted out. Some people didn't care. Some people couldn't make it. I'm sure a higher percentage of that population went than would go in Christian America in the 80s making some pilgrimage, but not everybody went. So the ones who are going are the faithful ones. They're the committed ones. To them, this faith matters, and they're trying to do the right thing, and they're trying to teach it to their children and their children's children too. And when they get there, they're being taken advantage of. We don't know this for sure, but I'd be willing to proffer a guess that the people exchanging those coins had a higher net value than the people who needed the exchanging done. I bet the people selling oxen had a higher net worth than a majority of the people buying the oxen from them. The rich were likely getting richer while the poor were getting poorer. And the galling thing is it's all in the name of God. They're taking advantage of the sacred to line their own pockets, and it's gross. And Jesus won't have it. He goes in there, flips tables, drives them out, and the disciples are reminded that it was said about him that he would have zeal for his father's house. So there's a lot of things that we can learn from this story as we look at it and we pull it apart and we analyze it. There's a lot of things we can learn from this story. I think one of the things, and I almost preached about it, but I'm just going to set it here and let you guys consider it later in your own time. Maybe you can talk about it in your small groups. But this story pretty heavily indicates that justice matters a lot to Jesus. And fighting against injustice matters a lot to Jesus. I think what galled Jesus was the fact that these people who in good faith were trying to be obedient to their father were being taken advantage of for their very faith. It's remarkably unjust and it ticked them off. But I think more than that, more than that, was what they were turning his father's house into. And what I see glaring like a bullhorn from these passages is that Jesus will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. Our Jesus will not put up with, he will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. I don't know where you draw lines in your life. I don't know what you feel like you can't put up with, what really gets your ire going. I know for me, when I see someone who is, believe it or not, when I see someone who is willfully unkind and hurtful to someone else, I write that person off. I have a really hard time with someone who is willing to be unkind and hurtful to someone else. I just can't tolerate it. I don't know what your thing is. Jesus' thing is, one of them, you will not sully the sacred while I am here. Because the temple, the temple was sacred to the Jew. It was sacred to Jesus. Do you understand that the temple was the place of the presence of God for thousands of years? In that back rectangle where the Holy of Holies sat, in the Holy of Holies behind a veil sat the Ark of the Covenant. And on the Ark of the Covenant, there's two angels, golden angels, and their wings touch in the middle. And where their wings touch is called the mercy seat. And on the mercy seat rests the very presence of God, making that temple and that city and that nation unique in all the world. Do you know that every synagogue built outside of Israel is built to face Jerusalem and that every synagogue in Israel faces Jerusalem. It's all about the Holy of Holies and what's in there and the presence of God being in that place. The temple was a sacred space. A space that when you go into it, it's different than any other experience in your life. A space where you take your children and you teach them the way that you were taught. The space where when you become the matriarch or the patriarch of your family, you sit your grandchildren down and you tell them about the pilgrimages that you used to make. And most importantly, it's a place of worship where we assign worth to God. Not just praise and worship, not singing like what we did a few minutes ago, but worship where you declare with every breath and with every action and with every thought and with every deed that God, you are Lord and I am not. That was a place where you went to lay yourself down prostrate and say, God, you are amazing and to stand in awe of God. The temple was a space for the sacred and they sullied it with their selfishness. And so Jesus said, no, I will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. Now here's why that should matter a lot to you and I, because of what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians chapter 6. In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul tells us this, or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body. The New Testament teaches us that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And I used to hear growing up, I would hear Baptists say that you shouldn't drink because your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and alcohol is not healthy for you. And then you just look at them and be like, do you eat fried chicken? And then that clearly is a misapplication. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Meaning, Paul tells us in other writings, I think it's Ephesians, but I'm not certain on that. But I am certain that what he says is that when you become a Christian, that you receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment on your salvation. And again, to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He came to deliver the world. That he did what he said he did. He died on the cross and he rose again on the third day. And that he is who he says he, that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day and he's going to get us and take us home. To be a Christian is to believe those things. And when we believe those things, the Bible teaches us that God gives us his Holy Spirit in our hearts. And what does that language mean? We don't know. We just kind of feel that language. But he gives us the Holy Spirit in our heart as a seal of the promise that one day he's going to send his son back to take us to him, to take us home. And that because of that, because this is the place where the Holy Spirit dwells, we have now become the temple. Our bodies are the temple. Our bodies are where the presence of God sits in this earthly place. Because when Jesus died on the cross for our sins, many of you know this, the veil that was hung in the Holy of Holies that separated the presence of God from everyone else was torn in two from top to bottom and the presence of God exited that place. And then we learn at the end of the Gospels and at the beginning of Acts that that presence actually returns to us in the form of God's Spirit and that we are the houses of God's Spirit. We are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And what are temples for? Temples are for worship. Temples are sacred. Temples are where we meet with God. And when we talk about temples being places of worship, I am reminded I'm reminded that Paul wrote that we are actually called to be living sacrifices. That going through life as a living sacrifice, Paul calls it, this is our spiritual act of worship, holy and acceptable to God. He tells us as Christians that we are to live our lives as sacrifices. God, we wake up every day, God, what would you have me do today? How would you have me use this instrument for your glory today? And that is our spiritual act of worship. Not praise, but worship. And our spiritual act of worship, if what happens in the temple is every thought, every action, every deed declares implicitly, Lord, you are Lord and I am not, then what he calls us to do, what we are called to do when we understand the theology of the New Testament is to live our lives as the temples of the Holy Spirit, to live our lives as spiritual acts of worship. Meaning, when we go throughout our day, every thought, every word, every action, every deed ought to declare, God, you are God and I am not. Now that is pretty high bar. And I'll be the first to admit to you, I do not think I have yet accumulated a day where every thought, deed, action, emotion, reaction I had that day declared, God, you are God and I am not. But here's what we're not going to do at Grace. We're not going to back off of the high bar that Scripture sets for us to make it more attainable for ourselves so that we become something that we're not supposed to be. We're going to sit in humility and brokenness before the incredibly high bar of Scripture and say, Jesus, I can't. You have to help me. But when we are told that our bodies, the temples of the Holy Spirit, the way to live our lives is living sacrifices. This is our spiritual act of worship within that temple. We are told that every thought and deed and action and word needs to declare that he is Lord and we are not. And that's a very high bar. We are also reminded that Jesus does not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. And Paul has declared us sacred because we are temples. You guys can see where I'm going there. All of you, I'm certain, walked in here this morning with something in your temple that's sullying the sacred. All of us in our lives have trampled on Jesus. All of us in our actions and our thoughts and our deeds and our words have sullied the sacred, have prevented our bodies from being used for worship. And so, to me, the story of Jesus cleansing the temple is in all four Gospels because it is a continuous reminder when we examine it and consider it and reflect on it that we ought to be people of repentance. That we ought to be people who invite Jesus into our life and say, turn over my tables if you need to. Show me where I am sullying the sacred and help me to get rid of those things. I don't need to enumerate the possible sins and the possible attitudes that you walked into this room with. And when I say you, I mean me too. I don't need to list those for you because you already know what they are. Because you have the Holy Spirit and he's getting after you about them right now. So I believe that this story calls us to repentance. Calls us to a moment where we plead with Jesus, would you please clean out this temple? Would you please turn over these tables? And when we talk about repentance, most of us in this room know what repentance is. I've done a sermon or two on it, but just so we're on the same page. Repentance means 180 degree turn. So it's not just confession. Confession is to agree with God about your sin. Yes, I see that. And it definitely was wrong to cuss at that six-year-old in the store. And I'm so sorry. That's wrong. Repentance is to move away from it and never do that again. Okay. So confession is, I'm sorry that I disappointed you in this way. I can see why that was disappointing. I agree, I would be disappointed in me too. But if we just keep doing it, then it doesn't matter. We just stop it, I'm sorry. So repentance is to apologize and then move in the opposite direction, away from sin and back towards the Father. That's what repentance is. And I think that when we think about repentance, we think about repenting of actions, things that we did. And so we repent and we say, God, I'm sorry that I did this. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm sorry that I looked at that. I'm not going to look at that anymore. I'm sorry that I drank too much that time. I'm not going to drink too much anymore. I'm sorry that I lost my temper. I'm not going to lose my temper. I'm sorry that I worried too much. I'm not going to worry. We tend to repent of actions, things that we did. I'm sorry I did blank. I'm not going to do blank anymore. But I would actually put in front of you maybe a new way of thinking or a different way of thinking about repentance that was put in front of me a couple of weeks ago and I'm just so grateful for it. I think that we should repent of what we allow in our hearts, not necessarily how we behave. We should repent of what we allow to take up residence in our heart. The attitudes and the motives behind the behaviors are far more important to repent of than the actions themselves. Can I actually, can I tell you something? I mean, I know I can. That's a stupid question. I'm sorry. I'm gonna. I actually had an interesting conversation recently with a couple of my friends where we were asking, is God really even that interested in our behavior? Does he even really care about our behavior? And I increasingly think the answer is no. I increasingly think it's just he doesn't really care about our behavior, not because it doesn't matter to him what we do, but because out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. Because our behaviors will follow our attitudes and motives. So he's far more worried about cleansing our heart than making our behavior good. And I think that the way it works to repent of attitudes over actions can go something like this. You could pick a sin. I'm not sure what it is you struggle with. I can make some educated guesses, but I know for sure what I struggle with. And I shared one of those with you last week. I got angry. I lost my temper. I slapped the center console. I raised my voice at my daughter. She cried, and it was a moment that I wish I could take back. And I do that. I have a shorter fuse than I'd like. I can get angry or frustrated quickly. Hopefully, I deflate quickly too. But that's one of the things that I deal with. And so last week we talked about how when we lose our temper and we lash out, we looked at the story of Peter in the garden and they were coming to arrest Jesus and he swung his sword and he cut off the ear of one of the guards arresting Jesus. And Jesus picks up the ear and he puts it back on the guard and he mouthing us and he says, go on your way, Peter, stop doing that. And so we kind of talked about this language of sometimes we will lash out and we'll cut off people's ears. And so if anger is a thing that you deal with, like me, then I don't think it's really helpful to say, God, I'm sorry I cut off that person's ear. I'm never going to cut off ears again. I'm going to take a deep breath and count to 10. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm sorry I lost my temper at my daughter. I'm sorry I lost my temper at my coworker, at my wife, at my husband, whatever it is. I'm going to count to 10. I'm not going to do that anymore. I don't think that's super helpful. I think what's more helpful is to stop and think, well, why was I angry? Just in general, I'm going to step over here. This is not biblical, okay? I hesitated to even say anything about this, but when you ask why you're angry, you'll almost always find that you're not entitled to it. And most anger comes from unmet expectations. And some of those aren't very fair. Okay. When I reflect on when I get frustrated, what I find at the root of that, 98% of the time, is just unmitigated selfishness. It's just a bratty nine-year-old kid who doesn't want to do what they don't want to do. I don't want to get up and take the dog outside. I wish we didn't have one. I want to sit on the couch. So I'm angry. A lot of my anger has to do with me just wanting to sit on the couch. I don't want to get up and go do that. I don't want to clean. I don't want to go follow after a two-year-old. I want to sit right here, and I want to watch the Masters. That's what I want to do. I don't want to be going this slowly on 540. I'd like to be going quicker than you, and you're prohibiting that. I don't want to be in this conversation. I don't want to hear that story. I don't want to have to go there. I don't want to have to go stand in a field with sunshine and get my picture taken with my children who will not smile. I don't want to do that. My anger, my frustration in my life almost always is stirred up by poor Nate being made to do something he doesn't want to do. What a baby. You are too. So for me, rather than praying, God, help me not lash out at people anymore. A much better prayer is, God, help me to become a more selfless, patient person so that I might better love those around me. Help me to become, I've identified that I get frustrated because I'm selfish, so help me to be a more patient and selfless person. And here's the best part, so that I might better love those around me. Because those sins and attitudes and actions that exist in your life, who do they hurt the most? They hurt the people you love the most. And when we carry those through our lives, we actually love them more poorly than we could and should. So a helpful thing when we repent is to think, how was this attitude? How was my selfishness? How was my greed? How was my anxiety? How was my stubbornness? How was my pride? How was that hurting the people around me? And then you apologize to them and you repent of that too. But we don't repent by praying that God would take away actions. We pray that he would come into our hearts and take away attitudes. And I think that this mindset of repentance sheds light on what David writes in Psalm 139. It's a passage that's vexed me for most of my life. I'll tell you why in a second. But in Psalm 139, David says, search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. I usually joke when I mention that verse that that's a prayer I've never had to pray. I've never had to be like, dear God, can you just show me where I'm sinning? Because I don't see it. And I would like you to help me. I've never had to pray that prayer. I know where I'm messing up. I see it. And if I don't always see it, I have a wife. She sees it. She'll tell me. She's not here today. I can say that. Lily's sick. She's got a cold. But the more I think about it, I don't really think that's what David meant either. I don't think maybe he did, but David was so very human. David was a terrible father. He had so many cracks in the facade. It's difficult for me to believe that David had a season of his life when he was writing Psalm 139 where he thought, you know what? I know I used to mess up, but I've been pretty much nailing it lately. God, I think I'm perfect for the last month, so if you could just tell me if I'm not, that'd be great. I don't think that's what David was doing. I think what David was doing is what we're talking about this morning. Jesus, can you come in my heart and search out those motives? Can you come in my heart and start flipping over tables? Some of us are people pleasers. We bend over backwards to make everyone around us happy. And sometimes that makes us be people that we're not. It's an interesting prayer to say, God, can you show me why I do that? Can you help me understand why I want those people to like me so much? Can you help me understand why I'm getting so angry? Can you help me understand why I seem to be so motivated by success? Can you help me understand why I don't like many of the people in my life right now and I know it's my problem? We start praying motive prayers, idols in heart prayers, sullying the temple prayers. And true repentance, the kind that we need, really, we can't do that on our own. If we're not repenting of actions, and we can't just white-knuckle our way back to holiness, but we have to repent of attitudes and things that we've allowed to take root in our heart and sully the sacred, then we need the kind of cleansing that only Jesus can offer. We need to pray the prayer of David in light of the story of Jesus cleansing the temple and say, God, wherever the tables have set up in my life, wherever there's money changing going on, wherever I'm taking advantage of people, whatever is in here that's sullying the sacred space of the temple of your Holy Spirit, God, would you show it to me, and would you give me the courage to pray that it leaves? And I'll help you with this too. Maybe you know exactly what it is. I don't need God to divine my attitude. I don't need to go to counseling to help suss this out. I don't need to talk to advisors who love me and can tell me what my attitudes have been. I know exactly what I need to do. But I don't want to do it. I like that sin. I like that sullying. And I'm not going to listen to one sermon by some guy and then walk away from that. Okay? I've been there too. So let me just encourage you to pray this. God, I don't want this to not be in my life. Would you help me to want to want it to go away? I'm not ready to let go of this sin, but God, will you move me closer to wanting to get rid of it, to hating it like you do? Because right now I don't. Right now I like it. Will you just help move the needle a little bit today and tomorrow and next week on not being happy with this in my life? But for a lot of us, the prayer today is a prayer of repentance, which should be a regular thing in our Christian life. God, show me what attitudes and idols I have in my heart and what things I have motivating the sin in my life that you might turn them over and force them out just like you did in the temple that day. Because if Jesus has a zeal for not sullying the sacred in that temple, then I can promise you that he is zealous about your temples too. Let's invite him in and let's be places that are places, let's be people that are places of worship every day as we learn what it is to repent of the things that are sullying the sacred in our lives. Let's pray. Father, God, we love you so much. We thank you that your kindness leads us to repentance, that it's not something you force onto us, that you don't run into our lives with a whip and start turning over tables and just cause all kinds of pain and hurt and dishevelment, but that your kindness, your love, your invitation, your grace, your patience and forbearance with us leads us to repentance. That the more we learn about you, the closer we want to be to you. And the less patience we have for the things that prevent us from worshiping you. God, I pray that we in this room would repent of sins big and little. That we would repent of attitudes egregious and simply unholy and unhelpful. And that God, even today, all of us in this room would take a step towards being cleansed. We pray the prayer of David and invite you into our hearts to clean things out so that we might be instruments of worship for you. We pray these things in your son's name. Amen.
Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. A lot of you have chosen this morning to make this a part of your Sunday. So many so that Keith had to sit in the front with the good Christians. So this is going to be a great Sunday. I almost said the good Christians except for Alan's up here too. So you guys can be buddies together. Sorry, you're both excellent placeholders for that joke that I wanted to make. And if you're, listen, if you're new here and you're trying to, you're kicking the tires, what just happened in worship is just such a great microcosm for, I think, who we are as a church, where we are worshiping earnestly and singing and getting after it. And it was a sweet moment. And then we start the next song and there's a little whoopsie and then we all laugh at ourselves and we just get right back into it. And I just thought it was great. I actually got on my knees and prayed and I pray before every sermon. And I'm just, I was just praying that I'm just so grateful that I get to be the pastor, one of the pastors of a church that I just love so much. I just, I just, I love this place. I love you guys. I consider it a huge privilege. I've told a couple different people this week. It just came up in conversation that I just don't think there could be an easier church to pastor. You guys are so great to me and my family. But anyways, we're in part two of our series called Big Emotions. I think, is that right, Carly? Is that what we're calling this one? Okay. I never know. I always tell them what it's about and then they just name it and I go, okay. And then I get it wrong. But part two of big emotions. And basically what we're doing is looking at stories, instances in the Bible where the people in the Bible had these big emotions, sometimes a blow up or a blow out. We're looking at that. We're examining it. We're relating to it because we're emotional creatures. We have blow ups and blow outs sometimes. And we're trying to figure out what we can learn from it. And so this week, we're looking at a pretty unique instance in the life of Christ. When I was growing up, I don't have many memories at all that don't involve church. I don't have a memory that goes beyond my church involvement. And so growing up, I heard all the stories. And before I heard the stories about Jesus, I heard about him that he was perfect, right? That he lived a sinless life. That he never did anything wrong, which is remarkable. And so I knew that as a little kid, but there's two stories that I encountered when I was young that gave me pause. Like, wait, are you sure? Because that really feels like sin. That really feels like that guy did stuff he wasn't supposed to do. The first one is in, I think it's Luke, when it records that Mary and Joseph took the family to Jerusalem for Passover, as was their habit. And they left, and Jesus chose to stay behind as a 12-year-old to talk to the rabbis and the scribes and the Pharisees. And I always looked at that story and thought, like, listen, I'm not trying to accuse our Savior of anything. I just know that when I was a kid, pretty high up on the obedience priority list was when your parents say it's time to go, you go. Like you don't just be like, yeah, I opted in to just remain at Six Flags after you guys left. Like I'm just going to, or I guess here it's Bush Gardens. I'm just going to, I'm just going to stay there. You guys go ahead. I'll figure it out. Like that seemed like pretty egregious sin for a 12 year old to just say, you know what you guys go on. I'm going to talk to my new pals in the temple, but obviously he didn't sin. I still not quite sure how that worked out for 12 year old Jesus, just to start making decisions about where he's going to stay. But I don't think that it blemishes his perfect record. The other story that made me go, gosh, that really seems like there's a different way to do that, is the story of Jesus cleansing the temple. And I honestly think that even now, and we'll get into the story in a second, so if you don't know what that is yet, don't worry, we'll get there. But I think even now, if you made us contemporaries of Jesus, and we saw him do what he's about to do when he cleanses the temple, we probably would have pulled him aside and been like, hey, buddy, I don't know that that was the best way to handle that. There's probably a different way to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish. It's pretty untoward to do that. We would probably tell him that he was wrong and that he owed some people some apologies. But we're going to get into the story and actually see why his anger and zeal in this story is pretty warranted. So this story is in all four of the Gospels. I think John gives the best account of it, and we find it in John 2, verses 13 through 16. So I'll read it to you, and then we can talk about what's going on. The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and the money changers sitting there. And then in verse 17, he says, So to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Wherever you were, you needed to get you and your family to Jerusalem to observe the holidays. Passover was one of those times where it's written in God's law and expected as you exercise your faith that you would be obedient and go supposed to go to the temple. And when you got to the temple, you were supposed to offer sacrifices in accordance with just your regular religious maintenance. In Leviticus, we see a ton of laws about what kinds of sacrifices are required for what types of grievances and sins. And so you had to offer those as well as your traditional Passover sacrifices for you and your family. This is all written into the law and required of good religious people. And so good religious people from all over Israel would go to Jerusalem on these high holidays and walk in obedience to those instructions in what we call the Old Testament. They're being obedient and living out their faith well. So if we picture this from the perspective of a family in Nazareth where Jesus was from, to get to Jerusalem, I believe is about 30 miles. Scholars believe that that journey is going to take three to five days depending on who you've got with you. For my family with a seven-year-old and a two-year-old, that's going to take seven days, and I'm going to not have any religion by the time I get to Jerusalem. Or I'll just have some serious sacrificing to do, right? To make things right. So whatever pace you go at, it's a three to five-day journey, a lot of people think. And you get there, you've got to find some place to stay. Maybe you stay in an inn. Maybe, I'm sure they had a commercialization set up and people would take advantage of people needing places to stay. Maybe you had friends or family in Jerusalem and there was one big house that you all got to stay at, but you've got to figure that out. And then you've got to go to the temple, right? But to go into the temple, you had to pay a temple tax. I don't know why you had to pay this temple tax. It feels a little bit like kind of Catholic indulgences, middle ages, like that kind of thing where the leaders of the church are just trying to extract more money from the people who come in. It would be like if I charged you $5 a seat to listen to the sermons and to worship with us. I don't think anything could clear this place out quicker than if I started asking for, that's right, than if I started asking for money to listen to me. But that's what you had to do when you went there. And so these money changers, they had these coins, and this is where the racket comes in. They had these coins that were made in Israel for Hebrews, and they did not bear Caesar's symbol. They had a real issue with coins with Caesar's symbol on them because Caesar claimed to be Lord, and that wasn't good. And so they couldn't accept the Roman currency that was ubiquitous in the country. Far more Roman currency going around than this particular, specifically Israeli currency going around. And so they would ask for you to take your Roman currency and exchange it for that Israeli currency or that Jewish currency. And some people think it's because of the issue with Caesar and other people think it's just that the Jewish coins were minted with more and better silver, and so it was of greater value. But at any rate, you had to take the coins that you had and exchange them. And you know, as well as I do, that the guy who's got the bucket of the Jewish coins at the temple and is exchanging them isn't doing that on good faith. He's making a little off the top because he's got a family to feed too, right? And maybe, maybe the family in Nazareth has its own cash of Jewish coins that are acceptable at the temple, and maybe they don't need that money changer. But my bet is they probably do. And my bet is he's scalping them. He's making some money off of that exchange. And we don't know for sure that the people in the temple who were selling animals and lending money, we don't know for sure that they were price gouging, that they were taking advantage of the populace. But we do know that Jesus said that they had turned his father's house and the other gospel accounts, that they had turned his father's house into a den of thieves or robbers. Which leads me to believe that they were taking advantage of their situation. You're a family from Nazareth. You're traveling three to five days. Who knows how many people are in your caravan. You probably don't want to or have the capacity to bring sheep with you, doves with you for the sacrifice, oxen with you for the sacrifice. You probably don't have that capacity. And even when you get where you're going and you've got to stay at the Hampton Inn, they probably don't allow sheep in there. Maybe you have a house that you can go to and they've got a stable or a barn and you've brought all your sacrificial animals and you're self-sufficient. But I would guess, and research bears this out, that most of the populace did not have that stuff to bring or the capacity to bring it to Jerusalem. So once you get to Jerusalem, to the temple, and you've got to get in the temple with the coin that they accept and you've got to perform the sacrifices that your God demands of you, you have to buy those animals once you get there. Do you see what I'm saying? This is like, this is a North Carolina zoo situation at the junction. This is Disney World. They've got you. You're going to get chicken tenders and you're going to pay $17 and you're going to like it. Nothing you can do about it. And again, we can't say with certainty that they were price gouging, but everything in the text points to the fact that they were. And so Jesus sees this and he's rightly angered by it. Because when you think about it, it's pretty appalling what they're doing. They are leveraging God's laws to line their own pockets. They are commercializing the sacred. And what's more, to me, the high priest is complicit in all of this. Because you don't get to set up shop on the temple grounds. And when we hear this story, please know that when we think about a temple, I think we think about this indoor structure. But at the Temple Mount, there was this outer courtyard that was the size of several football fields, and everyone's allowed in there, Gentiles and Jews alike. You're allowed in there, and that's where all of the tables and the moneylenders are set up. And then you have like this rectangle in the middle, and the rectangle is divided into two squares, and the front square is where Jewish men and women are allowed, and the back square is where Jewish that Jesus goes in and clears out. He goes in there. First of all, he sees what they're doing. And if you read the text, it says he fashioned a whip. He didn't go find one. He sat down and anger wove a whole whip. And then he took it and he started flipping over tables like a madman. And I assume hitting people with the whip. That's one of the scenes in Jesus's life I would have liked to attend. But when you understand what's going on, his anger makes so much sense. And to me, it's so very justifiable. These people are humble people trying to be obedient to their God, trying to do the right thing. And they're going to Jerusalem to take the pilgrimage like good Hebrews should. And listen, we know how faith works. We know how religious cultures work. I think we're kidding ourselves if we think 100% of the Hebrew people are taking a pilgrimage for all three high holidays every year. Some people had opted out. Some people didn't care. Some people couldn't make it. I'm sure a higher percentage of that population went than would go in Christian America in the 80s making some pilgrimage, but not everybody went. So the ones who are going are the faithful ones. They're the committed ones. To them, this faith matters, and they're trying to do the right thing, and they're trying to teach it to their children and their children's children too. And when they get there, they're being taken advantage of. We don't know this for sure, but I'd be willing to proffer a guess that the people exchanging those coins had a higher net value than the people who needed the exchanging done. I bet the people selling oxen had a higher net worth than a majority of the people buying the oxen from them. The rich were likely getting richer while the poor were getting poorer. And the galling thing is it's all in the name of God. They're taking advantage of the sacred to line their own pockets, and it's gross. And Jesus won't have it. He goes in there, flips tables, drives them out, and the disciples are reminded that it was said about him that he would have zeal for his father's house. So there's a lot of things that we can learn from this story as we look at it and we pull it apart and we analyze it. There's a lot of things we can learn from this story. I think one of the things, and I almost preached about it, but I'm just going to set it here and let you guys consider it later in your own time. Maybe you can talk about it in your small groups. But this story pretty heavily indicates that justice matters a lot to Jesus. And fighting against injustice matters a lot to Jesus. I think what galled Jesus was the fact that these people who in good faith were trying to be obedient to their father were being taken advantage of for their very faith. It's remarkably unjust and it ticked them off. But I think more than that, more than that, was what they were turning his father's house into. And what I see glaring like a bullhorn from these passages is that Jesus will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. Our Jesus will not put up with, he will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. I don't know where you draw lines in your life. I don't know what you feel like you can't put up with, what really gets your ire going. I know for me, when I see someone who is, believe it or not, when I see someone who is willfully unkind and hurtful to someone else, I write that person off. I have a really hard time with someone who is willing to be unkind and hurtful to someone else. I just can't tolerate it. I don't know what your thing is. Jesus' thing is, one of them, you will not sully the sacred while I am here. Because the temple, the temple was sacred to the Jew. It was sacred to Jesus. Do you understand that the temple was the place of the presence of God for thousands of years? In that back rectangle where the Holy of Holies sat, in the Holy of Holies behind a veil sat the Ark of the Covenant. And on the Ark of the Covenant, there's two angels, golden angels, and their wings touch in the middle. And where their wings touch is called the mercy seat. And on the mercy seat rests the very presence of God, making that temple and that city and that nation unique in all the world. Do you know that every synagogue built outside of Israel is built to face Jerusalem and that every synagogue in Israel faces Jerusalem. It's all about the Holy of Holies and what's in there and the presence of God being in that place. The temple was a sacred space. A space that when you go into it, it's different than any other experience in your life. A space where you take your children and you teach them the way that you were taught. The space where when you become the matriarch or the patriarch of your family, you sit your grandchildren down and you tell them about the pilgrimages that you used to make. And most importantly, it's a place of worship where we assign worth to God. Not just praise and worship, not singing like what we did a few minutes ago, but worship where you declare with every breath and with every action and with every thought and with every deed that God, you are Lord and I am not. That was a place where you went to lay yourself down prostrate and say, God, you are amazing and to stand in awe of God. The temple was a space for the sacred and they sullied it with their selfishness. And so Jesus said, no, I will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. Now here's why that should matter a lot to you and I, because of what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians chapter 6. In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul tells us this, or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body. The New Testament teaches us that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And I used to hear growing up, I would hear Baptists say that you shouldn't drink because your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and alcohol is not healthy for you. And then you just look at them and be like, do you eat fried chicken? And then that clearly is a misapplication. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Meaning, Paul tells us in other writings, I think it's Ephesians, but I'm not certain on that. But I am certain that what he says is that when you become a Christian, that you receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment on your salvation. And again, to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He came to deliver the world. That he did what he said he did. He died on the cross and he rose again on the third day. And that he is who he says he, that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day and he's going to get us and take us home. To be a Christian is to believe those things. And when we believe those things, the Bible teaches us that God gives us his Holy Spirit in our hearts. And what does that language mean? We don't know. We just kind of feel that language. But he gives us the Holy Spirit in our heart as a seal of the promise that one day he's going to send his son back to take us to him, to take us home. And that because of that, because this is the place where the Holy Spirit dwells, we have now become the temple. Our bodies are the temple. Our bodies are where the presence of God sits in this earthly place. Because when Jesus died on the cross for our sins, many of you know this, the veil that was hung in the Holy of Holies that separated the presence of God from everyone else was torn in two from top to bottom and the presence of God exited that place. And then we learn at the end of the Gospels and at the beginning of Acts that that presence actually returns to us in the form of God's Spirit and that we are the houses of God's Spirit. We are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And what are temples for? Temples are for worship. Temples are sacred. Temples are where we meet with God. And when we talk about temples being places of worship, I am reminded I'm reminded that Paul wrote that we are actually called to be living sacrifices. That going through life as a living sacrifice, Paul calls it, this is our spiritual act of worship, holy and acceptable to God. He tells us as Christians that we are to live our lives as sacrifices. God, we wake up every day, God, what would you have me do today? How would you have me use this instrument for your glory today? And that is our spiritual act of worship. Not praise, but worship. And our spiritual act of worship, if what happens in the temple is every thought, every action, every deed declares implicitly, Lord, you are Lord and I am not, then what he calls us to do, what we are called to do when we understand the theology of the New Testament is to live our lives as the temples of the Holy Spirit, to live our lives as spiritual acts of worship. Meaning, when we go throughout our day, every thought, every word, every action, every deed ought to declare, God, you are God and I am not. Now that is pretty high bar. And I'll be the first to admit to you, I do not think I have yet accumulated a day where every thought, deed, action, emotion, reaction I had that day declared, God, you are God and I am not. But here's what we're not going to do at Grace. We're not going to back off of the high bar that Scripture sets for us to make it more attainable for ourselves so that we become something that we're not supposed to be. We're going to sit in humility and brokenness before the incredibly high bar of Scripture and say, Jesus, I can't. You have to help me. But when we are told that our bodies, the temples of the Holy Spirit, the way to live our lives is living sacrifices. This is our spiritual act of worship within that temple. We are told that every thought and deed and action and word needs to declare that he is Lord and we are not. And that's a very high bar. We are also reminded that Jesus does not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. And Paul has declared us sacred because we are temples. You guys can see where I'm going there. All of you, I'm certain, walked in here this morning with something in your temple that's sullying the sacred. All of us in our lives have trampled on Jesus. All of us in our actions and our thoughts and our deeds and our words have sullied the sacred, have prevented our bodies from being used for worship. And so, to me, the story of Jesus cleansing the temple is in all four Gospels because it is a continuous reminder when we examine it and consider it and reflect on it that we ought to be people of repentance. That we ought to be people who invite Jesus into our life and say, turn over my tables if you need to. Show me where I am sullying the sacred and help me to get rid of those things. I don't need to enumerate the possible sins and the possible attitudes that you walked into this room with. And when I say you, I mean me too. I don't need to list those for you because you already know what they are. Because you have the Holy Spirit and he's getting after you about them right now. So I believe that this story calls us to repentance. Calls us to a moment where we plead with Jesus, would you please clean out this temple? Would you please turn over these tables? And when we talk about repentance, most of us in this room know what repentance is. I've done a sermon or two on it, but just so we're on the same page. Repentance means 180 degree turn. So it's not just confession. Confession is to agree with God about your sin. Yes, I see that. And it definitely was wrong to cuss at that six-year-old in the store. And I'm so sorry. That's wrong. Repentance is to move away from it and never do that again. Okay. So confession is, I'm sorry that I disappointed you in this way. I can see why that was disappointing. I agree, I would be disappointed in me too. But if we just keep doing it, then it doesn't matter. We just stop it, I'm sorry. So repentance is to apologize and then move in the opposite direction, away from sin and back towards the Father. That's what repentance is. And I think that when we think about repentance, we think about repenting of actions, things that we did. And so we repent and we say, God, I'm sorry that I did this. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm sorry that I looked at that. I'm not going to look at that anymore. I'm sorry that I drank too much that time. I'm not going to drink too much anymore. I'm sorry that I lost my temper. I'm not going to lose my temper. I'm sorry that I worried too much. I'm not going to worry. We tend to repent of actions, things that we did. I'm sorry I did blank. I'm not going to do blank anymore. But I would actually put in front of you maybe a new way of thinking or a different way of thinking about repentance that was put in front of me a couple of weeks ago and I'm just so grateful for it. I think that we should repent of what we allow in our hearts, not necessarily how we behave. We should repent of what we allow to take up residence in our heart. The attitudes and the motives behind the behaviors are far more important to repent of than the actions themselves. Can I actually, can I tell you something? I mean, I know I can. That's a stupid question. I'm sorry. I'm gonna. I actually had an interesting conversation recently with a couple of my friends where we were asking, is God really even that interested in our behavior? Does he even really care about our behavior? And I increasingly think the answer is no. I increasingly think it's just he doesn't really care about our behavior, not because it doesn't matter to him what we do, but because out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. Because our behaviors will follow our attitudes and motives. So he's far more worried about cleansing our heart than making our behavior good. And I think that the way it works to repent of attitudes over actions can go something like this. You could pick a sin. I'm not sure what it is you struggle with. I can make some educated guesses, but I know for sure what I struggle with. And I shared one of those with you last week. I got angry. I lost my temper. I slapped the center console. I raised my voice at my daughter. She cried, and it was a moment that I wish I could take back. And I do that. I have a shorter fuse than I'd like. I can get angry or frustrated quickly. Hopefully, I deflate quickly too. But that's one of the things that I deal with. And so last week we talked about how when we lose our temper and we lash out, we looked at the story of Peter in the garden and they were coming to arrest Jesus and he swung his sword and he cut off the ear of one of the guards arresting Jesus. And Jesus picks up the ear and he puts it back on the guard and he mouthing us and he says, go on your way, Peter, stop doing that. And so we kind of talked about this language of sometimes we will lash out and we'll cut off people's ears. And so if anger is a thing that you deal with, like me, then I don't think it's really helpful to say, God, I'm sorry I cut off that person's ear. I'm never going to cut off ears again. I'm going to take a deep breath and count to 10. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm sorry I lost my temper at my daughter. I'm sorry I lost my temper at my coworker, at my wife, at my husband, whatever it is. I'm going to count to 10. I'm not going to do that anymore. I don't think that's super helpful. I think what's more helpful is to stop and think, well, why was I angry? Just in general, I'm going to step over here. This is not biblical, okay? I hesitated to even say anything about this, but when you ask why you're angry, you'll almost always find that you're not entitled to it. And most anger comes from unmet expectations. And some of those aren't very fair. Okay. When I reflect on when I get frustrated, what I find at the root of that, 98% of the time, is just unmitigated selfishness. It's just a bratty nine-year-old kid who doesn't want to do what they don't want to do. I don't want to get up and take the dog outside. I wish we didn't have one. I want to sit on the couch. So I'm angry. A lot of my anger has to do with me just wanting to sit on the couch. I don't want to get up and go do that. I don't want to clean. I don't want to go follow after a two-year-old. I want to sit right here, and I want to watch the Masters. That's what I want to do. I don't want to be going this slowly on 540. I'd like to be going quicker than you, and you're prohibiting that. I don't want to be in this conversation. I don't want to hear that story. I don't want to have to go there. I don't want to have to go stand in a field with sunshine and get my picture taken with my children who will not smile. I don't want to do that. My anger, my frustration in my life almost always is stirred up by poor Nate being made to do something he doesn't want to do. What a baby. You are too. So for me, rather than praying, God, help me not lash out at people anymore. A much better prayer is, God, help me to become a more selfless, patient person so that I might better love those around me. Help me to become, I've identified that I get frustrated because I'm selfish, so help me to be a more patient and selfless person. And here's the best part, so that I might better love those around me. Because those sins and attitudes and actions that exist in your life, who do they hurt the most? They hurt the people you love the most. And when we carry those through our lives, we actually love them more poorly than we could and should. So a helpful thing when we repent is to think, how was this attitude? How was my selfishness? How was my greed? How was my anxiety? How was my stubbornness? How was my pride? How was that hurting the people around me? And then you apologize to them and you repent of that too. But we don't repent by praying that God would take away actions. We pray that he would come into our hearts and take away attitudes. And I think that this mindset of repentance sheds light on what David writes in Psalm 139. It's a passage that's vexed me for most of my life. I'll tell you why in a second. But in Psalm 139, David says, search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. I usually joke when I mention that verse that that's a prayer I've never had to pray. I've never had to be like, dear God, can you just show me where I'm sinning? Because I don't see it. And I would like you to help me. I've never had to pray that prayer. I know where I'm messing up. I see it. And if I don't always see it, I have a wife. She sees it. She'll tell me. She's not here today. I can say that. Lily's sick. She's got a cold. But the more I think about it, I don't really think that's what David meant either. I don't think maybe he did, but David was so very human. David was a terrible father. He had so many cracks in the facade. It's difficult for me to believe that David had a season of his life when he was writing Psalm 139 where he thought, you know what? I know I used to mess up, but I've been pretty much nailing it lately. God, I think I'm perfect for the last month, so if you could just tell me if I'm not, that'd be great. I don't think that's what David was doing. I think what David was doing is what we're talking about this morning. Jesus, can you come in my heart and search out those motives? Can you come in my heart and start flipping over tables? Some of us are people pleasers. We bend over backwards to make everyone around us happy. And sometimes that makes us be people that we're not. It's an interesting prayer to say, God, can you show me why I do that? Can you help me understand why I want those people to like me so much? Can you help me understand why I'm getting so angry? Can you help me understand why I seem to be so motivated by success? Can you help me understand why I don't like many of the people in my life right now and I know it's my problem? We start praying motive prayers, idols in heart prayers, sullying the temple prayers. And true repentance, the kind that we need, really, we can't do that on our own. If we're not repenting of actions, and we can't just white-knuckle our way back to holiness, but we have to repent of attitudes and things that we've allowed to take root in our heart and sully the sacred, then we need the kind of cleansing that only Jesus can offer. We need to pray the prayer of David in light of the story of Jesus cleansing the temple and say, God, wherever the tables have set up in my life, wherever there's money changing going on, wherever I'm taking advantage of people, whatever is in here that's sullying the sacred space of the temple of your Holy Spirit, God, would you show it to me, and would you give me the courage to pray that it leaves? And I'll help you with this too. Maybe you know exactly what it is. I don't need God to divine my attitude. I don't need to go to counseling to help suss this out. I don't need to talk to advisors who love me and can tell me what my attitudes have been. I know exactly what I need to do. But I don't want to do it. I like that sin. I like that sullying. And I'm not going to listen to one sermon by some guy and then walk away from that. Okay? I've been there too. So let me just encourage you to pray this. God, I don't want this to not be in my life. Would you help me to want to want it to go away? I'm not ready to let go of this sin, but God, will you move me closer to wanting to get rid of it, to hating it like you do? Because right now I don't. Right now I like it. Will you just help move the needle a little bit today and tomorrow and next week on not being happy with this in my life? But for a lot of us, the prayer today is a prayer of repentance, which should be a regular thing in our Christian life. God, show me what attitudes and idols I have in my heart and what things I have motivating the sin in my life that you might turn them over and force them out just like you did in the temple that day. Because if Jesus has a zeal for not sullying the sacred in that temple, then I can promise you that he is zealous about your temples too. Let's invite him in and let's be places that are places, let's be people that are places of worship every day as we learn what it is to repent of the things that are sullying the sacred in our lives. Let's pray. Father, God, we love you so much. We thank you that your kindness leads us to repentance, that it's not something you force onto us, that you don't run into our lives with a whip and start turning over tables and just cause all kinds of pain and hurt and dishevelment, but that your kindness, your love, your invitation, your grace, your patience and forbearance with us leads us to repentance. That the more we learn about you, the closer we want to be to you. And the less patience we have for the things that prevent us from worshiping you. God, I pray that we in this room would repent of sins big and little. That we would repent of attitudes egregious and simply unholy and unhelpful. And that God, even today, all of us in this room would take a step towards being cleansed. We pray the prayer of David and invite you into our hearts to clean things out so that we might be instruments of worship for you. We pray these things in your son's name. Amen.
Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. A lot of you have chosen this morning to make this a part of your Sunday. So many so that Keith had to sit in the front with the good Christians. So this is going to be a great Sunday. I almost said the good Christians except for Alan's up here too. So you guys can be buddies together. Sorry, you're both excellent placeholders for that joke that I wanted to make. And if you're, listen, if you're new here and you're trying to, you're kicking the tires, what just happened in worship is just such a great microcosm for, I think, who we are as a church, where we are worshiping earnestly and singing and getting after it. And it was a sweet moment. And then we start the next song and there's a little whoopsie and then we all laugh at ourselves and we just get right back into it. And I just thought it was great. I actually got on my knees and prayed and I pray before every sermon. And I'm just, I was just praying that I'm just so grateful that I get to be the pastor, one of the pastors of a church that I just love so much. I just, I just, I love this place. I love you guys. I consider it a huge privilege. I've told a couple different people this week. It just came up in conversation that I just don't think there could be an easier church to pastor. You guys are so great to me and my family. But anyways, we're in part two of our series called Big Emotions. I think, is that right, Carly? Is that what we're calling this one? Okay. I never know. I always tell them what it's about and then they just name it and I go, okay. And then I get it wrong. But part two of big emotions. And basically what we're doing is looking at stories, instances in the Bible where the people in the Bible had these big emotions, sometimes a blow up or a blow out. We're looking at that. We're examining it. We're relating to it because we're emotional creatures. We have blow ups and blow outs sometimes. And we're trying to figure out what we can learn from it. And so this week, we're looking at a pretty unique instance in the life of Christ. When I was growing up, I don't have many memories at all that don't involve church. I don't have a memory that goes beyond my church involvement. And so growing up, I heard all the stories. And before I heard the stories about Jesus, I heard about him that he was perfect, right? That he lived a sinless life. That he never did anything wrong, which is remarkable. And so I knew that as a little kid, but there's two stories that I encountered when I was young that gave me pause. Like, wait, are you sure? Because that really feels like sin. That really feels like that guy did stuff he wasn't supposed to do. The first one is in, I think it's Luke, when it records that Mary and Joseph took the family to Jerusalem for Passover, as was their habit. And they left, and Jesus chose to stay behind as a 12-year-old to talk to the rabbis and the scribes and the Pharisees. And I always looked at that story and thought, like, listen, I'm not trying to accuse our Savior of anything. I just know that when I was a kid, pretty high up on the obedience priority list was when your parents say it's time to go, you go. Like you don't just be like, yeah, I opted in to just remain at Six Flags after you guys left. Like I'm just going to, or I guess here it's Bush Gardens. I'm just going to, I'm just going to stay there. You guys go ahead. I'll figure it out. Like that seemed like pretty egregious sin for a 12 year old to just say, you know what you guys go on. I'm going to talk to my new pals in the temple, but obviously he didn't sin. I still not quite sure how that worked out for 12 year old Jesus, just to start making decisions about where he's going to stay. But I don't think that it blemishes his perfect record. The other story that made me go, gosh, that really seems like there's a different way to do that, is the story of Jesus cleansing the temple. And I honestly think that even now, and we'll get into the story in a second, so if you don't know what that is yet, don't worry, we'll get there. But I think even now, if you made us contemporaries of Jesus, and we saw him do what he's about to do when he cleanses the temple, we probably would have pulled him aside and been like, hey, buddy, I don't know that that was the best way to handle that. There's probably a different way to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish. It's pretty untoward to do that. We would probably tell him that he was wrong and that he owed some people some apologies. But we're going to get into the story and actually see why his anger and zeal in this story is pretty warranted. So this story is in all four of the Gospels. I think John gives the best account of it, and we find it in John 2, verses 13 through 16. So I'll read it to you, and then we can talk about what's going on. The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and the money changers sitting there. And then in verse 17, he says, So to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Wherever you were, you needed to get you and your family to Jerusalem to observe the holidays. Passover was one of those times where it's written in God's law and expected as you exercise your faith that you would be obedient and go supposed to go to the temple. And when you got to the temple, you were supposed to offer sacrifices in accordance with just your regular religious maintenance. In Leviticus, we see a ton of laws about what kinds of sacrifices are required for what types of grievances and sins. And so you had to offer those as well as your traditional Passover sacrifices for you and your family. This is all written into the law and required of good religious people. And so good religious people from all over Israel would go to Jerusalem on these high holidays and walk in obedience to those instructions in what we call the Old Testament. They're being obedient and living out their faith well. So if we picture this from the perspective of a family in Nazareth where Jesus was from, to get to Jerusalem, I believe is about 30 miles. Scholars believe that that journey is going to take three to five days depending on who you've got with you. For my family with a seven-year-old and a two-year-old, that's going to take seven days, and I'm going to not have any religion by the time I get to Jerusalem. Or I'll just have some serious sacrificing to do, right? To make things right. So whatever pace you go at, it's a three to five-day journey, a lot of people think. And you get there, you've got to find some place to stay. Maybe you stay in an inn. Maybe, I'm sure they had a commercialization set up and people would take advantage of people needing places to stay. Maybe you had friends or family in Jerusalem and there was one big house that you all got to stay at, but you've got to figure that out. And then you've got to go to the temple, right? But to go into the temple, you had to pay a temple tax. I don't know why you had to pay this temple tax. It feels a little bit like kind of Catholic indulgences, middle ages, like that kind of thing where the leaders of the church are just trying to extract more money from the people who come in. It would be like if I charged you $5 a seat to listen to the sermons and to worship with us. I don't think anything could clear this place out quicker than if I started asking for, that's right, than if I started asking for money to listen to me. But that's what you had to do when you went there. And so these money changers, they had these coins, and this is where the racket comes in. They had these coins that were made in Israel for Hebrews, and they did not bear Caesar's symbol. They had a real issue with coins with Caesar's symbol on them because Caesar claimed to be Lord, and that wasn't good. And so they couldn't accept the Roman currency that was ubiquitous in the country. Far more Roman currency going around than this particular, specifically Israeli currency going around. And so they would ask for you to take your Roman currency and exchange it for that Israeli currency or that Jewish currency. And some people think it's because of the issue with Caesar and other people think it's just that the Jewish coins were minted with more and better silver, and so it was of greater value. But at any rate, you had to take the coins that you had and exchange them. And you know, as well as I do, that the guy who's got the bucket of the Jewish coins at the temple and is exchanging them isn't doing that on good faith. He's making a little off the top because he's got a family to feed too, right? And maybe, maybe the family in Nazareth has its own cash of Jewish coins that are acceptable at the temple, and maybe they don't need that money changer. But my bet is they probably do. And my bet is he's scalping them. He's making some money off of that exchange. And we don't know for sure that the people in the temple who were selling animals and lending money, we don't know for sure that they were price gouging, that they were taking advantage of the populace. But we do know that Jesus said that they had turned his father's house and the other gospel accounts, that they had turned his father's house into a den of thieves or robbers. Which leads me to believe that they were taking advantage of their situation. You're a family from Nazareth. You're traveling three to five days. Who knows how many people are in your caravan. You probably don't want to or have the capacity to bring sheep with you, doves with you for the sacrifice, oxen with you for the sacrifice. You probably don't have that capacity. And even when you get where you're going and you've got to stay at the Hampton Inn, they probably don't allow sheep in there. Maybe you have a house that you can go to and they've got a stable or a barn and you've brought all your sacrificial animals and you're self-sufficient. But I would guess, and research bears this out, that most of the populace did not have that stuff to bring or the capacity to bring it to Jerusalem. So once you get to Jerusalem, to the temple, and you've got to get in the temple with the coin that they accept and you've got to perform the sacrifices that your God demands of you, you have to buy those animals once you get there. Do you see what I'm saying? This is like, this is a North Carolina zoo situation at the junction. This is Disney World. They've got you. You're going to get chicken tenders and you're going to pay $17 and you're going to like it. Nothing you can do about it. And again, we can't say with certainty that they were price gouging, but everything in the text points to the fact that they were. And so Jesus sees this and he's rightly angered by it. Because when you think about it, it's pretty appalling what they're doing. They are leveraging God's laws to line their own pockets. They are commercializing the sacred. And what's more, to me, the high priest is complicit in all of this. Because you don't get to set up shop on the temple grounds. And when we hear this story, please know that when we think about a temple, I think we think about this indoor structure. But at the Temple Mount, there was this outer courtyard that was the size of several football fields, and everyone's allowed in there, Gentiles and Jews alike. You're allowed in there, and that's where all of the tables and the moneylenders are set up. And then you have like this rectangle in the middle, and the rectangle is divided into two squares, and the front square is where Jewish men and women are allowed, and the back square is where Jewish that Jesus goes in and clears out. He goes in there. First of all, he sees what they're doing. And if you read the text, it says he fashioned a whip. He didn't go find one. He sat down and anger wove a whole whip. And then he took it and he started flipping over tables like a madman. And I assume hitting people with the whip. That's one of the scenes in Jesus's life I would have liked to attend. But when you understand what's going on, his anger makes so much sense. And to me, it's so very justifiable. These people are humble people trying to be obedient to their God, trying to do the right thing. And they're going to Jerusalem to take the pilgrimage like good Hebrews should. And listen, we know how faith works. We know how religious cultures work. I think we're kidding ourselves if we think 100% of the Hebrew people are taking a pilgrimage for all three high holidays every year. Some people had opted out. Some people didn't care. Some people couldn't make it. I'm sure a higher percentage of that population went than would go in Christian America in the 80s making some pilgrimage, but not everybody went. So the ones who are going are the faithful ones. They're the committed ones. To them, this faith matters, and they're trying to do the right thing, and they're trying to teach it to their children and their children's children too. And when they get there, they're being taken advantage of. We don't know this for sure, but I'd be willing to proffer a guess that the people exchanging those coins had a higher net value than the people who needed the exchanging done. I bet the people selling oxen had a higher net worth than a majority of the people buying the oxen from them. The rich were likely getting richer while the poor were getting poorer. And the galling thing is it's all in the name of God. They're taking advantage of the sacred to line their own pockets, and it's gross. And Jesus won't have it. He goes in there, flips tables, drives them out, and the disciples are reminded that it was said about him that he would have zeal for his father's house. So there's a lot of things that we can learn from this story as we look at it and we pull it apart and we analyze it. There's a lot of things we can learn from this story. I think one of the things, and I almost preached about it, but I'm just going to set it here and let you guys consider it later in your own time. Maybe you can talk about it in your small groups. But this story pretty heavily indicates that justice matters a lot to Jesus. And fighting against injustice matters a lot to Jesus. I think what galled Jesus was the fact that these people who in good faith were trying to be obedient to their father were being taken advantage of for their very faith. It's remarkably unjust and it ticked them off. But I think more than that, more than that, was what they were turning his father's house into. And what I see glaring like a bullhorn from these passages is that Jesus will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. Our Jesus will not put up with, he will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. I don't know where you draw lines in your life. I don't know what you feel like you can't put up with, what really gets your ire going. I know for me, when I see someone who is, believe it or not, when I see someone who is willfully unkind and hurtful to someone else, I write that person off. I have a really hard time with someone who is willing to be unkind and hurtful to someone else. I just can't tolerate it. I don't know what your thing is. Jesus' thing is, one of them, you will not sully the sacred while I am here. Because the temple, the temple was sacred to the Jew. It was sacred to Jesus. Do you understand that the temple was the place of the presence of God for thousands of years? In that back rectangle where the Holy of Holies sat, in the Holy of Holies behind a veil sat the Ark of the Covenant. And on the Ark of the Covenant, there's two angels, golden angels, and their wings touch in the middle. And where their wings touch is called the mercy seat. And on the mercy seat rests the very presence of God, making that temple and that city and that nation unique in all the world. Do you know that every synagogue built outside of Israel is built to face Jerusalem and that every synagogue in Israel faces Jerusalem. It's all about the Holy of Holies and what's in there and the presence of God being in that place. The temple was a sacred space. A space that when you go into it, it's different than any other experience in your life. A space where you take your children and you teach them the way that you were taught. The space where when you become the matriarch or the patriarch of your family, you sit your grandchildren down and you tell them about the pilgrimages that you used to make. And most importantly, it's a place of worship where we assign worth to God. Not just praise and worship, not singing like what we did a few minutes ago, but worship where you declare with every breath and with every action and with every thought and with every deed that God, you are Lord and I am not. That was a place where you went to lay yourself down prostrate and say, God, you are amazing and to stand in awe of God. The temple was a space for the sacred and they sullied it with their selfishness. And so Jesus said, no, I will not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. Now here's why that should matter a lot to you and I, because of what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians chapter 6. In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul tells us this, or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body. The New Testament teaches us that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And I used to hear growing up, I would hear Baptists say that you shouldn't drink because your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and alcohol is not healthy for you. And then you just look at them and be like, do you eat fried chicken? And then that clearly is a misapplication. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Meaning, Paul tells us in other writings, I think it's Ephesians, but I'm not certain on that. But I am certain that what he says is that when you become a Christian, that you receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment on your salvation. And again, to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He came to deliver the world. That he did what he said he did. He died on the cross and he rose again on the third day. And that he is who he says he, that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day and he's going to get us and take us home. To be a Christian is to believe those things. And when we believe those things, the Bible teaches us that God gives us his Holy Spirit in our hearts. And what does that language mean? We don't know. We just kind of feel that language. But he gives us the Holy Spirit in our heart as a seal of the promise that one day he's going to send his son back to take us to him, to take us home. And that because of that, because this is the place where the Holy Spirit dwells, we have now become the temple. Our bodies are the temple. Our bodies are where the presence of God sits in this earthly place. Because when Jesus died on the cross for our sins, many of you know this, the veil that was hung in the Holy of Holies that separated the presence of God from everyone else was torn in two from top to bottom and the presence of God exited that place. And then we learn at the end of the Gospels and at the beginning of Acts that that presence actually returns to us in the form of God's Spirit and that we are the houses of God's Spirit. We are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And what are temples for? Temples are for worship. Temples are sacred. Temples are where we meet with God. And when we talk about temples being places of worship, I am reminded I'm reminded that Paul wrote that we are actually called to be living sacrifices. That going through life as a living sacrifice, Paul calls it, this is our spiritual act of worship, holy and acceptable to God. He tells us as Christians that we are to live our lives as sacrifices. God, we wake up every day, God, what would you have me do today? How would you have me use this instrument for your glory today? And that is our spiritual act of worship. Not praise, but worship. And our spiritual act of worship, if what happens in the temple is every thought, every action, every deed declares implicitly, Lord, you are Lord and I am not, then what he calls us to do, what we are called to do when we understand the theology of the New Testament is to live our lives as the temples of the Holy Spirit, to live our lives as spiritual acts of worship. Meaning, when we go throughout our day, every thought, every word, every action, every deed ought to declare, God, you are God and I am not. Now that is pretty high bar. And I'll be the first to admit to you, I do not think I have yet accumulated a day where every thought, deed, action, emotion, reaction I had that day declared, God, you are God and I am not. But here's what we're not going to do at Grace. We're not going to back off of the high bar that Scripture sets for us to make it more attainable for ourselves so that we become something that we're not supposed to be. We're going to sit in humility and brokenness before the incredibly high bar of Scripture and say, Jesus, I can't. You have to help me. But when we are told that our bodies, the temples of the Holy Spirit, the way to live our lives is living sacrifices. This is our spiritual act of worship within that temple. We are told that every thought and deed and action and word needs to declare that he is Lord and we are not. And that's a very high bar. We are also reminded that Jesus does not tolerate the sullying of the sacred. And Paul has declared us sacred because we are temples. You guys can see where I'm going there. All of you, I'm certain, walked in here this morning with something in your temple that's sullying the sacred. All of us in our lives have trampled on Jesus. All of us in our actions and our thoughts and our deeds and our words have sullied the sacred, have prevented our bodies from being used for worship. And so, to me, the story of Jesus cleansing the temple is in all four Gospels because it is a continuous reminder when we examine it and consider it and reflect on it that we ought to be people of repentance. That we ought to be people who invite Jesus into our life and say, turn over my tables if you need to. Show me where I am sullying the sacred and help me to get rid of those things. I don't need to enumerate the possible sins and the possible attitudes that you walked into this room with. And when I say you, I mean me too. I don't need to list those for you because you already know what they are. Because you have the Holy Spirit and he's getting after you about them right now. So I believe that this story calls us to repentance. Calls us to a moment where we plead with Jesus, would you please clean out this temple? Would you please turn over these tables? And when we talk about repentance, most of us in this room know what repentance is. I've done a sermon or two on it, but just so we're on the same page. Repentance means 180 degree turn. So it's not just confession. Confession is to agree with God about your sin. Yes, I see that. And it definitely was wrong to cuss at that six-year-old in the store. And I'm so sorry. That's wrong. Repentance is to move away from it and never do that again. Okay. So confession is, I'm sorry that I disappointed you in this way. I can see why that was disappointing. I agree, I would be disappointed in me too. But if we just keep doing it, then it doesn't matter. We just stop it, I'm sorry. So repentance is to apologize and then move in the opposite direction, away from sin and back towards the Father. That's what repentance is. And I think that when we think about repentance, we think about repenting of actions, things that we did. And so we repent and we say, God, I'm sorry that I did this. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm sorry that I looked at that. I'm not going to look at that anymore. I'm sorry that I drank too much that time. I'm not going to drink too much anymore. I'm sorry that I lost my temper. I'm not going to lose my temper. I'm sorry that I worried too much. I'm not going to worry. We tend to repent of actions, things that we did. I'm sorry I did blank. I'm not going to do blank anymore. But I would actually put in front of you maybe a new way of thinking or a different way of thinking about repentance that was put in front of me a couple of weeks ago and I'm just so grateful for it. I think that we should repent of what we allow in our hearts, not necessarily how we behave. We should repent of what we allow to take up residence in our heart. The attitudes and the motives behind the behaviors are far more important to repent of than the actions themselves. Can I actually, can I tell you something? I mean, I know I can. That's a stupid question. I'm sorry. I'm gonna. I actually had an interesting conversation recently with a couple of my friends where we were asking, is God really even that interested in our behavior? Does he even really care about our behavior? And I increasingly think the answer is no. I increasingly think it's just he doesn't really care about our behavior, not because it doesn't matter to him what we do, but because out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. Because our behaviors will follow our attitudes and motives. So he's far more worried about cleansing our heart than making our behavior good. And I think that the way it works to repent of attitudes over actions can go something like this. You could pick a sin. I'm not sure what it is you struggle with. I can make some educated guesses, but I know for sure what I struggle with. And I shared one of those with you last week. I got angry. I lost my temper. I slapped the center console. I raised my voice at my daughter. She cried, and it was a moment that I wish I could take back. And I do that. I have a shorter fuse than I'd like. I can get angry or frustrated quickly. Hopefully, I deflate quickly too. But that's one of the things that I deal with. And so last week we talked about how when we lose our temper and we lash out, we looked at the story of Peter in the garden and they were coming to arrest Jesus and he swung his sword and he cut off the ear of one of the guards arresting Jesus. And Jesus picks up the ear and he puts it back on the guard and he mouthing us and he says, go on your way, Peter, stop doing that. And so we kind of talked about this language of sometimes we will lash out and we'll cut off people's ears. And so if anger is a thing that you deal with, like me, then I don't think it's really helpful to say, God, I'm sorry I cut off that person's ear. I'm never going to cut off ears again. I'm going to take a deep breath and count to 10. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm sorry I lost my temper at my daughter. I'm sorry I lost my temper at my coworker, at my wife, at my husband, whatever it is. I'm going to count to 10. I'm not going to do that anymore. I don't think that's super helpful. I think what's more helpful is to stop and think, well, why was I angry? Just in general, I'm going to step over here. This is not biblical, okay? I hesitated to even say anything about this, but when you ask why you're angry, you'll almost always find that you're not entitled to it. And most anger comes from unmet expectations. And some of those aren't very fair. Okay. When I reflect on when I get frustrated, what I find at the root of that, 98% of the time, is just unmitigated selfishness. It's just a bratty nine-year-old kid who doesn't want to do what they don't want to do. I don't want to get up and take the dog outside. I wish we didn't have one. I want to sit on the couch. So I'm angry. A lot of my anger has to do with me just wanting to sit on the couch. I don't want to get up and go do that. I don't want to clean. I don't want to go follow after a two-year-old. I want to sit right here, and I want to watch the Masters. That's what I want to do. I don't want to be going this slowly on 540. I'd like to be going quicker than you, and you're prohibiting that. I don't want to be in this conversation. I don't want to hear that story. I don't want to have to go there. I don't want to have to go stand in a field with sunshine and get my picture taken with my children who will not smile. I don't want to do that. My anger, my frustration in my life almost always is stirred up by poor Nate being made to do something he doesn't want to do. What a baby. You are too. So for me, rather than praying, God, help me not lash out at people anymore. A much better prayer is, God, help me to become a more selfless, patient person so that I might better love those around me. Help me to become, I've identified that I get frustrated because I'm selfish, so help me to be a more patient and selfless person. And here's the best part, so that I might better love those around me. Because those sins and attitudes and actions that exist in your life, who do they hurt the most? They hurt the people you love the most. And when we carry those through our lives, we actually love them more poorly than we could and should. So a helpful thing when we repent is to think, how was this attitude? How was my selfishness? How was my greed? How was my anxiety? How was my stubbornness? How was my pride? How was that hurting the people around me? And then you apologize to them and you repent of that too. But we don't repent by praying that God would take away actions. We pray that he would come into our hearts and take away attitudes. And I think that this mindset of repentance sheds light on what David writes in Psalm 139. It's a passage that's vexed me for most of my life. I'll tell you why in a second. But in Psalm 139, David says, search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. I usually joke when I mention that verse that that's a prayer I've never had to pray. I've never had to be like, dear God, can you just show me where I'm sinning? Because I don't see it. And I would like you to help me. I've never had to pray that prayer. I know where I'm messing up. I see it. And if I don't always see it, I have a wife. She sees it. She'll tell me. She's not here today. I can say that. Lily's sick. She's got a cold. But the more I think about it, I don't really think that's what David meant either. I don't think maybe he did, but David was so very human. David was a terrible father. He had so many cracks in the facade. It's difficult for me to believe that David had a season of his life when he was writing Psalm 139 where he thought, you know what? I know I used to mess up, but I've been pretty much nailing it lately. God, I think I'm perfect for the last month, so if you could just tell me if I'm not, that'd be great. I don't think that's what David was doing. I think what David was doing is what we're talking about this morning. Jesus, can you come in my heart and search out those motives? Can you come in my heart and start flipping over tables? Some of us are people pleasers. We bend over backwards to make everyone around us happy. And sometimes that makes us be people that we're not. It's an interesting prayer to say, God, can you show me why I do that? Can you help me understand why I want those people to like me so much? Can you help me understand why I'm getting so angry? Can you help me understand why I seem to be so motivated by success? Can you help me understand why I don't like many of the people in my life right now and I know it's my problem? We start praying motive prayers, idols in heart prayers, sullying the temple prayers. And true repentance, the kind that we need, really, we can't do that on our own. If we're not repenting of actions, and we can't just white-knuckle our way back to holiness, but we have to repent of attitudes and things that we've allowed to take root in our heart and sully the sacred, then we need the kind of cleansing that only Jesus can offer. We need to pray the prayer of David in light of the story of Jesus cleansing the temple and say, God, wherever the tables have set up in my life, wherever there's money changing going on, wherever I'm taking advantage of people, whatever is in here that's sullying the sacred space of the temple of your Holy Spirit, God, would you show it to me, and would you give me the courage to pray that it leaves? And I'll help you with this too. Maybe you know exactly what it is. I don't need God to divine my attitude. I don't need to go to counseling to help suss this out. I don't need to talk to advisors who love me and can tell me what my attitudes have been. I know exactly what I need to do. But I don't want to do it. I like that sin. I like that sullying. And I'm not going to listen to one sermon by some guy and then walk away from that. Okay? I've been there too. So let me just encourage you to pray this. God, I don't want this to not be in my life. Would you help me to want to want it to go away? I'm not ready to let go of this sin, but God, will you move me closer to wanting to get rid of it, to hating it like you do? Because right now I don't. Right now I like it. Will you just help move the needle a little bit today and tomorrow and next week on not being happy with this in my life? But for a lot of us, the prayer today is a prayer of repentance, which should be a regular thing in our Christian life. God, show me what attitudes and idols I have in my heart and what things I have motivating the sin in my life that you might turn them over and force them out just like you did in the temple that day. Because if Jesus has a zeal for not sullying the sacred in that temple, then I can promise you that he is zealous about your temples too. Let's invite him in and let's be places that are places, let's be people that are places of worship every day as we learn what it is to repent of the things that are sullying the sacred in our lives. Let's pray. Father, God, we love you so much. We thank you that your kindness leads us to repentance, that it's not something you force onto us, that you don't run into our lives with a whip and start turning over tables and just cause all kinds of pain and hurt and dishevelment, but that your kindness, your love, your invitation, your grace, your patience and forbearance with us leads us to repentance. That the more we learn about you, the closer we want to be to you. And the less patience we have for the things that prevent us from worshiping you. God, I pray that we in this room would repent of sins big and little. That we would repent of attitudes egregious and simply unholy and unhelpful. And that God, even today, all of us in this room would take a step towards being cleansed. We pray the prayer of David and invite you into our hearts to clean things out so that we might be instruments of worship for you. We pray these things in your son's name. Amen.
