Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This is a really great crew to have on a June Sunday. So thanks for being here, everybody. Real quick before I get launched into the sermon, wanted to bring your attention that we every year take a adult trip to Mexico. There's a barbecue after the service. That's for the student trip going to Mexico in July. And so we hope that you'll stick around and be a part of that and have lunch with us and hang out. It's kind of what we do. But there's also an adult trip coming up in October. And the deadline to sign up for that is in the middle of this month. If that's something that you've never experienced before, you've never done with Grace, it's a really great trip. We have a really fantastic relationship with the folks at Faith Ministry down in Reynosa, Mexico. And it's a lot of fun. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. You can go online if you have any questions. There's different links all over our website, but I did want to mention that before I just got started. This is the last part of our series called The Forgotten God, where we're focusing on the Holy Spirit. Often we talk a lot about God the Father, talk a lot about God the Son, but we kind of forget or are fearful of or have some questions or some doubts surrounding the Holy Spirit. And so sometimes it's easier just to kind of back away from the Holy Spirit or to just kind of live in mystery about the Holy Spirit. But for the last three weeks, and now this is the fourth week, we've really been focusing on who He is and what He does. And so the first week we looked at this idea that Jesus said it was actually better for us to have the Spirit than it was to have Him right next to us, which is an audacious claim. But we determined that that was true because the Spirit continues His ministry through us, which is the spiritual gifts that we looked at in the second week, and then also to us, which was the roles of the Spirit that we looked at last week as the comforter or the helper. But this whole time, I've been setting up this sermon on the last Sunday of the series to answer this question that I think, to be a Christian who's paying attention very much at all is to have this question. If you're a believer and you've learned about the Spirit and you've seen the different things that the Spirit does and you hear what Scripture has to say about the Holy Spirit, we can't help but wonder at times how come my experiences with the Spirit don't line up all the time with what I've learned to be true of the Spirit? How do I sync up what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I think very often there is a disconnect there. And I think that it's important to be willing to tackle that question because to be a believer of any, I think, I don't want to offend anybody, but to be a believer of any intellectual integrity is to have doubts, is to encounter things that you don't understand and that you can't make sense of. And I think there's really three ways to respond to that. When we encounter something that doesn't make sense, when someone close to us gets sick or hurt and we don't understand how God can let that happen, a doubt creeps in. When there's someone who's incredibly sinful and incredibly successful and we're trying to do the things the right way and we can't seem to catch up to them, sometimes we kind of go, God, that doesn't seem fair, and doubt creeps in. When we see big tragedy on a grand scale happen, we kind of look at that and we go, God, how could you let that happen? And doubt creeps in. Or we read passages in scripture that don't seem to sync up with what we've experienced in life, and doubt creeps in. We go, gosh, how can this be true in the Bible and this be true in my life? And so I think to be a Christian is to doubt. And really, we can do three things with those doubts. A lot of us just stuff them, right? We just ignore them. Dudes are good at this. That doesn't seem to make sense. Don't worry about that. Just go sing the songs. Okay, that's fine. And then we go do that. We just kind of stuff them. Or we seek out answers, or we let them drive us away. And so what we're going to talk about this morning, which is really best framed up, the more I thought about the question, how come what I've learned of the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit, really the better way to ask this question is, how come I'm not experiencing the Spirit the way I think I should? And so that's what's at the top of your bulletin there, is five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. And I put this one last because I said it up front, I don't know what I'm going to say here. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then. And if this is a question that you've seriously asked yourself, I'll just tell you up front, this is not gonna be wholly satisfying to you. You're not gonna leave today going, oh man, that makes tons of sense. Well, I don't have that question anymore. But hopefully it'll push you in the right direction. It also occurred to me this week that even though I'm not 100% certain how to answer this question, and even though I know I'm not going to do it to the satisfaction of some of you to whom it is a burning question, that it's to our detriment if I'm not willing to engage areas of text and scripture and spirituality that I'm not 100% sure on. Because if I only ever get up here and tell you things I'm certain about, then I develop within us collectively a very shallow faith. So we've got to be willing to talk about things on Sundays that might not make sense to us yet. So this morning, I feel like it's less of a sermon, me preaching to you, and I really approached it as if you and I could sit down across the table and talk about this. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, and you're like me, and you read these passages, because I read passages and I still have doubts. This question still forms in my mind. How come I don't experience that? I read 1 Corinthians 12 that we talked about two weeks ago with the gifts of the Spirit. And Ephesians 4 and the chapter in Romans, I think it's 6 or 7 that talks about the gifts of the Spirit. And I begin to wonder, how come I don't experience those? I don't feel like I have any supernatural gifts. If I were supernaturally good at teaching, I would hope I would be better than this. I don't feel like I have supernatural gifts. I'll be honest, I've not seen tongues. I've not seen authentic prophecy. And so I read about those in the New Testament and in the back of my mind, I kind of go, how come I don't see that? How come I don't see healings and casting out demons? How come that's not a part of my life? How come I don't see that? Or I'll read in Romans 8, where it says that if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body, we will live. And I've been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I prayed to accept Christ when I was four and a half years old, and then God matured my faith over time. I've wanted desperately to put to death deeds of the body, those sinful proclivities that exist in all of us, that if we're being honest, we wish we could get rid of. I've wanted desperately to get rid of those. I've prayed that God would take them from me. I've appealed, based on Romans 8, to the Spirit, help me put these to death. And they're not put to death. They still exist in me as much as I want them to not be a part of me. So then I see that in Scripture, and I'm like, well, how come that's not happening in my life? Or, my goodness, you read the book of Acts. Pentecost, the disciples are sitting in this room, and the Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues, and then they go out and they preach a sermon in their own language, and the people there from all over the world hear it in their own language. And again, we see these healings and these casting out of demons, and we see people who, there's a guy named Simon the Magician who tries to pay the disciples for the Spirit because he wants to be able to do the cool tricks that they do. How come I don't experience that? And if it's a question that I have, and it's a question that one of my elders had as I was talking about the series with him, it's got to be a question that most Christians have. And so if we could sit across a table from each other and you would just say, Nate, what's your take on this? How come those things seem incompatible? How come I'm not experiencing the Spirit in that way? After some thought, I think these are the five things that I would suggest to you. I wish that we could have a discourse about this. And if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, then you can just kind of pretend that you're at the coffee shop or the pub at the next table over and you're eavesdropping on us and kind of getting a little insight into this faith of weirdos, right? But this is kind of what I would offer you if we could have a conversation, five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. The first three are really taken from the book that I encourage you guys to read as we went through the series, Forgotten God by Francis Chan. So for some of you, this may sound familiar. And the first one is the most accusatory. I don't mean it to be. I worked really hard to find reasons that weren't just because you stink at being a Christian. I don't want that to be the answer. But if we're being honest, that's part of it sometimes. And that's really the first one. I don't mean to say it like that, but that's the implication. And so as we think about why don't we experience the Spirit the way that it seems that people did in Scripture, the way that we feel like we should, what's going on here, I think maybe one of the first things I would suggest, and it's not the only reason, and it may not be applicable to you at all, but I think it's applicable to some of us, is maybe we don't actually want the Spirit. Maybe if we're just being gut-level honest, we don't actually want the Spirit in our life. We want the good things. We want the peace. We want the happiness. We want the guidance. We want to know what to do in this business decision. We want to know which city that we should move to. But we don't really want the submission that comes with it. We don't really want all of the spirit. I'd like you here, but not over here. God, I'll do anything you want me to do except that. God, I'll move anywhere. Our family will move anywhere you want us to move besides over there. God, I'll give you anything I have besides my finances. Sometimes we feel like the rich young ruler, right? The one that went up to Jesus and he said, Jesus, I'm ready to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, great, sell everything that you have and follow me. And then we go, I'm not ready to follow that. If we're being honest, often we parcel out our submission. Don't we? Often we parcel out our submission. We divide it up and we say, God, you can have these portions of my life, but you can't have these. I'll trust you here, but I won't trust you with my kids. I'm going to keep them pretty close to the vest. I'll trust you. I'll do anything you want me to do within these parameters, God. And so what that proves, and again, I don't know some of you well enough at all to put this in your face and say, you don't experience the Spirit because it's your fault. But I think it's a truth of Scripture and a truth of life that we have to examine and at least do an inventory on in ourselves. Is this true of me? James tells us that it's possible. James was the brother of Jesus, which is pretty much like the only evidence you need that Jesus was the actual Son of God, because what would it take for you to convince your brother that you were divine? So he convinced his brother that he was divine, and then James wrote a book of the Bible. And in that book, he said, you don't have the things you pray for because you ask for the wrong reasons. You ask for your own selfish reasons. And again, that's awful accusatory. But is it possible that we want the Holy Spirit and His guidance in our life to bring about the things that we want and maybe not to bring about the things that He wants? And so when we think about why don't we experience the Spirit, I think a very viable reason is for some of us, if we're being honest, maybe we don't really want him. Now, that's not the only reason. I said that was the most accusatory. There's others. I think for some of us, maybe we've simply eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. Maybe we've orchestrated our life and organized our life in such a way that the Spirit's just not very essential. That we can kind of do it on autopilot. We can just kind of get by week after week, day after day. And we really don't need the Spirit very much. And so we just kind of cruise through life. A couple years ago, I was reading a book. I think it's by Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not certain. And it was in this book, he was describing a study on the brain activity of mice, because I'm a nerd and I read books like that. And so they were studying the brain activity of mice. And what they did is they put them at the beginning of a maze and they would open the door for the maze. And the end of the maze was cheese. And the mouse would have to like find its way to the end of the maze to get to the cheese. And the first time this mouse did this maze, the brainwaves were going nuts. They were just all over the place. He was redlining for the entire maze experience until he found the cheese, and he calmed down because he's trying to figure out where to go, right? And what they found is the more he did the maze, the less he thought about it, the less his mind was engaged. Until the very last time this mouse did this maze, the gate opened and there was this flurry of activity while he tried to figure out where he was. But as soon as he realized it was the same old maze that he's always done, there was virtually no brain activity until the very end when he had finished the cheese and then began to look for the next thing to do. And what it showed them is your brain can learn these behaviors and learn these functions so that it essentially goes on autopilot when you're doing something. It just kind of learns and files away these behaviors so that it doesn't have to critically think about it again and can kind of rest and relax and just go through the day. And that's what was happening to this mouse. He was just going on autopilot, going through the maze. I think that's a pretty good picture of how a lot of us can set up our lives. We get up in the morning. We do our routine. We take a shower. We go to work. We do the thing. We interact with the people. We talk to the clients. We send the emails. We come home, we say hey to the husband or the wife, we deal with the kids or we call the kids or we text the kids and we watch the show and we do the thing and then we go to bed and we get up and we do it the next day. And maybe one of the nights we go to small group and we pray for somebody and then we go to church maybe and we interact and we do the church deal and we'd go home. But for a lot of us, I think it's possible that we kind of have orchestrated life in such a way that we can do it on autopilot. And if we're being honest, our life really doesn't require the Spirit very much. And I think the encouragement there is that we need to be taking steps in our life that require the Spirit's aid, that if we are not reliant on the Spirit to help us and intercede with this, that we are going to be in serious trouble. I think about the life of grace. When I got here two years ago, let me tell you something, we needed the Spirit, man. For those of you who don't know the story, it was not going well. And we didn't really know. I got here in April. We didn't really know if we were going to make it out of May. We were just kind of figuring this thing out together. We needed the Holy Spirit to intervene, and He did in incredible ways. Two years later, we're a lot healthier. And I'll be honest with you. If I stop praying every week, if the elders stop praying, if staff stop praying, if our partners stop praying, I'm pretty sure we could keep going through the motions of church for several weeks without anybody feeling any big difference. And I think our life is like that too. Think about when you rely on God the most. The times in your life when you're most drawn to him, when you're most consistent in prayer, when you feel closest to the Father, when you feel a need for his presence more than any other. Aren't there times when you're anxious and when you're hurting? Aren't there times when you're not sure if something's going to work out? Isn't that when you run to the Father? Aren't there times when you're hurting and you feel like you need Him? Isn't that when you run to the Father? I know having a three-year-old daughter, I can't get her to slow down for anything. Lily is running around 90 to nothing all the time. The only times I can get her to settle down and sit on my lap and just be still with me is when she's hurting, when she's crying about something, when she's upset about something, when she's hurting herself. And sometimes we treat God the same way. And I think that it's possible that we just live these comfortable lives that don't require the Spirit to help us very much. And I would simply ask you, if the Holy Spirit's the comforter, how can He comfort us if we're never uncomfortable? How can the Holy Spirit comfort if we're not uncomfortable? If we're not taking any steps of faith in our life that require the Holy Spirit to show up, we're going to look real silly. If we're not branching out and having the conversation or starting the ministry or praying the prayers or dreaming the big dreams, how can we rely on the Holy Spirit if we only ever stay comfortable? So for some of us, I think we've eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. For others, maybe this one is more applicable to you, I don't know. For others, I think it's possible that our lives are just too noisy. Maybe our lives are too noisy. Maybe we just have so much going on in our life that we just don't have any time to hear the Spirit anyways. I was reading an article the other night in bed, and it was about the sounds that we hear. I think it was in the New Yorker or something. And it was just talking about now with technology and everything going on that we are constantly assaulted by and bombarded with sounds. And like humans aren't really used to this. We just hear so much noise all the time. We hear so much noise from all the different things going on and all the technology that we have in our life that we now have more technology to add on top of that technology so we don't hear the other technology spilling into our lives. It's crazy. We've got noise canceling headphones. On my phone, I have a white noise app. And when I'm on a plane and I'm tired of listening to other people talk, I put that in and I crank up the white noise and I can't hear a thing. I also do that in my office. Sometimes in meetings. I'm just playing around. We have these, we have devices to drown out the noise that the world is already making. We are just constantly assaulted with and bombarded by noise and other things. And our lives are so busy. We don't have any dead time. We don't have any downtime. And then even when we do, even when we find ourselves with 10 minutes with nothing to do, pull out the phone. Now I've got something to do. We are a perpetually distracted people. We constantly have something to divert our attention, to take it, to look at. And we very rarely sit alone with our thoughts. And so I would ask you this, and this may be my favorite question from today. This may be my favorite question from the series. It's one that I've been thinking about this week. If the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to you, when would you hear him? If the Holy Spirit were trying to speak to you, when would you hear him? What time have you carved out of your day where that can happen? I've said since I started here that the most important thing any of us can do in our life, the most important habit that we can develop is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And if you've done that with any consistency, then you would say that's a time when the Holy Spirit could speak to me. And we know, and we're going to talk about this, I think, next week, we all have various degrees of success with that. But for most of us, for most of our Christian life, and I'm not saying this as an accusatory thing. I'm just being honest with you because I've been around church for a long time, and a lot of y'all are my friends, and we kind of know each other's patterns. For a lot of us, the only time we get where the Holy Spirit can actually speak to us is on a Sunday morning in church. And if I pitched a dud that week, oh well, we'll have to wait until the next time we come. And sometimes we don't even come every week. I mean, grace, God bless us, we have kind of an every other week congregation. And I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad about that. That's why we have podcasts and stuff online. And you'll never hear me beating the drum of you've got to come every week. That's what good Christians do. But if that's the only time we have in our life to hear from God, when do we expect to do it? And if we're walking through our lives and we're upset because we don't feel like our experience of the Spirit really syncs up with what Scripture teaches, we don't really feel His guidance and direction in our life, I would just ask you, if He were trying to speak to you, when would you hear Him? Have you carved out time in your life regularly to be quiet and to focus on God? Which leads me to the next thing that I might suggest if our experience with the Spirit isn't what we think it should be. Maybe we're simply looking for the wrong things. Maybe we're looking for the wrong things. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is in Kings. I think it's 1 Kings chapter 19. Elijah has just finished this showdown with the prophets of Baal. If you don't know what that is, for the purpose of this morning, don't worry about that. He did a really cool thing and he beat 450 other prophets. He's a stud, but he was exhausted. And so God tells him, go to a cave and wait for me. I'm going to talk to you there. So Elijah goes to this cave and he's waiting for God. And it says that there was a mighty wind that passed over the front of the cave. This big noise, a lot of things rattling. I imagine rocks falling and trees falling over. But then it says God wasn't in the wind. And then there was an earthquake. The ground shook, more rocks fell, more trees fell. I'm sure it was very noisy, incredibly loud. And if you're Elijah, you're going, oh, certainly this is God. But God wasn't in the earthquake. And then it says there was a fire. A big conflagration outside the cave. He could kind of watch it be torched and sweep by. And if you're Elijah, you're thinking this has to be God. But it says that God wasn't in the fire. And then there was a gentle whisper. And we find that God was in the whisper. So often in life, God is in the whispers, speaking to us softly, speaking to us through things that almost seem coincidental. Can I just tell you that the Holy Spirit's not a drama queen? He's not a Kardashian. He's not looking for the best way to be seen by anybody. He's quiet and he's subtle and he works in the background. And he's typically pretty good with not bringing a lot of attention to himself. He's like the wind. We don't know where he's coming and where he's going. And so sometimes I think that we're simply looking for the wrong things and if we would pay attention a little bit better, if we would listen for the whispers, we would see all the places in our life where the Holy Spirit is actually interjecting and ministering to us as we speak. The easiest example of this is your salvation. If you're here this morning and you call yourself a believer, that's the Holy Spirit acting in your life. That's you literally experiencing the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2 tells us that we can't understand spiritual things without the Spirit. Romans teaches us that the Spirit actually ignites our desire for salvation, that we walk around before we know Jesus as spiritually blind people, and we cannot open our own eyes, and the Spirit actually opens our eyes and activates our faith. So if you're here today and you feel like you have a faith and you believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit gave you that faith and opened your eyes to have that faith. That's the Spirit. And so it's not totally fair to say, gosh, I'm not sure if I've experienced the Spirit. If you know Jesus, you've experienced the Spirit. We say that the Spirit guides and directs. But I think sometimes we fail to pay attention to the ways that he does that. That time that you went to church, and maybe you hadn't been in a while, but the sermon was exactly what you needed. I'm not talking about this morning. I'm talking about other mornings. The sermon was exactly what you needed. That's the Spirit. That time you got that phone call from a friend totally randomly who just said, hey, you're on my mind. I just wanted to give you a call, see how you were doing. That's the Spirit. That time that you emailed somebody or you called somebody or you texted somebody and you said, hey, just thinking about you, I hope you're doing good. And they get back to you and they say, oh my goodness, I was just thinking of you. I needed to hear this so much. That's the Spirit. Can I just tell you anecdotally that question of if you're going to hear the Spirit, like when are you going to hear him? He's trying to speak to you. When's he going to talk to you? Like when have you made time? When I'm making time in my life to hear the Spirit, when I'm really consistent in my time in the mornings, in my quiet times, without fail, He puts people on my heart to just stop and jot down and make a note about and send them an email or a text later that day. Without fail, He does that. And without fail, they're appreciative of getting that. Those things in your life that seem like coincidences, that perfect neighbor that you have that just suits you, that is just so nice that we ended up in this community, that perfect job that you have where you're around people that, man, it really makes sense. Maybe the job's not perfect, but you know that God's using you in the lives of these people. That great relationship that you're in, those are all works and moves of the Spirit. I think about myself here at Grace and my relationship with this church. Jen and I looked for a church for a year. We started looking in February of 2016. And that entire year, my prayer was, Father, prepare me for a place and prepare a place for us. Prepare us for a place and prepare a place for us. And we just waited. And when I got to grace, it was the Holy Spirit answered that prayer. We were ready to go. One of the things I hate doing is being patient. I don't like taking my time and making slow decisions and getting everybody on board and kind of just talking to everybody. Comfortable with this as we move forward. Everybody good. Like, I don't like doing that stuff. I just like, let's go. Let's go. And when I got to Grace, guess what we needed to do? There was no time to sit around and be like, is everybody comfortable right now? We just had to go. It was great. And when people now, my friends that I knew before Grace, when they check on me, hey man, how's Raleigh? How's it going? How you like in the church? I get to tell them, dude, I love it. I love these people. There's about two of y'all I wouldn't want to go to lunch with. The rest of you, man, I love so much. I love grace. I've never been more myself in ministry than I am here. You guys afford me with your gracious attitudes. I'm permitted to be the same person here that I am at dinner that I am on my couch. I couldn't be more comfortable. And it's not lost on me that that's the Holy Spirit preparing us and knitting us together. Now, I'm not trying to paint the picture that I'm some like God-sent pastor that's going to like carry us into the sunset. But for now, what I'm saying is it's a good marriage. And I see the Holy Spirit moving in that. You have your stories too. And I think sometimes we dismiss what the Holy Spirit does as coincidence, but if we're paying attention, what we'll realize is that was the Holy Spirit moving and directing in my life. So sometimes we simply need to open our eyes and notice what the Spirit is doing. Now, if you're here and this is a burning question for you and you're not yet satisfied, I only have one thing left for you. And you're not going to like it. But it's true. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Both wonder just a little bit longer. How is this going to make sense? How has this come together? God, I don't understand it yet. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the answers I've gotten. And maybe for you, you're just going to have to wonder just a little bit longer how it all makes sense. But I also mean wonder in the sense of wondering at the awe and the grandeur of God. And maybe you're here and you're like, man, listen, I'm telling you, I've done all that stuff. I want the Holy Spirit in my life. I want all of his leadership. I'm not trying to parcel out my obedience. I desperately want the Spirit. I'm listening for the Spirit. I have made time for the Spirit. I am noticing the little things that the Spirit does, and I'm telling you, I want more of the Spirit, and I don't understand why I don't have it. Well, then you're in good company. Because David, one of the most influential believers that's ever lived, one of the greatest lives that's ever been lived, left us his spiritual diary. And in the 13th chapter of that diary, in Psalm 13, he says, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? How long will you forget me? At different places he says it is so groans for the Father. We can find a lot of those psalms where David is going, how come I don't feel you? And all David was left to do was wonder just a little longer when God was going to arrive. And Jesus actually describes this to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. He tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind and those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind. We don't know where they're coming from or when they're going or what they're going to do. We can't understand or harness. The Spirit is something that we cannot grasp. And I think sometimes with our Western minds, we try to wrap our mind around the Spirit and who He is and systematize Him. And I've done these things, so I should be experiencing these things. And what Scripture teaches us is He's wilder than that. He's bigger than that. He's more wondrous than that. And so sometimes we have to be content to wonder for just a little longer. To that end, I've been reading a book by a girl named Rachel Held Evans called Searching for Sundays. And there's parts of it that, gosh, I just really love. And she wrote a chapter in it about the Holy Spirit where she describes him based on the different descriptors that we find in the Bible. He's fire and he's breath and he's wind and he's a label, he's a seal for us. And she describes how the Spirit is like wind and it's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard and so I thought that I would finish today by sharing this with you. She writes this. It travels to every corner of a cornerless world and amplifies the atmosphere. It smells like honeysuckle, curry, smoke, sea. It feels like a kiss, a breath, a burn, a sting. It can whisper or whistle or roar, bend and break and inflate. It can be harnessed but never stopped or contained, its effects observed while its essence remains unseen. It says, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. We are born into a windy world where the Spirit is steady as a breeze and as strong as a hurricane. There is no city, no village, no wilderness where you cannot find it. So pay attention. And as we finish our series on the Spirit, I think that would probably be my final admonishment to you. It's better that we have the Spirit than if Jesus himself would have stayed here with us. The Spirit gives us gifts to do ministry through us. And if we don't feel those gifts, we should just love on people until they affirm them in us. The Spirit is moving in His roles to comfort us and to help us and to guide us. And if we don't see that, we're not experiencing that, maybe there's some inventory that we need to do. Maybe we need to pray that our eyes will be opened a little bit. Maybe we need to make space in our life for the Spirit. But I hope that what we'll do as we go from this space is that we'll know, and we go from this series, that we'll know that the Holy Spirit is real, that he is active, that he is moving like the wind, and that he is carrying us with him, and that even if we don't feel him, maybe as we leave here, all of us collectively can pay a little bit more attention to the Spirit and invite him more and more into our lives. And maybe we can wonder just a little bit longer and be satisfied in that wondering. Let's pray. Father, thank You for this morning. Thank You for Your Spirit. Thank You for the parts of Him that we can understand. Thank You for the parts of him that we can't. God, I pray that we would pay attention to where you're working in our lives. That we would lean into you. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would feel invited in. I pray they would know that they are welcome, that you're not waiting for them to get anything together, that you're not waiting for them to somehow deserve you, that you're not waiting for them to get all the other things out of their life that they think need to be out of their life, but that you're just simply waiting and inviting. For those of us who are believers who feel uninvited because of what we've done or who we are or what we've let crowd into our lives, God, let us just come to you as our Father and feel the love that you lavish on us. Help us to pay attention to your Spirit, to notice Him when the wind is blowing, and to be led by Him and submitted to Him more and more. It's in your Son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This is a really great crew to have on a June Sunday. So thanks for being here, everybody. Real quick before I get launched into the sermon, wanted to bring your attention that we every year take a adult trip to Mexico. There's a barbecue after the service. That's for the student trip going to Mexico in July. And so we hope that you'll stick around and be a part of that and have lunch with us and hang out. It's kind of what we do. But there's also an adult trip coming up in October. And the deadline to sign up for that is in the middle of this month. If that's something that you've never experienced before, you've never done with Grace, it's a really great trip. We have a really fantastic relationship with the folks at Faith Ministry down in Reynosa, Mexico. And it's a lot of fun. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. You can go online if you have any questions. There's different links all over our website, but I did want to mention that before I just got started. This is the last part of our series called The Forgotten God, where we're focusing on the Holy Spirit. Often we talk a lot about God the Father, talk a lot about God the Son, but we kind of forget or are fearful of or have some questions or some doubts surrounding the Holy Spirit. And so sometimes it's easier just to kind of back away from the Holy Spirit or to just kind of live in mystery about the Holy Spirit. But for the last three weeks, and now this is the fourth week, we've really been focusing on who He is and what He does. And so the first week we looked at this idea that Jesus said it was actually better for us to have the Spirit than it was to have Him right next to us, which is an audacious claim. But we determined that that was true because the Spirit continues His ministry through us, which is the spiritual gifts that we looked at in the second week, and then also to us, which was the roles of the Spirit that we looked at last week as the comforter or the helper. But this whole time, I've been setting up this sermon on the last Sunday of the series to answer this question that I think, to be a Christian who's paying attention very much at all is to have this question. If you're a believer and you've learned about the Spirit and you've seen the different things that the Spirit does and you hear what Scripture has to say about the Holy Spirit, we can't help but wonder at times how come my experiences with the Spirit don't line up all the time with what I've learned to be true of the Spirit? How do I sync up what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I think very often there is a disconnect there. And I think that it's important to be willing to tackle that question because to be a believer of any, I think, I don't want to offend anybody, but to be a believer of any intellectual integrity is to have doubts, is to encounter things that you don't understand and that you can't make sense of. And I think there's really three ways to respond to that. When we encounter something that doesn't make sense, when someone close to us gets sick or hurt and we don't understand how God can let that happen, a doubt creeps in. When there's someone who's incredibly sinful and incredibly successful and we're trying to do the things the right way and we can't seem to catch up to them, sometimes we kind of go, God, that doesn't seem fair, and doubt creeps in. When we see big tragedy on a grand scale happen, we kind of look at that and we go, God, how could you let that happen? And doubt creeps in. Or we read passages in scripture that don't seem to sync up with what we've experienced in life, and doubt creeps in. We go, gosh, how can this be true in the Bible and this be true in my life? And so I think to be a Christian is to doubt. And really, we can do three things with those doubts. A lot of us just stuff them, right? We just ignore them. Dudes are good at this. That doesn't seem to make sense. Don't worry about that. Just go sing the songs. Okay, that's fine. And then we go do that. We just kind of stuff them. Or we seek out answers, or we let them drive us away. And so what we're going to talk about this morning, which is really best framed up, the more I thought about the question, how come what I've learned of the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit, really the better way to ask this question is, how come I'm not experiencing the Spirit the way I think I should? And so that's what's at the top of your bulletin there, is five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. And I put this one last because I said it up front, I don't know what I'm going to say here. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then. And if this is a question that you've seriously asked yourself, I'll just tell you up front, this is not gonna be wholly satisfying to you. You're not gonna leave today going, oh man, that makes tons of sense. Well, I don't have that question anymore. But hopefully it'll push you in the right direction. It also occurred to me this week that even though I'm not 100% certain how to answer this question, and even though I know I'm not going to do it to the satisfaction of some of you to whom it is a burning question, that it's to our detriment if I'm not willing to engage areas of text and scripture and spirituality that I'm not 100% sure on. Because if I only ever get up here and tell you things I'm certain about, then I develop within us collectively a very shallow faith. So we've got to be willing to talk about things on Sundays that might not make sense to us yet. So this morning, I feel like it's less of a sermon, me preaching to you, and I really approached it as if you and I could sit down across the table and talk about this. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, and you're like me, and you read these passages, because I read passages and I still have doubts. This question still forms in my mind. How come I don't experience that? I read 1 Corinthians 12 that we talked about two weeks ago with the gifts of the Spirit. And Ephesians 4 and the chapter in Romans, I think it's 6 or 7 that talks about the gifts of the Spirit. And I begin to wonder, how come I don't experience those? I don't feel like I have any supernatural gifts. If I were supernaturally good at teaching, I would hope I would be better than this. I don't feel like I have supernatural gifts. I'll be honest, I've not seen tongues. I've not seen authentic prophecy. And so I read about those in the New Testament and in the back of my mind, I kind of go, how come I don't see that? How come I don't see healings and casting out demons? How come that's not a part of my life? How come I don't see that? Or I'll read in Romans 8, where it says that if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body, we will live. And I've been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I prayed to accept Christ when I was four and a half years old, and then God matured my faith over time. I've wanted desperately to put to death deeds of the body, those sinful proclivities that exist in all of us, that if we're being honest, we wish we could get rid of. I've wanted desperately to get rid of those. I've prayed that God would take them from me. I've appealed, based on Romans 8, to the Spirit, help me put these to death. And they're not put to death. They still exist in me as much as I want them to not be a part of me. So then I see that in Scripture, and I'm like, well, how come that's not happening in my life? Or, my goodness, you read the book of Acts. Pentecost, the disciples are sitting in this room, and the Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues, and then they go out and they preach a sermon in their own language, and the people there from all over the world hear it in their own language. And again, we see these healings and these casting out of demons, and we see people who, there's a guy named Simon the Magician who tries to pay the disciples for the Spirit because he wants to be able to do the cool tricks that they do. How come I don't experience that? And if it's a question that I have, and it's a question that one of my elders had as I was talking about the series with him, it's got to be a question that most Christians have. And so if we could sit across a table from each other and you would just say, Nate, what's your take on this? How come those things seem incompatible? How come I'm not experiencing the Spirit in that way? After some thought, I think these are the five things that I would suggest to you. I wish that we could have a discourse about this. And if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, then you can just kind of pretend that you're at the coffee shop or the pub at the next table over and you're eavesdropping on us and kind of getting a little insight into this faith of weirdos, right? But this is kind of what I would offer you if we could have a conversation, five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. The first three are really taken from the book that I encourage you guys to read as we went through the series, Forgotten God by Francis Chan. So for some of you, this may sound familiar. And the first one is the most accusatory. I don't mean it to be. I worked really hard to find reasons that weren't just because you stink at being a Christian. I don't want that to be the answer. But if we're being honest, that's part of it sometimes. And that's really the first one. I don't mean to say it like that, but that's the implication. And so as we think about why don't we experience the Spirit the way that it seems that people did in Scripture, the way that we feel like we should, what's going on here, I think maybe one of the first things I would suggest, and it's not the only reason, and it may not be applicable to you at all, but I think it's applicable to some of us, is maybe we don't actually want the Spirit. Maybe if we're just being gut-level honest, we don't actually want the Spirit in our life. We want the good things. We want the peace. We want the happiness. We want the guidance. We want to know what to do in this business decision. We want to know which city that we should move to. But we don't really want the submission that comes with it. We don't really want all of the spirit. I'd like you here, but not over here. God, I'll do anything you want me to do except that. God, I'll move anywhere. Our family will move anywhere you want us to move besides over there. God, I'll give you anything I have besides my finances. Sometimes we feel like the rich young ruler, right? The one that went up to Jesus and he said, Jesus, I'm ready to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, great, sell everything that you have and follow me. And then we go, I'm not ready to follow that. If we're being honest, often we parcel out our submission. Don't we? Often we parcel out our submission. We divide it up and we say, God, you can have these portions of my life, but you can't have these. I'll trust you here, but I won't trust you with my kids. I'm going to keep them pretty close to the vest. I'll trust you. I'll do anything you want me to do within these parameters, God. And so what that proves, and again, I don't know some of you well enough at all to put this in your face and say, you don't experience the Spirit because it's your fault. But I think it's a truth of Scripture and a truth of life that we have to examine and at least do an inventory on in ourselves. Is this true of me? James tells us that it's possible. James was the brother of Jesus, which is pretty much like the only evidence you need that Jesus was the actual Son of God, because what would it take for you to convince your brother that you were divine? So he convinced his brother that he was divine, and then James wrote a book of the Bible. And in that book, he said, you don't have the things you pray for because you ask for the wrong reasons. You ask for your own selfish reasons. And again, that's awful accusatory. But is it possible that we want the Holy Spirit and His guidance in our life to bring about the things that we want and maybe not to bring about the things that He wants? And so when we think about why don't we experience the Spirit, I think a very viable reason is for some of us, if we're being honest, maybe we don't really want him. Now, that's not the only reason. I said that was the most accusatory. There's others. I think for some of us, maybe we've simply eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. Maybe we've orchestrated our life and organized our life in such a way that the Spirit's just not very essential. That we can kind of do it on autopilot. We can just kind of get by week after week, day after day. And we really don't need the Spirit very much. And so we just kind of cruise through life. A couple years ago, I was reading a book. I think it's by Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not certain. And it was in this book, he was describing a study on the brain activity of mice, because I'm a nerd and I read books like that. And so they were studying the brain activity of mice. And what they did is they put them at the beginning of a maze and they would open the door for the maze. And the end of the maze was cheese. And the mouse would have to like find its way to the end of the maze to get to the cheese. And the first time this mouse did this maze, the brainwaves were going nuts. They were just all over the place. He was redlining for the entire maze experience until he found the cheese, and he calmed down because he's trying to figure out where to go, right? And what they found is the more he did the maze, the less he thought about it, the less his mind was engaged. Until the very last time this mouse did this maze, the gate opened and there was this flurry of activity while he tried to figure out where he was. But as soon as he realized it was the same old maze that he's always done, there was virtually no brain activity until the very end when he had finished the cheese and then began to look for the next thing to do. And what it showed them is your brain can learn these behaviors and learn these functions so that it essentially goes on autopilot when you're doing something. It just kind of learns and files away these behaviors so that it doesn't have to critically think about it again and can kind of rest and relax and just go through the day. And that's what was happening to this mouse. He was just going on autopilot, going through the maze. I think that's a pretty good picture of how a lot of us can set up our lives. We get up in the morning. We do our routine. We take a shower. We go to work. We do the thing. We interact with the people. We talk to the clients. We send the emails. We come home, we say hey to the husband or the wife, we deal with the kids or we call the kids or we text the kids and we watch the show and we do the thing and then we go to bed and we get up and we do it the next day. And maybe one of the nights we go to small group and we pray for somebody and then we go to church maybe and we interact and we do the church deal and we'd go home. But for a lot of us, I think it's possible that we kind of have orchestrated life in such a way that we can do it on autopilot. And if we're being honest, our life really doesn't require the Spirit very much. And I think the encouragement there is that we need to be taking steps in our life that require the Spirit's aid, that if we are not reliant on the Spirit to help us and intercede with this, that we are going to be in serious trouble. I think about the life of grace. When I got here two years ago, let me tell you something, we needed the Spirit, man. For those of you who don't know the story, it was not going well. And we didn't really know. I got here in April. We didn't really know if we were going to make it out of May. We were just kind of figuring this thing out together. We needed the Holy Spirit to intervene, and He did in incredible ways. Two years later, we're a lot healthier. And I'll be honest with you. If I stop praying every week, if the elders stop praying, if staff stop praying, if our partners stop praying, I'm pretty sure we could keep going through the motions of church for several weeks without anybody feeling any big difference. And I think our life is like that too. Think about when you rely on God the most. The times in your life when you're most drawn to him, when you're most consistent in prayer, when you feel closest to the Father, when you feel a need for his presence more than any other. Aren't there times when you're anxious and when you're hurting? Aren't there times when you're not sure if something's going to work out? Isn't that when you run to the Father? Aren't there times when you're hurting and you feel like you need Him? Isn't that when you run to the Father? I know having a three-year-old daughter, I can't get her to slow down for anything. Lily is running around 90 to nothing all the time. The only times I can get her to settle down and sit on my lap and just be still with me is when she's hurting, when she's crying about something, when she's upset about something, when she's hurting herself. And sometimes we treat God the same way. And I think that it's possible that we just live these comfortable lives that don't require the Spirit to help us very much. And I would simply ask you, if the Holy Spirit's the comforter, how can He comfort us if we're never uncomfortable? How can the Holy Spirit comfort if we're not uncomfortable? If we're not taking any steps of faith in our life that require the Holy Spirit to show up, we're going to look real silly. If we're not branching out and having the conversation or starting the ministry or praying the prayers or dreaming the big dreams, how can we rely on the Holy Spirit if we only ever stay comfortable? So for some of us, I think we've eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. For others, maybe this one is more applicable to you, I don't know. For others, I think it's possible that our lives are just too noisy. Maybe our lives are too noisy. Maybe we just have so much going on in our life that we just don't have any time to hear the Spirit anyways. I was reading an article the other night in bed, and it was about the sounds that we hear. I think it was in the New Yorker or something. And it was just talking about now with technology and everything going on that we are constantly assaulted by and bombarded with sounds. And like humans aren't really used to this. We just hear so much noise all the time. We hear so much noise from all the different things going on and all the technology that we have in our life that we now have more technology to add on top of that technology so we don't hear the other technology spilling into our lives. It's crazy. We've got noise canceling headphones. On my phone, I have a white noise app. And when I'm on a plane and I'm tired of listening to other people talk, I put that in and I crank up the white noise and I can't hear a thing. I also do that in my office. Sometimes in meetings. I'm just playing around. We have these, we have devices to drown out the noise that the world is already making. We are just constantly assaulted with and bombarded by noise and other things. And our lives are so busy. We don't have any dead time. We don't have any downtime. And then even when we do, even when we find ourselves with 10 minutes with nothing to do, pull out the phone. Now I've got something to do. We are a perpetually distracted people. We constantly have something to divert our attention, to take it, to look at. And we very rarely sit alone with our thoughts. And so I would ask you this, and this may be my favorite question from today. This may be my favorite question from the series. It's one that I've been thinking about this week. If the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to you, when would you hear him? If the Holy Spirit were trying to speak to you, when would you hear him? What time have you carved out of your day where that can happen? I've said since I started here that the most important thing any of us can do in our life, the most important habit that we can develop is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And if you've done that with any consistency, then you would say that's a time when the Holy Spirit could speak to me. And we know, and we're going to talk about this, I think, next week, we all have various degrees of success with that. But for most of us, for most of our Christian life, and I'm not saying this as an accusatory thing. I'm just being honest with you because I've been around church for a long time, and a lot of y'all are my friends, and we kind of know each other's patterns. For a lot of us, the only time we get where the Holy Spirit can actually speak to us is on a Sunday morning in church. And if I pitched a dud that week, oh well, we'll have to wait until the next time we come. And sometimes we don't even come every week. I mean, grace, God bless us, we have kind of an every other week congregation. And I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad about that. That's why we have podcasts and stuff online. And you'll never hear me beating the drum of you've got to come every week. That's what good Christians do. But if that's the only time we have in our life to hear from God, when do we expect to do it? And if we're walking through our lives and we're upset because we don't feel like our experience of the Spirit really syncs up with what Scripture teaches, we don't really feel His guidance and direction in our life, I would just ask you, if He were trying to speak to you, when would you hear Him? Have you carved out time in your life regularly to be quiet and to focus on God? Which leads me to the next thing that I might suggest if our experience with the Spirit isn't what we think it should be. Maybe we're simply looking for the wrong things. Maybe we're looking for the wrong things. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is in Kings. I think it's 1 Kings chapter 19. Elijah has just finished this showdown with the prophets of Baal. If you don't know what that is, for the purpose of this morning, don't worry about that. He did a really cool thing and he beat 450 other prophets. He's a stud, but he was exhausted. And so God tells him, go to a cave and wait for me. I'm going to talk to you there. So Elijah goes to this cave and he's waiting for God. And it says that there was a mighty wind that passed over the front of the cave. This big noise, a lot of things rattling. I imagine rocks falling and trees falling over. But then it says God wasn't in the wind. And then there was an earthquake. The ground shook, more rocks fell, more trees fell. I'm sure it was very noisy, incredibly loud. And if you're Elijah, you're going, oh, certainly this is God. But God wasn't in the earthquake. And then it says there was a fire. A big conflagration outside the cave. He could kind of watch it be torched and sweep by. And if you're Elijah, you're thinking this has to be God. But it says that God wasn't in the fire. And then there was a gentle whisper. And we find that God was in the whisper. So often in life, God is in the whispers, speaking to us softly, speaking to us through things that almost seem coincidental. Can I just tell you that the Holy Spirit's not a drama queen? He's not a Kardashian. He's not looking for the best way to be seen by anybody. He's quiet and he's subtle and he works in the background. And he's typically pretty good with not bringing a lot of attention to himself. He's like the wind. We don't know where he's coming and where he's going. And so sometimes I think that we're simply looking for the wrong things and if we would pay attention a little bit better, if we would listen for the whispers, we would see all the places in our life where the Holy Spirit is actually interjecting and ministering to us as we speak. The easiest example of this is your salvation. If you're here this morning and you call yourself a believer, that's the Holy Spirit acting in your life. That's you literally experiencing the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2 tells us that we can't understand spiritual things without the Spirit. Romans teaches us that the Spirit actually ignites our desire for salvation, that we walk around before we know Jesus as spiritually blind people, and we cannot open our own eyes, and the Spirit actually opens our eyes and activates our faith. So if you're here today and you feel like you have a faith and you believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit gave you that faith and opened your eyes to have that faith. That's the Spirit. And so it's not totally fair to say, gosh, I'm not sure if I've experienced the Spirit. If you know Jesus, you've experienced the Spirit. We say that the Spirit guides and directs. But I think sometimes we fail to pay attention to the ways that he does that. That time that you went to church, and maybe you hadn't been in a while, but the sermon was exactly what you needed. I'm not talking about this morning. I'm talking about other mornings. The sermon was exactly what you needed. That's the Spirit. That time you got that phone call from a friend totally randomly who just said, hey, you're on my mind. I just wanted to give you a call, see how you were doing. That's the Spirit. That time that you emailed somebody or you called somebody or you texted somebody and you said, hey, just thinking about you, I hope you're doing good. And they get back to you and they say, oh my goodness, I was just thinking of you. I needed to hear this so much. That's the Spirit. Can I just tell you anecdotally that question of if you're going to hear the Spirit, like when are you going to hear him? He's trying to speak to you. When's he going to talk to you? Like when have you made time? When I'm making time in my life to hear the Spirit, when I'm really consistent in my time in the mornings, in my quiet times, without fail, He puts people on my heart to just stop and jot down and make a note about and send them an email or a text later that day. Without fail, He does that. And without fail, they're appreciative of getting that. Those things in your life that seem like coincidences, that perfect neighbor that you have that just suits you, that is just so nice that we ended up in this community, that perfect job that you have where you're around people that, man, it really makes sense. Maybe the job's not perfect, but you know that God's using you in the lives of these people. That great relationship that you're in, those are all works and moves of the Spirit. I think about myself here at Grace and my relationship with this church. Jen and I looked for a church for a year. We started looking in February of 2016. And that entire year, my prayer was, Father, prepare me for a place and prepare a place for us. Prepare us for a place and prepare a place for us. And we just waited. And when I got to grace, it was the Holy Spirit answered that prayer. We were ready to go. One of the things I hate doing is being patient. I don't like taking my time and making slow decisions and getting everybody on board and kind of just talking to everybody. Comfortable with this as we move forward. Everybody good. Like, I don't like doing that stuff. I just like, let's go. Let's go. And when I got to Grace, guess what we needed to do? There was no time to sit around and be like, is everybody comfortable right now? We just had to go. It was great. And when people now, my friends that I knew before Grace, when they check on me, hey man, how's Raleigh? How's it going? How you like in the church? I get to tell them, dude, I love it. I love these people. There's about two of y'all I wouldn't want to go to lunch with. The rest of you, man, I love so much. I love grace. I've never been more myself in ministry than I am here. You guys afford me with your gracious attitudes. I'm permitted to be the same person here that I am at dinner that I am on my couch. I couldn't be more comfortable. And it's not lost on me that that's the Holy Spirit preparing us and knitting us together. Now, I'm not trying to paint the picture that I'm some like God-sent pastor that's going to like carry us into the sunset. But for now, what I'm saying is it's a good marriage. And I see the Holy Spirit moving in that. You have your stories too. And I think sometimes we dismiss what the Holy Spirit does as coincidence, but if we're paying attention, what we'll realize is that was the Holy Spirit moving and directing in my life. So sometimes we simply need to open our eyes and notice what the Spirit is doing. Now, if you're here and this is a burning question for you and you're not yet satisfied, I only have one thing left for you. And you're not going to like it. But it's true. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Both wonder just a little bit longer. How is this going to make sense? How has this come together? God, I don't understand it yet. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the answers I've gotten. And maybe for you, you're just going to have to wonder just a little bit longer how it all makes sense. But I also mean wonder in the sense of wondering at the awe and the grandeur of God. And maybe you're here and you're like, man, listen, I'm telling you, I've done all that stuff. I want the Holy Spirit in my life. I want all of his leadership. I'm not trying to parcel out my obedience. I desperately want the Spirit. I'm listening for the Spirit. I have made time for the Spirit. I am noticing the little things that the Spirit does, and I'm telling you, I want more of the Spirit, and I don't understand why I don't have it. Well, then you're in good company. Because David, one of the most influential believers that's ever lived, one of the greatest lives that's ever been lived, left us his spiritual diary. And in the 13th chapter of that diary, in Psalm 13, he says, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? How long will you forget me? At different places he says it is so groans for the Father. We can find a lot of those psalms where David is going, how come I don't feel you? And all David was left to do was wonder just a little longer when God was going to arrive. And Jesus actually describes this to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. He tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind and those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind. We don't know where they're coming from or when they're going or what they're going to do. We can't understand or harness. The Spirit is something that we cannot grasp. And I think sometimes with our Western minds, we try to wrap our mind around the Spirit and who He is and systematize Him. And I've done these things, so I should be experiencing these things. And what Scripture teaches us is He's wilder than that. He's bigger than that. He's more wondrous than that. And so sometimes we have to be content to wonder for just a little longer. To that end, I've been reading a book by a girl named Rachel Held Evans called Searching for Sundays. And there's parts of it that, gosh, I just really love. And she wrote a chapter in it about the Holy Spirit where she describes him based on the different descriptors that we find in the Bible. He's fire and he's breath and he's wind and he's a label, he's a seal for us. And she describes how the Spirit is like wind and it's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard and so I thought that I would finish today by sharing this with you. She writes this. It travels to every corner of a cornerless world and amplifies the atmosphere. It smells like honeysuckle, curry, smoke, sea. It feels like a kiss, a breath, a burn, a sting. It can whisper or whistle or roar, bend and break and inflate. It can be harnessed but never stopped or contained, its effects observed while its essence remains unseen. It says, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. We are born into a windy world where the Spirit is steady as a breeze and as strong as a hurricane. There is no city, no village, no wilderness where you cannot find it. So pay attention. And as we finish our series on the Spirit, I think that would probably be my final admonishment to you. It's better that we have the Spirit than if Jesus himself would have stayed here with us. The Spirit gives us gifts to do ministry through us. And if we don't feel those gifts, we should just love on people until they affirm them in us. The Spirit is moving in His roles to comfort us and to help us and to guide us. And if we don't see that, we're not experiencing that, maybe there's some inventory that we need to do. Maybe we need to pray that our eyes will be opened a little bit. Maybe we need to make space in our life for the Spirit. But I hope that what we'll do as we go from this space is that we'll know, and we go from this series, that we'll know that the Holy Spirit is real, that he is active, that he is moving like the wind, and that he is carrying us with him, and that even if we don't feel him, maybe as we leave here, all of us collectively can pay a little bit more attention to the Spirit and invite him more and more into our lives. And maybe we can wonder just a little bit longer and be satisfied in that wondering. Let's pray. Father, thank You for this morning. Thank You for Your Spirit. Thank You for the parts of Him that we can understand. Thank You for the parts of him that we can't. God, I pray that we would pay attention to where you're working in our lives. That we would lean into you. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would feel invited in. I pray they would know that they are welcome, that you're not waiting for them to get anything together, that you're not waiting for them to somehow deserve you, that you're not waiting for them to get all the other things out of their life that they think need to be out of their life, but that you're just simply waiting and inviting. For those of us who are believers who feel uninvited because of what we've done or who we are or what we've let crowd into our lives, God, let us just come to you as our Father and feel the love that you lavish on us. Help us to pay attention to your Spirit, to notice Him when the wind is blowing, and to be led by Him and submitted to Him more and more. It's in your Son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name's Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This is a really great crew to have on a June Sunday. So thanks for being here, everybody. Real quick before I get launched into the sermon, wanted to bring your attention that we every year take a adult trip to Mexico. There's a barbecue after the service. That's for the student trip going to Mexico in July. And so we hope that you'll stick around and be a part of that and have lunch with us and hang out. It's kind of what we do. But there's also an adult trip coming up in October. And the deadline to sign up for that is in the middle of this month. If that's something that you've never experienced before, you've never done with Grace, it's a really great trip. We have a really fantastic relationship with the folks at Faith Ministry down in Reynosa, Mexico. And it's a lot of fun. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. You can go online if you have any questions. There's different links all over our website, but I did want to mention that before I just got started. This is the last part of our series called The Forgotten God, where we're focusing on the Holy Spirit. Often we talk a lot about God the Father, talk a lot about God the Son, but we kind of forget or are fearful of or have some questions or some doubts surrounding the Holy Spirit. And so sometimes it's easier just to kind of back away from the Holy Spirit or to just kind of live in mystery about the Holy Spirit. But for the last three weeks, and now this is the fourth week, we've really been focusing on who He is and what He does. And so the first week we looked at this idea that Jesus said it was actually better for us to have the Spirit than it was to have Him right next to us, which is an audacious claim. But we determined that that was true because the Spirit continues His ministry through us, which is the spiritual gifts that we looked at in the second week, and then also to us, which was the roles of the Spirit that we looked at last week as the comforter or the helper. But this whole time, I've been setting up this sermon on the last Sunday of the series to answer this question that I think, to be a Christian who's paying attention very much at all is to have this question. If you're a believer and you've learned about the Spirit and you've seen the different things that the Spirit does and you hear what Scripture has to say about the Holy Spirit, we can't help but wonder at times how come my experiences with the Spirit don't line up all the time with what I've learned to be true of the Spirit? How do I sync up what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I think very often there is a disconnect there. And I think that it's important to be willing to tackle that question because to be a believer of any, I think, I don't want to offend anybody, but to be a believer of any intellectual integrity is to have doubts, is to encounter things that you don't understand and that you can't make sense of. And I think there's really three ways to respond to that. When we encounter something that doesn't make sense, when someone close to us gets sick or hurt and we don't understand how God can let that happen, a doubt creeps in. When there's someone who's incredibly sinful and incredibly successful and we're trying to do the things the right way and we can't seem to catch up to them, sometimes we kind of go, God, that doesn't seem fair, and doubt creeps in. When we see big tragedy on a grand scale happen, we kind of look at that and we go, God, how could you let that happen? And doubt creeps in. Or we read passages in scripture that don't seem to sync up with what we've experienced in life, and doubt creeps in. We go, gosh, how can this be true in the Bible and this be true in my life? And so I think to be a Christian is to doubt. And really, we can do three things with those doubts. A lot of us just stuff them, right? We just ignore them. Dudes are good at this. That doesn't seem to make sense. Don't worry about that. Just go sing the songs. Okay, that's fine. And then we go do that. We just kind of stuff them. Or we seek out answers, or we let them drive us away. And so what we're going to talk about this morning, which is really best framed up, the more I thought about the question, how come what I've learned of the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit, really the better way to ask this question is, how come I'm not experiencing the Spirit the way I think I should? And so that's what's at the top of your bulletin there, is five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. And I put this one last because I said it up front, I don't know what I'm going to say here. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then. And if this is a question that you've seriously asked yourself, I'll just tell you up front, this is not gonna be wholly satisfying to you. You're not gonna leave today going, oh man, that makes tons of sense. Well, I don't have that question anymore. But hopefully it'll push you in the right direction. It also occurred to me this week that even though I'm not 100% certain how to answer this question, and even though I know I'm not going to do it to the satisfaction of some of you to whom it is a burning question, that it's to our detriment if I'm not willing to engage areas of text and scripture and spirituality that I'm not 100% sure on. Because if I only ever get up here and tell you things I'm certain about, then I develop within us collectively a very shallow faith. So we've got to be willing to talk about things on Sundays that might not make sense to us yet. So this morning, I feel like it's less of a sermon, me preaching to you, and I really approached it as if you and I could sit down across the table and talk about this. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, and you're like me, and you read these passages, because I read passages and I still have doubts. This question still forms in my mind. How come I don't experience that? I read 1 Corinthians 12 that we talked about two weeks ago with the gifts of the Spirit. And Ephesians 4 and the chapter in Romans, I think it's 6 or 7 that talks about the gifts of the Spirit. And I begin to wonder, how come I don't experience those? I don't feel like I have any supernatural gifts. If I were supernaturally good at teaching, I would hope I would be better than this. I don't feel like I have supernatural gifts. I'll be honest, I've not seen tongues. I've not seen authentic prophecy. And so I read about those in the New Testament and in the back of my mind, I kind of go, how come I don't see that? How come I don't see healings and casting out demons? How come that's not a part of my life? How come I don't see that? Or I'll read in Romans 8, where it says that if by the Spirit we put to death the deeds of the body, we will live. And I've been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I prayed to accept Christ when I was four and a half years old, and then God matured my faith over time. I've wanted desperately to put to death deeds of the body, those sinful proclivities that exist in all of us, that if we're being honest, we wish we could get rid of. I've wanted desperately to get rid of those. I've prayed that God would take them from me. I've appealed, based on Romans 8, to the Spirit, help me put these to death. And they're not put to death. They still exist in me as much as I want them to not be a part of me. So then I see that in Scripture, and I'm like, well, how come that's not happening in my life? Or, my goodness, you read the book of Acts. Pentecost, the disciples are sitting in this room, and the Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues, and then they go out and they preach a sermon in their own language, and the people there from all over the world hear it in their own language. And again, we see these healings and these casting out of demons, and we see people who, there's a guy named Simon the Magician who tries to pay the disciples for the Spirit because he wants to be able to do the cool tricks that they do. How come I don't experience that? And if it's a question that I have, and it's a question that one of my elders had as I was talking about the series with him, it's got to be a question that most Christians have. And so if we could sit across a table from each other and you would just say, Nate, what's your take on this? How come those things seem incompatible? How come I'm not experiencing the Spirit in that way? After some thought, I think these are the five things that I would suggest to you. I wish that we could have a discourse about this. And if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't call yourself a Christian, then you can just kind of pretend that you're at the coffee shop or the pub at the next table over and you're eavesdropping on us and kind of getting a little insight into this faith of weirdos, right? But this is kind of what I would offer you if we could have a conversation, five reasons why maybe we're not experiencing the Spirit the way we think we should. The first three are really taken from the book that I encourage you guys to read as we went through the series, Forgotten God by Francis Chan. So for some of you, this may sound familiar. And the first one is the most accusatory. I don't mean it to be. I worked really hard to find reasons that weren't just because you stink at being a Christian. I don't want that to be the answer. But if we're being honest, that's part of it sometimes. And that's really the first one. I don't mean to say it like that, but that's the implication. And so as we think about why don't we experience the Spirit the way that it seems that people did in Scripture, the way that we feel like we should, what's going on here, I think maybe one of the first things I would suggest, and it's not the only reason, and it may not be applicable to you at all, but I think it's applicable to some of us, is maybe we don't actually want the Spirit. Maybe if we're just being gut-level honest, we don't actually want the Spirit in our life. We want the good things. We want the peace. We want the happiness. We want the guidance. We want to know what to do in this business decision. We want to know which city that we should move to. But we don't really want the submission that comes with it. We don't really want all of the spirit. I'd like you here, but not over here. God, I'll do anything you want me to do except that. God, I'll move anywhere. Our family will move anywhere you want us to move besides over there. God, I'll give you anything I have besides my finances. Sometimes we feel like the rich young ruler, right? The one that went up to Jesus and he said, Jesus, I'm ready to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, great, sell everything that you have and follow me. And then we go, I'm not ready to follow that. If we're being honest, often we parcel out our submission. Don't we? Often we parcel out our submission. We divide it up and we say, God, you can have these portions of my life, but you can't have these. I'll trust you here, but I won't trust you with my kids. I'm going to keep them pretty close to the vest. I'll trust you. I'll do anything you want me to do within these parameters, God. And so what that proves, and again, I don't know some of you well enough at all to put this in your face and say, you don't experience the Spirit because it's your fault. But I think it's a truth of Scripture and a truth of life that we have to examine and at least do an inventory on in ourselves. Is this true of me? James tells us that it's possible. James was the brother of Jesus, which is pretty much like the only evidence you need that Jesus was the actual Son of God, because what would it take for you to convince your brother that you were divine? So he convinced his brother that he was divine, and then James wrote a book of the Bible. And in that book, he said, you don't have the things you pray for because you ask for the wrong reasons. You ask for your own selfish reasons. And again, that's awful accusatory. But is it possible that we want the Holy Spirit and His guidance in our life to bring about the things that we want and maybe not to bring about the things that He wants? And so when we think about why don't we experience the Spirit, I think a very viable reason is for some of us, if we're being honest, maybe we don't really want him. Now, that's not the only reason. I said that was the most accusatory. There's others. I think for some of us, maybe we've simply eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. Maybe we've orchestrated our life and organized our life in such a way that the Spirit's just not very essential. That we can kind of do it on autopilot. We can just kind of get by week after week, day after day. And we really don't need the Spirit very much. And so we just kind of cruise through life. A couple years ago, I was reading a book. I think it's by Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm not certain. And it was in this book, he was describing a study on the brain activity of mice, because I'm a nerd and I read books like that. And so they were studying the brain activity of mice. And what they did is they put them at the beginning of a maze and they would open the door for the maze. And the end of the maze was cheese. And the mouse would have to like find its way to the end of the maze to get to the cheese. And the first time this mouse did this maze, the brainwaves were going nuts. They were just all over the place. He was redlining for the entire maze experience until he found the cheese, and he calmed down because he's trying to figure out where to go, right? And what they found is the more he did the maze, the less he thought about it, the less his mind was engaged. Until the very last time this mouse did this maze, the gate opened and there was this flurry of activity while he tried to figure out where he was. But as soon as he realized it was the same old maze that he's always done, there was virtually no brain activity until the very end when he had finished the cheese and then began to look for the next thing to do. And what it showed them is your brain can learn these behaviors and learn these functions so that it essentially goes on autopilot when you're doing something. It just kind of learns and files away these behaviors so that it doesn't have to critically think about it again and can kind of rest and relax and just go through the day. And that's what was happening to this mouse. He was just going on autopilot, going through the maze. I think that's a pretty good picture of how a lot of us can set up our lives. We get up in the morning. We do our routine. We take a shower. We go to work. We do the thing. We interact with the people. We talk to the clients. We send the emails. We come home, we say hey to the husband or the wife, we deal with the kids or we call the kids or we text the kids and we watch the show and we do the thing and then we go to bed and we get up and we do it the next day. And maybe one of the nights we go to small group and we pray for somebody and then we go to church maybe and we interact and we do the church deal and we'd go home. But for a lot of us, I think it's possible that we kind of have orchestrated life in such a way that we can do it on autopilot. And if we're being honest, our life really doesn't require the Spirit very much. And I think the encouragement there is that we need to be taking steps in our life that require the Spirit's aid, that if we are not reliant on the Spirit to help us and intercede with this, that we are going to be in serious trouble. I think about the life of grace. When I got here two years ago, let me tell you something, we needed the Spirit, man. For those of you who don't know the story, it was not going well. And we didn't really know. I got here in April. We didn't really know if we were going to make it out of May. We were just kind of figuring this thing out together. We needed the Holy Spirit to intervene, and He did in incredible ways. Two years later, we're a lot healthier. And I'll be honest with you. If I stop praying every week, if the elders stop praying, if staff stop praying, if our partners stop praying, I'm pretty sure we could keep going through the motions of church for several weeks without anybody feeling any big difference. And I think our life is like that too. Think about when you rely on God the most. The times in your life when you're most drawn to him, when you're most consistent in prayer, when you feel closest to the Father, when you feel a need for his presence more than any other. Aren't there times when you're anxious and when you're hurting? Aren't there times when you're not sure if something's going to work out? Isn't that when you run to the Father? Aren't there times when you're hurting and you feel like you need Him? Isn't that when you run to the Father? I know having a three-year-old daughter, I can't get her to slow down for anything. Lily is running around 90 to nothing all the time. The only times I can get her to settle down and sit on my lap and just be still with me is when she's hurting, when she's crying about something, when she's upset about something, when she's hurting herself. And sometimes we treat God the same way. And I think that it's possible that we just live these comfortable lives that don't require the Spirit to help us very much. And I would simply ask you, if the Holy Spirit's the comforter, how can He comfort us if we're never uncomfortable? How can the Holy Spirit comfort if we're not uncomfortable? If we're not taking any steps of faith in our life that require the Holy Spirit to show up, we're going to look real silly. If we're not branching out and having the conversation or starting the ministry or praying the prayers or dreaming the big dreams, how can we rely on the Holy Spirit if we only ever stay comfortable? So for some of us, I think we've eliminated the need for the Spirit in our life. For others, maybe this one is more applicable to you, I don't know. For others, I think it's possible that our lives are just too noisy. Maybe our lives are too noisy. Maybe we just have so much going on in our life that we just don't have any time to hear the Spirit anyways. I was reading an article the other night in bed, and it was about the sounds that we hear. I think it was in the New Yorker or something. And it was just talking about now with technology and everything going on that we are constantly assaulted by and bombarded with sounds. And like humans aren't really used to this. We just hear so much noise all the time. We hear so much noise from all the different things going on and all the technology that we have in our life that we now have more technology to add on top of that technology so we don't hear the other technology spilling into our lives. It's crazy. We've got noise canceling headphones. On my phone, I have a white noise app. And when I'm on a plane and I'm tired of listening to other people talk, I put that in and I crank up the white noise and I can't hear a thing. I also do that in my office. Sometimes in meetings. I'm just playing around. We have these, we have devices to drown out the noise that the world is already making. We are just constantly assaulted with and bombarded by noise and other things. And our lives are so busy. We don't have any dead time. We don't have any downtime. And then even when we do, even when we find ourselves with 10 minutes with nothing to do, pull out the phone. Now I've got something to do. We are a perpetually distracted people. We constantly have something to divert our attention, to take it, to look at. And we very rarely sit alone with our thoughts. And so I would ask you this, and this may be my favorite question from today. This may be my favorite question from the series. It's one that I've been thinking about this week. If the Holy Spirit wanted to speak to you, when would you hear him? If the Holy Spirit were trying to speak to you, when would you hear him? What time have you carved out of your day where that can happen? I've said since I started here that the most important thing any of us can do in our life, the most important habit that we can develop is to get up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. And if you've done that with any consistency, then you would say that's a time when the Holy Spirit could speak to me. And we know, and we're going to talk about this, I think, next week, we all have various degrees of success with that. But for most of us, for most of our Christian life, and I'm not saying this as an accusatory thing. I'm just being honest with you because I've been around church for a long time, and a lot of y'all are my friends, and we kind of know each other's patterns. For a lot of us, the only time we get where the Holy Spirit can actually speak to us is on a Sunday morning in church. And if I pitched a dud that week, oh well, we'll have to wait until the next time we come. And sometimes we don't even come every week. I mean, grace, God bless us, we have kind of an every other week congregation. And I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad about that. That's why we have podcasts and stuff online. And you'll never hear me beating the drum of you've got to come every week. That's what good Christians do. But if that's the only time we have in our life to hear from God, when do we expect to do it? And if we're walking through our lives and we're upset because we don't feel like our experience of the Spirit really syncs up with what Scripture teaches, we don't really feel His guidance and direction in our life, I would just ask you, if He were trying to speak to you, when would you hear Him? Have you carved out time in your life regularly to be quiet and to focus on God? Which leads me to the next thing that I might suggest if our experience with the Spirit isn't what we think it should be. Maybe we're simply looking for the wrong things. Maybe we're looking for the wrong things. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is in Kings. I think it's 1 Kings chapter 19. Elijah has just finished this showdown with the prophets of Baal. If you don't know what that is, for the purpose of this morning, don't worry about that. He did a really cool thing and he beat 450 other prophets. He's a stud, but he was exhausted. And so God tells him, go to a cave and wait for me. I'm going to talk to you there. So Elijah goes to this cave and he's waiting for God. And it says that there was a mighty wind that passed over the front of the cave. This big noise, a lot of things rattling. I imagine rocks falling and trees falling over. But then it says God wasn't in the wind. And then there was an earthquake. The ground shook, more rocks fell, more trees fell. I'm sure it was very noisy, incredibly loud. And if you're Elijah, you're going, oh, certainly this is God. But God wasn't in the earthquake. And then it says there was a fire. A big conflagration outside the cave. He could kind of watch it be torched and sweep by. And if you're Elijah, you're thinking this has to be God. But it says that God wasn't in the fire. And then there was a gentle whisper. And we find that God was in the whisper. So often in life, God is in the whispers, speaking to us softly, speaking to us through things that almost seem coincidental. Can I just tell you that the Holy Spirit's not a drama queen? He's not a Kardashian. He's not looking for the best way to be seen by anybody. He's quiet and he's subtle and he works in the background. And he's typically pretty good with not bringing a lot of attention to himself. He's like the wind. We don't know where he's coming and where he's going. And so sometimes I think that we're simply looking for the wrong things and if we would pay attention a little bit better, if we would listen for the whispers, we would see all the places in our life where the Holy Spirit is actually interjecting and ministering to us as we speak. The easiest example of this is your salvation. If you're here this morning and you call yourself a believer, that's the Holy Spirit acting in your life. That's you literally experiencing the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2 tells us that we can't understand spiritual things without the Spirit. Romans teaches us that the Spirit actually ignites our desire for salvation, that we walk around before we know Jesus as spiritually blind people, and we cannot open our own eyes, and the Spirit actually opens our eyes and activates our faith. So if you're here today and you feel like you have a faith and you believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit gave you that faith and opened your eyes to have that faith. That's the Spirit. And so it's not totally fair to say, gosh, I'm not sure if I've experienced the Spirit. If you know Jesus, you've experienced the Spirit. We say that the Spirit guides and directs. But I think sometimes we fail to pay attention to the ways that he does that. That time that you went to church, and maybe you hadn't been in a while, but the sermon was exactly what you needed. I'm not talking about this morning. I'm talking about other mornings. The sermon was exactly what you needed. That's the Spirit. That time you got that phone call from a friend totally randomly who just said, hey, you're on my mind. I just wanted to give you a call, see how you were doing. That's the Spirit. That time that you emailed somebody or you called somebody or you texted somebody and you said, hey, just thinking about you, I hope you're doing good. And they get back to you and they say, oh my goodness, I was just thinking of you. I needed to hear this so much. That's the Spirit. Can I just tell you anecdotally that question of if you're going to hear the Spirit, like when are you going to hear him? He's trying to speak to you. When's he going to talk to you? Like when have you made time? When I'm making time in my life to hear the Spirit, when I'm really consistent in my time in the mornings, in my quiet times, without fail, He puts people on my heart to just stop and jot down and make a note about and send them an email or a text later that day. Without fail, He does that. And without fail, they're appreciative of getting that. Those things in your life that seem like coincidences, that perfect neighbor that you have that just suits you, that is just so nice that we ended up in this community, that perfect job that you have where you're around people that, man, it really makes sense. Maybe the job's not perfect, but you know that God's using you in the lives of these people. That great relationship that you're in, those are all works and moves of the Spirit. I think about myself here at Grace and my relationship with this church. Jen and I looked for a church for a year. We started looking in February of 2016. And that entire year, my prayer was, Father, prepare me for a place and prepare a place for us. Prepare us for a place and prepare a place for us. And we just waited. And when I got to grace, it was the Holy Spirit answered that prayer. We were ready to go. One of the things I hate doing is being patient. I don't like taking my time and making slow decisions and getting everybody on board and kind of just talking to everybody. Comfortable with this as we move forward. Everybody good. Like, I don't like doing that stuff. I just like, let's go. Let's go. And when I got to Grace, guess what we needed to do? There was no time to sit around and be like, is everybody comfortable right now? We just had to go. It was great. And when people now, my friends that I knew before Grace, when they check on me, hey man, how's Raleigh? How's it going? How you like in the church? I get to tell them, dude, I love it. I love these people. There's about two of y'all I wouldn't want to go to lunch with. The rest of you, man, I love so much. I love grace. I've never been more myself in ministry than I am here. You guys afford me with your gracious attitudes. I'm permitted to be the same person here that I am at dinner that I am on my couch. I couldn't be more comfortable. And it's not lost on me that that's the Holy Spirit preparing us and knitting us together. Now, I'm not trying to paint the picture that I'm some like God-sent pastor that's going to like carry us into the sunset. But for now, what I'm saying is it's a good marriage. And I see the Holy Spirit moving in that. You have your stories too. And I think sometimes we dismiss what the Holy Spirit does as coincidence, but if we're paying attention, what we'll realize is that was the Holy Spirit moving and directing in my life. So sometimes we simply need to open our eyes and notice what the Spirit is doing. Now, if you're here and this is a burning question for you and you're not yet satisfied, I only have one thing left for you. And you're not going to like it. But it's true. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Maybe we simply have to wonder. Both wonder just a little bit longer. How is this going to make sense? How has this come together? God, I don't understand it yet. I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the answers I've gotten. And maybe for you, you're just going to have to wonder just a little bit longer how it all makes sense. But I also mean wonder in the sense of wondering at the awe and the grandeur of God. And maybe you're here and you're like, man, listen, I'm telling you, I've done all that stuff. I want the Holy Spirit in my life. I want all of his leadership. I'm not trying to parcel out my obedience. I desperately want the Spirit. I'm listening for the Spirit. I have made time for the Spirit. I am noticing the little things that the Spirit does, and I'm telling you, I want more of the Spirit, and I don't understand why I don't have it. Well, then you're in good company. Because David, one of the most influential believers that's ever lived, one of the greatest lives that's ever been lived, left us his spiritual diary. And in the 13th chapter of that diary, in Psalm 13, he says, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? How long will you forget me? At different places he says it is so groans for the Father. We can find a lot of those psalms where David is going, how come I don't feel you? And all David was left to do was wonder just a little longer when God was going to arrive. And Jesus actually describes this to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. He tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind and those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind. We don't know where they're coming from or when they're going or what they're going to do. We can't understand or harness. The Spirit is something that we cannot grasp. And I think sometimes with our Western minds, we try to wrap our mind around the Spirit and who He is and systematize Him. And I've done these things, so I should be experiencing these things. And what Scripture teaches us is He's wilder than that. He's bigger than that. He's more wondrous than that. And so sometimes we have to be content to wonder for just a little longer. To that end, I've been reading a book by a girl named Rachel Held Evans called Searching for Sundays. And there's parts of it that, gosh, I just really love. And she wrote a chapter in it about the Holy Spirit where she describes him based on the different descriptors that we find in the Bible. He's fire and he's breath and he's wind and he's a label, he's a seal for us. And she describes how the Spirit is like wind and it's one of the best descriptions I've ever heard and so I thought that I would finish today by sharing this with you. She writes this. It travels to every corner of a cornerless world and amplifies the atmosphere. It smells like honeysuckle, curry, smoke, sea. It feels like a kiss, a breath, a burn, a sting. It can whisper or whistle or roar, bend and break and inflate. It can be harnessed but never stopped or contained, its effects observed while its essence remains unseen. It says, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it's going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. We are born into a windy world where the Spirit is steady as a breeze and as strong as a hurricane. There is no city, no village, no wilderness where you cannot find it. So pay attention. And as we finish our series on the Spirit, I think that would probably be my final admonishment to you. It's better that we have the Spirit than if Jesus himself would have stayed here with us. The Spirit gives us gifts to do ministry through us. And if we don't feel those gifts, we should just love on people until they affirm them in us. The Spirit is moving in His roles to comfort us and to help us and to guide us. And if we don't see that, we're not experiencing that, maybe there's some inventory that we need to do. Maybe we need to pray that our eyes will be opened a little bit. Maybe we need to make space in our life for the Spirit. But I hope that what we'll do as we go from this space is that we'll know, and we go from this series, that we'll know that the Holy Spirit is real, that he is active, that he is moving like the wind, and that he is carrying us with him, and that even if we don't feel him, maybe as we leave here, all of us collectively can pay a little bit more attention to the Spirit and invite him more and more into our lives. And maybe we can wonder just a little bit longer and be satisfied in that wondering. Let's pray. Father, thank You for this morning. Thank You for Your Spirit. Thank You for the parts of Him that we can understand. Thank You for the parts of him that we can't. God, I pray that we would pay attention to where you're working in our lives. That we would lean into you. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would feel invited in. I pray they would know that they are welcome, that you're not waiting for them to get anything together, that you're not waiting for them to somehow deserve you, that you're not waiting for them to get all the other things out of their life that they think need to be out of their life, but that you're just simply waiting and inviting. For those of us who are believers who feel uninvited because of what we've done or who we are or what we've let crowd into our lives, God, let us just come to you as our Father and feel the love that you lavish on us. Help us to pay attention to your Spirit, to notice Him when the wind is blowing, and to be led by Him and submitted to Him more and more. It's in your Son's name we ask these things. Amen.
All right, well, good morning, and thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors at Grace, and if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that. This is officially a summer Sunday, so you guys really mean it. I'm grateful for your being here as we move into the summer, and I'm excited about our upcoming summer series that starts week after next called Kids Stories for Grownups, where we look at some of the Bible stories that many of us learned when we were younger that we've all heard of, and we kind of revisit those and wonder what we can still learn from them as fully formed, intelligent adults. So that should be exciting. And I love it because the stories from the Bible and the Old Testament are some of my favorite things to examine. So we're excited to get into that series here in a couple of weeks. And I'm excited for the end of this service when we'll take communion together. We're going to take it the old-fashioned way for the first time in over two years. And I know there's many of you here who have never partaken in communion at Grace in the way in which we will do it and have always done it for years. So I'm excited for us to do that as a family, and I'll explain more about that later. But right now, we're going to get into the first part of a two-part sermon based in 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 8. So if you have a Bible, you can open there, and we'll be looking at that text this morning. This morning, we're going to look at verses 5 through 7, and the next week we're going to look just at verse 8. And I know that I say this a lot, and you guys will chuckle at me, but this is one of my favorite passages in all the Bible. I love this passage, and I told you if you get the grace vine and read that this week, so that's two big ifs. Okay, so if you get it and if you actually read it, then you would have seen that I said in the grace vine, if you don't get it, fill out a connection card or something and make sure that you get on our weekly email list so you know what's going on. Unless you don't want that in your inbox, then don't fill it out and we won't send you anything. But I said in there that this passage sums up so much of what we need for the Christian life, for Christian behavior, for Christian expectations, and for Christian purpose. This passage kind of just succinctly encapsulates for us where we need to be focused and what happens when we focus on these things. And for me, I just love it. I've always loved this passage. And it's a big reason that we're doing a series in Peter, and this is what I said in the Grace Find, is so that I can preach these two things. I was actually in a conversation with our new worship pastor, Aaron, about this passage and said, man, I don't know how to condense it to one sermon. And I kind of told him the two things I was thinking. He was like, you got to do two. And I'm like, great, two-parter. I'm in charge of the sermons anyway. So it just became a two-part sermon. So here we go. We're going to dive in, but I want to dive in with some reflections on what the Bible has to say about love, because that's what we're going to be building to today is the way that we're instructed to love according to Peter in 2 Peter. So as we think about the biblical idea of love, it's kind of Christian 101, one of the very first things you learn when you are a believer. After God loved you and Jesus died on the cross for you, and after those things, the thing you learn about what you're supposed to do is love other people, right? We all know. That's the very first thing we're told. Love God, love others. This is what we learn immediately, right? I'm reminded of the conversation that Jesus has early in his ministry where a younger person comes up to him and they say, what do you say is the greatest commandment? And they have a little conversation about it. And it's settled upon that Jesus agrees that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. These are the two greatest commandments. And Jesus says that in those commandments is captured the whole law and the prophets. Meaning, if we'll do those two things, then we'll do everything we're supposed to do in this book. Those two things, just love God, love others, will capture everything in this book. And so I've always loved that teaching because it distills something very complicated, very detailed, down to its most basic elements. It takes everything in this book that we're supposed to do from cover to cover, all the behaviors that we're supposed to have, all the prayers that we're supposed to pray, all the things we're supposed to start doing, all the things we're supposed to stop doing, all the things we're supposed to think, all the ways that our character needs to change. It takes all of that and it boils it down to two simple commandments. Just love God and love others. And in doing that, you'll take care of everything here. And that's something that is probably not new information for a vast majority of you. You know that, you've been taught that, you're aware of it. If I asked many of you what the greatest commandments were, you would tell me those things. But Jesus, later in his ministry, distills those commandments down even more to just one thing. In John chapter 13, verse 35, at the end of his ministry, he's teaching the disciples. He's been with them for three years and he tells them this, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. So he says, he gets them, he sits them down and another week they're going to have the last supper. They're going to do communion. They're going to start communion that we're going to observe at the end of the service. And after he spent three years with them, modeling for them what ministry is, teaching them, discipling them, he sits them down. He says, this is the new commandment that I give to you. And that's a huge word, new commandment. That's not just a passive phrase that he's saying to get to the point. What he's saying is the greatest commandments are to love God and love others. The 10 commandments we learned in Exodus. I'm gonna give you a new commandment that hasn't been given for thousands of years. There's been no new commandments for 4,000 years. I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm gonna give you a new commandment. This one's fresh, listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm going to give you a new commandment. This one's fresh. Listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, go love other people like that. That's it. That's the commandment. But what about all the other things? If you do this, if you go love other people like I've loved you, you'll do all the other things. And in our, some of our theological minds, we'll go, well, Jesus, wait a second. We need to love you too though, right? We can't just go love other people because then that's not Christian, that's just kindness. And Jesus goes, yeah, but go try to love other people the way I've loved the disciples without first loving me. And so Jesus knows that baked into offering Christ-like love to those around us is the necessity that we would fall deeply in love with him, that we would love him earnestly and passionately and sincerely in a steadfast way. It is impossible to live out the new prepping this week, just as an aside, how powerful would it be to live your life in such a way that after you spent time with people, after your kids grew up in your home and you sent them out into the world, what if as a mama or a daddy, you were able to look at those kids and you would say, sweetheart, the way that I've loved you for these last, hopefully just 18 years and then get out, right? But the way that I've loved you for these last 18 years, you go and love other people like I've loved you. What if you could, the people who worked for you, when they moved on to bigger and better and you gave them some parting advice, what if you could look at them and say, the way that I've loved you when you've been with me, go love other people like that. What if you could say that if you moved away? What if you could say that to your small group? What if you could say that to the people that you've been associated with? What if you could say that if you're changing roles, if you're leaving one company and go to the next one, what if you could look at your co-workers and say, all I would ask is that you love people the way that I have loved you. What if you lived a life powerful enough to be able to say that? I could not say that to people. But what if we lived our life in such a way that we could look at the people around us and say, the way that I've loved you and cared for you and prayed for you, now go and do that to other people. And that be the very will of God. It's such a powerful example that Jesus sets there to be able to say that to the disciples. But he tells them very clearly, love is the most important thing. You go love. You go offer the kind of love that I've offered you. You go offer that to everyone around you, to your neighbors, to your brothers, to everyone around you. And that's the commandment. That's what God needs of you. Because if you'll just simply do that one thing, then you will have done all of these things. Jesus knows this. And so he's setting up love as the apex value. And as if that's not clear enough, Paul in his writings in Corinthians, and we're going to get to the love passage in Corinthians 13, but at the end of this passage where he's written about spiritual gifts and he's saying, but spiritual gifts really don't compare to Christian values and of the Christian values of the virtues, really there's only three that remain. He says this in 1 Corinthians 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Paul makes it very clear. Love is the apex virtue. I always think that there's got to be some family with triplet girls named faith, hope, and love. And you know which one is the favorite, right? Faith and Hope, they're fine. But Love, she's great. These three remain, Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love. So Paul makes it very clear, in addition to all the teachings of Jesus, where it's very clear throughout the Gospels that Love really is the apex value. And so so we tell new Christians, when you become a Christian, Christianity 101, what do I need to do? What's expected of me? Go love God, go love others. And then if you really want to get technical about it, Jesus gives us one commandment, go and love other people as Jesus has loved you. That's what we are to do. That's what we're instructed to do. That's what we see in scripture over and over and over again is like, okay, you're a believer now. You're a Christian. You believe that God is your father and Jesus is your savior. And just to be very clear, the simplest way I know to understand what it means to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, that he is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. You believe in those things, you're a Christian. Once you believe those things, go love as Jesus loved you. He died for us. Go sacrificially love others. Offer a Christ-like love to your neighbor. But I don't know about you. I know about me. That's hard. I'm not very good. I'm not very good at loving people that I love. I'm really not good at loving people I don't care for. And so that's a challenging command. And it makes me wonder if we've ever considered this. Have you ever considered that maybe love is the end of a journey rather than the beginning? Maybe we build towards love. Maybe Jesus, when he told us to just go love other people, maybe he knew the layers of intricacy and nuance that lay underneath that, that that is a situation where it is far more easily said than done. What if actually offering Christ-like love to others is the end of a journey and it's not the place where we begin? And I can't help but think that that's true, that when we first become Christians, when we become believers, or as we go through our Christian life and God is forming our character and sanctifying us, as he does that, I can't help but think it's true that maybe love is the goal and not the starting place. And 1 Corinthians 13, where we learn the most about love and what it is, actually makes this point for me. I'll remind you of what is written in 1 Corinthians 13 verses four through eight. Now, this is usually read at weddings and that's fine and appropriate and good, but this is not romantic love. This is the love that is required of all believers. And this is the love we are to offer. This is what Paul says about it. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. So I would ask you this. Have you ever loved anybody like that? Have you ever actually loved anyone with a love that is not envious, that doesn't boast, that is not easily angered, that isn't rude, that takes no record of wrongs. So if you're married, that one's out. As I was asking myself, have I ever offered anyone this love? The most pure love I can think of is the love that a parent has for a child. Just the way that we've had two kids, and both times, as soon as they're born and they place them on Jen's chest and you're looking at this new life, my heart was instantly so full of love. It's nothing that you can describe. You can't really explain it. You just have to experience it. And when it happens, it just fills you up with so much joy and so much love. And it's just there. And the kid can't do anything but be annoying for like four years. So it's just there. You just love them, right? But even in that pure love, when my one-year-old son, John, is teething and fussy for three days straight, I really fail at not easily angered. I fall off the wagon there. I don't offer him that love. When my six-year-old Lily asks me how to pronounce a word in Spanish, and I tell her, and she says, no, you're wrong. Based on nothing, nothing. She doesn't even know how to say English words all the time. And listen, I don't want to brag. I took Spanish two twice in high school. And I've been to Mexico like a lot. All right. So I know Spanish pronunciations. And then she asked me how to say it. And I tell her, she's like, no, that's not it. And I just, I was easily angered in that moment. Maybe that wasn't easily angered. That was justified anger. I take it back. She deserved it. Have you ever loved anybody like we're told in Corinthians to love? Those things, those things are hard. Being patient and kind and not envious and not keeping any record of wrong and not boastful. That kind of love is hard. And loving others as Christ loves us, who condescended from heaven and took on human form and put up with us for three years, for 33 years, and faultlessly loved everyone around him, selflessly giving of himself. Have you ever loved anyone like that? And I'm belaboring the point to get us to this thought, that telling a new Christian to love like Jesus is like telling a crawling baby to run a marathon. Telling a newly formed Christian, someone who's just come into the faith, whether they're eight or 18 or 48, looking at them and going, okay, you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did and is going to do what he says he's going to do? Yes, I do. I absolutely do. Okay, then go in love exactly as he did. See you later. That's like looking at my son, John, and telling him to run a marathon. John crawls, and he crawls like really good. He's the best crawler that I've ever seen. He's a better crawler than all of your children. He crawls, and he can start to, like, stand a little bit, but he's fat, so he's got to develop some muscle before he can really get going. It would be like looking at him and being like, oh, you're crawling now, buddy? Well, how about a marathon? There's a lot of things that need to take place in his development before he can even think about that. Standing would be good without grabbing the couch or my pant leg. There's a start. Taking steps. Once you take steps, stay on your feet. Learn to actually run. And then there's this funny thing with kids where they have to learn to moderate their speed, right? If you've seen a little kid learn to run, they have one speed, sprint, full out sprint. There's no jogging. It's just the hardest possible steps, and they sprint to wherever they're going. There's no moderate in the middle. So you've got to learn how to jog and moderate your speed. You've got to let your body develop. You've got to build up lung capacity. You should probably try to eat healthy because it's hard to run a marathon on cheeseburgers. You have to start going distances. You have to work towards it. You have to build towards it. And to me, looking at a church full of people and saying, hey, we need to love others as Christ loved us, is in a lot of ways looking at developing children and saying you need to run a marathon. And I'm not looking to denigrate any new believers at all. I'm just trying to think of an illustration that could help us understand the path that needs to be traveled so that we can love as Jesus loves others. And we should understand it as a process, not a starting point, as a goal, not necessarily where we begin. And this is why I love the passage in 2 Peter so much. Because in 2 Peter, what we have is a roadmap to be able to love. Loving like Jesus loves feels impossible. Offering the type of love described in 1 Corinthians 13 feels like too big of a challenge. How could we ever do that? Well, this is where Peter comes in and he shows us and he tells us, hey, if you want to love, here's how you get there. So let's look at what I believe are building blocks of Peter telling God's children, here's how we begin the path towards love. Here's the journey that we take. 2 Peter 1, verses 5-7. For this very reason, make every effort. Let me stop right there. If I hadn't been lazy in my notes, I would have made this a point. And if you are a note taker, I would love for you to write this down. For this very reason, make every effort. Listen to me. Christian character is not developed by default. Christian character is not developed by default. We do not coast into godliness. We do not become a Christian, start going to church, and then slip it into neutral and just coast for the rest of our lives. And I think so many of us get stymied in our Christian walk. So many of us feel like we're in a rut. I know that I'm guilty of this because I somehow assume that developing Christian character and the process of sanctification, which is becoming more like God in character, that that process just happens by default. If I just claim faith for long enough, if I pray a couple of prayers, if I start to bless my meal, if I go to small group, if I go to church, that Christian faith will just develop by default in my life. And I'm just going to grow closer to Christ and experience the spiritual maturity and depth just by simply going through the motions and attending the things I'm supposed to attend. And I just want to tell you, there's a reason that he writes, make every effort. Sometimes we got to try. Christian character is not developed by default. We intentionally and ardently work at it our whole lives. He says this, for this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. We went through this passage in my men's Bible study, and there was a little bit of discussion of, are these things that we're supposed to pursue to make every effort to add to ourselves, our faith, virtue, virtue, knowledge, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection, love, are those things that we're supposed to pursue all together at the same time, just kind of haphazardly in our life, kind of like the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We just kind of pursue all of these things at once. And I just happen to think that that's not the intention of this passage. I think that these are actual building blocks. And I think that because of the word supplement, because Peter says, for this very reason, I want you to supplement your faith with virtue, then supplement your virtue with knowledge, then supplement your knowledge with self-control, then supplement, I think because of that word supplement that he's saying that these things intentionally build on one another. I also think that because he starts with faith. Without faith, none of the rest of this matters. Without faith, how in the world can we be virtuous? If virtuous is dictated to us by the desires of God and who he wants us to be and how he wants us to behave, then how can we possibly do that without faith? What are we being steadfast in? What are we persevering in if it's not faith? How can we possibly offer but move towards godliness without faith? Faith is the essential building block for all of this. It is also the starting point of all salvation. So if we think of new believers, what do they have? They have faith that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. They have faith. And Peter says, good. Instead of going and loving your neighbor as Jesus loved you, how about we do this? How about to that faith, we add virtue? Work on supplementing your faith with virtue. Virtue, simplest way I can understand it, is to be aware of the things that we're supposed to start doing and aware of the things that we're supposed to stop doing. When you are a believer, when you convert to Christianity, there's no doubt that you carry in some behaviors into your new faith that do not belong in your new faith, that ought not be there. And so there's, to be a Christian is to kind of have a constantly running list of things in your head, right? Of things that you're supposed to start doing and things that you should stop doing. And so to be virtuous is to take that seriously and just start to move towards God and character. And then he says, add to your virtue, knowledge, learn about your faith. And I would just slide this in there. I feel like many of us, I've spent my whole life in the church. And I would honestly tell you that I think, and this includes me many times in my life, I think most Christians just stall out right there. I think most Christians come to a faith, yep, I believe Jesus. And then kind of look around and be like, okay, there's some ways I'm supposed to behave. I need to stop doing that stuff. I need to start doing this stuff. And then that's it. And then we just put it on cruise control into eternity. I would be willing to bet that if you're here or you're listening, and sometimes faith feels hard, and it doesn't seem to click with you like it clicks with other people, and I'm just kind of in a rut, or maybe I'm just kind of going through the motions, or maybe I'm not really sure what I believe, I would be willing to bet that part of that is that you just stalled out right here. We started with faith. We added to faith the ways that I'm supposed to behave. And now let's just see what happens until I get to heaven. And there's so much more after that, that we are to make every effort to develop. He says, add to your virtue knowledge. This one's important. I don't think I can stress this too much. Christians, we need to learn about our faith. We need to know our faith. We need to understand our faith. We need to know some basic theology. We need to know some basic things about the Bible and the construction of Scripture and how we know we can trust it. We need to know about the triune God, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We need to know what words like faith and sanctification mean. We need to understand these things. And there's a lot of us who we don't really make much of an effort to do that. We don't really make much of an effort to learn. We just kind of soak in whatever I say, which that's sorry for you guys, and whatever's said in small groups and all those things. And we don't challenge ourselves with personal study. We need to learn and we need to grow. I talked about this, I preached about this a couple of weeks ago, that we need to be prepared with a why. When someone says, hey, why do you have faith? We need to be prepared with an answer. We are to add to our virtue knowledge. We ought to be learners of and about our faith. And if that's a place where you feel like you are lacking or you don't know where to go, please reach out to me and I'll do my best to point you towards some resources that won't all be books, some videos and some podcasts and stuff like that, depending on what kind of learner you are. But we need to grow in our knowledge of our faith. And then to that knowledge, we're to add self-control. The discipline of just continuing to do it, of denying ourself for the sake of something later, for the sake of something better. And then to self-control, we had said fastness or perseverance. This is another reason why I think it's actually building blocks because perseverance isn't required in the infancy of faith, right? If you ever have the privilege and the joy of being with someone in the moment when they convert and they pray to receive Christ and you say amen and then you look at them and you put your hand on their shoulder and you go, hey, listen, just hang in there, buddy. You're bad at that, all right? You're bad at giving advice. If fresh out of the gates, the first place you go to is just cling to hope. Until you've been disappointed by God, until you've been in a spiritual rut, until you've walked through a personal valley of the shadow of death, that advice and that encouragement rings hollow. But when I preached about suffering at the beginning of the book, and we talked about the fact that suffering is a fact of life. The encouragement that I gave you was to persevere. Cling to hope. Don't lose faith. When we addressed Uvalde last week and we said, what's the role of the church? Our role is to persevere and to cling to the hope and so beat back the darkness in the world with the hope that we cling to. We are to persevere. So these things build. And then to perseverance, godliness, becoming more like God in character. And then to godliness. And this is important. When I think about godliness, it's more than just virtue and it's more than just self-control. Because virtue and self-control, those address behaviors. Those address how we behave. But godliness is about who we are. It's about our being. Godliness is when we do the inner heart and soul work to figure out what is it inside of us that's broken that's motivating me to need virtue and to need self-control? What is it inside me that's not right? How is my heart unhealthy? Where are the pockets of darkness in my life that I have not addressed? Maybe we go through the motions of Christianity for years and years and years, and we're good at being virtuous, and we're good at being self-controlled, but there's this voice that kind of tells us when we start to pursue godliness, like, hey, you know the only reason that you've ever really gone through all the religious machinations is to get all the people around you to like you and respect you, right? And that you're really not super sincere in your faith. I'm not saying that that's occurred to me, but I've heard that it occurs to weaker Christians, perhaps. It's when we allow the Holy Spirit to really do the work in our hearts and we cry out to God. When we pursue godliness is when we realize how wretched we are. The person who wrote Amazing Grace, it said, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I promise they had pursued godliness because when you do that, you start to realize that you might have mastered the behaviors, but what's in here is gross. And so you ask God to come in and do the work. And as he works on your heart in that way, he says, now add to your godliness brotherly affection, which is familial affection, brotherly and sisterly affection. And it means the family of God for other Christian brothers and sisters now work on loving the church. And the Christian love that we're supposed to offer the church is powerful enough and strong enough. The unification that we have in Christ and the love that we can offer in Christ supersedes all the other divisions that would seek to drive a wedge within God's church. The love that we have for Christ and the love that we have for one another should overcome any political divide that we would experience between our Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Independent brothers and sisters. None of that should matter when we come together as a church. The love of Christ, the brotherly affection that we are instructed to offer overcomes ethnicity. It overcomes socioeconomic divides. It overcomes divides of just doing life different than one another. The people who just live lives that you would never ever choose and you don't get them and you don't understand them and you think they're dumb. Well, guess what? They think you're dumb too, but the love of Christ unites us. It should cover over those things. And how could we possibly offer the love of Christ to a fallen and lost and broken world when we can't even offer it to the people who share our faith? And I think it's worth pointing out that in our country and in our culture that is as divided as I can ever remember. As far as I can tell, in most churches, that division in the world is mirrored in the church 100%. All the divisions that exist out there, we bring in here. They bring in there. They bring in there. And unless we can learn as believers to offer brotherly affection to the Christians who think differently than us, to be humble enough to do that, how could we possibly offer brotherly affection to a lost and broken world with whom we have very little in common. So we pursue brotherly affection, loving God's church, loving God's people, allowing the love of Christ to bridge any gaps that exist between us. And then, once we do those things, we supplement them with the love of Christ. Now go and love others as Jesus loved you. But love, you see, is the end of the journey. It is not where we start. Jesus starts us there. Go love as I loved you, but he knows all the things that we have to learn along the way before we can be remotely capable of offering others the kind of love that he loved us. And so I don't know where you are. If we use 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 7 as some sort of crude diagnostic tool, I don't know where you are. I don't know where you look at that and go, gosh, that's really where I need to focus in on. That's really what I need to work on. But we're instructed that we are to make every effort, that these things are not just going to happen by osmosis. They're not just going to happen by sitting in the sermon and be like, yep, that was good. I learned from that. And then we go and never, ever work on these things. They'll never, ever happen. So I would strongly encourage you to go home. Take some time today or maybe tomorrow morning and sit down with this passage and say, Father, where am I? Father, what do I need? Do I need more faith? Father, do I need more virtue? Do I need more knowledge? Do I not know enough? God, maybe I need to start learning intentionally. Do I need to just simply cling to and persevere and learn how to flex that muscle because it's really important to me right now? Do I need to forgive some other believers and offer them brotherly or sisterly affection? Do I need to bridge the gap within my own church and let my love of Christ cover over any other divisions that exist? Or God, am I ready to begin to go out and start to offer the love that you offered me? Please do. Sit down with the passage and ask God, where am I? What do I need to do? Where should I place my effort? And it's my hope and my prayer and what I've been praying this whole week that we would do this. Let us commit together to make every effort, every effort to build towards love. Understanding that love is the apex, it's the end of the journey, and it's a path that we are all on to grow to there. Let us go this week and make every effort to build towards being people who offer Christ-like love to everyone around them. Who, after spending time with people, you are able to look at them and say, now go and love others as I have loved you. Let's pursue being those kinds of people and that kind of church with eyes wide open as we understand the journey that that is. In a minute, we're going to take communion and reflect on that love. But first, I'm going to pray for us. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for being love. Your word tells us that while we were still sinners, before we knew you, before we had any capacity of affection for you, that you died for us anyways. Let us be grateful for and fueled by that love. God, give us the discipline and desire to make every effort to build towards a capacity to love others as you have loved us. I pray all these things in your son's name. Amen. Next week when we come back, we're gonna look at what happens, at what the promise is when we pursue love in that way. Because it's not just a simple commandment to love. There's a payoff. And it's remarkable. I'm going to share that with you next week.
All right, well, good morning, and thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors at Grace, and if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that. This is officially a summer Sunday, so you guys really mean it. I'm grateful for your being here as we move into the summer, and I'm excited about our upcoming summer series that starts week after next called Kids Stories for Grownups, where we look at some of the Bible stories that many of us learned when we were younger that we've all heard of, and we kind of revisit those and wonder what we can still learn from them as fully formed, intelligent adults. So that should be exciting. And I love it because the stories from the Bible and the Old Testament are some of my favorite things to examine. So we're excited to get into that series here in a couple of weeks. And I'm excited for the end of this service when we'll take communion together. We're going to take it the old-fashioned way for the first time in over two years. And I know there's many of you here who have never partaken in communion at Grace in the way in which we will do it and have always done it for years. So I'm excited for us to do that as a family, and I'll explain more about that later. But right now, we're going to get into the first part of a two-part sermon based in 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 8. So if you have a Bible, you can open there, and we'll be looking at that text this morning. This morning, we're going to look at verses 5 through 7, and the next week we're going to look just at verse 8. And I know that I say this a lot, and you guys will chuckle at me, but this is one of my favorite passages in all the Bible. I love this passage, and I told you if you get the grace vine and read that this week, so that's two big ifs. Okay, so if you get it and if you actually read it, then you would have seen that I said in the grace vine, if you don't get it, fill out a connection card or something and make sure that you get on our weekly email list so you know what's going on. Unless you don't want that in your inbox, then don't fill it out and we won't send you anything. But I said in there that this passage sums up so much of what we need for the Christian life, for Christian behavior, for Christian expectations, and for Christian purpose. This passage kind of just succinctly encapsulates for us where we need to be focused and what happens when we focus on these things. And for me, I just love it. I've always loved this passage. And it's a big reason that we're doing a series in Peter, and this is what I said in the Grace Find, is so that I can preach these two things. I was actually in a conversation with our new worship pastor, Aaron, about this passage and said, man, I don't know how to condense it to one sermon. And I kind of told him the two things I was thinking. He was like, you got to do two. And I'm like, great, two-parter. I'm in charge of the sermons anyway. So it just became a two-part sermon. So here we go. We're going to dive in, but I want to dive in with some reflections on what the Bible has to say about love, because that's what we're going to be building to today is the way that we're instructed to love according to Peter in 2 Peter. So as we think about the biblical idea of love, it's kind of Christian 101, one of the very first things you learn when you are a believer. After God loved you and Jesus died on the cross for you, and after those things, the thing you learn about what you're supposed to do is love other people, right? We all know. That's the very first thing we're told. Love God, love others. This is what we learn immediately, right? I'm reminded of the conversation that Jesus has early in his ministry where a younger person comes up to him and they say, what do you say is the greatest commandment? And they have a little conversation about it. And it's settled upon that Jesus agrees that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. These are the two greatest commandments. And Jesus says that in those commandments is captured the whole law and the prophets. Meaning, if we'll do those two things, then we'll do everything we're supposed to do in this book. Those two things, just love God, love others, will capture everything in this book. And so I've always loved that teaching because it distills something very complicated, very detailed, down to its most basic elements. It takes everything in this book that we're supposed to do from cover to cover, all the behaviors that we're supposed to have, all the prayers that we're supposed to pray, all the things we're supposed to start doing, all the things we're supposed to stop doing, all the things we're supposed to think, all the ways that our character needs to change. It takes all of that and it boils it down to two simple commandments. Just love God and love others. And in doing that, you'll take care of everything here. And that's something that is probably not new information for a vast majority of you. You know that, you've been taught that, you're aware of it. If I asked many of you what the greatest commandments were, you would tell me those things. But Jesus, later in his ministry, distills those commandments down even more to just one thing. In John chapter 13, verse 35, at the end of his ministry, he's teaching the disciples. He's been with them for three years and he tells them this, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. So he says, he gets them, he sits them down and another week they're going to have the last supper. They're going to do communion. They're going to start communion that we're going to observe at the end of the service. And after he spent three years with them, modeling for them what ministry is, teaching them, discipling them, he sits them down. He says, this is the new commandment that I give to you. And that's a huge word, new commandment. That's not just a passive phrase that he's saying to get to the point. What he's saying is the greatest commandments are to love God and love others. The 10 commandments we learned in Exodus. I'm gonna give you a new commandment that hasn't been given for thousands of years. There's been no new commandments for 4,000 years. I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm gonna give you a new commandment. This one's fresh, listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm going to give you a new commandment. This one's fresh. Listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, go love other people like that. That's it. That's the commandment. But what about all the other things? If you do this, if you go love other people like I've loved you, you'll do all the other things. And in our, some of our theological minds, we'll go, well, Jesus, wait a second. We need to love you too though, right? We can't just go love other people because then that's not Christian, that's just kindness. And Jesus goes, yeah, but go try to love other people the way I've loved the disciples without first loving me. And so Jesus knows that baked into offering Christ-like love to those around us is the necessity that we would fall deeply in love with him, that we would love him earnestly and passionately and sincerely in a steadfast way. It is impossible to live out the new prepping this week, just as an aside, how powerful would it be to live your life in such a way that after you spent time with people, after your kids grew up in your home and you sent them out into the world, what if as a mama or a daddy, you were able to look at those kids and you would say, sweetheart, the way that I've loved you for these last, hopefully just 18 years and then get out, right? But the way that I've loved you for these last 18 years, you go and love other people like I've loved you. What if you could, the people who worked for you, when they moved on to bigger and better and you gave them some parting advice, what if you could look at them and say, the way that I've loved you when you've been with me, go love other people like that. What if you could say that if you moved away? What if you could say that to your small group? What if you could say that to the people that you've been associated with? What if you could say that if you're changing roles, if you're leaving one company and go to the next one, what if you could look at your co-workers and say, all I would ask is that you love people the way that I have loved you. What if you lived a life powerful enough to be able to say that? I could not say that to people. But what if we lived our life in such a way that we could look at the people around us and say, the way that I've loved you and cared for you and prayed for you, now go and do that to other people. And that be the very will of God. It's such a powerful example that Jesus sets there to be able to say that to the disciples. But he tells them very clearly, love is the most important thing. You go love. You go offer the kind of love that I've offered you. You go offer that to everyone around you, to your neighbors, to your brothers, to everyone around you. And that's the commandment. That's what God needs of you. Because if you'll just simply do that one thing, then you will have done all of these things. Jesus knows this. And so he's setting up love as the apex value. And as if that's not clear enough, Paul in his writings in Corinthians, and we're going to get to the love passage in Corinthians 13, but at the end of this passage where he's written about spiritual gifts and he's saying, but spiritual gifts really don't compare to Christian values and of the Christian values of the virtues, really there's only three that remain. He says this in 1 Corinthians 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Paul makes it very clear. Love is the apex virtue. I always think that there's got to be some family with triplet girls named faith, hope, and love. And you know which one is the favorite, right? Faith and Hope, they're fine. But Love, she's great. These three remain, Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love. So Paul makes it very clear, in addition to all the teachings of Jesus, where it's very clear throughout the Gospels that Love really is the apex value. And so so we tell new Christians, when you become a Christian, Christianity 101, what do I need to do? What's expected of me? Go love God, go love others. And then if you really want to get technical about it, Jesus gives us one commandment, go and love other people as Jesus has loved you. That's what we are to do. That's what we're instructed to do. That's what we see in scripture over and over and over again is like, okay, you're a believer now. You're a Christian. You believe that God is your father and Jesus is your savior. And just to be very clear, the simplest way I know to understand what it means to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, that he is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. You believe in those things, you're a Christian. Once you believe those things, go love as Jesus loved you. He died for us. Go sacrificially love others. Offer a Christ-like love to your neighbor. But I don't know about you. I know about me. That's hard. I'm not very good. I'm not very good at loving people that I love. I'm really not good at loving people I don't care for. And so that's a challenging command. And it makes me wonder if we've ever considered this. Have you ever considered that maybe love is the end of a journey rather than the beginning? Maybe we build towards love. Maybe Jesus, when he told us to just go love other people, maybe he knew the layers of intricacy and nuance that lay underneath that, that that is a situation where it is far more easily said than done. What if actually offering Christ-like love to others is the end of a journey and it's not the place where we begin? And I can't help but think that that's true, that when we first become Christians, when we become believers, or as we go through our Christian life and God is forming our character and sanctifying us, as he does that, I can't help but think it's true that maybe love is the goal and not the starting place. And 1 Corinthians 13, where we learn the most about love and what it is, actually makes this point for me. I'll remind you of what is written in 1 Corinthians 13 verses four through eight. Now, this is usually read at weddings and that's fine and appropriate and good, but this is not romantic love. This is the love that is required of all believers. And this is the love we are to offer. This is what Paul says about it. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. So I would ask you this. Have you ever loved anybody like that? Have you ever actually loved anyone with a love that is not envious, that doesn't boast, that is not easily angered, that isn't rude, that takes no record of wrongs. So if you're married, that one's out. As I was asking myself, have I ever offered anyone this love? The most pure love I can think of is the love that a parent has for a child. Just the way that we've had two kids, and both times, as soon as they're born and they place them on Jen's chest and you're looking at this new life, my heart was instantly so full of love. It's nothing that you can describe. You can't really explain it. You just have to experience it. And when it happens, it just fills you up with so much joy and so much love. And it's just there. And the kid can't do anything but be annoying for like four years. So it's just there. You just love them, right? But even in that pure love, when my one-year-old son, John, is teething and fussy for three days straight, I really fail at not easily angered. I fall off the wagon there. I don't offer him that love. When my six-year-old Lily asks me how to pronounce a word in Spanish, and I tell her, and she says, no, you're wrong. Based on nothing, nothing. She doesn't even know how to say English words all the time. And listen, I don't want to brag. I took Spanish two twice in high school. And I've been to Mexico like a lot. All right. So I know Spanish pronunciations. And then she asked me how to say it. And I tell her, she's like, no, that's not it. And I just, I was easily angered in that moment. Maybe that wasn't easily angered. That was justified anger. I take it back. She deserved it. Have you ever loved anybody like we're told in Corinthians to love? Those things, those things are hard. Being patient and kind and not envious and not keeping any record of wrong and not boastful. That kind of love is hard. And loving others as Christ loves us, who condescended from heaven and took on human form and put up with us for three years, for 33 years, and faultlessly loved everyone around him, selflessly giving of himself. Have you ever loved anyone like that? And I'm belaboring the point to get us to this thought, that telling a new Christian to love like Jesus is like telling a crawling baby to run a marathon. Telling a newly formed Christian, someone who's just come into the faith, whether they're eight or 18 or 48, looking at them and going, okay, you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did and is going to do what he says he's going to do? Yes, I do. I absolutely do. Okay, then go in love exactly as he did. See you later. That's like looking at my son, John, and telling him to run a marathon. John crawls, and he crawls like really good. He's the best crawler that I've ever seen. He's a better crawler than all of your children. He crawls, and he can start to, like, stand a little bit, but he's fat, so he's got to develop some muscle before he can really get going. It would be like looking at him and being like, oh, you're crawling now, buddy? Well, how about a marathon? There's a lot of things that need to take place in his development before he can even think about that. Standing would be good without grabbing the couch or my pant leg. There's a start. Taking steps. Once you take steps, stay on your feet. Learn to actually run. And then there's this funny thing with kids where they have to learn to moderate their speed, right? If you've seen a little kid learn to run, they have one speed, sprint, full out sprint. There's no jogging. It's just the hardest possible steps, and they sprint to wherever they're going. There's no moderate in the middle. So you've got to learn how to jog and moderate your speed. You've got to let your body develop. You've got to build up lung capacity. You should probably try to eat healthy because it's hard to run a marathon on cheeseburgers. You have to start going distances. You have to work towards it. You have to build towards it. And to me, looking at a church full of people and saying, hey, we need to love others as Christ loved us, is in a lot of ways looking at developing children and saying you need to run a marathon. And I'm not looking to denigrate any new believers at all. I'm just trying to think of an illustration that could help us understand the path that needs to be traveled so that we can love as Jesus loves others. And we should understand it as a process, not a starting point, as a goal, not necessarily where we begin. And this is why I love the passage in 2 Peter so much. Because in 2 Peter, what we have is a roadmap to be able to love. Loving like Jesus loves feels impossible. Offering the type of love described in 1 Corinthians 13 feels like too big of a challenge. How could we ever do that? Well, this is where Peter comes in and he shows us and he tells us, hey, if you want to love, here's how you get there. So let's look at what I believe are building blocks of Peter telling God's children, here's how we begin the path towards love. Here's the journey that we take. 2 Peter 1, verses 5-7. For this very reason, make every effort. Let me stop right there. If I hadn't been lazy in my notes, I would have made this a point. And if you are a note taker, I would love for you to write this down. For this very reason, make every effort. Listen to me. Christian character is not developed by default. Christian character is not developed by default. We do not coast into godliness. We do not become a Christian, start going to church, and then slip it into neutral and just coast for the rest of our lives. And I think so many of us get stymied in our Christian walk. So many of us feel like we're in a rut. I know that I'm guilty of this because I somehow assume that developing Christian character and the process of sanctification, which is becoming more like God in character, that that process just happens by default. If I just claim faith for long enough, if I pray a couple of prayers, if I start to bless my meal, if I go to small group, if I go to church, that Christian faith will just develop by default in my life. And I'm just going to grow closer to Christ and experience the spiritual maturity and depth just by simply going through the motions and attending the things I'm supposed to attend. And I just want to tell you, there's a reason that he writes, make every effort. Sometimes we got to try. Christian character is not developed by default. We intentionally and ardently work at it our whole lives. He says this, for this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. We went through this passage in my men's Bible study, and there was a little bit of discussion of, are these things that we're supposed to pursue to make every effort to add to ourselves, our faith, virtue, virtue, knowledge, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection, love, are those things that we're supposed to pursue all together at the same time, just kind of haphazardly in our life, kind of like the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We just kind of pursue all of these things at once. And I just happen to think that that's not the intention of this passage. I think that these are actual building blocks. And I think that because of the word supplement, because Peter says, for this very reason, I want you to supplement your faith with virtue, then supplement your virtue with knowledge, then supplement your knowledge with self-control, then supplement, I think because of that word supplement that he's saying that these things intentionally build on one another. I also think that because he starts with faith. Without faith, none of the rest of this matters. Without faith, how in the world can we be virtuous? If virtuous is dictated to us by the desires of God and who he wants us to be and how he wants us to behave, then how can we possibly do that without faith? What are we being steadfast in? What are we persevering in if it's not faith? How can we possibly offer but move towards godliness without faith? Faith is the essential building block for all of this. It is also the starting point of all salvation. So if we think of new believers, what do they have? They have faith that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. They have faith. And Peter says, good. Instead of going and loving your neighbor as Jesus loved you, how about we do this? How about to that faith, we add virtue? Work on supplementing your faith with virtue. Virtue, simplest way I can understand it, is to be aware of the things that we're supposed to start doing and aware of the things that we're supposed to stop doing. When you are a believer, when you convert to Christianity, there's no doubt that you carry in some behaviors into your new faith that do not belong in your new faith, that ought not be there. And so there's, to be a Christian is to kind of have a constantly running list of things in your head, right? Of things that you're supposed to start doing and things that you should stop doing. And so to be virtuous is to take that seriously and just start to move towards God and character. And then he says, add to your virtue, knowledge, learn about your faith. And I would just slide this in there. I feel like many of us, I've spent my whole life in the church. And I would honestly tell you that I think, and this includes me many times in my life, I think most Christians just stall out right there. I think most Christians come to a faith, yep, I believe Jesus. And then kind of look around and be like, okay, there's some ways I'm supposed to behave. I need to stop doing that stuff. I need to start doing this stuff. And then that's it. And then we just put it on cruise control into eternity. I would be willing to bet that if you're here or you're listening, and sometimes faith feels hard, and it doesn't seem to click with you like it clicks with other people, and I'm just kind of in a rut, or maybe I'm just kind of going through the motions, or maybe I'm not really sure what I believe, I would be willing to bet that part of that is that you just stalled out right here. We started with faith. We added to faith the ways that I'm supposed to behave. And now let's just see what happens until I get to heaven. And there's so much more after that, that we are to make every effort to develop. He says, add to your virtue knowledge. This one's important. I don't think I can stress this too much. Christians, we need to learn about our faith. We need to know our faith. We need to understand our faith. We need to know some basic theology. We need to know some basic things about the Bible and the construction of Scripture and how we know we can trust it. We need to know about the triune God, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We need to know what words like faith and sanctification mean. We need to understand these things. And there's a lot of us who we don't really make much of an effort to do that. We don't really make much of an effort to learn. We just kind of soak in whatever I say, which that's sorry for you guys, and whatever's said in small groups and all those things. And we don't challenge ourselves with personal study. We need to learn and we need to grow. I talked about this, I preached about this a couple of weeks ago, that we need to be prepared with a why. When someone says, hey, why do you have faith? We need to be prepared with an answer. We are to add to our virtue knowledge. We ought to be learners of and about our faith. And if that's a place where you feel like you are lacking or you don't know where to go, please reach out to me and I'll do my best to point you towards some resources that won't all be books, some videos and some podcasts and stuff like that, depending on what kind of learner you are. But we need to grow in our knowledge of our faith. And then to that knowledge, we're to add self-control. The discipline of just continuing to do it, of denying ourself for the sake of something later, for the sake of something better. And then to self-control, we had said fastness or perseverance. This is another reason why I think it's actually building blocks because perseverance isn't required in the infancy of faith, right? If you ever have the privilege and the joy of being with someone in the moment when they convert and they pray to receive Christ and you say amen and then you look at them and you put your hand on their shoulder and you go, hey, listen, just hang in there, buddy. You're bad at that, all right? You're bad at giving advice. If fresh out of the gates, the first place you go to is just cling to hope. Until you've been disappointed by God, until you've been in a spiritual rut, until you've walked through a personal valley of the shadow of death, that advice and that encouragement rings hollow. But when I preached about suffering at the beginning of the book, and we talked about the fact that suffering is a fact of life. The encouragement that I gave you was to persevere. Cling to hope. Don't lose faith. When we addressed Uvalde last week and we said, what's the role of the church? Our role is to persevere and to cling to the hope and so beat back the darkness in the world with the hope that we cling to. We are to persevere. So these things build. And then to perseverance, godliness, becoming more like God in character. And then to godliness. And this is important. When I think about godliness, it's more than just virtue and it's more than just self-control. Because virtue and self-control, those address behaviors. Those address how we behave. But godliness is about who we are. It's about our being. Godliness is when we do the inner heart and soul work to figure out what is it inside of us that's broken that's motivating me to need virtue and to need self-control? What is it inside me that's not right? How is my heart unhealthy? Where are the pockets of darkness in my life that I have not addressed? Maybe we go through the motions of Christianity for years and years and years, and we're good at being virtuous, and we're good at being self-controlled, but there's this voice that kind of tells us when we start to pursue godliness, like, hey, you know the only reason that you've ever really gone through all the religious machinations is to get all the people around you to like you and respect you, right? And that you're really not super sincere in your faith. I'm not saying that that's occurred to me, but I've heard that it occurs to weaker Christians, perhaps. It's when we allow the Holy Spirit to really do the work in our hearts and we cry out to God. When we pursue godliness is when we realize how wretched we are. The person who wrote Amazing Grace, it said, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I promise they had pursued godliness because when you do that, you start to realize that you might have mastered the behaviors, but what's in here is gross. And so you ask God to come in and do the work. And as he works on your heart in that way, he says, now add to your godliness brotherly affection, which is familial affection, brotherly and sisterly affection. And it means the family of God for other Christian brothers and sisters now work on loving the church. And the Christian love that we're supposed to offer the church is powerful enough and strong enough. The unification that we have in Christ and the love that we can offer in Christ supersedes all the other divisions that would seek to drive a wedge within God's church. The love that we have for Christ and the love that we have for one another should overcome any political divide that we would experience between our Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Independent brothers and sisters. None of that should matter when we come together as a church. The love of Christ, the brotherly affection that we are instructed to offer overcomes ethnicity. It overcomes socioeconomic divides. It overcomes divides of just doing life different than one another. The people who just live lives that you would never ever choose and you don't get them and you don't understand them and you think they're dumb. Well, guess what? They think you're dumb too, but the love of Christ unites us. It should cover over those things. And how could we possibly offer the love of Christ to a fallen and lost and broken world when we can't even offer it to the people who share our faith? And I think it's worth pointing out that in our country and in our culture that is as divided as I can ever remember. As far as I can tell, in most churches, that division in the world is mirrored in the church 100%. All the divisions that exist out there, we bring in here. They bring in there. They bring in there. And unless we can learn as believers to offer brotherly affection to the Christians who think differently than us, to be humble enough to do that, how could we possibly offer brotherly affection to a lost and broken world with whom we have very little in common. So we pursue brotherly affection, loving God's church, loving God's people, allowing the love of Christ to bridge any gaps that exist between us. And then, once we do those things, we supplement them with the love of Christ. Now go and love others as Jesus loved you. But love, you see, is the end of the journey. It is not where we start. Jesus starts us there. Go love as I loved you, but he knows all the things that we have to learn along the way before we can be remotely capable of offering others the kind of love that he loved us. And so I don't know where you are. If we use 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 7 as some sort of crude diagnostic tool, I don't know where you are. I don't know where you look at that and go, gosh, that's really where I need to focus in on. That's really what I need to work on. But we're instructed that we are to make every effort, that these things are not just going to happen by osmosis. They're not just going to happen by sitting in the sermon and be like, yep, that was good. I learned from that. And then we go and never, ever work on these things. They'll never, ever happen. So I would strongly encourage you to go home. Take some time today or maybe tomorrow morning and sit down with this passage and say, Father, where am I? Father, what do I need? Do I need more faith? Father, do I need more virtue? Do I need more knowledge? Do I not know enough? God, maybe I need to start learning intentionally. Do I need to just simply cling to and persevere and learn how to flex that muscle because it's really important to me right now? Do I need to forgive some other believers and offer them brotherly or sisterly affection? Do I need to bridge the gap within my own church and let my love of Christ cover over any other divisions that exist? Or God, am I ready to begin to go out and start to offer the love that you offered me? Please do. Sit down with the passage and ask God, where am I? What do I need to do? Where should I place my effort? And it's my hope and my prayer and what I've been praying this whole week that we would do this. Let us commit together to make every effort, every effort to build towards love. Understanding that love is the apex, it's the end of the journey, and it's a path that we are all on to grow to there. Let us go this week and make every effort to build towards being people who offer Christ-like love to everyone around them. Who, after spending time with people, you are able to look at them and say, now go and love others as I have loved you. Let's pursue being those kinds of people and that kind of church with eyes wide open as we understand the journey that that is. In a minute, we're going to take communion and reflect on that love. But first, I'm going to pray for us. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for being love. Your word tells us that while we were still sinners, before we knew you, before we had any capacity of affection for you, that you died for us anyways. Let us be grateful for and fueled by that love. God, give us the discipline and desire to make every effort to build towards a capacity to love others as you have loved us. I pray all these things in your son's name. Amen. Next week when we come back, we're gonna look at what happens, at what the promise is when we pursue love in that way. Because it's not just a simple commandment to love. There's a payoff. And it's remarkable. I'm going to share that with you next week.
All right, well, good morning, and thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors at Grace, and if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that. This is officially a summer Sunday, so you guys really mean it. I'm grateful for your being here as we move into the summer, and I'm excited about our upcoming summer series that starts week after next called Kids Stories for Grownups, where we look at some of the Bible stories that many of us learned when we were younger that we've all heard of, and we kind of revisit those and wonder what we can still learn from them as fully formed, intelligent adults. So that should be exciting. And I love it because the stories from the Bible and the Old Testament are some of my favorite things to examine. So we're excited to get into that series here in a couple of weeks. And I'm excited for the end of this service when we'll take communion together. We're going to take it the old-fashioned way for the first time in over two years. And I know there's many of you here who have never partaken in communion at Grace in the way in which we will do it and have always done it for years. So I'm excited for us to do that as a family, and I'll explain more about that later. But right now, we're going to get into the first part of a two-part sermon based in 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 8. So if you have a Bible, you can open there, and we'll be looking at that text this morning. This morning, we're going to look at verses 5 through 7, and the next week we're going to look just at verse 8. And I know that I say this a lot, and you guys will chuckle at me, but this is one of my favorite passages in all the Bible. I love this passage, and I told you if you get the grace vine and read that this week, so that's two big ifs. Okay, so if you get it and if you actually read it, then you would have seen that I said in the grace vine, if you don't get it, fill out a connection card or something and make sure that you get on our weekly email list so you know what's going on. Unless you don't want that in your inbox, then don't fill it out and we won't send you anything. But I said in there that this passage sums up so much of what we need for the Christian life, for Christian behavior, for Christian expectations, and for Christian purpose. This passage kind of just succinctly encapsulates for us where we need to be focused and what happens when we focus on these things. And for me, I just love it. I've always loved this passage. And it's a big reason that we're doing a series in Peter, and this is what I said in the Grace Find, is so that I can preach these two things. I was actually in a conversation with our new worship pastor, Aaron, about this passage and said, man, I don't know how to condense it to one sermon. And I kind of told him the two things I was thinking. He was like, you got to do two. And I'm like, great, two-parter. I'm in charge of the sermons anyway. So it just became a two-part sermon. So here we go. We're going to dive in, but I want to dive in with some reflections on what the Bible has to say about love, because that's what we're going to be building to today is the way that we're instructed to love according to Peter in 2 Peter. So as we think about the biblical idea of love, it's kind of Christian 101, one of the very first things you learn when you are a believer. After God loved you and Jesus died on the cross for you, and after those things, the thing you learn about what you're supposed to do is love other people, right? We all know. That's the very first thing we're told. Love God, love others. This is what we learn immediately, right? I'm reminded of the conversation that Jesus has early in his ministry where a younger person comes up to him and they say, what do you say is the greatest commandment? And they have a little conversation about it. And it's settled upon that Jesus agrees that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. These are the two greatest commandments. And Jesus says that in those commandments is captured the whole law and the prophets. Meaning, if we'll do those two things, then we'll do everything we're supposed to do in this book. Those two things, just love God, love others, will capture everything in this book. And so I've always loved that teaching because it distills something very complicated, very detailed, down to its most basic elements. It takes everything in this book that we're supposed to do from cover to cover, all the behaviors that we're supposed to have, all the prayers that we're supposed to pray, all the things we're supposed to start doing, all the things we're supposed to stop doing, all the things we're supposed to think, all the ways that our character needs to change. It takes all of that and it boils it down to two simple commandments. Just love God and love others. And in doing that, you'll take care of everything here. And that's something that is probably not new information for a vast majority of you. You know that, you've been taught that, you're aware of it. If I asked many of you what the greatest commandments were, you would tell me those things. But Jesus, later in his ministry, distills those commandments down even more to just one thing. In John chapter 13, verse 35, at the end of his ministry, he's teaching the disciples. He's been with them for three years and he tells them this, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. So he says, he gets them, he sits them down and another week they're going to have the last supper. They're going to do communion. They're going to start communion that we're going to observe at the end of the service. And after he spent three years with them, modeling for them what ministry is, teaching them, discipling them, he sits them down. He says, this is the new commandment that I give to you. And that's a huge word, new commandment. That's not just a passive phrase that he's saying to get to the point. What he's saying is the greatest commandments are to love God and love others. The 10 commandments we learned in Exodus. I'm gonna give you a new commandment that hasn't been given for thousands of years. There's been no new commandments for 4,000 years. I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm gonna give you a new commandment. This one's fresh, listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm going to give you a new commandment. This one's fresh. Listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, go love other people like that. That's it. That's the commandment. But what about all the other things? If you do this, if you go love other people like I've loved you, you'll do all the other things. And in our, some of our theological minds, we'll go, well, Jesus, wait a second. We need to love you too though, right? We can't just go love other people because then that's not Christian, that's just kindness. And Jesus goes, yeah, but go try to love other people the way I've loved the disciples without first loving me. And so Jesus knows that baked into offering Christ-like love to those around us is the necessity that we would fall deeply in love with him, that we would love him earnestly and passionately and sincerely in a steadfast way. It is impossible to live out the new prepping this week, just as an aside, how powerful would it be to live your life in such a way that after you spent time with people, after your kids grew up in your home and you sent them out into the world, what if as a mama or a daddy, you were able to look at those kids and you would say, sweetheart, the way that I've loved you for these last, hopefully just 18 years and then get out, right? But the way that I've loved you for these last 18 years, you go and love other people like I've loved you. What if you could, the people who worked for you, when they moved on to bigger and better and you gave them some parting advice, what if you could look at them and say, the way that I've loved you when you've been with me, go love other people like that. What if you could say that if you moved away? What if you could say that to your small group? What if you could say that to the people that you've been associated with? What if you could say that if you're changing roles, if you're leaving one company and go to the next one, what if you could look at your co-workers and say, all I would ask is that you love people the way that I have loved you. What if you lived a life powerful enough to be able to say that? I could not say that to people. But what if we lived our life in such a way that we could look at the people around us and say, the way that I've loved you and cared for you and prayed for you, now go and do that to other people. And that be the very will of God. It's such a powerful example that Jesus sets there to be able to say that to the disciples. But he tells them very clearly, love is the most important thing. You go love. You go offer the kind of love that I've offered you. You go offer that to everyone around you, to your neighbors, to your brothers, to everyone around you. And that's the commandment. That's what God needs of you. Because if you'll just simply do that one thing, then you will have done all of these things. Jesus knows this. And so he's setting up love as the apex value. And as if that's not clear enough, Paul in his writings in Corinthians, and we're going to get to the love passage in Corinthians 13, but at the end of this passage where he's written about spiritual gifts and he's saying, but spiritual gifts really don't compare to Christian values and of the Christian values of the virtues, really there's only three that remain. He says this in 1 Corinthians 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Paul makes it very clear. Love is the apex virtue. I always think that there's got to be some family with triplet girls named faith, hope, and love. And you know which one is the favorite, right? Faith and Hope, they're fine. But Love, she's great. These three remain, Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love. So Paul makes it very clear, in addition to all the teachings of Jesus, where it's very clear throughout the Gospels that Love really is the apex value. And so so we tell new Christians, when you become a Christian, Christianity 101, what do I need to do? What's expected of me? Go love God, go love others. And then if you really want to get technical about it, Jesus gives us one commandment, go and love other people as Jesus has loved you. That's what we are to do. That's what we're instructed to do. That's what we see in scripture over and over and over again is like, okay, you're a believer now. You're a Christian. You believe that God is your father and Jesus is your savior. And just to be very clear, the simplest way I know to understand what it means to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, that he is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. You believe in those things, you're a Christian. Once you believe those things, go love as Jesus loved you. He died for us. Go sacrificially love others. Offer a Christ-like love to your neighbor. But I don't know about you. I know about me. That's hard. I'm not very good. I'm not very good at loving people that I love. I'm really not good at loving people I don't care for. And so that's a challenging command. And it makes me wonder if we've ever considered this. Have you ever considered that maybe love is the end of a journey rather than the beginning? Maybe we build towards love. Maybe Jesus, when he told us to just go love other people, maybe he knew the layers of intricacy and nuance that lay underneath that, that that is a situation where it is far more easily said than done. What if actually offering Christ-like love to others is the end of a journey and it's not the place where we begin? And I can't help but think that that's true, that when we first become Christians, when we become believers, or as we go through our Christian life and God is forming our character and sanctifying us, as he does that, I can't help but think it's true that maybe love is the goal and not the starting place. And 1 Corinthians 13, where we learn the most about love and what it is, actually makes this point for me. I'll remind you of what is written in 1 Corinthians 13 verses four through eight. Now, this is usually read at weddings and that's fine and appropriate and good, but this is not romantic love. This is the love that is required of all believers. And this is the love we are to offer. This is what Paul says about it. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. So I would ask you this. Have you ever loved anybody like that? Have you ever actually loved anyone with a love that is not envious, that doesn't boast, that is not easily angered, that isn't rude, that takes no record of wrongs. So if you're married, that one's out. As I was asking myself, have I ever offered anyone this love? The most pure love I can think of is the love that a parent has for a child. Just the way that we've had two kids, and both times, as soon as they're born and they place them on Jen's chest and you're looking at this new life, my heart was instantly so full of love. It's nothing that you can describe. You can't really explain it. You just have to experience it. And when it happens, it just fills you up with so much joy and so much love. And it's just there. And the kid can't do anything but be annoying for like four years. So it's just there. You just love them, right? But even in that pure love, when my one-year-old son, John, is teething and fussy for three days straight, I really fail at not easily angered. I fall off the wagon there. I don't offer him that love. When my six-year-old Lily asks me how to pronounce a word in Spanish, and I tell her, and she says, no, you're wrong. Based on nothing, nothing. She doesn't even know how to say English words all the time. And listen, I don't want to brag. I took Spanish two twice in high school. And I've been to Mexico like a lot. All right. So I know Spanish pronunciations. And then she asked me how to say it. And I tell her, she's like, no, that's not it. And I just, I was easily angered in that moment. Maybe that wasn't easily angered. That was justified anger. I take it back. She deserved it. Have you ever loved anybody like we're told in Corinthians to love? Those things, those things are hard. Being patient and kind and not envious and not keeping any record of wrong and not boastful. That kind of love is hard. And loving others as Christ loves us, who condescended from heaven and took on human form and put up with us for three years, for 33 years, and faultlessly loved everyone around him, selflessly giving of himself. Have you ever loved anyone like that? And I'm belaboring the point to get us to this thought, that telling a new Christian to love like Jesus is like telling a crawling baby to run a marathon. Telling a newly formed Christian, someone who's just come into the faith, whether they're eight or 18 or 48, looking at them and going, okay, you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did and is going to do what he says he's going to do? Yes, I do. I absolutely do. Okay, then go in love exactly as he did. See you later. That's like looking at my son, John, and telling him to run a marathon. John crawls, and he crawls like really good. He's the best crawler that I've ever seen. He's a better crawler than all of your children. He crawls, and he can start to, like, stand a little bit, but he's fat, so he's got to develop some muscle before he can really get going. It would be like looking at him and being like, oh, you're crawling now, buddy? Well, how about a marathon? There's a lot of things that need to take place in his development before he can even think about that. Standing would be good without grabbing the couch or my pant leg. There's a start. Taking steps. Once you take steps, stay on your feet. Learn to actually run. And then there's this funny thing with kids where they have to learn to moderate their speed, right? If you've seen a little kid learn to run, they have one speed, sprint, full out sprint. There's no jogging. It's just the hardest possible steps, and they sprint to wherever they're going. There's no moderate in the middle. So you've got to learn how to jog and moderate your speed. You've got to let your body develop. You've got to build up lung capacity. You should probably try to eat healthy because it's hard to run a marathon on cheeseburgers. You have to start going distances. You have to work towards it. You have to build towards it. And to me, looking at a church full of people and saying, hey, we need to love others as Christ loved us, is in a lot of ways looking at developing children and saying you need to run a marathon. And I'm not looking to denigrate any new believers at all. I'm just trying to think of an illustration that could help us understand the path that needs to be traveled so that we can love as Jesus loves others. And we should understand it as a process, not a starting point, as a goal, not necessarily where we begin. And this is why I love the passage in 2 Peter so much. Because in 2 Peter, what we have is a roadmap to be able to love. Loving like Jesus loves feels impossible. Offering the type of love described in 1 Corinthians 13 feels like too big of a challenge. How could we ever do that? Well, this is where Peter comes in and he shows us and he tells us, hey, if you want to love, here's how you get there. So let's look at what I believe are building blocks of Peter telling God's children, here's how we begin the path towards love. Here's the journey that we take. 2 Peter 1, verses 5-7. For this very reason, make every effort. Let me stop right there. If I hadn't been lazy in my notes, I would have made this a point. And if you are a note taker, I would love for you to write this down. For this very reason, make every effort. Listen to me. Christian character is not developed by default. Christian character is not developed by default. We do not coast into godliness. We do not become a Christian, start going to church, and then slip it into neutral and just coast for the rest of our lives. And I think so many of us get stymied in our Christian walk. So many of us feel like we're in a rut. I know that I'm guilty of this because I somehow assume that developing Christian character and the process of sanctification, which is becoming more like God in character, that that process just happens by default. If I just claim faith for long enough, if I pray a couple of prayers, if I start to bless my meal, if I go to small group, if I go to church, that Christian faith will just develop by default in my life. And I'm just going to grow closer to Christ and experience the spiritual maturity and depth just by simply going through the motions and attending the things I'm supposed to attend. And I just want to tell you, there's a reason that he writes, make every effort. Sometimes we got to try. Christian character is not developed by default. We intentionally and ardently work at it our whole lives. He says this, for this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. We went through this passage in my men's Bible study, and there was a little bit of discussion of, are these things that we're supposed to pursue to make every effort to add to ourselves, our faith, virtue, virtue, knowledge, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection, love, are those things that we're supposed to pursue all together at the same time, just kind of haphazardly in our life, kind of like the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We just kind of pursue all of these things at once. And I just happen to think that that's not the intention of this passage. I think that these are actual building blocks. And I think that because of the word supplement, because Peter says, for this very reason, I want you to supplement your faith with virtue, then supplement your virtue with knowledge, then supplement your knowledge with self-control, then supplement, I think because of that word supplement that he's saying that these things intentionally build on one another. I also think that because he starts with faith. Without faith, none of the rest of this matters. Without faith, how in the world can we be virtuous? If virtuous is dictated to us by the desires of God and who he wants us to be and how he wants us to behave, then how can we possibly do that without faith? What are we being steadfast in? What are we persevering in if it's not faith? How can we possibly offer but move towards godliness without faith? Faith is the essential building block for all of this. It is also the starting point of all salvation. So if we think of new believers, what do they have? They have faith that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. They have faith. And Peter says, good. Instead of going and loving your neighbor as Jesus loved you, how about we do this? How about to that faith, we add virtue? Work on supplementing your faith with virtue. Virtue, simplest way I can understand it, is to be aware of the things that we're supposed to start doing and aware of the things that we're supposed to stop doing. When you are a believer, when you convert to Christianity, there's no doubt that you carry in some behaviors into your new faith that do not belong in your new faith, that ought not be there. And so there's, to be a Christian is to kind of have a constantly running list of things in your head, right? Of things that you're supposed to start doing and things that you should stop doing. And so to be virtuous is to take that seriously and just start to move towards God and character. And then he says, add to your virtue, knowledge, learn about your faith. And I would just slide this in there. I feel like many of us, I've spent my whole life in the church. And I would honestly tell you that I think, and this includes me many times in my life, I think most Christians just stall out right there. I think most Christians come to a faith, yep, I believe Jesus. And then kind of look around and be like, okay, there's some ways I'm supposed to behave. I need to stop doing that stuff. I need to start doing this stuff. And then that's it. And then we just put it on cruise control into eternity. I would be willing to bet that if you're here or you're listening, and sometimes faith feels hard, and it doesn't seem to click with you like it clicks with other people, and I'm just kind of in a rut, or maybe I'm just kind of going through the motions, or maybe I'm not really sure what I believe, I would be willing to bet that part of that is that you just stalled out right here. We started with faith. We added to faith the ways that I'm supposed to behave. And now let's just see what happens until I get to heaven. And there's so much more after that, that we are to make every effort to develop. He says, add to your virtue knowledge. This one's important. I don't think I can stress this too much. Christians, we need to learn about our faith. We need to know our faith. We need to understand our faith. We need to know some basic theology. We need to know some basic things about the Bible and the construction of Scripture and how we know we can trust it. We need to know about the triune God, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We need to know what words like faith and sanctification mean. We need to understand these things. And there's a lot of us who we don't really make much of an effort to do that. We don't really make much of an effort to learn. We just kind of soak in whatever I say, which that's sorry for you guys, and whatever's said in small groups and all those things. And we don't challenge ourselves with personal study. We need to learn and we need to grow. I talked about this, I preached about this a couple of weeks ago, that we need to be prepared with a why. When someone says, hey, why do you have faith? We need to be prepared with an answer. We are to add to our virtue knowledge. We ought to be learners of and about our faith. And if that's a place where you feel like you are lacking or you don't know where to go, please reach out to me and I'll do my best to point you towards some resources that won't all be books, some videos and some podcasts and stuff like that, depending on what kind of learner you are. But we need to grow in our knowledge of our faith. And then to that knowledge, we're to add self-control. The discipline of just continuing to do it, of denying ourself for the sake of something later, for the sake of something better. And then to self-control, we had said fastness or perseverance. This is another reason why I think it's actually building blocks because perseverance isn't required in the infancy of faith, right? If you ever have the privilege and the joy of being with someone in the moment when they convert and they pray to receive Christ and you say amen and then you look at them and you put your hand on their shoulder and you go, hey, listen, just hang in there, buddy. You're bad at that, all right? You're bad at giving advice. If fresh out of the gates, the first place you go to is just cling to hope. Until you've been disappointed by God, until you've been in a spiritual rut, until you've walked through a personal valley of the shadow of death, that advice and that encouragement rings hollow. But when I preached about suffering at the beginning of the book, and we talked about the fact that suffering is a fact of life. The encouragement that I gave you was to persevere. Cling to hope. Don't lose faith. When we addressed Uvalde last week and we said, what's the role of the church? Our role is to persevere and to cling to the hope and so beat back the darkness in the world with the hope that we cling to. We are to persevere. So these things build. And then to perseverance, godliness, becoming more like God in character. And then to godliness. And this is important. When I think about godliness, it's more than just virtue and it's more than just self-control. Because virtue and self-control, those address behaviors. Those address how we behave. But godliness is about who we are. It's about our being. Godliness is when we do the inner heart and soul work to figure out what is it inside of us that's broken that's motivating me to need virtue and to need self-control? What is it inside me that's not right? How is my heart unhealthy? Where are the pockets of darkness in my life that I have not addressed? Maybe we go through the motions of Christianity for years and years and years, and we're good at being virtuous, and we're good at being self-controlled, but there's this voice that kind of tells us when we start to pursue godliness, like, hey, you know the only reason that you've ever really gone through all the religious machinations is to get all the people around you to like you and respect you, right? And that you're really not super sincere in your faith. I'm not saying that that's occurred to me, but I've heard that it occurs to weaker Christians, perhaps. It's when we allow the Holy Spirit to really do the work in our hearts and we cry out to God. When we pursue godliness is when we realize how wretched we are. The person who wrote Amazing Grace, it said, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I promise they had pursued godliness because when you do that, you start to realize that you might have mastered the behaviors, but what's in here is gross. And so you ask God to come in and do the work. And as he works on your heart in that way, he says, now add to your godliness brotherly affection, which is familial affection, brotherly and sisterly affection. And it means the family of God for other Christian brothers and sisters now work on loving the church. And the Christian love that we're supposed to offer the church is powerful enough and strong enough. The unification that we have in Christ and the love that we can offer in Christ supersedes all the other divisions that would seek to drive a wedge within God's church. The love that we have for Christ and the love that we have for one another should overcome any political divide that we would experience between our Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Independent brothers and sisters. None of that should matter when we come together as a church. The love of Christ, the brotherly affection that we are instructed to offer overcomes ethnicity. It overcomes socioeconomic divides. It overcomes divides of just doing life different than one another. The people who just live lives that you would never ever choose and you don't get them and you don't understand them and you think they're dumb. Well, guess what? They think you're dumb too, but the love of Christ unites us. It should cover over those things. And how could we possibly offer the love of Christ to a fallen and lost and broken world when we can't even offer it to the people who share our faith? And I think it's worth pointing out that in our country and in our culture that is as divided as I can ever remember. As far as I can tell, in most churches, that division in the world is mirrored in the church 100%. All the divisions that exist out there, we bring in here. They bring in there. They bring in there. And unless we can learn as believers to offer brotherly affection to the Christians who think differently than us, to be humble enough to do that, how could we possibly offer brotherly affection to a lost and broken world with whom we have very little in common. So we pursue brotherly affection, loving God's church, loving God's people, allowing the love of Christ to bridge any gaps that exist between us. And then, once we do those things, we supplement them with the love of Christ. Now go and love others as Jesus loved you. But love, you see, is the end of the journey. It is not where we start. Jesus starts us there. Go love as I loved you, but he knows all the things that we have to learn along the way before we can be remotely capable of offering others the kind of love that he loved us. And so I don't know where you are. If we use 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 7 as some sort of crude diagnostic tool, I don't know where you are. I don't know where you look at that and go, gosh, that's really where I need to focus in on. That's really what I need to work on. But we're instructed that we are to make every effort, that these things are not just going to happen by osmosis. They're not just going to happen by sitting in the sermon and be like, yep, that was good. I learned from that. And then we go and never, ever work on these things. They'll never, ever happen. So I would strongly encourage you to go home. Take some time today or maybe tomorrow morning and sit down with this passage and say, Father, where am I? Father, what do I need? Do I need more faith? Father, do I need more virtue? Do I need more knowledge? Do I not know enough? God, maybe I need to start learning intentionally. Do I need to just simply cling to and persevere and learn how to flex that muscle because it's really important to me right now? Do I need to forgive some other believers and offer them brotherly or sisterly affection? Do I need to bridge the gap within my own church and let my love of Christ cover over any other divisions that exist? Or God, am I ready to begin to go out and start to offer the love that you offered me? Please do. Sit down with the passage and ask God, where am I? What do I need to do? Where should I place my effort? And it's my hope and my prayer and what I've been praying this whole week that we would do this. Let us commit together to make every effort, every effort to build towards love. Understanding that love is the apex, it's the end of the journey, and it's a path that we are all on to grow to there. Let us go this week and make every effort to build towards being people who offer Christ-like love to everyone around them. Who, after spending time with people, you are able to look at them and say, now go and love others as I have loved you. Let's pursue being those kinds of people and that kind of church with eyes wide open as we understand the journey that that is. In a minute, we're going to take communion and reflect on that love. But first, I'm going to pray for us. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for being love. Your word tells us that while we were still sinners, before we knew you, before we had any capacity of affection for you, that you died for us anyways. Let us be grateful for and fueled by that love. God, give us the discipline and desire to make every effort to build towards a capacity to love others as you have loved us. I pray all these things in your son's name. Amen. Next week when we come back, we're gonna look at what happens, at what the promise is when we pursue love in that way. Because it's not just a simple commandment to love. There's a payoff. And it's remarkable. I'm going to share that with you next week.
All right, well, good morning, and thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors at Grace, and if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that. This is officially a summer Sunday, so you guys really mean it. I'm grateful for your being here as we move into the summer, and I'm excited about our upcoming summer series that starts week after next called Kids Stories for Grownups, where we look at some of the Bible stories that many of us learned when we were younger that we've all heard of, and we kind of revisit those and wonder what we can still learn from them as fully formed, intelligent adults. So that should be exciting. And I love it because the stories from the Bible and the Old Testament are some of my favorite things to examine. So we're excited to get into that series here in a couple of weeks. And I'm excited for the end of this service when we'll take communion together. We're going to take it the old-fashioned way for the first time in over two years. And I know there's many of you here who have never partaken in communion at Grace in the way in which we will do it and have always done it for years. So I'm excited for us to do that as a family, and I'll explain more about that later. But right now, we're going to get into the first part of a two-part sermon based in 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 8. So if you have a Bible, you can open there, and we'll be looking at that text this morning. This morning, we're going to look at verses 5 through 7, and the next week we're going to look just at verse 8. And I know that I say this a lot, and you guys will chuckle at me, but this is one of my favorite passages in all the Bible. I love this passage, and I told you if you get the grace vine and read that this week, so that's two big ifs. Okay, so if you get it and if you actually read it, then you would have seen that I said in the grace vine, if you don't get it, fill out a connection card or something and make sure that you get on our weekly email list so you know what's going on. Unless you don't want that in your inbox, then don't fill it out and we won't send you anything. But I said in there that this passage sums up so much of what we need for the Christian life, for Christian behavior, for Christian expectations, and for Christian purpose. This passage kind of just succinctly encapsulates for us where we need to be focused and what happens when we focus on these things. And for me, I just love it. I've always loved this passage. And it's a big reason that we're doing a series in Peter, and this is what I said in the Grace Find, is so that I can preach these two things. I was actually in a conversation with our new worship pastor, Aaron, about this passage and said, man, I don't know how to condense it to one sermon. And I kind of told him the two things I was thinking. He was like, you got to do two. And I'm like, great, two-parter. I'm in charge of the sermons anyway. So it just became a two-part sermon. So here we go. We're going to dive in, but I want to dive in with some reflections on what the Bible has to say about love, because that's what we're going to be building to today is the way that we're instructed to love according to Peter in 2 Peter. So as we think about the biblical idea of love, it's kind of Christian 101, one of the very first things you learn when you are a believer. After God loved you and Jesus died on the cross for you, and after those things, the thing you learn about what you're supposed to do is love other people, right? We all know. That's the very first thing we're told. Love God, love others. This is what we learn immediately, right? I'm reminded of the conversation that Jesus has early in his ministry where a younger person comes up to him and they say, what do you say is the greatest commandment? And they have a little conversation about it. And it's settled upon that Jesus agrees that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. These are the two greatest commandments. And Jesus says that in those commandments is captured the whole law and the prophets. Meaning, if we'll do those two things, then we'll do everything we're supposed to do in this book. Those two things, just love God, love others, will capture everything in this book. And so I've always loved that teaching because it distills something very complicated, very detailed, down to its most basic elements. It takes everything in this book that we're supposed to do from cover to cover, all the behaviors that we're supposed to have, all the prayers that we're supposed to pray, all the things we're supposed to start doing, all the things we're supposed to stop doing, all the things we're supposed to think, all the ways that our character needs to change. It takes all of that and it boils it down to two simple commandments. Just love God and love others. And in doing that, you'll take care of everything here. And that's something that is probably not new information for a vast majority of you. You know that, you've been taught that, you're aware of it. If I asked many of you what the greatest commandments were, you would tell me those things. But Jesus, later in his ministry, distills those commandments down even more to just one thing. In John chapter 13, verse 35, at the end of his ministry, he's teaching the disciples. He's been with them for three years and he tells them this, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. So he says, he gets them, he sits them down and another week they're going to have the last supper. They're going to do communion. They're going to start communion that we're going to observe at the end of the service. And after he spent three years with them, modeling for them what ministry is, teaching them, discipling them, he sits them down. He says, this is the new commandment that I give to you. And that's a huge word, new commandment. That's not just a passive phrase that he's saying to get to the point. What he's saying is the greatest commandments are to love God and love others. The 10 commandments we learned in Exodus. I'm gonna give you a new commandment that hasn't been given for thousands of years. There's been no new commandments for 4,000 years. I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm gonna give you a new commandment. This one's fresh, listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm going to give you a new commandment. This one's fresh. Listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, go love other people like that. That's it. That's the commandment. But what about all the other things? If you do this, if you go love other people like I've loved you, you'll do all the other things. And in our, some of our theological minds, we'll go, well, Jesus, wait a second. We need to love you too though, right? We can't just go love other people because then that's not Christian, that's just kindness. And Jesus goes, yeah, but go try to love other people the way I've loved the disciples without first loving me. And so Jesus knows that baked into offering Christ-like love to those around us is the necessity that we would fall deeply in love with him, that we would love him earnestly and passionately and sincerely in a steadfast way. It is impossible to live out the new prepping this week, just as an aside, how powerful would it be to live your life in such a way that after you spent time with people, after your kids grew up in your home and you sent them out into the world, what if as a mama or a daddy, you were able to look at those kids and you would say, sweetheart, the way that I've loved you for these last, hopefully just 18 years and then get out, right? But the way that I've loved you for these last 18 years, you go and love other people like I've loved you. What if you could, the people who worked for you, when they moved on to bigger and better and you gave them some parting advice, what if you could look at them and say, the way that I've loved you when you've been with me, go love other people like that. What if you could say that if you moved away? What if you could say that to your small group? What if you could say that to the people that you've been associated with? What if you could say that if you're changing roles, if you're leaving one company and go to the next one, what if you could look at your co-workers and say, all I would ask is that you love people the way that I have loved you. What if you lived a life powerful enough to be able to say that? I could not say that to people. But what if we lived our life in such a way that we could look at the people around us and say, the way that I've loved you and cared for you and prayed for you, now go and do that to other people. And that be the very will of God. It's such a powerful example that Jesus sets there to be able to say that to the disciples. But he tells them very clearly, love is the most important thing. You go love. You go offer the kind of love that I've offered you. You go offer that to everyone around you, to your neighbors, to your brothers, to everyone around you. And that's the commandment. That's what God needs of you. Because if you'll just simply do that one thing, then you will have done all of these things. Jesus knows this. And so he's setting up love as the apex value. And as if that's not clear enough, Paul in his writings in Corinthians, and we're going to get to the love passage in Corinthians 13, but at the end of this passage where he's written about spiritual gifts and he's saying, but spiritual gifts really don't compare to Christian values and of the Christian values of the virtues, really there's only three that remain. He says this in 1 Corinthians 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Paul makes it very clear. Love is the apex virtue. I always think that there's got to be some family with triplet girls named faith, hope, and love. And you know which one is the favorite, right? Faith and Hope, they're fine. But Love, she's great. These three remain, Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love. So Paul makes it very clear, in addition to all the teachings of Jesus, where it's very clear throughout the Gospels that Love really is the apex value. And so so we tell new Christians, when you become a Christian, Christianity 101, what do I need to do? What's expected of me? Go love God, go love others. And then if you really want to get technical about it, Jesus gives us one commandment, go and love other people as Jesus has loved you. That's what we are to do. That's what we're instructed to do. That's what we see in scripture over and over and over again is like, okay, you're a believer now. You're a Christian. You believe that God is your father and Jesus is your savior. And just to be very clear, the simplest way I know to understand what it means to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, that he is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. You believe in those things, you're a Christian. Once you believe those things, go love as Jesus loved you. He died for us. Go sacrificially love others. Offer a Christ-like love to your neighbor. But I don't know about you. I know about me. That's hard. I'm not very good. I'm not very good at loving people that I love. I'm really not good at loving people I don't care for. And so that's a challenging command. And it makes me wonder if we've ever considered this. Have you ever considered that maybe love is the end of a journey rather than the beginning? Maybe we build towards love. Maybe Jesus, when he told us to just go love other people, maybe he knew the layers of intricacy and nuance that lay underneath that, that that is a situation where it is far more easily said than done. What if actually offering Christ-like love to others is the end of a journey and it's not the place where we begin? And I can't help but think that that's true, that when we first become Christians, when we become believers, or as we go through our Christian life and God is forming our character and sanctifying us, as he does that, I can't help but think it's true that maybe love is the goal and not the starting place. And 1 Corinthians 13, where we learn the most about love and what it is, actually makes this point for me. I'll remind you of what is written in 1 Corinthians 13 verses four through eight. Now, this is usually read at weddings and that's fine and appropriate and good, but this is not romantic love. This is the love that is required of all believers. And this is the love we are to offer. This is what Paul says about it. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. So I would ask you this. Have you ever loved anybody like that? Have you ever actually loved anyone with a love that is not envious, that doesn't boast, that is not easily angered, that isn't rude, that takes no record of wrongs. So if you're married, that one's out. As I was asking myself, have I ever offered anyone this love? The most pure love I can think of is the love that a parent has for a child. Just the way that we've had two kids, and both times, as soon as they're born and they place them on Jen's chest and you're looking at this new life, my heart was instantly so full of love. It's nothing that you can describe. You can't really explain it. You just have to experience it. And when it happens, it just fills you up with so much joy and so much love. And it's just there. And the kid can't do anything but be annoying for like four years. So it's just there. You just love them, right? But even in that pure love, when my one-year-old son, John, is teething and fussy for three days straight, I really fail at not easily angered. I fall off the wagon there. I don't offer him that love. When my six-year-old Lily asks me how to pronounce a word in Spanish, and I tell her, and she says, no, you're wrong. Based on nothing, nothing. She doesn't even know how to say English words all the time. And listen, I don't want to brag. I took Spanish two twice in high school. And I've been to Mexico like a lot. All right. So I know Spanish pronunciations. And then she asked me how to say it. And I tell her, she's like, no, that's not it. And I just, I was easily angered in that moment. Maybe that wasn't easily angered. That was justified anger. I take it back. She deserved it. Have you ever loved anybody like we're told in Corinthians to love? Those things, those things are hard. Being patient and kind and not envious and not keeping any record of wrong and not boastful. That kind of love is hard. And loving others as Christ loves us, who condescended from heaven and took on human form and put up with us for three years, for 33 years, and faultlessly loved everyone around him, selflessly giving of himself. Have you ever loved anyone like that? And I'm belaboring the point to get us to this thought, that telling a new Christian to love like Jesus is like telling a crawling baby to run a marathon. Telling a newly formed Christian, someone who's just come into the faith, whether they're eight or 18 or 48, looking at them and going, okay, you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did and is going to do what he says he's going to do? Yes, I do. I absolutely do. Okay, then go in love exactly as he did. See you later. That's like looking at my son, John, and telling him to run a marathon. John crawls, and he crawls like really good. He's the best crawler that I've ever seen. He's a better crawler than all of your children. He crawls, and he can start to, like, stand a little bit, but he's fat, so he's got to develop some muscle before he can really get going. It would be like looking at him and being like, oh, you're crawling now, buddy? Well, how about a marathon? There's a lot of things that need to take place in his development before he can even think about that. Standing would be good without grabbing the couch or my pant leg. There's a start. Taking steps. Once you take steps, stay on your feet. Learn to actually run. And then there's this funny thing with kids where they have to learn to moderate their speed, right? If you've seen a little kid learn to run, they have one speed, sprint, full out sprint. There's no jogging. It's just the hardest possible steps, and they sprint to wherever they're going. There's no moderate in the middle. So you've got to learn how to jog and moderate your speed. You've got to let your body develop. You've got to build up lung capacity. You should probably try to eat healthy because it's hard to run a marathon on cheeseburgers. You have to start going distances. You have to work towards it. You have to build towards it. And to me, looking at a church full of people and saying, hey, we need to love others as Christ loved us, is in a lot of ways looking at developing children and saying you need to run a marathon. And I'm not looking to denigrate any new believers at all. I'm just trying to think of an illustration that could help us understand the path that needs to be traveled so that we can love as Jesus loves others. And we should understand it as a process, not a starting point, as a goal, not necessarily where we begin. And this is why I love the passage in 2 Peter so much. Because in 2 Peter, what we have is a roadmap to be able to love. Loving like Jesus loves feels impossible. Offering the type of love described in 1 Corinthians 13 feels like too big of a challenge. How could we ever do that? Well, this is where Peter comes in and he shows us and he tells us, hey, if you want to love, here's how you get there. So let's look at what I believe are building blocks of Peter telling God's children, here's how we begin the path towards love. Here's the journey that we take. 2 Peter 1, verses 5-7. For this very reason, make every effort. Let me stop right there. If I hadn't been lazy in my notes, I would have made this a point. And if you are a note taker, I would love for you to write this down. For this very reason, make every effort. Listen to me. Christian character is not developed by default. Christian character is not developed by default. We do not coast into godliness. We do not become a Christian, start going to church, and then slip it into neutral and just coast for the rest of our lives. And I think so many of us get stymied in our Christian walk. So many of us feel like we're in a rut. I know that I'm guilty of this because I somehow assume that developing Christian character and the process of sanctification, which is becoming more like God in character, that that process just happens by default. If I just claim faith for long enough, if I pray a couple of prayers, if I start to bless my meal, if I go to small group, if I go to church, that Christian faith will just develop by default in my life. And I'm just going to grow closer to Christ and experience the spiritual maturity and depth just by simply going through the motions and attending the things I'm supposed to attend. And I just want to tell you, there's a reason that he writes, make every effort. Sometimes we got to try. Christian character is not developed by default. We intentionally and ardently work at it our whole lives. He says this, for this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. We went through this passage in my men's Bible study, and there was a little bit of discussion of, are these things that we're supposed to pursue to make every effort to add to ourselves, our faith, virtue, virtue, knowledge, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection, love, are those things that we're supposed to pursue all together at the same time, just kind of haphazardly in our life, kind of like the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We just kind of pursue all of these things at once. And I just happen to think that that's not the intention of this passage. I think that these are actual building blocks. And I think that because of the word supplement, because Peter says, for this very reason, I want you to supplement your faith with virtue, then supplement your virtue with knowledge, then supplement your knowledge with self-control, then supplement, I think because of that word supplement that he's saying that these things intentionally build on one another. I also think that because he starts with faith. Without faith, none of the rest of this matters. Without faith, how in the world can we be virtuous? If virtuous is dictated to us by the desires of God and who he wants us to be and how he wants us to behave, then how can we possibly do that without faith? What are we being steadfast in? What are we persevering in if it's not faith? How can we possibly offer but move towards godliness without faith? Faith is the essential building block for all of this. It is also the starting point of all salvation. So if we think of new believers, what do they have? They have faith that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. They have faith. And Peter says, good. Instead of going and loving your neighbor as Jesus loved you, how about we do this? How about to that faith, we add virtue? Work on supplementing your faith with virtue. Virtue, simplest way I can understand it, is to be aware of the things that we're supposed to start doing and aware of the things that we're supposed to stop doing. When you are a believer, when you convert to Christianity, there's no doubt that you carry in some behaviors into your new faith that do not belong in your new faith, that ought not be there. And so there's, to be a Christian is to kind of have a constantly running list of things in your head, right? Of things that you're supposed to start doing and things that you should stop doing. And so to be virtuous is to take that seriously and just start to move towards God and character. And then he says, add to your virtue, knowledge, learn about your faith. And I would just slide this in there. I feel like many of us, I've spent my whole life in the church. And I would honestly tell you that I think, and this includes me many times in my life, I think most Christians just stall out right there. I think most Christians come to a faith, yep, I believe Jesus. And then kind of look around and be like, okay, there's some ways I'm supposed to behave. I need to stop doing that stuff. I need to start doing this stuff. And then that's it. And then we just put it on cruise control into eternity. I would be willing to bet that if you're here or you're listening, and sometimes faith feels hard, and it doesn't seem to click with you like it clicks with other people, and I'm just kind of in a rut, or maybe I'm just kind of going through the motions, or maybe I'm not really sure what I believe, I would be willing to bet that part of that is that you just stalled out right here. We started with faith. We added to faith the ways that I'm supposed to behave. And now let's just see what happens until I get to heaven. And there's so much more after that, that we are to make every effort to develop. He says, add to your virtue knowledge. This one's important. I don't think I can stress this too much. Christians, we need to learn about our faith. We need to know our faith. We need to understand our faith. We need to know some basic theology. We need to know some basic things about the Bible and the construction of Scripture and how we know we can trust it. We need to know about the triune God, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We need to know what words like faith and sanctification mean. We need to understand these things. And there's a lot of us who we don't really make much of an effort to do that. We don't really make much of an effort to learn. We just kind of soak in whatever I say, which that's sorry for you guys, and whatever's said in small groups and all those things. And we don't challenge ourselves with personal study. We need to learn and we need to grow. I talked about this, I preached about this a couple of weeks ago, that we need to be prepared with a why. When someone says, hey, why do you have faith? We need to be prepared with an answer. We are to add to our virtue knowledge. We ought to be learners of and about our faith. And if that's a place where you feel like you are lacking or you don't know where to go, please reach out to me and I'll do my best to point you towards some resources that won't all be books, some videos and some podcasts and stuff like that, depending on what kind of learner you are. But we need to grow in our knowledge of our faith. And then to that knowledge, we're to add self-control. The discipline of just continuing to do it, of denying ourself for the sake of something later, for the sake of something better. And then to self-control, we had said fastness or perseverance. This is another reason why I think it's actually building blocks because perseverance isn't required in the infancy of faith, right? If you ever have the privilege and the joy of being with someone in the moment when they convert and they pray to receive Christ and you say amen and then you look at them and you put your hand on their shoulder and you go, hey, listen, just hang in there, buddy. You're bad at that, all right? You're bad at giving advice. If fresh out of the gates, the first place you go to is just cling to hope. Until you've been disappointed by God, until you've been in a spiritual rut, until you've walked through a personal valley of the shadow of death, that advice and that encouragement rings hollow. But when I preached about suffering at the beginning of the book, and we talked about the fact that suffering is a fact of life. The encouragement that I gave you was to persevere. Cling to hope. Don't lose faith. When we addressed Uvalde last week and we said, what's the role of the church? Our role is to persevere and to cling to the hope and so beat back the darkness in the world with the hope that we cling to. We are to persevere. So these things build. And then to perseverance, godliness, becoming more like God in character. And then to godliness. And this is important. When I think about godliness, it's more than just virtue and it's more than just self-control. Because virtue and self-control, those address behaviors. Those address how we behave. But godliness is about who we are. It's about our being. Godliness is when we do the inner heart and soul work to figure out what is it inside of us that's broken that's motivating me to need virtue and to need self-control? What is it inside me that's not right? How is my heart unhealthy? Where are the pockets of darkness in my life that I have not addressed? Maybe we go through the motions of Christianity for years and years and years, and we're good at being virtuous, and we're good at being self-controlled, but there's this voice that kind of tells us when we start to pursue godliness, like, hey, you know the only reason that you've ever really gone through all the religious machinations is to get all the people around you to like you and respect you, right? And that you're really not super sincere in your faith. I'm not saying that that's occurred to me, but I've heard that it occurs to weaker Christians, perhaps. It's when we allow the Holy Spirit to really do the work in our hearts and we cry out to God. When we pursue godliness is when we realize how wretched we are. The person who wrote Amazing Grace, it said, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I promise they had pursued godliness because when you do that, you start to realize that you might have mastered the behaviors, but what's in here is gross. And so you ask God to come in and do the work. And as he works on your heart in that way, he says, now add to your godliness brotherly affection, which is familial affection, brotherly and sisterly affection. And it means the family of God for other Christian brothers and sisters now work on loving the church. And the Christian love that we're supposed to offer the church is powerful enough and strong enough. The unification that we have in Christ and the love that we can offer in Christ supersedes all the other divisions that would seek to drive a wedge within God's church. The love that we have for Christ and the love that we have for one another should overcome any political divide that we would experience between our Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Independent brothers and sisters. None of that should matter when we come together as a church. The love of Christ, the brotherly affection that we are instructed to offer overcomes ethnicity. It overcomes socioeconomic divides. It overcomes divides of just doing life different than one another. The people who just live lives that you would never ever choose and you don't get them and you don't understand them and you think they're dumb. Well, guess what? They think you're dumb too, but the love of Christ unites us. It should cover over those things. And how could we possibly offer the love of Christ to a fallen and lost and broken world when we can't even offer it to the people who share our faith? And I think it's worth pointing out that in our country and in our culture that is as divided as I can ever remember. As far as I can tell, in most churches, that division in the world is mirrored in the church 100%. All the divisions that exist out there, we bring in here. They bring in there. They bring in there. And unless we can learn as believers to offer brotherly affection to the Christians who think differently than us, to be humble enough to do that, how could we possibly offer brotherly affection to a lost and broken world with whom we have very little in common. So we pursue brotherly affection, loving God's church, loving God's people, allowing the love of Christ to bridge any gaps that exist between us. And then, once we do those things, we supplement them with the love of Christ. Now go and love others as Jesus loved you. But love, you see, is the end of the journey. It is not where we start. Jesus starts us there. Go love as I loved you, but he knows all the things that we have to learn along the way before we can be remotely capable of offering others the kind of love that he loved us. And so I don't know where you are. If we use 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 7 as some sort of crude diagnostic tool, I don't know where you are. I don't know where you look at that and go, gosh, that's really where I need to focus in on. That's really what I need to work on. But we're instructed that we are to make every effort, that these things are not just going to happen by osmosis. They're not just going to happen by sitting in the sermon and be like, yep, that was good. I learned from that. And then we go and never, ever work on these things. They'll never, ever happen. So I would strongly encourage you to go home. Take some time today or maybe tomorrow morning and sit down with this passage and say, Father, where am I? Father, what do I need? Do I need more faith? Father, do I need more virtue? Do I need more knowledge? Do I not know enough? God, maybe I need to start learning intentionally. Do I need to just simply cling to and persevere and learn how to flex that muscle because it's really important to me right now? Do I need to forgive some other believers and offer them brotherly or sisterly affection? Do I need to bridge the gap within my own church and let my love of Christ cover over any other divisions that exist? Or God, am I ready to begin to go out and start to offer the love that you offered me? Please do. Sit down with the passage and ask God, where am I? What do I need to do? Where should I place my effort? And it's my hope and my prayer and what I've been praying this whole week that we would do this. Let us commit together to make every effort, every effort to build towards love. Understanding that love is the apex, it's the end of the journey, and it's a path that we are all on to grow to there. Let us go this week and make every effort to build towards being people who offer Christ-like love to everyone around them. Who, after spending time with people, you are able to look at them and say, now go and love others as I have loved you. Let's pursue being those kinds of people and that kind of church with eyes wide open as we understand the journey that that is. In a minute, we're going to take communion and reflect on that love. But first, I'm going to pray for us. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for being love. Your word tells us that while we were still sinners, before we knew you, before we had any capacity of affection for you, that you died for us anyways. Let us be grateful for and fueled by that love. God, give us the discipline and desire to make every effort to build towards a capacity to love others as you have loved us. I pray all these things in your son's name. Amen. Next week when we come back, we're gonna look at what happens, at what the promise is when we pursue love in that way. Because it's not just a simple commandment to love. There's a payoff. And it's remarkable. I'm going to share that with you next week.
All right, well, good morning, and thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors at Grace, and if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that. This is officially a summer Sunday, so you guys really mean it. I'm grateful for your being here as we move into the summer, and I'm excited about our upcoming summer series that starts week after next called Kids Stories for Grownups, where we look at some of the Bible stories that many of us learned when we were younger that we've all heard of, and we kind of revisit those and wonder what we can still learn from them as fully formed, intelligent adults. So that should be exciting. And I love it because the stories from the Bible and the Old Testament are some of my favorite things to examine. So we're excited to get into that series here in a couple of weeks. And I'm excited for the end of this service when we'll take communion together. We're going to take it the old-fashioned way for the first time in over two years. And I know there's many of you here who have never partaken in communion at Grace in the way in which we will do it and have always done it for years. So I'm excited for us to do that as a family, and I'll explain more about that later. But right now, we're going to get into the first part of a two-part sermon based in 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 8. So if you have a Bible, you can open there, and we'll be looking at that text this morning. This morning, we're going to look at verses 5 through 7, and the next week we're going to look just at verse 8. And I know that I say this a lot, and you guys will chuckle at me, but this is one of my favorite passages in all the Bible. I love this passage, and I told you if you get the grace vine and read that this week, so that's two big ifs. Okay, so if you get it and if you actually read it, then you would have seen that I said in the grace vine, if you don't get it, fill out a connection card or something and make sure that you get on our weekly email list so you know what's going on. Unless you don't want that in your inbox, then don't fill it out and we won't send you anything. But I said in there that this passage sums up so much of what we need for the Christian life, for Christian behavior, for Christian expectations, and for Christian purpose. This passage kind of just succinctly encapsulates for us where we need to be focused and what happens when we focus on these things. And for me, I just love it. I've always loved this passage. And it's a big reason that we're doing a series in Peter, and this is what I said in the Grace Find, is so that I can preach these two things. I was actually in a conversation with our new worship pastor, Aaron, about this passage and said, man, I don't know how to condense it to one sermon. And I kind of told him the two things I was thinking. He was like, you got to do two. And I'm like, great, two-parter. I'm in charge of the sermons anyway. So it just became a two-part sermon. So here we go. We're going to dive in, but I want to dive in with some reflections on what the Bible has to say about love, because that's what we're going to be building to today is the way that we're instructed to love according to Peter in 2 Peter. So as we think about the biblical idea of love, it's kind of Christian 101, one of the very first things you learn when you are a believer. After God loved you and Jesus died on the cross for you, and after those things, the thing you learn about what you're supposed to do is love other people, right? We all know. That's the very first thing we're told. Love God, love others. This is what we learn immediately, right? I'm reminded of the conversation that Jesus has early in his ministry where a younger person comes up to him and they say, what do you say is the greatest commandment? And they have a little conversation about it. And it's settled upon that Jesus agrees that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. These are the two greatest commandments. And Jesus says that in those commandments is captured the whole law and the prophets. Meaning, if we'll do those two things, then we'll do everything we're supposed to do in this book. Those two things, just love God, love others, will capture everything in this book. And so I've always loved that teaching because it distills something very complicated, very detailed, down to its most basic elements. It takes everything in this book that we're supposed to do from cover to cover, all the behaviors that we're supposed to have, all the prayers that we're supposed to pray, all the things we're supposed to start doing, all the things we're supposed to stop doing, all the things we're supposed to think, all the ways that our character needs to change. It takes all of that and it boils it down to two simple commandments. Just love God and love others. And in doing that, you'll take care of everything here. And that's something that is probably not new information for a vast majority of you. You know that, you've been taught that, you're aware of it. If I asked many of you what the greatest commandments were, you would tell me those things. But Jesus, later in his ministry, distills those commandments down even more to just one thing. In John chapter 13, verse 35, at the end of his ministry, he's teaching the disciples. He's been with them for three years and he tells them this, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. So he says, he gets them, he sits them down and another week they're going to have the last supper. They're going to do communion. They're going to start communion that we're going to observe at the end of the service. And after he spent three years with them, modeling for them what ministry is, teaching them, discipling them, he sits them down. He says, this is the new commandment that I give to you. And that's a huge word, new commandment. That's not just a passive phrase that he's saying to get to the point. What he's saying is the greatest commandments are to love God and love others. The 10 commandments we learned in Exodus. I'm gonna give you a new commandment that hasn't been given for thousands of years. There's been no new commandments for 4,000 years. I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm gonna give you a new commandment. This one's fresh, listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm going to give you a new commandment. This one's fresh. Listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, go love other people like that. That's it. That's the commandment. But what about all the other things? If you do this, if you go love other people like I've loved you, you'll do all the other things. And in our, some of our theological minds, we'll go, well, Jesus, wait a second. We need to love you too though, right? We can't just go love other people because then that's not Christian, that's just kindness. And Jesus goes, yeah, but go try to love other people the way I've loved the disciples without first loving me. And so Jesus knows that baked into offering Christ-like love to those around us is the necessity that we would fall deeply in love with him, that we would love him earnestly and passionately and sincerely in a steadfast way. It is impossible to live out the new prepping this week, just as an aside, how powerful would it be to live your life in such a way that after you spent time with people, after your kids grew up in your home and you sent them out into the world, what if as a mama or a daddy, you were able to look at those kids and you would say, sweetheart, the way that I've loved you for these last, hopefully just 18 years and then get out, right? But the way that I've loved you for these last 18 years, you go and love other people like I've loved you. What if you could, the people who worked for you, when they moved on to bigger and better and you gave them some parting advice, what if you could look at them and say, the way that I've loved you when you've been with me, go love other people like that. What if you could say that if you moved away? What if you could say that to your small group? What if you could say that to the people that you've been associated with? What if you could say that if you're changing roles, if you're leaving one company and go to the next one, what if you could look at your co-workers and say, all I would ask is that you love people the way that I have loved you. What if you lived a life powerful enough to be able to say that? I could not say that to people. But what if we lived our life in such a way that we could look at the people around us and say, the way that I've loved you and cared for you and prayed for you, now go and do that to other people. And that be the very will of God. It's such a powerful example that Jesus sets there to be able to say that to the disciples. But he tells them very clearly, love is the most important thing. You go love. You go offer the kind of love that I've offered you. You go offer that to everyone around you, to your neighbors, to your brothers, to everyone around you. And that's the commandment. That's what God needs of you. Because if you'll just simply do that one thing, then you will have done all of these things. Jesus knows this. And so he's setting up love as the apex value. And as if that's not clear enough, Paul in his writings in Corinthians, and we're going to get to the love passage in Corinthians 13, but at the end of this passage where he's written about spiritual gifts and he's saying, but spiritual gifts really don't compare to Christian values and of the Christian values of the virtues, really there's only three that remain. He says this in 1 Corinthians 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Paul makes it very clear. Love is the apex virtue. I always think that there's got to be some family with triplet girls named faith, hope, and love. And you know which one is the favorite, right? Faith and Hope, they're fine. But Love, she's great. These three remain, Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love. So Paul makes it very clear, in addition to all the teachings of Jesus, where it's very clear throughout the Gospels that Love really is the apex value. And so so we tell new Christians, when you become a Christian, Christianity 101, what do I need to do? What's expected of me? Go love God, go love others. And then if you really want to get technical about it, Jesus gives us one commandment, go and love other people as Jesus has loved you. That's what we are to do. That's what we're instructed to do. That's what we see in scripture over and over and over again is like, okay, you're a believer now. You're a Christian. You believe that God is your father and Jesus is your savior. And just to be very clear, the simplest way I know to understand what it means to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, that he is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. You believe in those things, you're a Christian. Once you believe those things, go love as Jesus loved you. He died for us. Go sacrificially love others. Offer a Christ-like love to your neighbor. But I don't know about you. I know about me. That's hard. I'm not very good. I'm not very good at loving people that I love. I'm really not good at loving people I don't care for. And so that's a challenging command. And it makes me wonder if we've ever considered this. Have you ever considered that maybe love is the end of a journey rather than the beginning? Maybe we build towards love. Maybe Jesus, when he told us to just go love other people, maybe he knew the layers of intricacy and nuance that lay underneath that, that that is a situation where it is far more easily said than done. What if actually offering Christ-like love to others is the end of a journey and it's not the place where we begin? And I can't help but think that that's true, that when we first become Christians, when we become believers, or as we go through our Christian life and God is forming our character and sanctifying us, as he does that, I can't help but think it's true that maybe love is the goal and not the starting place. And 1 Corinthians 13, where we learn the most about love and what it is, actually makes this point for me. I'll remind you of what is written in 1 Corinthians 13 verses four through eight. Now, this is usually read at weddings and that's fine and appropriate and good, but this is not romantic love. This is the love that is required of all believers. And this is the love we are to offer. This is what Paul says about it. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. So I would ask you this. Have you ever loved anybody like that? Have you ever actually loved anyone with a love that is not envious, that doesn't boast, that is not easily angered, that isn't rude, that takes no record of wrongs. So if you're married, that one's out. As I was asking myself, have I ever offered anyone this love? The most pure love I can think of is the love that a parent has for a child. Just the way that we've had two kids, and both times, as soon as they're born and they place them on Jen's chest and you're looking at this new life, my heart was instantly so full of love. It's nothing that you can describe. You can't really explain it. You just have to experience it. And when it happens, it just fills you up with so much joy and so much love. And it's just there. And the kid can't do anything but be annoying for like four years. So it's just there. You just love them, right? But even in that pure love, when my one-year-old son, John, is teething and fussy for three days straight, I really fail at not easily angered. I fall off the wagon there. I don't offer him that love. When my six-year-old Lily asks me how to pronounce a word in Spanish, and I tell her, and she says, no, you're wrong. Based on nothing, nothing. She doesn't even know how to say English words all the time. And listen, I don't want to brag. I took Spanish two twice in high school. And I've been to Mexico like a lot. All right. So I know Spanish pronunciations. And then she asked me how to say it. And I tell her, she's like, no, that's not it. And I just, I was easily angered in that moment. Maybe that wasn't easily angered. That was justified anger. I take it back. She deserved it. Have you ever loved anybody like we're told in Corinthians to love? Those things, those things are hard. Being patient and kind and not envious and not keeping any record of wrong and not boastful. That kind of love is hard. And loving others as Christ loves us, who condescended from heaven and took on human form and put up with us for three years, for 33 years, and faultlessly loved everyone around him, selflessly giving of himself. Have you ever loved anyone like that? And I'm belaboring the point to get us to this thought, that telling a new Christian to love like Jesus is like telling a crawling baby to run a marathon. Telling a newly formed Christian, someone who's just come into the faith, whether they're eight or 18 or 48, looking at them and going, okay, you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did and is going to do what he says he's going to do? Yes, I do. I absolutely do. Okay, then go in love exactly as he did. See you later. That's like looking at my son, John, and telling him to run a marathon. John crawls, and he crawls like really good. He's the best crawler that I've ever seen. He's a better crawler than all of your children. He crawls, and he can start to, like, stand a little bit, but he's fat, so he's got to develop some muscle before he can really get going. It would be like looking at him and being like, oh, you're crawling now, buddy? Well, how about a marathon? There's a lot of things that need to take place in his development before he can even think about that. Standing would be good without grabbing the couch or my pant leg. There's a start. Taking steps. Once you take steps, stay on your feet. Learn to actually run. And then there's this funny thing with kids where they have to learn to moderate their speed, right? If you've seen a little kid learn to run, they have one speed, sprint, full out sprint. There's no jogging. It's just the hardest possible steps, and they sprint to wherever they're going. There's no moderate in the middle. So you've got to learn how to jog and moderate your speed. You've got to let your body develop. You've got to build up lung capacity. You should probably try to eat healthy because it's hard to run a marathon on cheeseburgers. You have to start going distances. You have to work towards it. You have to build towards it. And to me, looking at a church full of people and saying, hey, we need to love others as Christ loved us, is in a lot of ways looking at developing children and saying you need to run a marathon. And I'm not looking to denigrate any new believers at all. I'm just trying to think of an illustration that could help us understand the path that needs to be traveled so that we can love as Jesus loves others. And we should understand it as a process, not a starting point, as a goal, not necessarily where we begin. And this is why I love the passage in 2 Peter so much. Because in 2 Peter, what we have is a roadmap to be able to love. Loving like Jesus loves feels impossible. Offering the type of love described in 1 Corinthians 13 feels like too big of a challenge. How could we ever do that? Well, this is where Peter comes in and he shows us and he tells us, hey, if you want to love, here's how you get there. So let's look at what I believe are building blocks of Peter telling God's children, here's how we begin the path towards love. Here's the journey that we take. 2 Peter 1, verses 5-7. For this very reason, make every effort. Let me stop right there. If I hadn't been lazy in my notes, I would have made this a point. And if you are a note taker, I would love for you to write this down. For this very reason, make every effort. Listen to me. Christian character is not developed by default. Christian character is not developed by default. We do not coast into godliness. We do not become a Christian, start going to church, and then slip it into neutral and just coast for the rest of our lives. And I think so many of us get stymied in our Christian walk. So many of us feel like we're in a rut. I know that I'm guilty of this because I somehow assume that developing Christian character and the process of sanctification, which is becoming more like God in character, that that process just happens by default. If I just claim faith for long enough, if I pray a couple of prayers, if I start to bless my meal, if I go to small group, if I go to church, that Christian faith will just develop by default in my life. And I'm just going to grow closer to Christ and experience the spiritual maturity and depth just by simply going through the motions and attending the things I'm supposed to attend. And I just want to tell you, there's a reason that he writes, make every effort. Sometimes we got to try. Christian character is not developed by default. We intentionally and ardently work at it our whole lives. He says this, for this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. We went through this passage in my men's Bible study, and there was a little bit of discussion of, are these things that we're supposed to pursue to make every effort to add to ourselves, our faith, virtue, virtue, knowledge, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection, love, are those things that we're supposed to pursue all together at the same time, just kind of haphazardly in our life, kind of like the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We just kind of pursue all of these things at once. And I just happen to think that that's not the intention of this passage. I think that these are actual building blocks. And I think that because of the word supplement, because Peter says, for this very reason, I want you to supplement your faith with virtue, then supplement your virtue with knowledge, then supplement your knowledge with self-control, then supplement, I think because of that word supplement that he's saying that these things intentionally build on one another. I also think that because he starts with faith. Without faith, none of the rest of this matters. Without faith, how in the world can we be virtuous? If virtuous is dictated to us by the desires of God and who he wants us to be and how he wants us to behave, then how can we possibly do that without faith? What are we being steadfast in? What are we persevering in if it's not faith? How can we possibly offer but move towards godliness without faith? Faith is the essential building block for all of this. It is also the starting point of all salvation. So if we think of new believers, what do they have? They have faith that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. They have faith. And Peter says, good. Instead of going and loving your neighbor as Jesus loved you, how about we do this? How about to that faith, we add virtue? Work on supplementing your faith with virtue. Virtue, simplest way I can understand it, is to be aware of the things that we're supposed to start doing and aware of the things that we're supposed to stop doing. When you are a believer, when you convert to Christianity, there's no doubt that you carry in some behaviors into your new faith that do not belong in your new faith, that ought not be there. And so there's, to be a Christian is to kind of have a constantly running list of things in your head, right? Of things that you're supposed to start doing and things that you should stop doing. And so to be virtuous is to take that seriously and just start to move towards God and character. And then he says, add to your virtue, knowledge, learn about your faith. And I would just slide this in there. I feel like many of us, I've spent my whole life in the church. And I would honestly tell you that I think, and this includes me many times in my life, I think most Christians just stall out right there. I think most Christians come to a faith, yep, I believe Jesus. And then kind of look around and be like, okay, there's some ways I'm supposed to behave. I need to stop doing that stuff. I need to start doing this stuff. And then that's it. And then we just put it on cruise control into eternity. I would be willing to bet that if you're here or you're listening, and sometimes faith feels hard, and it doesn't seem to click with you like it clicks with other people, and I'm just kind of in a rut, or maybe I'm just kind of going through the motions, or maybe I'm not really sure what I believe, I would be willing to bet that part of that is that you just stalled out right here. We started with faith. We added to faith the ways that I'm supposed to behave. And now let's just see what happens until I get to heaven. And there's so much more after that, that we are to make every effort to develop. He says, add to your virtue knowledge. This one's important. I don't think I can stress this too much. Christians, we need to learn about our faith. We need to know our faith. We need to understand our faith. We need to know some basic theology. We need to know some basic things about the Bible and the construction of Scripture and how we know we can trust it. We need to know about the triune God, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We need to know what words like faith and sanctification mean. We need to understand these things. And there's a lot of us who we don't really make much of an effort to do that. We don't really make much of an effort to learn. We just kind of soak in whatever I say, which that's sorry for you guys, and whatever's said in small groups and all those things. And we don't challenge ourselves with personal study. We need to learn and we need to grow. I talked about this, I preached about this a couple of weeks ago, that we need to be prepared with a why. When someone says, hey, why do you have faith? We need to be prepared with an answer. We are to add to our virtue knowledge. We ought to be learners of and about our faith. And if that's a place where you feel like you are lacking or you don't know where to go, please reach out to me and I'll do my best to point you towards some resources that won't all be books, some videos and some podcasts and stuff like that, depending on what kind of learner you are. But we need to grow in our knowledge of our faith. And then to that knowledge, we're to add self-control. The discipline of just continuing to do it, of denying ourself for the sake of something later, for the sake of something better. And then to self-control, we had said fastness or perseverance. This is another reason why I think it's actually building blocks because perseverance isn't required in the infancy of faith, right? If you ever have the privilege and the joy of being with someone in the moment when they convert and they pray to receive Christ and you say amen and then you look at them and you put your hand on their shoulder and you go, hey, listen, just hang in there, buddy. You're bad at that, all right? You're bad at giving advice. If fresh out of the gates, the first place you go to is just cling to hope. Until you've been disappointed by God, until you've been in a spiritual rut, until you've walked through a personal valley of the shadow of death, that advice and that encouragement rings hollow. But when I preached about suffering at the beginning of the book, and we talked about the fact that suffering is a fact of life. The encouragement that I gave you was to persevere. Cling to hope. Don't lose faith. When we addressed Uvalde last week and we said, what's the role of the church? Our role is to persevere and to cling to the hope and so beat back the darkness in the world with the hope that we cling to. We are to persevere. So these things build. And then to perseverance, godliness, becoming more like God in character. And then to godliness. And this is important. When I think about godliness, it's more than just virtue and it's more than just self-control. Because virtue and self-control, those address behaviors. Those address how we behave. But godliness is about who we are. It's about our being. Godliness is when we do the inner heart and soul work to figure out what is it inside of us that's broken that's motivating me to need virtue and to need self-control? What is it inside me that's not right? How is my heart unhealthy? Where are the pockets of darkness in my life that I have not addressed? Maybe we go through the motions of Christianity for years and years and years, and we're good at being virtuous, and we're good at being self-controlled, but there's this voice that kind of tells us when we start to pursue godliness, like, hey, you know the only reason that you've ever really gone through all the religious machinations is to get all the people around you to like you and respect you, right? And that you're really not super sincere in your faith. I'm not saying that that's occurred to me, but I've heard that it occurs to weaker Christians, perhaps. It's when we allow the Holy Spirit to really do the work in our hearts and we cry out to God. When we pursue godliness is when we realize how wretched we are. The person who wrote Amazing Grace, it said, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I promise they had pursued godliness because when you do that, you start to realize that you might have mastered the behaviors, but what's in here is gross. And so you ask God to come in and do the work. And as he works on your heart in that way, he says, now add to your godliness brotherly affection, which is familial affection, brotherly and sisterly affection. And it means the family of God for other Christian brothers and sisters now work on loving the church. And the Christian love that we're supposed to offer the church is powerful enough and strong enough. The unification that we have in Christ and the love that we can offer in Christ supersedes all the other divisions that would seek to drive a wedge within God's church. The love that we have for Christ and the love that we have for one another should overcome any political divide that we would experience between our Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Independent brothers and sisters. None of that should matter when we come together as a church. The love of Christ, the brotherly affection that we are instructed to offer overcomes ethnicity. It overcomes socioeconomic divides. It overcomes divides of just doing life different than one another. The people who just live lives that you would never ever choose and you don't get them and you don't understand them and you think they're dumb. Well, guess what? They think you're dumb too, but the love of Christ unites us. It should cover over those things. And how could we possibly offer the love of Christ to a fallen and lost and broken world when we can't even offer it to the people who share our faith? And I think it's worth pointing out that in our country and in our culture that is as divided as I can ever remember. As far as I can tell, in most churches, that division in the world is mirrored in the church 100%. All the divisions that exist out there, we bring in here. They bring in there. They bring in there. And unless we can learn as believers to offer brotherly affection to the Christians who think differently than us, to be humble enough to do that, how could we possibly offer brotherly affection to a lost and broken world with whom we have very little in common. So we pursue brotherly affection, loving God's church, loving God's people, allowing the love of Christ to bridge any gaps that exist between us. And then, once we do those things, we supplement them with the love of Christ. Now go and love others as Jesus loved you. But love, you see, is the end of the journey. It is not where we start. Jesus starts us there. Go love as I loved you, but he knows all the things that we have to learn along the way before we can be remotely capable of offering others the kind of love that he loved us. And so I don't know where you are. If we use 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 7 as some sort of crude diagnostic tool, I don't know where you are. I don't know where you look at that and go, gosh, that's really where I need to focus in on. That's really what I need to work on. But we're instructed that we are to make every effort, that these things are not just going to happen by osmosis. They're not just going to happen by sitting in the sermon and be like, yep, that was good. I learned from that. And then we go and never, ever work on these things. They'll never, ever happen. So I would strongly encourage you to go home. Take some time today or maybe tomorrow morning and sit down with this passage and say, Father, where am I? Father, what do I need? Do I need more faith? Father, do I need more virtue? Do I need more knowledge? Do I not know enough? God, maybe I need to start learning intentionally. Do I need to just simply cling to and persevere and learn how to flex that muscle because it's really important to me right now? Do I need to forgive some other believers and offer them brotherly or sisterly affection? Do I need to bridge the gap within my own church and let my love of Christ cover over any other divisions that exist? Or God, am I ready to begin to go out and start to offer the love that you offered me? Please do. Sit down with the passage and ask God, where am I? What do I need to do? Where should I place my effort? And it's my hope and my prayer and what I've been praying this whole week that we would do this. Let us commit together to make every effort, every effort to build towards love. Understanding that love is the apex, it's the end of the journey, and it's a path that we are all on to grow to there. Let us go this week and make every effort to build towards being people who offer Christ-like love to everyone around them. Who, after spending time with people, you are able to look at them and say, now go and love others as I have loved you. Let's pursue being those kinds of people and that kind of church with eyes wide open as we understand the journey that that is. In a minute, we're going to take communion and reflect on that love. But first, I'm going to pray for us. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for being love. Your word tells us that while we were still sinners, before we knew you, before we had any capacity of affection for you, that you died for us anyways. Let us be grateful for and fueled by that love. God, give us the discipline and desire to make every effort to build towards a capacity to love others as you have loved us. I pray all these things in your son's name. Amen. Next week when we come back, we're gonna look at what happens, at what the promise is when we pursue love in that way. Because it's not just a simple commandment to love. There's a payoff. And it's remarkable. I'm going to share that with you next week.
All right, well, good morning, and thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors at Grace, and if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that. This is officially a summer Sunday, so you guys really mean it. I'm grateful for your being here as we move into the summer, and I'm excited about our upcoming summer series that starts week after next called Kids Stories for Grownups, where we look at some of the Bible stories that many of us learned when we were younger that we've all heard of, and we kind of revisit those and wonder what we can still learn from them as fully formed, intelligent adults. So that should be exciting. And I love it because the stories from the Bible and the Old Testament are some of my favorite things to examine. So we're excited to get into that series here in a couple of weeks. And I'm excited for the end of this service when we'll take communion together. We're going to take it the old-fashioned way for the first time in over two years. And I know there's many of you here who have never partaken in communion at Grace in the way in which we will do it and have always done it for years. So I'm excited for us to do that as a family, and I'll explain more about that later. But right now, we're going to get into the first part of a two-part sermon based in 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 8. So if you have a Bible, you can open there, and we'll be looking at that text this morning. This morning, we're going to look at verses 5 through 7, and the next week we're going to look just at verse 8. And I know that I say this a lot, and you guys will chuckle at me, but this is one of my favorite passages in all the Bible. I love this passage, and I told you if you get the grace vine and read that this week, so that's two big ifs. Okay, so if you get it and if you actually read it, then you would have seen that I said in the grace vine, if you don't get it, fill out a connection card or something and make sure that you get on our weekly email list so you know what's going on. Unless you don't want that in your inbox, then don't fill it out and we won't send you anything. But I said in there that this passage sums up so much of what we need for the Christian life, for Christian behavior, for Christian expectations, and for Christian purpose. This passage kind of just succinctly encapsulates for us where we need to be focused and what happens when we focus on these things. And for me, I just love it. I've always loved this passage. And it's a big reason that we're doing a series in Peter, and this is what I said in the Grace Find, is so that I can preach these two things. I was actually in a conversation with our new worship pastor, Aaron, about this passage and said, man, I don't know how to condense it to one sermon. And I kind of told him the two things I was thinking. He was like, you got to do two. And I'm like, great, two-parter. I'm in charge of the sermons anyway. So it just became a two-part sermon. So here we go. We're going to dive in, but I want to dive in with some reflections on what the Bible has to say about love, because that's what we're going to be building to today is the way that we're instructed to love according to Peter in 2 Peter. So as we think about the biblical idea of love, it's kind of Christian 101, one of the very first things you learn when you are a believer. After God loved you and Jesus died on the cross for you, and after those things, the thing you learn about what you're supposed to do is love other people, right? We all know. That's the very first thing we're told. Love God, love others. This is what we learn immediately, right? I'm reminded of the conversation that Jesus has early in his ministry where a younger person comes up to him and they say, what do you say is the greatest commandment? And they have a little conversation about it. And it's settled upon that Jesus agrees that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, amen, and to love your neighbor as yourself. These are the two greatest commandments. And Jesus says that in those commandments is captured the whole law and the prophets. Meaning, if we'll do those two things, then we'll do everything we're supposed to do in this book. Those two things, just love God, love others, will capture everything in this book. And so I've always loved that teaching because it distills something very complicated, very detailed, down to its most basic elements. It takes everything in this book that we're supposed to do from cover to cover, all the behaviors that we're supposed to have, all the prayers that we're supposed to pray, all the things we're supposed to start doing, all the things we're supposed to stop doing, all the things we're supposed to think, all the ways that our character needs to change. It takes all of that and it boils it down to two simple commandments. Just love God and love others. And in doing that, you'll take care of everything here. And that's something that is probably not new information for a vast majority of you. You know that, you've been taught that, you're aware of it. If I asked many of you what the greatest commandments were, you would tell me those things. But Jesus, later in his ministry, distills those commandments down even more to just one thing. In John chapter 13, verse 35, at the end of his ministry, he's teaching the disciples. He's been with them for three years and he tells them this, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. So he says, he gets them, he sits them down and another week they're going to have the last supper. They're going to do communion. They're going to start communion that we're going to observe at the end of the service. And after he spent three years with them, modeling for them what ministry is, teaching them, discipling them, he sits them down. He says, this is the new commandment that I give to you. And that's a huge word, new commandment. That's not just a passive phrase that he's saying to get to the point. What he's saying is the greatest commandments are to love God and love others. The 10 commandments we learned in Exodus. I'm gonna give you a new commandment that hasn't been given for thousands of years. There's been no new commandments for 4,000 years. I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm gonna give you a new commandment. This one's fresh, listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, I, Jesus, the son of God, I'm going to give you a new commandment. This one's fresh. Listen to me. The way I've loved you for the last three years, go love other people like that. That's it. That's the commandment. But what about all the other things? If you do this, if you go love other people like I've loved you, you'll do all the other things. And in our, some of our theological minds, we'll go, well, Jesus, wait a second. We need to love you too though, right? We can't just go love other people because then that's not Christian, that's just kindness. And Jesus goes, yeah, but go try to love other people the way I've loved the disciples without first loving me. And so Jesus knows that baked into offering Christ-like love to those around us is the necessity that we would fall deeply in love with him, that we would love him earnestly and passionately and sincerely in a steadfast way. It is impossible to live out the new prepping this week, just as an aside, how powerful would it be to live your life in such a way that after you spent time with people, after your kids grew up in your home and you sent them out into the world, what if as a mama or a daddy, you were able to look at those kids and you would say, sweetheart, the way that I've loved you for these last, hopefully just 18 years and then get out, right? But the way that I've loved you for these last 18 years, you go and love other people like I've loved you. What if you could, the people who worked for you, when they moved on to bigger and better and you gave them some parting advice, what if you could look at them and say, the way that I've loved you when you've been with me, go love other people like that. What if you could say that if you moved away? What if you could say that to your small group? What if you could say that to the people that you've been associated with? What if you could say that if you're changing roles, if you're leaving one company and go to the next one, what if you could look at your co-workers and say, all I would ask is that you love people the way that I have loved you. What if you lived a life powerful enough to be able to say that? I could not say that to people. But what if we lived our life in such a way that we could look at the people around us and say, the way that I've loved you and cared for you and prayed for you, now go and do that to other people. And that be the very will of God. It's such a powerful example that Jesus sets there to be able to say that to the disciples. But he tells them very clearly, love is the most important thing. You go love. You go offer the kind of love that I've offered you. You go offer that to everyone around you, to your neighbors, to your brothers, to everyone around you. And that's the commandment. That's what God needs of you. Because if you'll just simply do that one thing, then you will have done all of these things. Jesus knows this. And so he's setting up love as the apex value. And as if that's not clear enough, Paul in his writings in Corinthians, and we're going to get to the love passage in Corinthians 13, but at the end of this passage where he's written about spiritual gifts and he's saying, but spiritual gifts really don't compare to Christian values and of the Christian values of the virtues, really there's only three that remain. He says this in 1 Corinthians 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Paul makes it very clear. Love is the apex virtue. I always think that there's got to be some family with triplet girls named faith, hope, and love. And you know which one is the favorite, right? Faith and Hope, they're fine. But Love, she's great. These three remain, Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love. So Paul makes it very clear, in addition to all the teachings of Jesus, where it's very clear throughout the Gospels that Love really is the apex value. And so so we tell new Christians, when you become a Christian, Christianity 101, what do I need to do? What's expected of me? Go love God, go love others. And then if you really want to get technical about it, Jesus gives us one commandment, go and love other people as Jesus has loved you. That's what we are to do. That's what we're instructed to do. That's what we see in scripture over and over and over again is like, okay, you're a believer now. You're a Christian. You believe that God is your father and Jesus is your savior. And just to be very clear, the simplest way I know to understand what it means to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, that he is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. You believe in those things, you're a Christian. Once you believe those things, go love as Jesus loved you. He died for us. Go sacrificially love others. Offer a Christ-like love to your neighbor. But I don't know about you. I know about me. That's hard. I'm not very good. I'm not very good at loving people that I love. I'm really not good at loving people I don't care for. And so that's a challenging command. And it makes me wonder if we've ever considered this. Have you ever considered that maybe love is the end of a journey rather than the beginning? Maybe we build towards love. Maybe Jesus, when he told us to just go love other people, maybe he knew the layers of intricacy and nuance that lay underneath that, that that is a situation where it is far more easily said than done. What if actually offering Christ-like love to others is the end of a journey and it's not the place where we begin? And I can't help but think that that's true, that when we first become Christians, when we become believers, or as we go through our Christian life and God is forming our character and sanctifying us, as he does that, I can't help but think it's true that maybe love is the goal and not the starting place. And 1 Corinthians 13, where we learn the most about love and what it is, actually makes this point for me. I'll remind you of what is written in 1 Corinthians 13 verses four through eight. Now, this is usually read at weddings and that's fine and appropriate and good, but this is not romantic love. This is the love that is required of all believers. And this is the love we are to offer. This is what Paul says about it. Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. So I would ask you this. Have you ever loved anybody like that? Have you ever actually loved anyone with a love that is not envious, that doesn't boast, that is not easily angered, that isn't rude, that takes no record of wrongs. So if you're married, that one's out. As I was asking myself, have I ever offered anyone this love? The most pure love I can think of is the love that a parent has for a child. Just the way that we've had two kids, and both times, as soon as they're born and they place them on Jen's chest and you're looking at this new life, my heart was instantly so full of love. It's nothing that you can describe. You can't really explain it. You just have to experience it. And when it happens, it just fills you up with so much joy and so much love. And it's just there. And the kid can't do anything but be annoying for like four years. So it's just there. You just love them, right? But even in that pure love, when my one-year-old son, John, is teething and fussy for three days straight, I really fail at not easily angered. I fall off the wagon there. I don't offer him that love. When my six-year-old Lily asks me how to pronounce a word in Spanish, and I tell her, and she says, no, you're wrong. Based on nothing, nothing. She doesn't even know how to say English words all the time. And listen, I don't want to brag. I took Spanish two twice in high school. And I've been to Mexico like a lot. All right. So I know Spanish pronunciations. And then she asked me how to say it. And I tell her, she's like, no, that's not it. And I just, I was easily angered in that moment. Maybe that wasn't easily angered. That was justified anger. I take it back. She deserved it. Have you ever loved anybody like we're told in Corinthians to love? Those things, those things are hard. Being patient and kind and not envious and not keeping any record of wrong and not boastful. That kind of love is hard. And loving others as Christ loves us, who condescended from heaven and took on human form and put up with us for three years, for 33 years, and faultlessly loved everyone around him, selflessly giving of himself. Have you ever loved anyone like that? And I'm belaboring the point to get us to this thought, that telling a new Christian to love like Jesus is like telling a crawling baby to run a marathon. Telling a newly formed Christian, someone who's just come into the faith, whether they're eight or 18 or 48, looking at them and going, okay, you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did and is going to do what he says he's going to do? Yes, I do. I absolutely do. Okay, then go in love exactly as he did. See you later. That's like looking at my son, John, and telling him to run a marathon. John crawls, and he crawls like really good. He's the best crawler that I've ever seen. He's a better crawler than all of your children. He crawls, and he can start to, like, stand a little bit, but he's fat, so he's got to develop some muscle before he can really get going. It would be like looking at him and being like, oh, you're crawling now, buddy? Well, how about a marathon? There's a lot of things that need to take place in his development before he can even think about that. Standing would be good without grabbing the couch or my pant leg. There's a start. Taking steps. Once you take steps, stay on your feet. Learn to actually run. And then there's this funny thing with kids where they have to learn to moderate their speed, right? If you've seen a little kid learn to run, they have one speed, sprint, full out sprint. There's no jogging. It's just the hardest possible steps, and they sprint to wherever they're going. There's no moderate in the middle. So you've got to learn how to jog and moderate your speed. You've got to let your body develop. You've got to build up lung capacity. You should probably try to eat healthy because it's hard to run a marathon on cheeseburgers. You have to start going distances. You have to work towards it. You have to build towards it. And to me, looking at a church full of people and saying, hey, we need to love others as Christ loved us, is in a lot of ways looking at developing children and saying you need to run a marathon. And I'm not looking to denigrate any new believers at all. I'm just trying to think of an illustration that could help us understand the path that needs to be traveled so that we can love as Jesus loves others. And we should understand it as a process, not a starting point, as a goal, not necessarily where we begin. And this is why I love the passage in 2 Peter so much. Because in 2 Peter, what we have is a roadmap to be able to love. Loving like Jesus loves feels impossible. Offering the type of love described in 1 Corinthians 13 feels like too big of a challenge. How could we ever do that? Well, this is where Peter comes in and he shows us and he tells us, hey, if you want to love, here's how you get there. So let's look at what I believe are building blocks of Peter telling God's children, here's how we begin the path towards love. Here's the journey that we take. 2 Peter 1, verses 5-7. For this very reason, make every effort. Let me stop right there. If I hadn't been lazy in my notes, I would have made this a point. And if you are a note taker, I would love for you to write this down. For this very reason, make every effort. Listen to me. Christian character is not developed by default. Christian character is not developed by default. We do not coast into godliness. We do not become a Christian, start going to church, and then slip it into neutral and just coast for the rest of our lives. And I think so many of us get stymied in our Christian walk. So many of us feel like we're in a rut. I know that I'm guilty of this because I somehow assume that developing Christian character and the process of sanctification, which is becoming more like God in character, that that process just happens by default. If I just claim faith for long enough, if I pray a couple of prayers, if I start to bless my meal, if I go to small group, if I go to church, that Christian faith will just develop by default in my life. And I'm just going to grow closer to Christ and experience the spiritual maturity and depth just by simply going through the motions and attending the things I'm supposed to attend. And I just want to tell you, there's a reason that he writes, make every effort. Sometimes we got to try. Christian character is not developed by default. We intentionally and ardently work at it our whole lives. He says this, for this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge and knowledge with self-control and self-control with steadfastness and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. We went through this passage in my men's Bible study, and there was a little bit of discussion of, are these things that we're supposed to pursue to make every effort to add to ourselves, our faith, virtue, virtue, knowledge, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection, love, are those things that we're supposed to pursue all together at the same time, just kind of haphazardly in our life, kind of like the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We just kind of pursue all of these things at once. And I just happen to think that that's not the intention of this passage. I think that these are actual building blocks. And I think that because of the word supplement, because Peter says, for this very reason, I want you to supplement your faith with virtue, then supplement your virtue with knowledge, then supplement your knowledge with self-control, then supplement, I think because of that word supplement that he's saying that these things intentionally build on one another. I also think that because he starts with faith. Without faith, none of the rest of this matters. Without faith, how in the world can we be virtuous? If virtuous is dictated to us by the desires of God and who he wants us to be and how he wants us to behave, then how can we possibly do that without faith? What are we being steadfast in? What are we persevering in if it's not faith? How can we possibly offer but move towards godliness without faith? Faith is the essential building block for all of this. It is also the starting point of all salvation. So if we think of new believers, what do they have? They have faith that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. They have faith. And Peter says, good. Instead of going and loving your neighbor as Jesus loved you, how about we do this? How about to that faith, we add virtue? Work on supplementing your faith with virtue. Virtue, simplest way I can understand it, is to be aware of the things that we're supposed to start doing and aware of the things that we're supposed to stop doing. When you are a believer, when you convert to Christianity, there's no doubt that you carry in some behaviors into your new faith that do not belong in your new faith, that ought not be there. And so there's, to be a Christian is to kind of have a constantly running list of things in your head, right? Of things that you're supposed to start doing and things that you should stop doing. And so to be virtuous is to take that seriously and just start to move towards God and character. And then he says, add to your virtue, knowledge, learn about your faith. And I would just slide this in there. I feel like many of us, I've spent my whole life in the church. And I would honestly tell you that I think, and this includes me many times in my life, I think most Christians just stall out right there. I think most Christians come to a faith, yep, I believe Jesus. And then kind of look around and be like, okay, there's some ways I'm supposed to behave. I need to stop doing that stuff. I need to start doing this stuff. And then that's it. And then we just put it on cruise control into eternity. I would be willing to bet that if you're here or you're listening, and sometimes faith feels hard, and it doesn't seem to click with you like it clicks with other people, and I'm just kind of in a rut, or maybe I'm just kind of going through the motions, or maybe I'm not really sure what I believe, I would be willing to bet that part of that is that you just stalled out right here. We started with faith. We added to faith the ways that I'm supposed to behave. And now let's just see what happens until I get to heaven. And there's so much more after that, that we are to make every effort to develop. He says, add to your virtue knowledge. This one's important. I don't think I can stress this too much. Christians, we need to learn about our faith. We need to know our faith. We need to understand our faith. We need to know some basic theology. We need to know some basic things about the Bible and the construction of Scripture and how we know we can trust it. We need to know about the triune God, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We need to know what words like faith and sanctification mean. We need to understand these things. And there's a lot of us who we don't really make much of an effort to do that. We don't really make much of an effort to learn. We just kind of soak in whatever I say, which that's sorry for you guys, and whatever's said in small groups and all those things. And we don't challenge ourselves with personal study. We need to learn and we need to grow. I talked about this, I preached about this a couple of weeks ago, that we need to be prepared with a why. When someone says, hey, why do you have faith? We need to be prepared with an answer. We are to add to our virtue knowledge. We ought to be learners of and about our faith. And if that's a place where you feel like you are lacking or you don't know where to go, please reach out to me and I'll do my best to point you towards some resources that won't all be books, some videos and some podcasts and stuff like that, depending on what kind of learner you are. But we need to grow in our knowledge of our faith. And then to that knowledge, we're to add self-control. The discipline of just continuing to do it, of denying ourself for the sake of something later, for the sake of something better. And then to self-control, we had said fastness or perseverance. This is another reason why I think it's actually building blocks because perseverance isn't required in the infancy of faith, right? If you ever have the privilege and the joy of being with someone in the moment when they convert and they pray to receive Christ and you say amen and then you look at them and you put your hand on their shoulder and you go, hey, listen, just hang in there, buddy. You're bad at that, all right? You're bad at giving advice. If fresh out of the gates, the first place you go to is just cling to hope. Until you've been disappointed by God, until you've been in a spiritual rut, until you've walked through a personal valley of the shadow of death, that advice and that encouragement rings hollow. But when I preached about suffering at the beginning of the book, and we talked about the fact that suffering is a fact of life. The encouragement that I gave you was to persevere. Cling to hope. Don't lose faith. When we addressed Uvalde last week and we said, what's the role of the church? Our role is to persevere and to cling to the hope and so beat back the darkness in the world with the hope that we cling to. We are to persevere. So these things build. And then to perseverance, godliness, becoming more like God in character. And then to godliness. And this is important. When I think about godliness, it's more than just virtue and it's more than just self-control. Because virtue and self-control, those address behaviors. Those address how we behave. But godliness is about who we are. It's about our being. Godliness is when we do the inner heart and soul work to figure out what is it inside of us that's broken that's motivating me to need virtue and to need self-control? What is it inside me that's not right? How is my heart unhealthy? Where are the pockets of darkness in my life that I have not addressed? Maybe we go through the motions of Christianity for years and years and years, and we're good at being virtuous, and we're good at being self-controlled, but there's this voice that kind of tells us when we start to pursue godliness, like, hey, you know the only reason that you've ever really gone through all the religious machinations is to get all the people around you to like you and respect you, right? And that you're really not super sincere in your faith. I'm not saying that that's occurred to me, but I've heard that it occurs to weaker Christians, perhaps. It's when we allow the Holy Spirit to really do the work in our hearts and we cry out to God. When we pursue godliness is when we realize how wretched we are. The person who wrote Amazing Grace, it said, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I promise they had pursued godliness because when you do that, you start to realize that you might have mastered the behaviors, but what's in here is gross. And so you ask God to come in and do the work. And as he works on your heart in that way, he says, now add to your godliness brotherly affection, which is familial affection, brotherly and sisterly affection. And it means the family of God for other Christian brothers and sisters now work on loving the church. And the Christian love that we're supposed to offer the church is powerful enough and strong enough. The unification that we have in Christ and the love that we can offer in Christ supersedes all the other divisions that would seek to drive a wedge within God's church. The love that we have for Christ and the love that we have for one another should overcome any political divide that we would experience between our Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Independent brothers and sisters. None of that should matter when we come together as a church. The love of Christ, the brotherly affection that we are instructed to offer overcomes ethnicity. It overcomes socioeconomic divides. It overcomes divides of just doing life different than one another. The people who just live lives that you would never ever choose and you don't get them and you don't understand them and you think they're dumb. Well, guess what? They think you're dumb too, but the love of Christ unites us. It should cover over those things. And how could we possibly offer the love of Christ to a fallen and lost and broken world when we can't even offer it to the people who share our faith? And I think it's worth pointing out that in our country and in our culture that is as divided as I can ever remember. As far as I can tell, in most churches, that division in the world is mirrored in the church 100%. All the divisions that exist out there, we bring in here. They bring in there. They bring in there. And unless we can learn as believers to offer brotherly affection to the Christians who think differently than us, to be humble enough to do that, how could we possibly offer brotherly affection to a lost and broken world with whom we have very little in common. So we pursue brotherly affection, loving God's church, loving God's people, allowing the love of Christ to bridge any gaps that exist between us. And then, once we do those things, we supplement them with the love of Christ. Now go and love others as Jesus loved you. But love, you see, is the end of the journey. It is not where we start. Jesus starts us there. Go love as I loved you, but he knows all the things that we have to learn along the way before we can be remotely capable of offering others the kind of love that he loved us. And so I don't know where you are. If we use 2 Peter 1, verses 5 through 7 as some sort of crude diagnostic tool, I don't know where you are. I don't know where you look at that and go, gosh, that's really where I need to focus in on. That's really what I need to work on. But we're instructed that we are to make every effort, that these things are not just going to happen by osmosis. They're not just going to happen by sitting in the sermon and be like, yep, that was good. I learned from that. And then we go and never, ever work on these things. They'll never, ever happen. So I would strongly encourage you to go home. Take some time today or maybe tomorrow morning and sit down with this passage and say, Father, where am I? Father, what do I need? Do I need more faith? Father, do I need more virtue? Do I need more knowledge? Do I not know enough? God, maybe I need to start learning intentionally. Do I need to just simply cling to and persevere and learn how to flex that muscle because it's really important to me right now? Do I need to forgive some other believers and offer them brotherly or sisterly affection? Do I need to bridge the gap within my own church and let my love of Christ cover over any other divisions that exist? Or God, am I ready to begin to go out and start to offer the love that you offered me? Please do. Sit down with the passage and ask God, where am I? What do I need to do? Where should I place my effort? And it's my hope and my prayer and what I've been praying this whole week that we would do this. Let us commit together to make every effort, every effort to build towards love. Understanding that love is the apex, it's the end of the journey, and it's a path that we are all on to grow to there. Let us go this week and make every effort to build towards being people who offer Christ-like love to everyone around them. Who, after spending time with people, you are able to look at them and say, now go and love others as I have loved you. Let's pursue being those kinds of people and that kind of church with eyes wide open as we understand the journey that that is. In a minute, we're going to take communion and reflect on that love. But first, I'm going to pray for us. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for being love. Your word tells us that while we were still sinners, before we knew you, before we had any capacity of affection for you, that you died for us anyways. Let us be grateful for and fueled by that love. God, give us the discipline and desire to make every effort to build towards a capacity to love others as you have loved us. I pray all these things in your son's name. Amen. Next week when we come back, we're gonna look at what happens, at what the promise is when we pursue love in that way. Because it's not just a simple commandment to love. There's a payoff. And it's remarkable. I'm going to share that with you next week.
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.
