1 John 2

All right. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is I was just looking at Aaron Winston this morning. Aaron's our children's pastor. And I looked at her and I said, do you realize this is our eighth September together? It's been a minute and I love September. September's everyone's back. Sched are regular, people are in school, small groups start, football kicks off. Football is the great unifier. Everyone can talk about the same thing on Sunday morning when we get here. It's very fun. And so I just love the fall and I love September. And for us at church and on staff, we think of September as the beginning of our ministry year. We've come off the summer. We try to get some rest in the summertime a little bit, but come September, we are sprinting and we pretty much go until summer extreme in June. So we are excited from our standpoint. And I have been excited to share with you this message that's really been about two years in the making, which puts a tremendous amount of pressure on its efficacy. But, you know, we'll see how it goes. But for about two years, God's been doing something in me, and it's kind of culminating in what I'm going to share with you today and where we're going to go for the rest of this series. This series is called The Traits of Grace. You may remember that we did this series in the fall of 2022. Prior to that, the staff had kind of gotten together and brainstormed what makes grace, grace, what makes us unique as a church? What are our unique characteristics? What do we want the characteristics of a partner of grace to be? And so we put stuff on the whiteboard. We settled on some things. I wrote it up. I submitted it to the elders. The elders enthusiastically agreed with it with very few changes. Yes, this is who we believe we are called to be at grace. And so then I walked us through the five traits in September and October of 22. We spent five weeks on them. We looked at each one of them, why biblically we believe we're supposed to do these things. But here's the thing is once I rolled those five traits out, I didn't really know what to do with them anymore. I didn't know how to continue to bring them up, how to continue to put them in front of you, how to really inculcate them as part of the culture of grace. And I feel like now, two years later, I do. And here's how we're going to do it. We're going to start by talking about discipleship. Discipleship, I don't know if you know this or not. Discipleship is the goal of every church. Every evangelical church ever, discipleship is the goal. It is the white whale of church ministry. To produce disciple-making disciples. To make disciples that serve Jesus Christ. To make disciples that build other disciples. That build other disciples. And on and on it goes. This is the goal of every church. Every church is seeking to make disciples of Christ. And this is right and good. This should be the goal because it's the commission. It's the great commission. Jesus, after he died on the cross, resurrected, did ministry with the disciples for 40 days, and ascended back up into heaven, his last instruction to the disciples were go into all the world, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He tells them to go and make disciples, not converts, not people who simply believe and extend faith towards Christ, but disciples. People who take their spiritual health seriously. People who are actively pursuing Jesus. Who are actively becoming more like Christ in character. That's the process of sanctification. So that has been the commission for every church ever. And it is what I talked about in my interview process when they hired me at Grace. It's what I've always thought about at church. How do we make disciples? And here's the secret that not many churches will admit to. And you certainly won't hear pastors confessing it from stage. But we're not very good at it. We're not very good at making disciples. Those of you who have been a part of the church for any amount of time, at least not intentionally, those of you who have been part of the church, when I say the church, I mean Big C Church, not just Grace, but just church. Church is a part of your life. I'd be willing to bet you've had some awkward interactions with the idea of discipleship. I can remember when I was in college, I went to Toccoa Falls College in Northeast Georgia, and I kept the grounds for the school. And the leader of that team, the full-time employee, was a wonderful godly man named George Champion. And I thought very highly of Mr. Champion. So I went to him one time and I said mr. champion will you disciple me will you show me what it is to be a godly man and mr. champion said yes of course because that's what you when people ask you that question you don't say no they'd be a jerk so you got to say yes okay people hey will you decide for me yes that's your answer so he says he says yeah sure and I go okay what do you want answer. So he says, he says, yeah, sure. And I go, okay, what do you want to do? And he says, what everyone says in that situation, let's, uh, get breakfast and read a book. Cause that's what you're supposed to do to make disciples in America. Apparently as you go to waffle house and you read a book, our problem was our town was so small. We didn't even have a waffle house. We We had a Huddle House with three bullet holes in the hood vent. But we went during safe hours, so it was fine. Mr. Champion said, I'll disciple you. You can meet me at the Huddle House. We'll go through a book together, but I get to work early, so I need to meet at 5 a.m. I was 20. 20-year-olds and 5 a.m. don't mix unless they've just been up that whole time. So I missed some. I hit the first two or three. And then the fourth one and the fifth one I slept through. Mr. Champion saw me at work, said, did you sleep through it? Yeah, I'm really sorry, sir. And by the sixth time, I couldn't look him in the eye anymore, and that effort at discipleship fizzled. We could probably tell stories of times that we asked someone to disciple us, of ways that we've learned about what discipleship really means, of programs and systems that we've done. We've done discipleship programs, discipleship groups, where the church puts us in this funnel, and we take classes. And as a result of doing all these things, we squirt out the other end of disciple, fully fledged forms, disciple of Christ. Now I'm ready to help other people go through the funnel. We've all tried these things, but they've lacked success and they've lacked success for me as well. It was with this background that I went to a small conference, I think in about 2019, 2018 or 2019, that was led by a pastor named Larry Osborne, who's got a pretty successful church in San Diego. And it was just 25 senior pastors sitting around the table while Larry was just sharing with us his wisdom. And Larry shared with us how they frame up discipleship in his church. And it was like a bulb went off for me. It was a fresh, brand new way to understand discipleship. Because I had always been told that discipleship had to be life on life. You guys ever heard that phrase, life on life discipleship? I was told that's how it had to be. Like when I was a student pastor, I'd go to these conferences and they would say, when you're discipling your students, you need to invite them into your home. Let them see how a godly man talks to his godly wife. Let them see how a godly man addresses his kids. Let them see how a godly man does yard work. Take them with you shopping. Let them see how a godly man shops at the grocery store. And I thought, well, probably a lot like a kind atheist or like a humble Hindu, you know? It's probably not too, I bet the Hindu is a nicer grocery shopper than I am anyways. And that never really resonated with me because in the first century, we think the model of discipleship based on scripture is life on life, is the disciples living with Jesus, following him around, being with him every day, watching all of his interactions. The problem is that may have been practical in the first century AD. It is not practical in the 21st century in the United States. So there's got to be a better way. With that background, I went to this conference and I heard Larry Osborne frame up discipleship in this unique way where he says discipleship is really nothing more than taking our next step of obedience. That when Jesus wants to grow us, he puts a step of obedience in front of us and he asks us to take it. And if we take it, we are being discipled. We are a disciple of Christ. If we don't, we are stagnating in our faith. And I had never heard it described that way before, but then he went through scripture. I went back and went through scripture and found it to be pretty obvious. Once you start putting the pieces together, I would remind you of a couple of verses first in John chapter 14, verse 15. When Jesus says this, if you love me, keep my commands. That's pretty simple. This is Jesus talking. If you love me, if you say you love me, then do what I say. If you say you want to be like me, then do what I tell you to do. If you love me, keep my commands. He says it even more clearly in Luke 6. I love this one. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I say? Why do you call me Lord of your life and not treat me that way? Why do you call me the king and not crown me? Why do you say one thing out of this side of your mouth and another thing out of this side of your mouth? Why do you sing to me on Sunday like I'm Lord and I'm your treasure and then act on Wednesday like you've never met me? I think that's pretty convicting and pretty applicable for all of us at different seasons. Why do you call me Lord and not do what I say? That's Jesus talking. And then we have this great passage from John, the disciple. John was probably the youngest disciple. He could have been as young as 10 when he was with the disciples. He's referred to in the gospel of John as the disciple whom Jesus loved. At the last supper, we see that John was reclining against Jesus's chest and Jesus was able to say things to John that only John could hear. And at the death of Jesus, at this crucifixion, he looked at John and asked John to take care of his mother, Mary. So they were very, very close. And John spent the rest of his life in service to this Jesus. He led the church and he had two disciples of his own, Polycarp and Erasmus, that became early church fathers to whom he handed off the keys of the kingdom. And at the end of his life, John writes some letters, general epistles to be circulated amongst the churches in Jerusalem and Asia Minor. And in his first letter, 1 John, he makes one thing abundantly clear, and we see it captured here in 1 John 2, verses 3 through 6, where he says this, We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands. Whoever says, I know him, but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person. But if anyone obeys his word, love for on all that he learns, giving a final encouragement to the churches that he loves so much to whom he's dedicated his life. He says, we know we love him if we obey him. If we say that we love him and we do not obey him, then we are liars and the truth is not in us. He says the litmus test for Christianity is very clear. Are you obedient to Christ or are you not? And so I would make simply this point about discipleship and its relationship with obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. If you'd like to know how you're doing spiritually, take an inventory of your life. Over the last few years, have you been growing in your obedience to Christ? Has your obedience to him increased? Are you giving him more and more of yourself and of your margins? Are you letting go of more and more things that don't need to be there that don't help you obey? Are you throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and running the race set before you? Or have you been stagnant in your obedience? Does your obedience in 2024 look pretty much how it looked in 2020? When you look behind you, do you see a wake of obedience or do you see stagnation? Scripture makes it pretty clear that if we want to call ourselves disciples of Christ, then we are people who are taking steps of obedience. And ever since Larry framed it up this way, I quit thinking about discipleship as this essential relationship with a person that walks you through life and tells you what to do. I quit thinking about discipleship as a program that you take. Because if we're being honest, those of us in the room who take our spiritual health seriously, those of us in the room that other people would look at and probably say that person is a disciple of Christ. That's someone who's growing in their obedience to Jesus. They're growing closer to him. They're growing more like him in character. I've seen that person taking strides. They are someone to whom their spiritual health is very, very important and they guard it fiercely. And I know that very few people in here would raise our hand and be like, yeah, I think I would call myself a disciple of Christ. But there's plenty of people in here who would say, I've taken my spiritual health very seriously and it matters to me and I'm intentional about it. If that's you, I wonder if you could point me to the program or the singular person who got you to that place. I wonder if you could point me to the Bible study you did that got you to where you are today. To the discipleship program that you enlisted in that spit you out the other side of the disciple. I wonder if you could point to the person who came alongside you, put their arm around you and said, I'm going to show you how to be a godly woman. Follow me. Some of us are blessed to have answers to those questions. A program or person for a season has profoundly impacted and changed your life. But most of us, our spiritual life and our discipleship is an amalgamation and a mosaic of all the different encounters that we've had in our life, of all the different relationships we've entered into and out of, of just the different programs and the different studies and the different information that we've been exposed to, and the different seasons of our life where God allowed someone to speak into our life. And so what I want us to see is that discipleship isn't so much a dynamic relationship with a person who guides us like Jesus did the disciples. And it's not a program that we enter into that if we just do the work, we'll come out the other side of the disciple. No, a disciple is someone who consistently takes steps of obedience as God places them in front of us. So at Grace, being a disciple means we're someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. That's how we frame up disciples. And that's why this first trait we're focused on is that of step-takers. Step-taker is a way of saying disciple. Those words to me are interchangeable in our vernacular. Someone who is a step-taker, someone who's committed to taking their next step of obedience that God places in front of them. And listen, I'm a firm believer that God at every season of our life, no matter where we are in our relationship with him, always places a next step of obedience in front of us. There's no such thing as perfect sainthood where we get to perfection and we've got nothing left to do but simply be holy for the rest of our lives. There's always something else that God is pressing us to do. And it could be that you're here this morning and you're not yet a believer. You wouldn't call yourself a person of faith. Maybe your step of obedience is just to explore spirituality more, to explore Christianity more. Maybe it's to take a step of faith and profess faith in Jesus Christ. Maybe you've been coming for a little while and your step of obedience is to join a small group this morning or this semester and put yourself out there in that way. Maybe your step of obedience is to volunteer somewhere in the church or somewhere in the community and partner with what God is doing. Maybe your step of obedience, we're going to talk about being people of devotion, and I'm going to tell you that the most important habit that anyone can have is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. Maybe your step of obedience is to do that. Those are simple things, and I'm rooting for you that that gets to be yours. Because steps of obedience can get much harder than that. It could be to admit that we have an addiction and we don't know what to do about it. It could be to forgive that person in our life that probably doesn't deserve our forgiveness, but the anger we hold towards them is a cancer that eats us, not them. We could admit that a problem's too big for us. Maybe our next step of obedience is to approach our spouse and say, hey, neither of us have been happy for a while, but we have a responsibility for a joyful, godly marriage here to model for our kids, so let's figure this thing out. Maybe your next step of obedience is to quit a job or to change careers or to start a small group or to share the gospel with your neighbor. I don't know what your next step of obedience is, but I know that God is pressing one on each of us in the room. And here's the thing. Here's what I know, that if God presses on us to take a step of obedience, that Jesus will be there when we take it. Which is why I say that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The scarier the step God asks us to take, the more it deepens our faith when we take it and see that Jesus was there the whole time. And when we think about this model of discipleship simply being not necessarily life on life or a program that we do, but a step of obedience that we take, that really is the biblical model. That's how Jesus did it in here. If you read through the gospels, looking for Jesus to tell them to do something and to see whether or not they'll do it, what you'll see is that he really did form the disciples and train the disciples through these steps of obedience. I think about the call of the disciples. When he went and he called Peter, one of the greatest disciples. Peter had just got done fishing. He was on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. And Jesus went up to him and he says, hey, I want you to go back out there and I want you to cast your nets on the other side of the boat. Now, this is a hassle. Okay? This is annoying. Peter and his boys had just spent the whole day fishing. They didn't catch anything. They were discouraged. They had come in. They had wound up the nets. Have you seen those nets? Those things are huge. I can't imagine the unholy hassle it would be to just put those together at the end of every day and unfurl them at the beginning of the next day. It seems like a hugely tedious task. They had done that. They were done. They were putting up the boat. They were going to go and have some wine and olives and maybe some feta cheese. That's what I would do if I lived in Capernaum. They were looking forward to the next thing. And Jesus comes up and he says, hey, put that on hold. Go back out. Unfurl the nets on the other side. And Peter was obedient and he did it. And he had a greater catch than he had ever had before. He took a step of obedience. And Jesus grew his faith. Levi's call was different. Jesus went to Peter and he said, I want you to do your work more. And he went to Levi and he said, I want you to not do your work at all. Levi was a tax collector. He was making very good money because tax collectors did because they were jerks. And he goes to Levi who later would become Matthew. And he says, I want you to quit this and I want you to follow me. I want you to take this step of obedience. Quit your job and do what I'm asking you to do. And he did it. And he followed him. And Jesus turned him into a disciple and grew his faith. I think about him training them in ministry. When the disciples had been with him for a matter of months or a year or more, And he said, you've seen me casting out demons. You've seen me doing things in God's name. Now you go out too, but you pair off two by two, go into the surrounding towns and villages and you do what you saw me do. Go take this step of obedience and do what I'm asking you to do. And then I think about the restoration of Peter. And this is worth the sermon at some other point. I love this story in the Bible. But at the Last Supper, Jesus looks at Peter and he says, before the rooster crows in the morning, you will have denied me three times. And Peter says, no way, I would die for you, Jesus. And Jesus is like, okay, I'm not usually wrong about this stuff, but all right. And sure enough, that night, before the rooster crows, Peter denies knowing Jesus three times. And after the third time, the rooster crows, and Jesus looks Peter in the eye, and Peter goes away weeping because he's failed his Savior. And we see that Peter disqualifies himself from ministry because he goes back to what he was doing before he met Jesus, and he's fishing. And Jesus makes breakfast on the beach, and he up to Peter and he says, Peter, do you love me? Peter says, yes, Lord, you know I love you. He says, then feed my sheep. Obey me. Go do what I'm telling you to do. And then he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've trained you to do. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Then go take care of my lambs. Be a good shepherd like I've shown you how to be. Do what I've told you and taught you to do. Obey me and go and lead the church. It's this beautiful restoration. Three times Peter denies Christ. Three times Jesus says, do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. And what we really see throughout the New Testament, throughout the Gospels in particular, is that to be a disciple of Jesus is to be one who simply obeys Jesus. And if it's true that disciples are step-takers, then how do we make disciples? How do we get actively involved in making disciples of other people? We do it this way. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We don't have to jump in and have breakfast with them and show them what it is to be a godly person in all ways. No, we can just be in their life and help them see what their next step of obedience might be. Yeah, you should join that team. Yes, you should start that ministry. Yes, you should have that conversation. Hey, you should read this book with me and then let's apply it to our lives. It's just, it's helping someone identify and take their next step of obedience. And here's what I love about this model of discipleship is it allows us to speak into people's lives in categories, in specific ways. It allows you to invite someone into your life to teach you in a specific way, but not all the ways. When I went to Mr. Champion when I was in college and I said, will you disciple me? That was such a loaded question because in my naive 20-year-old brain, what I meant was, I didn't know this is what I meant, but what I meant was, will you meet with me for an hour once a week over a soggy waffle and teach me how to be a godly theologian, a godly husband in the future? Will you teach me things that I can remember so that I'll be a godly parent and a good dad for my kids? Will you disciple me in how to do ministry and be the good pastor that I want to be one day? I was putting on him my hopes and dreams for my whole life. Will you help me become who God wants me to be? That's a heavy weight. But if discipleship is simply helping people see their next step of obedience and take it, then I can go to somebody and I can say, hey, you've accomplished some things in your life and in your ministry that I admire. And you've done it in a godly way. Can I ask you questions about how to lead my church like you've led yours? You can go to a mom who's older and has children that seem to actually like her and say, hey, your kids are in the early years of high school and they will talk to you at restaurants. How did you do that? Teach me how to do that so that my children will talk to me when they get older. Will you disciple me in motherhood? You can go to someone who seems to know scripture really well. Say, hey, you seem to know the Bible well. Will you meet with me and just teach me how you study it and help me and point me to the books that you've read? And then after I read them, can we talk about that? We can invite people in for pockets of our life as we seek to take our next step of obedience, but we don't have to make someone or some program responsible for all of our discipleship. And I find it to be a really freeing thing to think about it in that way. Now here's why I'm talking about this today. Here's why I'm leading off the series with being a step-taker. So that I can tell you the story that I'm about to tell you. Before I do, I just want to finish up. This is kind of the sermon portion of the morning. The next is a family meeting. Our next step of obedience as a church is to get serious about being step-takers. I believe that we all have steps of obedience to take as individuals, and God is pressing those on us. And my prayer for you over this series is that you'll be open-hearted and open-minded and open-eared and open-eyed so that you'll be able to see what God is pressing on you to do. It's my prayer for you is that you'll take a step of obedience as a result of the series. But I also think that we as a church, grace, our partnership, we have a next step to take as a church as well. And it's to get serious about being step takers. And here's why I'm convinced of this. Two years ago in October, I was with a very good friend. He wasn't yet a good friend at the time, but he would become a very good friend in part as a result of this conversation. We were on the back porch late at night with our favorite beverages. And I believe that God works in those moments. Those are glorious nights. And we were talking about church and he's someone that's got a couple of years on me and so he was pressing on me a little bit and he was asking me questions. What do you want grace to be? What do you want to be? What do you want to be known for as a pastor? When you spin it forward five, ten years, what do you want to be true of you? What do you want to be true of grace? And he just, he kept pressing on me. And I said, well, what do you want grace to be? Well, you know, I've been a part of other churches and I've seen these patterns of unhealth in those churches. And I don't want grace to be a place that falls into those patterns. I don't want to do that. What do you want to be as a senior pastor? Well, I've, you know, I've been around other senior pastors and I've seen what it does to senior pastors to be the guy in the room for their whole life. And when you, when, when in most places, I know it sounds obnoxious, but I'm just being honest with you. All right. And if you want to judge me as a jerk, that's fine. You're probably right. But when you go through life, you've seen this in business. You've seen this in ministry. When you go through life and most rooms that you're in, you're the weightiest voice in that room, that does something to you. It messes you up. And if you don't monitor that stuff, you become an unholy jerk. That's why I've told the staff and the elders, part of your responsibility, your holy sacred duty to the church is to keep the senior pastor stink off me. And if I ever get to acting like I'm too big for my britches, some of y'all need to knock me down some pegs. Not this week, though. I'm busy. I lost my place. I said, so I don't want to become one of those guys. What about staff? What do you want to do with staff? Well, I've been on staff before, and it was unhealthy. It wasn't good. I've seen how church hurts people. I don't want to hurt people and burn people out. I don't want them to be a cog in the machine. I don't want staff to be taken for granted. And he kept asking me questions, and I kept him my best answers. And finally he got the smirk on his face and I said, what? And he goes, I feel like I know a whole lot about what you don't want to be. I don't have the first clue about what you do want to be or what you want grace to be. And I went, I think it's time for bed. He was right. And I realized that night and subsequent days and thought and prayer that my greatest vision for grace had only ever been health. My greatest vision for us was simply to be a place that was healthy. And for a while, for a while, that vision has served us very well. When I got here in 2017, that's the vision that we needed. We were grossly unhealthy in myriad ways. Those of you who weren't here at that time, I'm not going to go through the whole story, but let's just say that I got hired in the first week of April. I started in the first week of April in 2017. Let me just tell you, if they hadn't figured out how to get a warm body up here preaching by April, there is no way they would have made it out of May. Okay, they were teetering on the brink. If you were here, raise your hand if I'm lying. It was tough. And so we needed to get healthy. That's the vision that we needed to have. Then right about the time we got healthy, we launched the campaign, we do all the things, the whole nation got unhealthy with COVID. Our last Sunday was March 8th, 2020. We announced how much had been pledged for the campaign. And then we just didn't meet again. Do you realize that our next, that our last service was March 8th, 2020? That our next normal, non-summer, unmasked service was in September of 22, that COVID profoundly infected Grace for two and a half years. And it was somewhere in that two and a half years that I realized and accepted as we were trying to hold things together with duct tape and wire, we are never going back to that church that we were. All the health and all the growth that we saw were hitting the reset button. And I had to mourn that. And that was tough. And it made me want to quit at times. But we got back from COVID and we started rebuilding. And we've worked Gibby onto our, Aaron Gibson onto our staff, which has really been a bear. And we've gotten to a place of health again. Where one of the things I'm most proud of, you might find this silly, but one of the things I'm most proud of is that we had a friend in our small group that we had been friends with the whole time that we were at Grace who came on staff with Grace and we're still friends. I still treat her like my little sister and slam her laptop shut whenever I walk past her in the office. We're still buddies. There's no secrets that were found that made us unattractive. When someone comes on as an elder, they don't look around and go, this is really surprising. They look around and they go, this is pretty much what I thought was going to be going on over there. We have volunteers that come in during the week. They're not surprised by what they see. There's no seedy underbelly to grace. We are what you see. I am who I am on Sunday and on Wednesday, and so is everybody that I know. and I think with great pride we are a very healthy church. But I've also been deeply convicted that that's not enough. It's not enough to simply exist in our health. It's not enough to simply come on Sundays, praise God together, hear a sermon that's hopefully decent, and go home and reflect and then go to small group and yuck it up for 45 minutes and then pray for five. That's not enough. And what I see happening, I'm just going to speak honestly as your pastor right now, what I see happening is grace sinking into this healthy malaise where we're happy to be good enough. And this is where I will also press that, and I'm including me in this, that church-wide malaise sinking into good enough creeps into us too. And I know a lot of us, I know a lot of us, me included, who have settled for good enough in our own spiritual lives, who have gotten to a place of health and said, I think I'm good. I'm just going to cruise it in from here. You didn't, never did you cognitively think that. Never did we cognitively just slide into health as a church at Grace and go, well, there's nothing left to do. But we do it by default if we don't press to the next thing. And so this morning, together, I want us to press into the next step. Also, during that fall, I met somebody named Ru Sin, who is a worldwide church planner, tip of the spear stuff in countries where the gospel is illegal, and it is amazing. And I would go to these seminars that he would lead where he would train these pastors in these other countries how to make disciples in their churches. And he had so many slide decks and so many slide shows that I asked him if he proposed to his wife via slide deck. It was one of those guys, like so many. And it was so organized and so many different things and so many different modules and things that you need to do. And it was just mind numbing. And in one of those trainings, I took with me an elder of our church and that elder raised his hand and asked the question I wanted him to ask, which was, Rue, this is great, but discipleship is not linear. The Holy Spirit is wild. He's unpredictable. We can't program spiritual growth. So why are you trying to do that? And Rue's answer was fantastic. He said, you're right. The Holy Spirit is wild and free. The Holy Spirit is unpredictable and uses life experiences and different things to grow us in ways that we don't expect. He said, but that's the Holy Spirit's job is to grow. My job is to build the lattice work that directs where that vine grows. And as I heard him say that, I went, yep, that's what we need. That's our next step of obedience as a church. That's what I need to be working on is latticework for grace so that when someone says, I'm ready to grow spiritually, we have a way to point you and to point that growth. So last September, on this very same Sunday, the first one after Labor Day, last year it was September 10th, I stood up here and I said, hey, in my sabbatical I became convicted that I wasn't working for you guys as hard as I could. And I know a thing I need to do and I'm going to spend the better part of my year working on it. And I did. And we developed what we are calling discipleship pathways. These are in the lobby. I didn't put them in your seat because I didn't want them to be convoluted with your small groups thing. These are in the lobby. These are online. We've got a whole resource page that Carly worked on very hard that looks very good where you can go and you can see a list of all the things that I'm about to tell you about. In the discipleship pathways, in our lattice work to direct our spiritual growth, I sat down with Rue and I said, I want to develop this for grace, but I can't develop it like you develop it because we're not a slide deck church. We're not a linear class taking church. We need options. I'm not going to go tell anybody what to do. I'm certainly not going to go tell small group leaders what to do, but we need an answer to how we can grow spiritually. How can we develop this? And he said, well, what's important to you? What are the key values in your church? And I said, well, that's easy. The five traits that we are kingdom builders, that we are step takers, that we are a people of devotion, that we are partners and that we are conduits of grace. Those are what's valuable to us. And he goes, great, let's start there. And so what we have is each of the traits, conduits of grace, and then recommended opportunities and studies under each one of those things. People of devotion, how do I understand the Bible more? Things that I've written for that that are recommended for groups and for individuals. We got them for all five traits. If you go out into the lobby, you'll see over the glass doors where we have now emblazoned on the wall the five traits of grace. And now I know what to do with who we are, which is to press the partners of grace into embodying the five traits of grace all the time as much as I can, because it's our next step of obedience to take to become serious about taking steps. And we're going to see at the end of this series that the apex trait, the one that I want to push everyone to, what I want, what I want grace to produce is a church full of kingdom builders. And I can't wait to build there and tell you about exactly what that means. But these discipleship pathways, just so you understand what they are and how we're going to use them. Underneath each category, underneath each trait, is something that's called group study and then individual study. And the group study is things that you can do in your small groups. You want to grow as a conduit of grace in your small group. You can go to your small group leader and say, hey, could we maybe do this study this time around? I shared this with all the small group leaders on July 28th. They've already been thinking about it. So maybe they'll kick out two or three to you that maybe we can do in our group this semester. Is this what you'd like to do? Then there's individual studies, resources, things you can watch, things you can read so that you can grow on your own in these areas. I would also encourage you, we've talked about sacred spaces in here, having two or three people in your life who know you intimately and can encourage you spiritually. Maybe you go through a book in your sacred space and say, hey, will you guys, will you ladies read this together with me? Then we're also introducing something else that I'm very excited about called Pathway Courses. These are courses that are going to be offered as one-offs for you to take. They're not small groups. They're not part of your small groups, although your small group could together choose this semester, let's not meet as a small group. Let's go to this course that's being offered. The courses that we're offering, you're going to hear about one here in a few minutes. Doug Bergeson is going to be teaching through, he's one of our elders. He's going to be teaching through the big picture, a 30 week course. It's this, this semester and next semester that walks us through the Bible. A couple other guys, Jim Banks, Jim Adams and Burt Banks are going to be going through, yeah, Jim Banks. Don't tell them. They're going to be going through Bethel Bible Study. It's a two-year deal. It changed Jim's life, changed Burt's life, and we want to get a handful of people and go through that. I've become convicted that we have an unusual concentration of leaders in our congregation. There's more of you here that lead outside of these walls than what is normal in the population. And so I want it to be true that people who work for you, their life is better because they work for someone who came to grace. We want to impact them by impacting you. So one of the leaders in the church, one of the business leaders in the church and I developed a seven-week discussion thing for leaders to talk about being godly leaders in the workplace that we're going to go through. My dad wrote a theology 101 course that Gary Green is going to teach. Gary Green's in the back there in the blue shirt looking just great. Gary Green's going to teach that maybe as soon as next semester. We've got a couple more. Aaron's doing a theology of worship to take his team through and anybody else who wants to be interested in that. Those are courses. And we're not going to offer them all at once. We're going to offer them one at a time, sparingly. And make that something that's available to you that you can say, either as a small group, let's go through this together. Or you can just double up for a time. Or you can go to your small group leader and you say, hey, I'm going to take a semester off. I'm going to go do this. But that's what the discipleship pathways are. And there's nothing magical about this sheet of paper and the resources on it. There's nothing new under the sun here. The point is not to point to the pathways. The point is to get you on the pathways. The point is to get you to see that the next, I've said, this is the most important series we've done in years, and it's the most important thing we'll do for the next three to five years, because we cannot, listen to me, Grace, we cannot just happily stagnate in good enough. We cannot happily stagnate in healthy. We're healthy. We're here. We're moving forward. We're growing. We've got to ask what's next. Where do we go? And where I think we go is getting really serious about our spiritual health and our personal holiness and taking steps of faith together. So I hope that over the course of this series, you'll be ready to do just that. Let me pray. Father, thank you for the way that you gently convict, for the way that you bring us along. God, I pray that if we have been stagnating in our own health, that we would realize that that's a pretty precarious place to be. Father, challenge us in our own spiritual growth. Challenge us to take steps of obedience towards you. Challenge us, God. Help us to answer the call as a church to pursue you more earnestly. God, grow in us a desire for you. Grow in us a desire for holiness. Help us to model that for the people who are around us and use this series as a season of profound change for grace as you activate us to pursue you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is I was just looking at Aaron Winston this morning. Aaron's our children's pastor. And I looked at her and I said, do you realize this is our eighth September together? It's been a minute and I love September. September's everyone's back. Sched are regular, people are in school, small groups start, football kicks off. Football is the great unifier. Everyone can talk about the same thing on Sunday morning when we get here. It's very fun. And so I just love the fall and I love September. And for us at church and on staff, we think of September as the beginning of our ministry year. We've come off the summer. We try to get some rest in the summertime a little bit, but come September, we are sprinting and we pretty much go until summer extreme in June. So we are excited from our standpoint. And I have been excited to share with you this message that's really been about two years in the making, which puts a tremendous amount of pressure on its efficacy. But, you know, we'll see how it goes. But for about two years, God's been doing something in me, and it's kind of culminating in what I'm going to share with you today and where we're going to go for the rest of this series. This series is called The Traits of Grace. You may remember that we did this series in the fall of 2022. Prior to that, the staff had kind of gotten together and brainstormed what makes grace, grace, what makes us unique as a church? What are our unique characteristics? What do we want the characteristics of a partner of grace to be? And so we put stuff on the whiteboard. We settled on some things. I wrote it up. I submitted it to the elders. The elders enthusiastically agreed with it with very few changes. Yes, this is who we believe we are called to be at grace. And so then I walked us through the five traits in September and October of 22. We spent five weeks on them. We looked at each one of them, why biblically we believe we're supposed to do these things. But here's the thing is once I rolled those five traits out, I didn't really know what to do with them anymore. I didn't know how to continue to bring them up, how to continue to put them in front of you, how to really inculcate them as part of the culture of grace. And I feel like now, two years later, I do. And here's how we're going to do it. We're going to start by talking about discipleship. Discipleship, I don't know if you know this or not. Discipleship is the goal of every church. Every evangelical church ever, discipleship is the goal. It is the white whale of church ministry. To produce disciple-making disciples. To make disciples that serve Jesus Christ. To make disciples that build other disciples. That build other disciples. And on and on it goes. This is the goal of every church. Every church is seeking to make disciples of Christ. And this is right and good. This should be the goal because it's the commission. It's the great commission. Jesus, after he died on the cross, resurrected, did ministry with the disciples for 40 days, and ascended back up into heaven, his last instruction to the disciples were go into all the world, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He tells them to go and make disciples, not converts, not people who simply believe and extend faith towards Christ, but disciples. People who take their spiritual health seriously. People who are actively pursuing Jesus. Who are actively becoming more like Christ in character. That's the process of sanctification. So that has been the commission for every church ever. And it is what I talked about in my interview process when they hired me at Grace. It's what I've always thought about at church. How do we make disciples? And here's the secret that not many churches will admit to. And you certainly won't hear pastors confessing it from stage. But we're not very good at it. We're not very good at making disciples. Those of you who have been a part of the church for any amount of time, at least not intentionally, those of you who have been part of the church, when I say the church, I mean Big C Church, not just Grace, but just church. Church is a part of your life. I'd be willing to bet you've had some awkward interactions with the idea of discipleship. I can remember when I was in college, I went to Toccoa Falls College in Northeast Georgia, and I kept the grounds for the school. And the leader of that team, the full-time employee, was a wonderful godly man named George Champion. And I thought very highly of Mr. Champion. So I went to him one time and I said mr. champion will you disciple me will you show me what it is to be a godly man and mr. champion said yes of course because that's what you when people ask you that question you don't say no they'd be a jerk so you got to say yes okay people hey will you decide for me yes that's your answer so he says he says yeah sure and I go okay what do you want answer. So he says, he says, yeah, sure. And I go, okay, what do you want to do? And he says, what everyone says in that situation, let's, uh, get breakfast and read a book. Cause that's what you're supposed to do to make disciples in America. Apparently as you go to waffle house and you read a book, our problem was our town was so small. We didn't even have a waffle house. We We had a Huddle House with three bullet holes in the hood vent. But we went during safe hours, so it was fine. Mr. Champion said, I'll disciple you. You can meet me at the Huddle House. We'll go through a book together, but I get to work early, so I need to meet at 5 a.m. I was 20. 20-year-olds and 5 a.m. don't mix unless they've just been up that whole time. So I missed some. I hit the first two or three. And then the fourth one and the fifth one I slept through. Mr. Champion saw me at work, said, did you sleep through it? Yeah, I'm really sorry, sir. And by the sixth time, I couldn't look him in the eye anymore, and that effort at discipleship fizzled. We could probably tell stories of times that we asked someone to disciple us, of ways that we've learned about what discipleship really means, of programs and systems that we've done. We've done discipleship programs, discipleship groups, where the church puts us in this funnel, and we take classes. And as a result of doing all these things, we squirt out the other end of disciple, fully fledged forms, disciple of Christ. Now I'm ready to help other people go through the funnel. We've all tried these things, but they've lacked success and they've lacked success for me as well. It was with this background that I went to a small conference, I think in about 2019, 2018 or 2019, that was led by a pastor named Larry Osborne, who's got a pretty successful church in San Diego. And it was just 25 senior pastors sitting around the table while Larry was just sharing with us his wisdom. And Larry shared with us how they frame up discipleship in his church. And it was like a bulb went off for me. It was a fresh, brand new way to understand discipleship. Because I had always been told that discipleship had to be life on life. You guys ever heard that phrase, life on life discipleship? I was told that's how it had to be. Like when I was a student pastor, I'd go to these conferences and they would say, when you're discipling your students, you need to invite them into your home. Let them see how a godly man talks to his godly wife. Let them see how a godly man addresses his kids. Let them see how a godly man does yard work. Take them with you shopping. Let them see how a godly man shops at the grocery store. And I thought, well, probably a lot like a kind atheist or like a humble Hindu, you know? It's probably not too, I bet the Hindu is a nicer grocery shopper than I am anyways. And that never really resonated with me because in the first century, we think the model of discipleship based on scripture is life on life, is the disciples living with Jesus, following him around, being with him every day, watching all of his interactions. The problem is that may have been practical in the first century AD. It is not practical in the 21st century in the United States. So there's got to be a better way. With that background, I went to this conference and I heard Larry Osborne frame up discipleship in this unique way where he says discipleship is really nothing more than taking our next step of obedience. That when Jesus wants to grow us, he puts a step of obedience in front of us and he asks us to take it. And if we take it, we are being discipled. We are a disciple of Christ. If we don't, we are stagnating in our faith. And I had never heard it described that way before, but then he went through scripture. I went back and went through scripture and found it to be pretty obvious. Once you start putting the pieces together, I would remind you of a couple of verses first in John chapter 14, verse 15. When Jesus says this, if you love me, keep my commands. That's pretty simple. This is Jesus talking. If you love me, if you say you love me, then do what I say. If you say you want to be like me, then do what I tell you to do. If you love me, keep my commands. He says it even more clearly in Luke 6. I love this one. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I say? Why do you call me Lord of your life and not treat me that way? Why do you call me the king and not crown me? Why do you say one thing out of this side of your mouth and another thing out of this side of your mouth? Why do you sing to me on Sunday like I'm Lord and I'm your treasure and then act on Wednesday like you've never met me? I think that's pretty convicting and pretty applicable for all of us at different seasons. Why do you call me Lord and not do what I say? That's Jesus talking. And then we have this great passage from John, the disciple. John was probably the youngest disciple. He could have been as young as 10 when he was with the disciples. He's referred to in the gospel of John as the disciple whom Jesus loved. At the last supper, we see that John was reclining against Jesus's chest and Jesus was able to say things to John that only John could hear. And at the death of Jesus, at this crucifixion, he looked at John and asked John to take care of his mother, Mary. So they were very, very close. And John spent the rest of his life in service to this Jesus. He led the church and he had two disciples of his own, Polycarp and Erasmus, that became early church fathers to whom he handed off the keys of the kingdom. And at the end of his life, John writes some letters, general epistles to be circulated amongst the churches in Jerusalem and Asia Minor. And in his first letter, 1 John, he makes one thing abundantly clear, and we see it captured here in 1 John 2, verses 3 through 6, where he says this, We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands. Whoever says, I know him, but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person. But if anyone obeys his word, love for on all that he learns, giving a final encouragement to the churches that he loves so much to whom he's dedicated his life. He says, we know we love him if we obey him. If we say that we love him and we do not obey him, then we are liars and the truth is not in us. He says the litmus test for Christianity is very clear. Are you obedient to Christ or are you not? And so I would make simply this point about discipleship and its relationship with obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. If you'd like to know how you're doing spiritually, take an inventory of your life. Over the last few years, have you been growing in your obedience to Christ? Has your obedience to him increased? Are you giving him more and more of yourself and of your margins? Are you letting go of more and more things that don't need to be there that don't help you obey? Are you throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and running the race set before you? Or have you been stagnant in your obedience? Does your obedience in 2024 look pretty much how it looked in 2020? When you look behind you, do you see a wake of obedience or do you see stagnation? Scripture makes it pretty clear that if we want to call ourselves disciples of Christ, then we are people who are taking steps of obedience. And ever since Larry framed it up this way, I quit thinking about discipleship as this essential relationship with a person that walks you through life and tells you what to do. I quit thinking about discipleship as a program that you take. Because if we're being honest, those of us in the room who take our spiritual health seriously, those of us in the room that other people would look at and probably say that person is a disciple of Christ. That's someone who's growing in their obedience to Jesus. They're growing closer to him. They're growing more like him in character. I've seen that person taking strides. They are someone to whom their spiritual health is very, very important and they guard it fiercely. And I know that very few people in here would raise our hand and be like, yeah, I think I would call myself a disciple of Christ. But there's plenty of people in here who would say, I've taken my spiritual health very seriously and it matters to me and I'm intentional about it. If that's you, I wonder if you could point me to the program or the singular person who got you to that place. I wonder if you could point me to the Bible study you did that got you to where you are today. To the discipleship program that you enlisted in that spit you out the other side of the disciple. I wonder if you could point to the person who came alongside you, put their arm around you and said, I'm going to show you how to be a godly woman. Follow me. Some of us are blessed to have answers to those questions. A program or person for a season has profoundly impacted and changed your life. But most of us, our spiritual life and our discipleship is an amalgamation and a mosaic of all the different encounters that we've had in our life, of all the different relationships we've entered into and out of, of just the different programs and the different studies and the different information that we've been exposed to, and the different seasons of our life where God allowed someone to speak into our life. And so what I want us to see is that discipleship isn't so much a dynamic relationship with a person who guides us like Jesus did the disciples. And it's not a program that we enter into that if we just do the work, we'll come out the other side of the disciple. No, a disciple is someone who consistently takes steps of obedience as God places them in front of us. So at Grace, being a disciple means we're someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. That's how we frame up disciples. And that's why this first trait we're focused on is that of step-takers. Step-taker is a way of saying disciple. Those words to me are interchangeable in our vernacular. Someone who is a step-taker, someone who's committed to taking their next step of obedience that God places in front of them. And listen, I'm a firm believer that God at every season of our life, no matter where we are in our relationship with him, always places a next step of obedience in front of us. There's no such thing as perfect sainthood where we get to perfection and we've got nothing left to do but simply be holy for the rest of our lives. There's always something else that God is pressing us to do. And it could be that you're here this morning and you're not yet a believer. You wouldn't call yourself a person of faith. Maybe your step of obedience is just to explore spirituality more, to explore Christianity more. Maybe it's to take a step of faith and profess faith in Jesus Christ. Maybe you've been coming for a little while and your step of obedience is to join a small group this morning or this semester and put yourself out there in that way. Maybe your step of obedience is to volunteer somewhere in the church or somewhere in the community and partner with what God is doing. Maybe your step of obedience, we're going to talk about being people of devotion, and I'm going to tell you that the most important habit that anyone can have is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. Maybe your step of obedience is to do that. Those are simple things, and I'm rooting for you that that gets to be yours. Because steps of obedience can get much harder than that. It could be to admit that we have an addiction and we don't know what to do about it. It could be to forgive that person in our life that probably doesn't deserve our forgiveness, but the anger we hold towards them is a cancer that eats us, not them. We could admit that a problem's too big for us. Maybe our next step of obedience is to approach our spouse and say, hey, neither of us have been happy for a while, but we have a responsibility for a joyful, godly marriage here to model for our kids, so let's figure this thing out. Maybe your next step of obedience is to quit a job or to change careers or to start a small group or to share the gospel with your neighbor. I don't know what your next step of obedience is, but I know that God is pressing one on each of us in the room. And here's the thing. Here's what I know, that if God presses on us to take a step of obedience, that Jesus will be there when we take it. Which is why I say that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The scarier the step God asks us to take, the more it deepens our faith when we take it and see that Jesus was there the whole time. And when we think about this model of discipleship simply being not necessarily life on life or a program that we do, but a step of obedience that we take, that really is the biblical model. That's how Jesus did it in here. If you read through the gospels, looking for Jesus to tell them to do something and to see whether or not they'll do it, what you'll see is that he really did form the disciples and train the disciples through these steps of obedience. I think about the call of the disciples. When he went and he called Peter, one of the greatest disciples. Peter had just got done fishing. He was on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. And Jesus went up to him and he says, hey, I want you to go back out there and I want you to cast your nets on the other side of the boat. Now, this is a hassle. Okay? This is annoying. Peter and his boys had just spent the whole day fishing. They didn't catch anything. They were discouraged. They had come in. They had wound up the nets. Have you seen those nets? Those things are huge. I can't imagine the unholy hassle it would be to just put those together at the end of every day and unfurl them at the beginning of the next day. It seems like a hugely tedious task. They had done that. They were done. They were putting up the boat. They were going to go and have some wine and olives and maybe some feta cheese. That's what I would do if I lived in Capernaum. They were looking forward to the next thing. And Jesus comes up and he says, hey, put that on hold. Go back out. Unfurl the nets on the other side. And Peter was obedient and he did it. And he had a greater catch than he had ever had before. He took a step of obedience. And Jesus grew his faith. Levi's call was different. Jesus went to Peter and he said, I want you to do your work more. And he went to Levi and he said, I want you to not do your work at all. Levi was a tax collector. He was making very good money because tax collectors did because they were jerks. And he goes to Levi who later would become Matthew. And he says, I want you to quit this and I want you to follow me. I want you to take this step of obedience. Quit your job and do what I'm asking you to do. And he did it. And he followed him. And Jesus turned him into a disciple and grew his faith. I think about him training them in ministry. When the disciples had been with him for a matter of months or a year or more, And he said, you've seen me casting out demons. You've seen me doing things in God's name. Now you go out too, but you pair off two by two, go into the surrounding towns and villages and you do what you saw me do. Go take this step of obedience and do what I'm asking you to do. And then I think about the restoration of Peter. And this is worth the sermon at some other point. I love this story in the Bible. But at the Last Supper, Jesus looks at Peter and he says, before the rooster crows in the morning, you will have denied me three times. And Peter says, no way, I would die for you, Jesus. And Jesus is like, okay, I'm not usually wrong about this stuff, but all right. And sure enough, that night, before the rooster crows, Peter denies knowing Jesus three times. And after the third time, the rooster crows, and Jesus looks Peter in the eye, and Peter goes away weeping because he's failed his Savior. And we see that Peter disqualifies himself from ministry because he goes back to what he was doing before he met Jesus, and he's fishing. And Jesus makes breakfast on the beach, and he up to Peter and he says, Peter, do you love me? Peter says, yes, Lord, you know I love you. He says, then feed my sheep. Obey me. Go do what I'm telling you to do. And then he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've trained you to do. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Then go take care of my lambs. Be a good shepherd like I've shown you how to be. Do what I've told you and taught you to do. Obey me and go and lead the church. It's this beautiful restoration. Three times Peter denies Christ. Three times Jesus says, do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. And what we really see throughout the New Testament, throughout the Gospels in particular, is that to be a disciple of Jesus is to be one who simply obeys Jesus. And if it's true that disciples are step-takers, then how do we make disciples? How do we get actively involved in making disciples of other people? We do it this way. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We don't have to jump in and have breakfast with them and show them what it is to be a godly person in all ways. No, we can just be in their life and help them see what their next step of obedience might be. Yeah, you should join that team. Yes, you should start that ministry. Yes, you should have that conversation. Hey, you should read this book with me and then let's apply it to our lives. It's just, it's helping someone identify and take their next step of obedience. And here's what I love about this model of discipleship is it allows us to speak into people's lives in categories, in specific ways. It allows you to invite someone into your life to teach you in a specific way, but not all the ways. When I went to Mr. Champion when I was in college and I said, will you disciple me? That was such a loaded question because in my naive 20-year-old brain, what I meant was, I didn't know this is what I meant, but what I meant was, will you meet with me for an hour once a week over a soggy waffle and teach me how to be a godly theologian, a godly husband in the future? Will you teach me things that I can remember so that I'll be a godly parent and a good dad for my kids? Will you disciple me in how to do ministry and be the good pastor that I want to be one day? I was putting on him my hopes and dreams for my whole life. Will you help me become who God wants me to be? That's a heavy weight. But if discipleship is simply helping people see their next step of obedience and take it, then I can go to somebody and I can say, hey, you've accomplished some things in your life and in your ministry that I admire. And you've done it in a godly way. Can I ask you questions about how to lead my church like you've led yours? You can go to a mom who's older and has children that seem to actually like her and say, hey, your kids are in the early years of high school and they will talk to you at restaurants. How did you do that? Teach me how to do that so that my children will talk to me when they get older. Will you disciple me in motherhood? You can go to someone who seems to know scripture really well. Say, hey, you seem to know the Bible well. Will you meet with me and just teach me how you study it and help me and point me to the books that you've read? And then after I read them, can we talk about that? We can invite people in for pockets of our life as we seek to take our next step of obedience, but we don't have to make someone or some program responsible for all of our discipleship. And I find it to be a really freeing thing to think about it in that way. Now here's why I'm talking about this today. Here's why I'm leading off the series with being a step-taker. So that I can tell you the story that I'm about to tell you. Before I do, I just want to finish up. This is kind of the sermon portion of the morning. The next is a family meeting. Our next step of obedience as a church is to get serious about being step-takers. I believe that we all have steps of obedience to take as individuals, and God is pressing those on us. And my prayer for you over this series is that you'll be open-hearted and open-minded and open-eared and open-eyed so that you'll be able to see what God is pressing on you to do. It's my prayer for you is that you'll take a step of obedience as a result of the series. But I also think that we as a church, grace, our partnership, we have a next step to take as a church as well. And it's to get serious about being step takers. And here's why I'm convinced of this. Two years ago in October, I was with a very good friend. He wasn't yet a good friend at the time, but he would become a very good friend in part as a result of this conversation. We were on the back porch late at night with our favorite beverages. And I believe that God works in those moments. Those are glorious nights. And we were talking about church and he's someone that's got a couple of years on me and so he was pressing on me a little bit and he was asking me questions. What do you want grace to be? What do you want to be? What do you want to be known for as a pastor? When you spin it forward five, ten years, what do you want to be true of you? What do you want to be true of grace? And he just, he kept pressing on me. And I said, well, what do you want grace to be? Well, you know, I've been a part of other churches and I've seen these patterns of unhealth in those churches. And I don't want grace to be a place that falls into those patterns. I don't want to do that. What do you want to be as a senior pastor? Well, I've, you know, I've been around other senior pastors and I've seen what it does to senior pastors to be the guy in the room for their whole life. And when you, when, when in most places, I know it sounds obnoxious, but I'm just being honest with you. All right. And if you want to judge me as a jerk, that's fine. You're probably right. But when you go through life, you've seen this in business. You've seen this in ministry. When you go through life and most rooms that you're in, you're the weightiest voice in that room, that does something to you. It messes you up. And if you don't monitor that stuff, you become an unholy jerk. That's why I've told the staff and the elders, part of your responsibility, your holy sacred duty to the church is to keep the senior pastor stink off me. And if I ever get to acting like I'm too big for my britches, some of y'all need to knock me down some pegs. Not this week, though. I'm busy. I lost my place. I said, so I don't want to become one of those guys. What about staff? What do you want to do with staff? Well, I've been on staff before, and it was unhealthy. It wasn't good. I've seen how church hurts people. I don't want to hurt people and burn people out. I don't want them to be a cog in the machine. I don't want staff to be taken for granted. And he kept asking me questions, and I kept him my best answers. And finally he got the smirk on his face and I said, what? And he goes, I feel like I know a whole lot about what you don't want to be. I don't have the first clue about what you do want to be or what you want grace to be. And I went, I think it's time for bed. He was right. And I realized that night and subsequent days and thought and prayer that my greatest vision for grace had only ever been health. My greatest vision for us was simply to be a place that was healthy. And for a while, for a while, that vision has served us very well. When I got here in 2017, that's the vision that we needed. We were grossly unhealthy in myriad ways. Those of you who weren't here at that time, I'm not going to go through the whole story, but let's just say that I got hired in the first week of April. I started in the first week of April in 2017. Let me just tell you, if they hadn't figured out how to get a warm body up here preaching by April, there is no way they would have made it out of May. Okay, they were teetering on the brink. If you were here, raise your hand if I'm lying. It was tough. And so we needed to get healthy. That's the vision that we needed to have. Then right about the time we got healthy, we launched the campaign, we do all the things, the whole nation got unhealthy with COVID. Our last Sunday was March 8th, 2020. We announced how much had been pledged for the campaign. And then we just didn't meet again. Do you realize that our next, that our last service was March 8th, 2020? That our next normal, non-summer, unmasked service was in September of 22, that COVID profoundly infected Grace for two and a half years. And it was somewhere in that two and a half years that I realized and accepted as we were trying to hold things together with duct tape and wire, we are never going back to that church that we were. All the health and all the growth that we saw were hitting the reset button. And I had to mourn that. And that was tough. And it made me want to quit at times. But we got back from COVID and we started rebuilding. And we've worked Gibby onto our, Aaron Gibson onto our staff, which has really been a bear. And we've gotten to a place of health again. Where one of the things I'm most proud of, you might find this silly, but one of the things I'm most proud of is that we had a friend in our small group that we had been friends with the whole time that we were at Grace who came on staff with Grace and we're still friends. I still treat her like my little sister and slam her laptop shut whenever I walk past her in the office. We're still buddies. There's no secrets that were found that made us unattractive. When someone comes on as an elder, they don't look around and go, this is really surprising. They look around and they go, this is pretty much what I thought was going to be going on over there. We have volunteers that come in during the week. They're not surprised by what they see. There's no seedy underbelly to grace. We are what you see. I am who I am on Sunday and on Wednesday, and so is everybody that I know. and I think with great pride we are a very healthy church. But I've also been deeply convicted that that's not enough. It's not enough to simply exist in our health. It's not enough to simply come on Sundays, praise God together, hear a sermon that's hopefully decent, and go home and reflect and then go to small group and yuck it up for 45 minutes and then pray for five. That's not enough. And what I see happening, I'm just going to speak honestly as your pastor right now, what I see happening is grace sinking into this healthy malaise where we're happy to be good enough. And this is where I will also press that, and I'm including me in this, that church-wide malaise sinking into good enough creeps into us too. And I know a lot of us, I know a lot of us, me included, who have settled for good enough in our own spiritual lives, who have gotten to a place of health and said, I think I'm good. I'm just going to cruise it in from here. You didn't, never did you cognitively think that. Never did we cognitively just slide into health as a church at Grace and go, well, there's nothing left to do. But we do it by default if we don't press to the next thing. And so this morning, together, I want us to press into the next step. Also, during that fall, I met somebody named Ru Sin, who is a worldwide church planner, tip of the spear stuff in countries where the gospel is illegal, and it is amazing. And I would go to these seminars that he would lead where he would train these pastors in these other countries how to make disciples in their churches. And he had so many slide decks and so many slide shows that I asked him if he proposed to his wife via slide deck. It was one of those guys, like so many. And it was so organized and so many different things and so many different modules and things that you need to do. And it was just mind numbing. And in one of those trainings, I took with me an elder of our church and that elder raised his hand and asked the question I wanted him to ask, which was, Rue, this is great, but discipleship is not linear. The Holy Spirit is wild. He's unpredictable. We can't program spiritual growth. So why are you trying to do that? And Rue's answer was fantastic. He said, you're right. The Holy Spirit is wild and free. The Holy Spirit is unpredictable and uses life experiences and different things to grow us in ways that we don't expect. He said, but that's the Holy Spirit's job is to grow. My job is to build the lattice work that directs where that vine grows. And as I heard him say that, I went, yep, that's what we need. That's our next step of obedience as a church. That's what I need to be working on is latticework for grace so that when someone says, I'm ready to grow spiritually, we have a way to point you and to point that growth. So last September, on this very same Sunday, the first one after Labor Day, last year it was September 10th, I stood up here and I said, hey, in my sabbatical I became convicted that I wasn't working for you guys as hard as I could. And I know a thing I need to do and I'm going to spend the better part of my year working on it. And I did. And we developed what we are calling discipleship pathways. These are in the lobby. I didn't put them in your seat because I didn't want them to be convoluted with your small groups thing. These are in the lobby. These are online. We've got a whole resource page that Carly worked on very hard that looks very good where you can go and you can see a list of all the things that I'm about to tell you about. In the discipleship pathways, in our lattice work to direct our spiritual growth, I sat down with Rue and I said, I want to develop this for grace, but I can't develop it like you develop it because we're not a slide deck church. We're not a linear class taking church. We need options. I'm not going to go tell anybody what to do. I'm certainly not going to go tell small group leaders what to do, but we need an answer to how we can grow spiritually. How can we develop this? And he said, well, what's important to you? What are the key values in your church? And I said, well, that's easy. The five traits that we are kingdom builders, that we are step takers, that we are a people of devotion, that we are partners and that we are conduits of grace. Those are what's valuable to us. And he goes, great, let's start there. And so what we have is each of the traits, conduits of grace, and then recommended opportunities and studies under each one of those things. People of devotion, how do I understand the Bible more? Things that I've written for that that are recommended for groups and for individuals. We got them for all five traits. If you go out into the lobby, you'll see over the glass doors where we have now emblazoned on the wall the five traits of grace. And now I know what to do with who we are, which is to press the partners of grace into embodying the five traits of grace all the time as much as I can, because it's our next step of obedience to take to become serious about taking steps. And we're going to see at the end of this series that the apex trait, the one that I want to push everyone to, what I want, what I want grace to produce is a church full of kingdom builders. And I can't wait to build there and tell you about exactly what that means. But these discipleship pathways, just so you understand what they are and how we're going to use them. Underneath each category, underneath each trait, is something that's called group study and then individual study. And the group study is things that you can do in your small groups. You want to grow as a conduit of grace in your small group. You can go to your small group leader and say, hey, could we maybe do this study this time around? I shared this with all the small group leaders on July 28th. They've already been thinking about it. So maybe they'll kick out two or three to you that maybe we can do in our group this semester. Is this what you'd like to do? Then there's individual studies, resources, things you can watch, things you can read so that you can grow on your own in these areas. I would also encourage you, we've talked about sacred spaces in here, having two or three people in your life who know you intimately and can encourage you spiritually. Maybe you go through a book in your sacred space and say, hey, will you guys, will you ladies read this together with me? Then we're also introducing something else that I'm very excited about called Pathway Courses. These are courses that are going to be offered as one-offs for you to take. They're not small groups. They're not part of your small groups, although your small group could together choose this semester, let's not meet as a small group. Let's go to this course that's being offered. The courses that we're offering, you're going to hear about one here in a few minutes. Doug Bergeson is going to be teaching through, he's one of our elders. He's going to be teaching through the big picture, a 30 week course. It's this, this semester and next semester that walks us through the Bible. A couple other guys, Jim Banks, Jim Adams and Burt Banks are going to be going through, yeah, Jim Banks. Don't tell them. They're going to be going through Bethel Bible Study. It's a two-year deal. It changed Jim's life, changed Burt's life, and we want to get a handful of people and go through that. I've become convicted that we have an unusual concentration of leaders in our congregation. There's more of you here that lead outside of these walls than what is normal in the population. And so I want it to be true that people who work for you, their life is better because they work for someone who came to grace. We want to impact them by impacting you. So one of the leaders in the church, one of the business leaders in the church and I developed a seven-week discussion thing for leaders to talk about being godly leaders in the workplace that we're going to go through. My dad wrote a theology 101 course that Gary Green is going to teach. Gary Green's in the back there in the blue shirt looking just great. Gary Green's going to teach that maybe as soon as next semester. We've got a couple more. Aaron's doing a theology of worship to take his team through and anybody else who wants to be interested in that. Those are courses. And we're not going to offer them all at once. We're going to offer them one at a time, sparingly. And make that something that's available to you that you can say, either as a small group, let's go through this together. Or you can just double up for a time. Or you can go to your small group leader and you say, hey, I'm going to take a semester off. I'm going to go do this. But that's what the discipleship pathways are. And there's nothing magical about this sheet of paper and the resources on it. There's nothing new under the sun here. The point is not to point to the pathways. The point is to get you on the pathways. The point is to get you to see that the next, I've said, this is the most important series we've done in years, and it's the most important thing we'll do for the next three to five years, because we cannot, listen to me, Grace, we cannot just happily stagnate in good enough. We cannot happily stagnate in healthy. We're healthy. We're here. We're moving forward. We're growing. We've got to ask what's next. Where do we go? And where I think we go is getting really serious about our spiritual health and our personal holiness and taking steps of faith together. So I hope that over the course of this series, you'll be ready to do just that. Let me pray. Father, thank you for the way that you gently convict, for the way that you bring us along. God, I pray that if we have been stagnating in our own health, that we would realize that that's a pretty precarious place to be. Father, challenge us in our own spiritual growth. Challenge us to take steps of obedience towards you. Challenge us, God. Help us to answer the call as a church to pursue you more earnestly. God, grow in us a desire for you. Grow in us a desire for holiness. Help us to model that for the people who are around us and use this series as a season of profound change for grace as you activate us to pursue you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service. This is I was just looking at Aaron Winston this morning. Aaron's our children's pastor. And I looked at her and I said, do you realize this is our eighth September together? It's been a minute and I love September. September's everyone's back. Sched are regular, people are in school, small groups start, football kicks off. Football is the great unifier. Everyone can talk about the same thing on Sunday morning when we get here. It's very fun. And so I just love the fall and I love September. And for us at church and on staff, we think of September as the beginning of our ministry year. We've come off the summer. We try to get some rest in the summertime a little bit, but come September, we are sprinting and we pretty much go until summer extreme in June. So we are excited from our standpoint. And I have been excited to share with you this message that's really been about two years in the making, which puts a tremendous amount of pressure on its efficacy. But, you know, we'll see how it goes. But for about two years, God's been doing something in me, and it's kind of culminating in what I'm going to share with you today and where we're going to go for the rest of this series. This series is called The Traits of Grace. You may remember that we did this series in the fall of 2022. Prior to that, the staff had kind of gotten together and brainstormed what makes grace, grace, what makes us unique as a church? What are our unique characteristics? What do we want the characteristics of a partner of grace to be? And so we put stuff on the whiteboard. We settled on some things. I wrote it up. I submitted it to the elders. The elders enthusiastically agreed with it with very few changes. Yes, this is who we believe we are called to be at grace. And so then I walked us through the five traits in September and October of 22. We spent five weeks on them. We looked at each one of them, why biblically we believe we're supposed to do these things. But here's the thing is once I rolled those five traits out, I didn't really know what to do with them anymore. I didn't know how to continue to bring them up, how to continue to put them in front of you, how to really inculcate them as part of the culture of grace. And I feel like now, two years later, I do. And here's how we're going to do it. We're going to start by talking about discipleship. Discipleship, I don't know if you know this or not. Discipleship is the goal of every church. Every evangelical church ever, discipleship is the goal. It is the white whale of church ministry. To produce disciple-making disciples. To make disciples that serve Jesus Christ. To make disciples that build other disciples. That build other disciples. And on and on it goes. This is the goal of every church. Every church is seeking to make disciples of Christ. And this is right and good. This should be the goal because it's the commission. It's the great commission. Jesus, after he died on the cross, resurrected, did ministry with the disciples for 40 days, and ascended back up into heaven, his last instruction to the disciples were go into all the world, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He tells them to go and make disciples, not converts, not people who simply believe and extend faith towards Christ, but disciples. People who take their spiritual health seriously. People who are actively pursuing Jesus. Who are actively becoming more like Christ in character. That's the process of sanctification. So that has been the commission for every church ever. And it is what I talked about in my interview process when they hired me at Grace. It's what I've always thought about at church. How do we make disciples? And here's the secret that not many churches will admit to. And you certainly won't hear pastors confessing it from stage. But we're not very good at it. We're not very good at making disciples. Those of you who have been a part of the church for any amount of time, at least not intentionally, those of you who have been part of the church, when I say the church, I mean Big C Church, not just Grace, but just church. Church is a part of your life. I'd be willing to bet you've had some awkward interactions with the idea of discipleship. I can remember when I was in college, I went to Toccoa Falls College in Northeast Georgia, and I kept the grounds for the school. And the leader of that team, the full-time employee, was a wonderful godly man named George Champion. And I thought very highly of Mr. Champion. So I went to him one time and I said mr. champion will you disciple me will you show me what it is to be a godly man and mr. champion said yes of course because that's what you when people ask you that question you don't say no they'd be a jerk so you got to say yes okay people hey will you decide for me yes that's your answer so he says he says yeah sure and I go okay what do you want answer. So he says, he says, yeah, sure. And I go, okay, what do you want to do? And he says, what everyone says in that situation, let's, uh, get breakfast and read a book. Cause that's what you're supposed to do to make disciples in America. Apparently as you go to waffle house and you read a book, our problem was our town was so small. We didn't even have a waffle house. We We had a Huddle House with three bullet holes in the hood vent. But we went during safe hours, so it was fine. Mr. Champion said, I'll disciple you. You can meet me at the Huddle House. We'll go through a book together, but I get to work early, so I need to meet at 5 a.m. I was 20. 20-year-olds and 5 a.m. don't mix unless they've just been up that whole time. So I missed some. I hit the first two or three. And then the fourth one and the fifth one I slept through. Mr. Champion saw me at work, said, did you sleep through it? Yeah, I'm really sorry, sir. And by the sixth time, I couldn't look him in the eye anymore, and that effort at discipleship fizzled. We could probably tell stories of times that we asked someone to disciple us, of ways that we've learned about what discipleship really means, of programs and systems that we've done. We've done discipleship programs, discipleship groups, where the church puts us in this funnel, and we take classes. And as a result of doing all these things, we squirt out the other end of disciple, fully fledged forms, disciple of Christ. Now I'm ready to help other people go through the funnel. We've all tried these things, but they've lacked success and they've lacked success for me as well. It was with this background that I went to a small conference, I think in about 2019, 2018 or 2019, that was led by a pastor named Larry Osborne, who's got a pretty successful church in San Diego. And it was just 25 senior pastors sitting around the table while Larry was just sharing with us his wisdom. And Larry shared with us how they frame up discipleship in his church. And it was like a bulb went off for me. It was a fresh, brand new way to understand discipleship. Because I had always been told that discipleship had to be life on life. You guys ever heard that phrase, life on life discipleship? I was told that's how it had to be. Like when I was a student pastor, I'd go to these conferences and they would say, when you're discipling your students, you need to invite them into your home. Let them see how a godly man talks to his godly wife. Let them see how a godly man addresses his kids. Let them see how a godly man does yard work. Take them with you shopping. Let them see how a godly man shops at the grocery store. And I thought, well, probably a lot like a kind atheist or like a humble Hindu, you know? It's probably not too, I bet the Hindu is a nicer grocery shopper than I am anyways. And that never really resonated with me because in the first century, we think the model of discipleship based on scripture is life on life, is the disciples living with Jesus, following him around, being with him every day, watching all of his interactions. The problem is that may have been practical in the first century AD. It is not practical in the 21st century in the United States. So there's got to be a better way. With that background, I went to this conference and I heard Larry Osborne frame up discipleship in this unique way where he says discipleship is really nothing more than taking our next step of obedience. That when Jesus wants to grow us, he puts a step of obedience in front of us and he asks us to take it. And if we take it, we are being discipled. We are a disciple of Christ. If we don't, we are stagnating in our faith. And I had never heard it described that way before, but then he went through scripture. I went back and went through scripture and found it to be pretty obvious. Once you start putting the pieces together, I would remind you of a couple of verses first in John chapter 14, verse 15. When Jesus says this, if you love me, keep my commands. That's pretty simple. This is Jesus talking. If you love me, if you say you love me, then do what I say. If you say you want to be like me, then do what I tell you to do. If you love me, keep my commands. He says it even more clearly in Luke 6. I love this one. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I say? Why do you call me Lord of your life and not treat me that way? Why do you call me the king and not crown me? Why do you say one thing out of this side of your mouth and another thing out of this side of your mouth? Why do you sing to me on Sunday like I'm Lord and I'm your treasure and then act on Wednesday like you've never met me? I think that's pretty convicting and pretty applicable for all of us at different seasons. Why do you call me Lord and not do what I say? That's Jesus talking. And then we have this great passage from John, the disciple. John was probably the youngest disciple. He could have been as young as 10 when he was with the disciples. He's referred to in the gospel of John as the disciple whom Jesus loved. At the last supper, we see that John was reclining against Jesus's chest and Jesus was able to say things to John that only John could hear. And at the death of Jesus, at this crucifixion, he looked at John and asked John to take care of his mother, Mary. So they were very, very close. And John spent the rest of his life in service to this Jesus. He led the church and he had two disciples of his own, Polycarp and Erasmus, that became early church fathers to whom he handed off the keys of the kingdom. And at the end of his life, John writes some letters, general epistles to be circulated amongst the churches in Jerusalem and Asia Minor. And in his first letter, 1 John, he makes one thing abundantly clear, and we see it captured here in 1 John 2, verses 3 through 6, where he says this, We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands. Whoever says, I know him, but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person. But if anyone obeys his word, love for on all that he learns, giving a final encouragement to the churches that he loves so much to whom he's dedicated his life. He says, we know we love him if we obey him. If we say that we love him and we do not obey him, then we are liars and the truth is not in us. He says the litmus test for Christianity is very clear. Are you obedient to Christ or are you not? And so I would make simply this point about discipleship and its relationship with obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. We are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. If you'd like to know how you're doing spiritually, take an inventory of your life. Over the last few years, have you been growing in your obedience to Christ? Has your obedience to him increased? Are you giving him more and more of yourself and of your margins? Are you letting go of more and more things that don't need to be there that don't help you obey? Are you throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and running the race set before you? Or have you been stagnant in your obedience? Does your obedience in 2024 look pretty much how it looked in 2020? When you look behind you, do you see a wake of obedience or do you see stagnation? Scripture makes it pretty clear that if we want to call ourselves disciples of Christ, then we are people who are taking steps of obedience. And ever since Larry framed it up this way, I quit thinking about discipleship as this essential relationship with a person that walks you through life and tells you what to do. I quit thinking about discipleship as a program that you take. Because if we're being honest, those of us in the room who take our spiritual health seriously, those of us in the room that other people would look at and probably say that person is a disciple of Christ. That's someone who's growing in their obedience to Jesus. They're growing closer to him. They're growing more like him in character. I've seen that person taking strides. They are someone to whom their spiritual health is very, very important and they guard it fiercely. And I know that very few people in here would raise our hand and be like, yeah, I think I would call myself a disciple of Christ. But there's plenty of people in here who would say, I've taken my spiritual health very seriously and it matters to me and I'm intentional about it. If that's you, I wonder if you could point me to the program or the singular person who got you to that place. I wonder if you could point me to the Bible study you did that got you to where you are today. To the discipleship program that you enlisted in that spit you out the other side of the disciple. I wonder if you could point to the person who came alongside you, put their arm around you and said, I'm going to show you how to be a godly woman. Follow me. Some of us are blessed to have answers to those questions. A program or person for a season has profoundly impacted and changed your life. But most of us, our spiritual life and our discipleship is an amalgamation and a mosaic of all the different encounters that we've had in our life, of all the different relationships we've entered into and out of, of just the different programs and the different studies and the different information that we've been exposed to, and the different seasons of our life where God allowed someone to speak into our life. And so what I want us to see is that discipleship isn't so much a dynamic relationship with a person who guides us like Jesus did the disciples. And it's not a program that we enter into that if we just do the work, we'll come out the other side of the disciple. No, a disciple is someone who consistently takes steps of obedience as God places them in front of us. So at Grace, being a disciple means we're someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. That's how we frame up disciples. And that's why this first trait we're focused on is that of step-takers. Step-taker is a way of saying disciple. Those words to me are interchangeable in our vernacular. Someone who is a step-taker, someone who's committed to taking their next step of obedience that God places in front of them. And listen, I'm a firm believer that God at every season of our life, no matter where we are in our relationship with him, always places a next step of obedience in front of us. There's no such thing as perfect sainthood where we get to perfection and we've got nothing left to do but simply be holy for the rest of our lives. There's always something else that God is pressing us to do. And it could be that you're here this morning and you're not yet a believer. You wouldn't call yourself a person of faith. Maybe your step of obedience is just to explore spirituality more, to explore Christianity more. Maybe it's to take a step of faith and profess faith in Jesus Christ. Maybe you've been coming for a little while and your step of obedience is to join a small group this morning or this semester and put yourself out there in that way. Maybe your step of obedience is to volunteer somewhere in the church or somewhere in the community and partner with what God is doing. Maybe your step of obedience, we're going to talk about being people of devotion, and I'm going to tell you that the most important habit that anyone can have is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. Maybe your step of obedience is to do that. Those are simple things, and I'm rooting for you that that gets to be yours. Because steps of obedience can get much harder than that. It could be to admit that we have an addiction and we don't know what to do about it. It could be to forgive that person in our life that probably doesn't deserve our forgiveness, but the anger we hold towards them is a cancer that eats us, not them. We could admit that a problem's too big for us. Maybe our next step of obedience is to approach our spouse and say, hey, neither of us have been happy for a while, but we have a responsibility for a joyful, godly marriage here to model for our kids, so let's figure this thing out. Maybe your next step of obedience is to quit a job or to change careers or to start a small group or to share the gospel with your neighbor. I don't know what your next step of obedience is, but I know that God is pressing one on each of us in the room. And here's the thing. Here's what I know, that if God presses on us to take a step of obedience, that Jesus will be there when we take it. Which is why I say that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The scarier the step God asks us to take, the more it deepens our faith when we take it and see that Jesus was there the whole time. And when we think about this model of discipleship simply being not necessarily life on life or a program that we do, but a step of obedience that we take, that really is the biblical model. That's how Jesus did it in here. If you read through the gospels, looking for Jesus to tell them to do something and to see whether or not they'll do it, what you'll see is that he really did form the disciples and train the disciples through these steps of obedience. I think about the call of the disciples. When he went and he called Peter, one of the greatest disciples. Peter had just got done fishing. He was on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. And Jesus went up to him and he says, hey, I want you to go back out there and I want you to cast your nets on the other side of the boat. Now, this is a hassle. Okay? This is annoying. Peter and his boys had just spent the whole day fishing. They didn't catch anything. They were discouraged. They had come in. They had wound up the nets. Have you seen those nets? Those things are huge. I can't imagine the unholy hassle it would be to just put those together at the end of every day and unfurl them at the beginning of the next day. It seems like a hugely tedious task. They had done that. They were done. They were putting up the boat. They were going to go and have some wine and olives and maybe some feta cheese. That's what I would do if I lived in Capernaum. They were looking forward to the next thing. And Jesus comes up and he says, hey, put that on hold. Go back out. Unfurl the nets on the other side. And Peter was obedient and he did it. And he had a greater catch than he had ever had before. He took a step of obedience. And Jesus grew his faith. Levi's call was different. Jesus went to Peter and he said, I want you to do your work more. And he went to Levi and he said, I want you to not do your work at all. Levi was a tax collector. He was making very good money because tax collectors did because they were jerks. And he goes to Levi who later would become Matthew. And he says, I want you to quit this and I want you to follow me. I want you to take this step of obedience. Quit your job and do what I'm asking you to do. And he did it. And he followed him. And Jesus turned him into a disciple and grew his faith. I think about him training them in ministry. When the disciples had been with him for a matter of months or a year or more, And he said, you've seen me casting out demons. You've seen me doing things in God's name. Now you go out too, but you pair off two by two, go into the surrounding towns and villages and you do what you saw me do. Go take this step of obedience and do what I'm asking you to do. And then I think about the restoration of Peter. And this is worth the sermon at some other point. I love this story in the Bible. But at the Last Supper, Jesus looks at Peter and he says, before the rooster crows in the morning, you will have denied me three times. And Peter says, no way, I would die for you, Jesus. And Jesus is like, okay, I'm not usually wrong about this stuff, but all right. And sure enough, that night, before the rooster crows, Peter denies knowing Jesus three times. And after the third time, the rooster crows, and Jesus looks Peter in the eye, and Peter goes away weeping because he's failed his Savior. And we see that Peter disqualifies himself from ministry because he goes back to what he was doing before he met Jesus, and he's fishing. And Jesus makes breakfast on the beach, and he up to Peter and he says, Peter, do you love me? Peter says, yes, Lord, you know I love you. He says, then feed my sheep. Obey me. Go do what I'm telling you to do. And then he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've trained you to do. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Then go take care of my lambs. Be a good shepherd like I've shown you how to be. Do what I've told you and taught you to do. Obey me and go and lead the church. It's this beautiful restoration. Three times Peter denies Christ. Three times Jesus says, do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. Do you love me? Obey me. And what we really see throughout the New Testament, throughout the Gospels in particular, is that to be a disciple of Jesus is to be one who simply obeys Jesus. And if it's true that disciples are step-takers, then how do we make disciples? How do we get actively involved in making disciples of other people? We do it this way. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. We don't have to jump in and have breakfast with them and show them what it is to be a godly person in all ways. No, we can just be in their life and help them see what their next step of obedience might be. Yeah, you should join that team. Yes, you should start that ministry. Yes, you should have that conversation. Hey, you should read this book with me and then let's apply it to our lives. It's just, it's helping someone identify and take their next step of obedience. And here's what I love about this model of discipleship is it allows us to speak into people's lives in categories, in specific ways. It allows you to invite someone into your life to teach you in a specific way, but not all the ways. When I went to Mr. Champion when I was in college and I said, will you disciple me? That was such a loaded question because in my naive 20-year-old brain, what I meant was, I didn't know this is what I meant, but what I meant was, will you meet with me for an hour once a week over a soggy waffle and teach me how to be a godly theologian, a godly husband in the future? Will you teach me things that I can remember so that I'll be a godly parent and a good dad for my kids? Will you disciple me in how to do ministry and be the good pastor that I want to be one day? I was putting on him my hopes and dreams for my whole life. Will you help me become who God wants me to be? That's a heavy weight. But if discipleship is simply helping people see their next step of obedience and take it, then I can go to somebody and I can say, hey, you've accomplished some things in your life and in your ministry that I admire. And you've done it in a godly way. Can I ask you questions about how to lead my church like you've led yours? You can go to a mom who's older and has children that seem to actually like her and say, hey, your kids are in the early years of high school and they will talk to you at restaurants. How did you do that? Teach me how to do that so that my children will talk to me when they get older. Will you disciple me in motherhood? You can go to someone who seems to know scripture really well. Say, hey, you seem to know the Bible well. Will you meet with me and just teach me how you study it and help me and point me to the books that you've read? And then after I read them, can we talk about that? We can invite people in for pockets of our life as we seek to take our next step of obedience, but we don't have to make someone or some program responsible for all of our discipleship. And I find it to be a really freeing thing to think about it in that way. Now here's why I'm talking about this today. Here's why I'm leading off the series with being a step-taker. So that I can tell you the story that I'm about to tell you. Before I do, I just want to finish up. This is kind of the sermon portion of the morning. The next is a family meeting. Our next step of obedience as a church is to get serious about being step-takers. I believe that we all have steps of obedience to take as individuals, and God is pressing those on us. And my prayer for you over this series is that you'll be open-hearted and open-minded and open-eared and open-eyed so that you'll be able to see what God is pressing on you to do. It's my prayer for you is that you'll take a step of obedience as a result of the series. But I also think that we as a church, grace, our partnership, we have a next step to take as a church as well. And it's to get serious about being step takers. And here's why I'm convinced of this. Two years ago in October, I was with a very good friend. He wasn't yet a good friend at the time, but he would become a very good friend in part as a result of this conversation. We were on the back porch late at night with our favorite beverages. And I believe that God works in those moments. Those are glorious nights. And we were talking about church and he's someone that's got a couple of years on me and so he was pressing on me a little bit and he was asking me questions. What do you want grace to be? What do you want to be? What do you want to be known for as a pastor? When you spin it forward five, ten years, what do you want to be true of you? What do you want to be true of grace? And he just, he kept pressing on me. And I said, well, what do you want grace to be? Well, you know, I've been a part of other churches and I've seen these patterns of unhealth in those churches. And I don't want grace to be a place that falls into those patterns. I don't want to do that. What do you want to be as a senior pastor? Well, I've, you know, I've been around other senior pastors and I've seen what it does to senior pastors to be the guy in the room for their whole life. And when you, when, when in most places, I know it sounds obnoxious, but I'm just being honest with you. All right. And if you want to judge me as a jerk, that's fine. You're probably right. But when you go through life, you've seen this in business. You've seen this in ministry. When you go through life and most rooms that you're in, you're the weightiest voice in that room, that does something to you. It messes you up. And if you don't monitor that stuff, you become an unholy jerk. That's why I've told the staff and the elders, part of your responsibility, your holy sacred duty to the church is to keep the senior pastor stink off me. And if I ever get to acting like I'm too big for my britches, some of y'all need to knock me down some pegs. Not this week, though. I'm busy. I lost my place. I said, so I don't want to become one of those guys. What about staff? What do you want to do with staff? Well, I've been on staff before, and it was unhealthy. It wasn't good. I've seen how church hurts people. I don't want to hurt people and burn people out. I don't want them to be a cog in the machine. I don't want staff to be taken for granted. And he kept asking me questions, and I kept him my best answers. And finally he got the smirk on his face and I said, what? And he goes, I feel like I know a whole lot about what you don't want to be. I don't have the first clue about what you do want to be or what you want grace to be. And I went, I think it's time for bed. He was right. And I realized that night and subsequent days and thought and prayer that my greatest vision for grace had only ever been health. My greatest vision for us was simply to be a place that was healthy. And for a while, for a while, that vision has served us very well. When I got here in 2017, that's the vision that we needed. We were grossly unhealthy in myriad ways. Those of you who weren't here at that time, I'm not going to go through the whole story, but let's just say that I got hired in the first week of April. I started in the first week of April in 2017. Let me just tell you, if they hadn't figured out how to get a warm body up here preaching by April, there is no way they would have made it out of May. Okay, they were teetering on the brink. If you were here, raise your hand if I'm lying. It was tough. And so we needed to get healthy. That's the vision that we needed to have. Then right about the time we got healthy, we launched the campaign, we do all the things, the whole nation got unhealthy with COVID. Our last Sunday was March 8th, 2020. We announced how much had been pledged for the campaign. And then we just didn't meet again. Do you realize that our next, that our last service was March 8th, 2020? That our next normal, non-summer, unmasked service was in September of 22, that COVID profoundly infected Grace for two and a half years. And it was somewhere in that two and a half years that I realized and accepted as we were trying to hold things together with duct tape and wire, we are never going back to that church that we were. All the health and all the growth that we saw were hitting the reset button. And I had to mourn that. And that was tough. And it made me want to quit at times. But we got back from COVID and we started rebuilding. And we've worked Gibby onto our, Aaron Gibson onto our staff, which has really been a bear. And we've gotten to a place of health again. Where one of the things I'm most proud of, you might find this silly, but one of the things I'm most proud of is that we had a friend in our small group that we had been friends with the whole time that we were at Grace who came on staff with Grace and we're still friends. I still treat her like my little sister and slam her laptop shut whenever I walk past her in the office. We're still buddies. There's no secrets that were found that made us unattractive. When someone comes on as an elder, they don't look around and go, this is really surprising. They look around and they go, this is pretty much what I thought was going to be going on over there. We have volunteers that come in during the week. They're not surprised by what they see. There's no seedy underbelly to grace. We are what you see. I am who I am on Sunday and on Wednesday, and so is everybody that I know. and I think with great pride we are a very healthy church. But I've also been deeply convicted that that's not enough. It's not enough to simply exist in our health. It's not enough to simply come on Sundays, praise God together, hear a sermon that's hopefully decent, and go home and reflect and then go to small group and yuck it up for 45 minutes and then pray for five. That's not enough. And what I see happening, I'm just going to speak honestly as your pastor right now, what I see happening is grace sinking into this healthy malaise where we're happy to be good enough. And this is where I will also press that, and I'm including me in this, that church-wide malaise sinking into good enough creeps into us too. And I know a lot of us, I know a lot of us, me included, who have settled for good enough in our own spiritual lives, who have gotten to a place of health and said, I think I'm good. I'm just going to cruise it in from here. You didn't, never did you cognitively think that. Never did we cognitively just slide into health as a church at Grace and go, well, there's nothing left to do. But we do it by default if we don't press to the next thing. And so this morning, together, I want us to press into the next step. Also, during that fall, I met somebody named Ru Sin, who is a worldwide church planner, tip of the spear stuff in countries where the gospel is illegal, and it is amazing. And I would go to these seminars that he would lead where he would train these pastors in these other countries how to make disciples in their churches. And he had so many slide decks and so many slide shows that I asked him if he proposed to his wife via slide deck. It was one of those guys, like so many. And it was so organized and so many different things and so many different modules and things that you need to do. And it was just mind numbing. And in one of those trainings, I took with me an elder of our church and that elder raised his hand and asked the question I wanted him to ask, which was, Rue, this is great, but discipleship is not linear. The Holy Spirit is wild. He's unpredictable. We can't program spiritual growth. So why are you trying to do that? And Rue's answer was fantastic. He said, you're right. The Holy Spirit is wild and free. The Holy Spirit is unpredictable and uses life experiences and different things to grow us in ways that we don't expect. He said, but that's the Holy Spirit's job is to grow. My job is to build the lattice work that directs where that vine grows. And as I heard him say that, I went, yep, that's what we need. That's our next step of obedience as a church. That's what I need to be working on is latticework for grace so that when someone says, I'm ready to grow spiritually, we have a way to point you and to point that growth. So last September, on this very same Sunday, the first one after Labor Day, last year it was September 10th, I stood up here and I said, hey, in my sabbatical I became convicted that I wasn't working for you guys as hard as I could. And I know a thing I need to do and I'm going to spend the better part of my year working on it. And I did. And we developed what we are calling discipleship pathways. These are in the lobby. I didn't put them in your seat because I didn't want them to be convoluted with your small groups thing. These are in the lobby. These are online. We've got a whole resource page that Carly worked on very hard that looks very good where you can go and you can see a list of all the things that I'm about to tell you about. In the discipleship pathways, in our lattice work to direct our spiritual growth, I sat down with Rue and I said, I want to develop this for grace, but I can't develop it like you develop it because we're not a slide deck church. We're not a linear class taking church. We need options. I'm not going to go tell anybody what to do. I'm certainly not going to go tell small group leaders what to do, but we need an answer to how we can grow spiritually. How can we develop this? And he said, well, what's important to you? What are the key values in your church? And I said, well, that's easy. The five traits that we are kingdom builders, that we are step takers, that we are a people of devotion, that we are partners and that we are conduits of grace. Those are what's valuable to us. And he goes, great, let's start there. And so what we have is each of the traits, conduits of grace, and then recommended opportunities and studies under each one of those things. People of devotion, how do I understand the Bible more? Things that I've written for that that are recommended for groups and for individuals. We got them for all five traits. If you go out into the lobby, you'll see over the glass doors where we have now emblazoned on the wall the five traits of grace. And now I know what to do with who we are, which is to press the partners of grace into embodying the five traits of grace all the time as much as I can, because it's our next step of obedience to take to become serious about taking steps. And we're going to see at the end of this series that the apex trait, the one that I want to push everyone to, what I want, what I want grace to produce is a church full of kingdom builders. And I can't wait to build there and tell you about exactly what that means. But these discipleship pathways, just so you understand what they are and how we're going to use them. Underneath each category, underneath each trait, is something that's called group study and then individual study. And the group study is things that you can do in your small groups. You want to grow as a conduit of grace in your small group. You can go to your small group leader and say, hey, could we maybe do this study this time around? I shared this with all the small group leaders on July 28th. They've already been thinking about it. So maybe they'll kick out two or three to you that maybe we can do in our group this semester. Is this what you'd like to do? Then there's individual studies, resources, things you can watch, things you can read so that you can grow on your own in these areas. I would also encourage you, we've talked about sacred spaces in here, having two or three people in your life who know you intimately and can encourage you spiritually. Maybe you go through a book in your sacred space and say, hey, will you guys, will you ladies read this together with me? Then we're also introducing something else that I'm very excited about called Pathway Courses. These are courses that are going to be offered as one-offs for you to take. They're not small groups. They're not part of your small groups, although your small group could together choose this semester, let's not meet as a small group. Let's go to this course that's being offered. The courses that we're offering, you're going to hear about one here in a few minutes. Doug Bergeson is going to be teaching through, he's one of our elders. He's going to be teaching through the big picture, a 30 week course. It's this, this semester and next semester that walks us through the Bible. A couple other guys, Jim Banks, Jim Adams and Burt Banks are going to be going through, yeah, Jim Banks. Don't tell them. They're going to be going through Bethel Bible Study. It's a two-year deal. It changed Jim's life, changed Burt's life, and we want to get a handful of people and go through that. I've become convicted that we have an unusual concentration of leaders in our congregation. There's more of you here that lead outside of these walls than what is normal in the population. And so I want it to be true that people who work for you, their life is better because they work for someone who came to grace. We want to impact them by impacting you. So one of the leaders in the church, one of the business leaders in the church and I developed a seven-week discussion thing for leaders to talk about being godly leaders in the workplace that we're going to go through. My dad wrote a theology 101 course that Gary Green is going to teach. Gary Green's in the back there in the blue shirt looking just great. Gary Green's going to teach that maybe as soon as next semester. We've got a couple more. Aaron's doing a theology of worship to take his team through and anybody else who wants to be interested in that. Those are courses. And we're not going to offer them all at once. We're going to offer them one at a time, sparingly. And make that something that's available to you that you can say, either as a small group, let's go through this together. Or you can just double up for a time. Or you can go to your small group leader and you say, hey, I'm going to take a semester off. I'm going to go do this. But that's what the discipleship pathways are. And there's nothing magical about this sheet of paper and the resources on it. There's nothing new under the sun here. The point is not to point to the pathways. The point is to get you on the pathways. The point is to get you to see that the next, I've said, this is the most important series we've done in years, and it's the most important thing we'll do for the next three to five years, because we cannot, listen to me, Grace, we cannot just happily stagnate in good enough. We cannot happily stagnate in healthy. We're healthy. We're here. We're moving forward. We're growing. We've got to ask what's next. Where do we go? And where I think we go is getting really serious about our spiritual health and our personal holiness and taking steps of faith together. So I hope that over the course of this series, you'll be ready to do just that. Let me pray. Father, thank you for the way that you gently convict, for the way that you bring us along. God, I pray that if we have been stagnating in our own health, that we would realize that that's a pretty precarious place to be. Father, challenge us in our own spiritual growth. Challenge us to take steps of obedience towards you. Challenge us, God. Help us to answer the call as a church to pursue you more earnestly. God, grow in us a desire for you. Grow in us a desire for holiness. Help us to model that for the people who are around us and use this series as a season of profound change for grace as you activate us to pursue you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here. If I haven't gotten to meet you, I'd love to do that after the service. Or you could just come to Discover Grace right after the service. We've got food for you and we've got space, so hang out with us there. Just for a little bit of clarity, Mikey, I don't know where you're sitting, but I lied to you in front of the whole church. This is not great. This is fine, I would call it. This is what I'm about to tell you is average. This is an average sermon for me. So let's adjust expectations to whatever you think my average is. If you think my average is good, then I got good news for you. You're going to like it. If you think it's not so good, then, you know, good luck in finding another church. And I mean it. I hope they serve you better than I can. This morning we are in the letters of John, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. We've been moving through the books of the New Testament. This summer and next summer we're doing a series called 27 where we go through the 27 books of the New Testament. But sometimes we are grouping them together because the letters of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John really all three have the same message. And 2nd John and 3rd John are one chapter. So it'd be tough to give you an overview of that one chapter. It's better to just group them together because the message that they preach, the message that they proclaim, is very similar all the way throughout. Now, John, the disciple, wrote these letters. He wrote them probably towards the end of his ministry. It's the same John that wrote the Gospel of John, in which he describes himself the disciple whom Jesus loved We've talked many times about John's unique relationship with Jesus. They were uniquely close They sat next to each other at dinner. Jesus told John some things that he didn't share with the other disciples There was a relational closeness there that I'm not sure Jesus or John experienced anywhere else in their life. And then John also wrote the book of Revelation that we're going to get to next summer. And then towards the end of his ministry, he wrote these three letters. And John is also super significant in church history because we believe that he probably kind of replaced Peter as the leader of the church after Peter passed away. Then John was a leader of the church. And then he discipled some guys named Ignatius and Polycarp, and they like took the church after John did. So he's kind of the link between the last of the biblical figures to lead the church. And then guys that we learn about in history books, not in the Bible. So these are significant letters that they fall at the end of his ministry and reveal to us what he thinks is most important to share with the people. And unlike some of the letters like Thessalonians that's written specifically to the church in Thessalonica, these letters are written to all the churches, to take one, to read it to the congregation, and then to get it to the next church down the road so they can read it there the next week. So these are just general advice, advisory letters to the church. And in 1, 2, and 3 John, we see this theme, this instruction, this singular idea come up multiple times. When we decided to do this series going through the books of the New Testament, I knew when we planned the series what I was going to preach when we got to the epistles of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. Because they proclaim one loud message the whole time. I knew what I was going to be preaching. To me, now maybe somebody else has preached an overview on these three, and they pulled a different theme out, and I don't want to be critical of that, but as I read it, when I look at these letters, there's one theme to talk about that if we don't talk about that, we're doing a disservice to these letters from John. And I went through, and I read the theme. I know what it is. And so I read the letters in preparation for the sermon. And I counted 12 times in seven chapters that John says basically the exact same thing. It's the most reiterative book in the Bible that I know of, besides maybe Proverbs. Just the same idea over and over and over again. He keeps bringing your attention back to this one singular principle. And it's captured in a lot of passages, but I'm going to look at 1 John 2, verses 3 through 6. It's kind of the seminal passage that captures this idea that shows up 11 and the other 11 ones that I counted off for myself is simply this idea. If you love God, your actions will prove it. If you love God, your life will bear that out. So clearly, I'm talking to the Christians in the room. If you're here this morning and you're not a a Christian then you get to kind of watch from the outside and see what you might want to get yourself into or what you might be considering but this isn't for you this is for the believers in the room and if you're a believer you've said at some point that you love God and what John says is that's great if that's true then your actions will bear it out we will it. And what's great is all of these letters, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, are like a commentary or a blow-up of this teaching that Jesus offers to the disciples that's only recorded in the Gospel of John. In John chapter 15, when Jesus says, if you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. He says, to abide in me, you keep my commandments, and my commandments are that you would love. So then at the end of his life, John is reflecting back onto that singular teaching of Jesus. If you abide in me, you'll bear much fruit. How do you abide in me? You obey me. What does it mean to obey me? You obey my commandments. What's my commandment? That you would love one another. So then 12 different times in his swan songs to the church, he reiterates this idea. If you love me, if you love God, your actions will bear that out. And when you think about that, it makes a lot of sense because that's true of every relationship, right? Like I have a wife named Jen. She's wonderful. And if I told her every morning when we woke up, sweetheart, I love you so much. You're the best. Text her in the middle of the day, just thinking about you. I love you. Before we go to bed at night, hey, you're the best. I love you. That's great. But if my actions don't bear that out during the day, if I'm an unholy, impatient jerk to her, if I'm a terrible father to her children, if I give her crud about the house being dirty when I get home, when she's had a way more hectic day than I have, if I refuse to be helpful around the house, if I nitpick her and just make these little demands, if I just take the service that she offers the family for granted and I never express how much I appreciate it, if I don't cut the grass, if I'm lazy around the house, if I just don't do any of the stuff that a halfway decent husband is supposed to do, eventually she's going to stop believing it when I tell her that I love her, isn't she? If Aaron Winston, our wonderful children's pastor, says she loves the kids and she loves their families, but she doesn't bother to learn their names when they show up, eventually y'all are going to stop believing her when she says that she loves them. It's one thing to say it, but John says, put your money where your mouth is. If you say that you love God, then act like it. Then do the things that communicate love to him. If I want Jen to know that I love her, then I need to learn her and do the things that I know communicate love for her. I need to show up randomly in the middle of the day with a Chick-fil-A Coke because she didn't sleep well last night. When I do that, she knows that I love her. Jen needs to laugh at my jokes. That's all I need from her. That's all I require. Touch me sometimes. Just give me a pat on the back. You're great. And then when I make a joke like laugh and I know as long as she laughs at my joke the world is right everything's okay that's all we need but we learn to love in the language that people receive love and God says you know what I want you to do you know the important thing if you say that you love me you know how you show me you obey me you submit to submit to me. You trust me. You keep my commandments. So really the question becomes, why is obedience the thing that God asks of us to prove our love to him? And it's not that we have to prove our love to him, but why is that the proof of our love to him? I think it's for this reason. Obedience admits that God is the expert and we trust that expertise. Obedience admits that God is the expert on life, on humanity, on love, on the human condition, on the universe, and that we trust in that expertise. I'll tell you what got me thinking about that in this way. Sometime last year, some of the kind folks in the church started gently encouraging me that, hey, you know, it'd be great if we could have a cross somewhere on the stage. And so I thought through it, and I thought maybe there's a chance we can inlay one in this center panel. And we've got a lot of talented woodworkers at the church, and none of them were available. But Greg Taylor has tools. So I called Greg, and I asked if he would be interested in this. Some of y'all are picking up on that. I asked if he could help with this. And he said, yeah. He got excited about it, and we started kind of talking about what we could possibly do. He kind of sketched some stuff out and told me what he was thinking. And as he was telling me what he was thinking, I honestly thought, like, I don't think it's going to look good. I don't think, I don't, I don't think that's the way that we should go. It's not really, I don't see it like you see it. So that doesn't sound like a good idea to me. But I also know this, that knowing just a little bit more than most folks about the Bible does not make me a good interior designer. So you know what I did? I shut up. And I was like, all right, Master Woodworker, I don't see your plan. But you do, and you seem excited about it, so go ahead. And then he did that. And I came in here and I saw it. And I thought, I sure am glad I shut up, because that looks phenomenal. looks phenomenal thank you Greg the whole church got better because of that often in my role I have to trust the advice of others who have an expertise that I don't last summer when we were going through the purchase of the land we own four acres off of Litchford Road we'll find out more about what's gonna go there on the 10th of December, two weeks from today. Oh, December, I said? We're going to delay it even more. It's going to be so fun. It's going to keep you guys waiting. Yeah, thanks. Two weeks from now, September the 10th. I'm so focused on that sermon that what I want to say in that sermon kept me up all night last night. I couldn't go to sleep because I was thinking about that. And then I woke up and I was like, I kind of came to this morning. I was like, that's not even what I'm preaching this morning. I have to focus on this. I'm thinking about that a lot. But as we were going to buy the land last year, there was a team of people that were kind of informing us, informing the elders, informing me on the decisions that we should make. And they were spearheaded by one of the great partners of our church, a guy named Scott Hurst. Scott Hurst is a lifelong corporate real estate guy. And so he would call me and he would say, hey, what do you think we should do about this? Do you think we should make this kind of offer? Do you think we should do this or that or whatever? And I would always tell him, Scott, I don't know. Your vote is my vote. Whatever you think we should do is what I think we should do. I have no right to usurp your expertise and insert myself and think I know what to do as we evaluate whether or not to purchase land. I'm just trusting in your wisdom. In the same way, we had a group of people that we put together from the finance committee, from the elders, and one of the bankers that we have at the church. And we put together, I don't know if they're the finest financial minds in the church, but they were the most available at this time. So we put them in a room and we said, how much do we need to raise so that when we build the building, we're borrowing a responsible amount? And they gave me an amount. And as soon as they gave me the amount, I said, that sounds great. That's fine. Zero pushback. No questions. Let's go. Because I trust in the expertise of those people. So I'm happy to submit to what they think. Now, how ridiculously absurd would it be of me to hear the advice of those people and slough it off? To hear Greg say, hey, this is what I think we should do with the cross. And for me to be like, listen, Greg, I know you spent a lifetime in your basement, in your shop, working on projects. And I couldn't do what you've done in a whole lifetime. But I was a trim carpenter for six months when I was 25 years old. And I know a thing or two. And I'm just going to tell you, I don't like your vision, man. You need to rethink that. What if I looked at Scott Hurst when he gave me some advice on something? And I said, you know what? I didn't take a course on corporate real estate and sales deals when I was in seminary, but that was in the class right next door. And I picked up on some stuff. And I think I know a little bit better. What if I push back on the team of people that we asked to advise us on how much we need to raise? What if I push back and I said, that's not, that's a bad idea. That's not doable. I would be dumb. I'm not saying that I'm not. I'm just saying that would be proof. That'd be what you would need. I would be incredibly prideful and incredibly obstinate and incredibly short-sighted and incredibly myopic if I just threw off the advice of the experts in my life and just chose my own way. I was like, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to do this. Because I know how to read the Bible and run my mouth for 30 minutes, I'm the smartest and we're going to do what I say. No, it's dumb. It's silly. It's short-sighted and prideful to throw off that sort of wisdom. And yet, you guys see where I'm going with this? God is the author of the universe. Jesus is the founder and perfecter of your faith. God knew your very soul before he knit you in your mother's womb. He knows the hairs on your head. He knows the number. He knew the good work that he created you to walk in before he ever created you. To say that God knows you better than you know yourself is a vast understatement. He doesn't just know you. He knows the depth of you and all the possibilities of you and all the inclinations of you and all the future pathways of you. He knows all the things that bring you joy. He knows all the things that fill you up. Not only you, but everyone around you. For all of history, he designed all of this. He is the author of life. He is omniscient, meaning he is all-knowing. He is omnipresent, meaning he is everywhere. He can see every possible outcome of every possible scenario, and he can play that out better than any computer we could ever touch. He has all the algorithms. He can figure it out. We can't see past this minute, and he can see every outcome for all eternity, and he's told us some things about how we should live our lives, things that we should do and things that we shouldn't do, things that we should pursue and things that we should cut off, things that are good for us and things that will damage our soul. The author of the universe who sees into the infinite has told you those things and yet we choose to trust in our own wisdom and not his. In different ways and in different seasons and at different times. We throw off the wisdom of the infinite for the blindness of the broken. We have access. Through his word. Through his presence. Through his spirit. Through prayer. Through others. Who call Jesus their savior. We have access to him. To the divine. To the infinitely wise. And he makes it very clear what he wants us to do with our lives. He makes it very clear how we are supposed to love and how we are supposed to serve, how we are supposed to outdo one another with humility. How we are supposed to avoid certain things and embrace certain things. And in the face of that infinite wisdom that only wants what's best for us, we continue to choose the blindness of the broken. The pleasures of today sacrificing the joy of tomorrow. And I don't know where you are in your obedience to God. When I say things like, you know, there's ways in which we're all being disobedient, I don't know what comes to your mind. For some of us, we flash right away. We know the areas where we're allowing sin and the things that so easily entangle to prohibit us from running our race. When I say, what's an area of your life where you're just not being fully obedient to God, you know right away. And that's good. Others of us, because we've been at this a while, have probably settled into this place where we've begun to settle for good enough, where we worked really hard, we've done pretty well, things in life are going pretty good, we've got our spiritual disciplines, we've got our regimens, and we don't do them all the time, but we do them most of the time. And when I compare myself to the other people around me, I seem to be doing pretty well. And I know that there's more work that I could do, but it's hard. So I'm going to stop. And we settle into this kind of middle-of-the-road faith where we're just comfortable. And God, through his word and through his prayer and through worship, beckons us to more. He calls us into deeper obedience. He calls us to walk with him in stride. He calls us to abide in him. He offers this much more full life that's waiting for us on the other side of obedience, and yet we just choose to throw off the wisdom of the infinite that God knows what's best for us in favor of the blindness of the broken. No, I know what's best for myself. Do you understand that when we sin, that's what we do? We throw off God's wisdom and we choose our own wisdom? No, no, no, I know that you are the author of the universe. I know that you kind of wrote this thing and you know all the things there are to know, but for this one, I'm right. Listen, if you think I'm dumb, if I were to ignore the advice of Scott and corporate real estate, what does that make us all when we ignore God's expertise in our own life and we choose our own? It seems really silly to be disobedient when we put it that way, doesn't it? What must it feel like to God when we regularly and habitually refuse His expertise and choose our own? Is there anything, is there anything in life more infuriating than when you're talking with someone and you know you're right about a thing and they will not give it to you? They insist that you are wrong and that they are right and you don't know what universe they're from because you're right and you know you're right. And if you're a parent, you know exactly what I'm talking about. This happened sometime last year and I don't remember the particular word. But Lily, my daughter, she was six at the time. And I think I've shared a little bit of this before. And again, I'm making up this conversation. I remember the gist of it, but I don't remember the word and the actual things that were said. But this is pretty much how the conversation went. She pointed to a word. It was mañana, the Spanish word for tomorrow. I think that's right, right? That means tomorrow. Yeah? You're Spanish adjacent. You should know. His wife speaks Spanish. And I said, she pointed to the word. She said, how do you say this, Daddy? And I said, you say that mañana. And she goes, I don't think that's right. And I'm like, based on what? Based on what expertise do you think I'm wrong? Like, I'm open. Maybe you know something I don't. And she goes, well, that's not, that's not how my, how my teacher at school says to say it. She's taking Spanish at school. She says, that's not how the Spanish teacher says to say it. And I said, how'd the Spanish teacher say that you should say it? And she says, banana. And I'm like, excuse me, banana? That's what you're going to enter the chat with? And I just kind of look at her. I said, I said, baby, that's not right. And she goes, yes, it is, dad. That's what my Spanish teacher said. I said, I do not believe that that's what your Spanish teacher taught you. Because if it is, there's going to be a really strongly worded email. Not that I'm passionate about Spanish education, but that's ridiculous. I'm going to write an email about that. And we're going back and forth. And I'm literally like, I'm even pulling out reason like, Lily, you have taken two months of Spanish. You're largely illiterate in English at this point in your life. I promise you, I know that it's mañana. Do you see that? That's an ñ. That means ñ, mañana. That's what that means. That's why it's there. And it didn't matter to her. Like, Lily, I took Spanish three times in high school. I only made it through. I took Spanish two twice. But I did take it three times, technically. I've been to Spanish-speaking countries. I've been exposed to that. If you drop me in the middle of Costa Rica, I could get home. There would be hand motions and things, but I could get back. Like, I know that's manana. And it was so infuriating because it didn't matter what I said. She was right, and I was wrong, and I literally had to finish the discussion about manana manana with agree to disagree. We have two different opinions about this. I was so mad. How infuriating is it? When you know the right thing to do, you know the right answer. And the person you're talking to is like, man, that's not right. And yet, as I was talking to our student pastor, Kyle, about this this week, he pointed it out and I thought it was a great point. Our God experiences so very little of that frustration. In those moments, when we're obstinate and we are insisting to him that it's pronounced manana, I do not believe that our God experiences frustration like we experience frustration. I do not believe he is angered by that like we are angered by that. In those moments of our profound obstinance, I believe that God is more hurt by our disobedience than he is frustrated. I believe he is more hurt by our disobedience than he is frustrated. I think of it like this. Some of you have walked this path. My children are not old enough to have walked this path, but I've watched other people walk it. And you know the pain of being a parent with adult children and watching those children choose a path that leads to pain. You've watched those children make choices and you can see the end of that road. You know how that's going to end. You know their life is going to be shattered because of it. You know their heart is going to break because of it. You know that they are going to shipwreck themselves with the choices they are making and you are impotent to stop them. And all you can do is sit back and hope that the crash isn't so bad. And hope that when they're ready to pick up the pieces, they ask you to help. Some of my older parents in the room know the pain of watching an adult child collide towards catastrophe knowing there is nothing that you can do. And I think that this is what our Father in Heaven experiences every day. Watching us just careen out of control, spiraling towards a collision or a blow-up or a shipwreck, knowing that what's there is going to end and hurt for us, hoping that when we get there, we allow him to help us pick up the pieces. I do not think our God experiences anger and frustration with us when we're disobedient the way that we understand those emotions. I think he experiences hurt because he knows he has something better for us. Do you ever think about why God asks us to do things? He tells us, he makes it very clear in scripture that we're not to lust, that we're to avoid sexual immorality. Are we to do that just because God wants us to live puritanical lives that aren't as exciting and interesting as those who don't put themselves under the standards of the Bible? Is that what God wants is just his children to be more puritanical and less indulgent than other people, and so let's just keep a lid on that. No. God knows that if you are married, that every time you look at someone who's not your spouse and you desire them in a way that you don't desire your spouse, that you cheapen your spouse and you make the relationship worse. Every time you look at someone outside your marriage and you compare them to who you are married to and you want things that they seem to have that your spouse doesn't seem to have, then you cheapen your spouse and you weaken your marriage. Every time. And God knows this. So he doesn't tell us not to lust because he wants us to be Puritans. That's a happy accident of avoiding lust. But the point is, it's only when we never do that, it only deepens our devotion to our spouse. It only deepens our attraction to our spouse. It only heightens our desire for them. And then in living within this happy, fulfilling marriage where you two are mutually desired, guess what you experience? Maximum happiness and joy in a happy marriage, which is what we all want. God says, he tells us in Psalms, David writes this. In his presence there is fullness of joy, his right hand is our pleasures forevermore. It's the idea that if we pursue him, if we obey him, then the best things are waiting for us there. Why does he tell you not to be greedy? Because he doesn't want you to have nice things? Because he wants you to live the life of a pauper? No, because he knows that if you're greedy, that those things that you want are going to own you. That you're going to live a life serving stuff and image. And it'll throw off your priorities and you won't be the spouse that you're supposed to be and you won't be the parent that you're supposed to be and you won't be the member of God's church and kingdom that you're supposed to be. Because you spend your life pursuing and hanging on to stuff. And there's no joy to be found there. If you think about anything in the Bible that God tells you to do, anything in the Bible that requires your obedience, and you ask yourself, and listen, I'll give you a hint. I always preach this. Whenever there is an instruction from God in the Bible, and I have to present it to you, hey, guys, we need to not be prideful. Hey, guys, we need to not lust. Hey, the Bible tells us that we need to pursue humility. Like, whatever it is, I'm always thinking in the back of my head, why? Why is it important for God that we would do those things? Why would he instruct his children in those things? And the conclusion, it looks a lot of different ways and a lot of different sermons, but this is the basic formula. He tells us to do something, A, because when we do it, we love other people and him better. Bottom line. When we don't lust, we're loving God and others better. When we're not prideful, we love God and others better. When we're not greedy, we love God and others better. When we show humility, we love God and others better. When we offer hospitality, we love God and others better. That's always the first answer. And then ancillary to that, the benefit of that, that should push our selfish souls directly to it, is that also it's what's best for us. Also, there is the greatest joy found in obedience. There is the greatest joy in the fullest life found in following the good shepherd. God asks us to be obedient. He puts things in front of us, not for his weird pleasure, not because he wants us to feel bad, not to browbeat us and make us puritanical, but because by walking in obedience to God, we love him and others better, and we find the greatest joy possible. So he urges his children to obey him. That's why I love this verse in John 10.10. It hangs over my desk. I think in this verse is the fundamental question for all of Christendom. Jesus in John 10 is referring to himself as the good shepherd, and he says he lays at the gate of the pen to protect us, and then he says this, the thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly. Other translations say, have it to the full. And I love that verse. I love that thought, that point. Jesus came that we might have life and have it to the full. And so it's no mistake. It's no exaggeration to say that Jesus wants the best life possible for you. That's not health and wealth, praying that. I'm not telling you if you follow him, you're going to be rich and no one in your family is ever going to get sick. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is in Jesus the promise is, if you follow your good shepherd and go where he leads you, and don't wander into your own fields trying to find your own sustenance, but if you trust him and you follow him and his wisdom, he will lead you to the best pastures, and in those pastures, you will find fullness of life, life to the full, life abundant. Meaning, there is no greater life waiting for you outside of God's commands. Which brings us to the fundamental question of Christianity. Jesus says, he's the good shepherd. Do you believe him? Jesus says, he will take you to the best pastures. Do you believe him? Jesus says, if you just put your head down and follow him, if you just abide in him, that you will find a fullness of joy there that you can find nowhere else. Do you believe him? He beckons with that teaching the simple question, hey, hey, hey, do you trust me? Do you trust me? Do you trust Jesus? And John, at the end of his life, as he distills all the teaching of a lifetime to this singular point, hey, do you trust Jesus? Do you say that you love him? Do you say that you know him? Well then, obey him, because obedience proves trust. I don't know what areas of your life you would look at and say that they're out of sync with God. I don't know where you would find your disobedience. But whenever there's an area of our life that's not submitted to God and his wisdom, what we are saying with our actions is, I'm the expert here. I don't need you. I do not trust you to be the good shepherd. I will be my own shepherd and I will find my own pastures. Thanks very much. So that's the question that I would leave you with. When Jesus says that he's the good shepherd, when God says that he cares for us, when we're told that he's going to lead us into green pastures, when we're told that in his presence there is fullness of joy, in his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. Do you believe that? If you do, then obey him. And if you need to pray while I'm praying, if you need to pray while we're singing, and offer some areas of your life over to God where you've been walking in disobedience, declare that now before you walk out those doors that you will offer those over to him and you will walk in obedience and trust him to be the good shepherd. Prove to God with your obedience to his commands that you love him and you trust him. And what you'll find there is the best life possible. Let's pray. Father, I always say that we love you. And we do. I know that we do. And God, we believe. But sometimes we need you to help our unbelief. God, I know that this room is full of people who love you, who want to love you more, who want to know you better. But we have so many things clinging on to our souls, entangling us, keeping us from running our races. So we simply pray this morning, God, that you would help us see them. What are the things holding us back? What are the pockets of disobedience that we've clung to and allowed and fostered and nurtured over the years that we need to expose and let go? God, if there are things pressing on our hearts and our souls right now, would you not let us leave this place until we agree to submit those things to you? To walk in obedience in those areas once and for all. Lord, we love you. We pray that our actions this week would bear that out. That we would love you and others well. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here. If I haven't gotten to meet you, I'd love to do that after the service. Or you could just come to Discover Grace right after the service. We've got food for you and we've got space, so hang out with us there. Just for a little bit of clarity, Mikey, I don't know where you're sitting, but I lied to you in front of the whole church. This is not great. This is fine, I would call it. This is what I'm about to tell you is average. This is an average sermon for me. So let's adjust expectations to whatever you think my average is. If you think my average is good, then I got good news for you. You're going to like it. If you think it's not so good, then, you know, good luck in finding another church. And I mean it. I hope they serve you better than I can. This morning we are in the letters of John, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. We've been moving through the books of the New Testament. This summer and next summer we're doing a series called 27 where we go through the 27 books of the New Testament. But sometimes we are grouping them together because the letters of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John really all three have the same message. And 2nd John and 3rd John are one chapter. So it'd be tough to give you an overview of that one chapter. It's better to just group them together because the message that they preach, the message that they proclaim, is very similar all the way throughout. Now, John, the disciple, wrote these letters. He wrote them probably towards the end of his ministry. It's the same John that wrote the Gospel of John, in which he describes himself the disciple whom Jesus loved We've talked many times about John's unique relationship with Jesus. They were uniquely close They sat next to each other at dinner. Jesus told John some things that he didn't share with the other disciples There was a relational closeness there that I'm not sure Jesus or John experienced anywhere else in their life. And then John also wrote the book of Revelation that we're going to get to next summer. And then towards the end of his ministry, he wrote these three letters. And John is also super significant in church history because we believe that he probably kind of replaced Peter as the leader of the church after Peter passed away. Then John was a leader of the church. And then he discipled some guys named Ignatius and Polycarp, and they like took the church after John did. So he's kind of the link between the last of the biblical figures to lead the church. And then guys that we learn about in history books, not in the Bible. So these are significant letters that they fall at the end of his ministry and reveal to us what he thinks is most important to share with the people. And unlike some of the letters like Thessalonians that's written specifically to the church in Thessalonica, these letters are written to all the churches, to take one, to read it to the congregation, and then to get it to the next church down the road so they can read it there the next week. So these are just general advice, advisory letters to the church. And in 1, 2, and 3 John, we see this theme, this instruction, this singular idea come up multiple times. When we decided to do this series going through the books of the New Testament, I knew when we planned the series what I was going to preach when we got to the epistles of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. Because they proclaim one loud message the whole time. I knew what I was going to be preaching. To me, now maybe somebody else has preached an overview on these three, and they pulled a different theme out, and I don't want to be critical of that, but as I read it, when I look at these letters, there's one theme to talk about that if we don't talk about that, we're doing a disservice to these letters from John. And I went through, and I read the theme. I know what it is. And so I read the letters in preparation for the sermon. And I counted 12 times in seven chapters that John says basically the exact same thing. It's the most reiterative book in the Bible that I know of, besides maybe Proverbs. Just the same idea over and over and over again. He keeps bringing your attention back to this one singular principle. And it's captured in a lot of passages, but I'm going to look at 1 John 2, verses 3 through 6. It's kind of the seminal passage that captures this idea that shows up 11 and the other 11 ones that I counted off for myself is simply this idea. If you love God, your actions will prove it. If you love God, your life will bear that out. So clearly, I'm talking to the Christians in the room. If you're here this morning and you're not a a Christian then you get to kind of watch from the outside and see what you might want to get yourself into or what you might be considering but this isn't for you this is for the believers in the room and if you're a believer you've said at some point that you love God and what John says is that's great if that's true then your actions will bear it out we will it. And what's great is all of these letters, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, are like a commentary or a blow-up of this teaching that Jesus offers to the disciples that's only recorded in the Gospel of John. In John chapter 15, when Jesus says, if you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. He says, to abide in me, you keep my commandments, and my commandments are that you would love. So then at the end of his life, John is reflecting back onto that singular teaching of Jesus. If you abide in me, you'll bear much fruit. How do you abide in me? You obey me. What does it mean to obey me? You obey my commandments. What's my commandment? That you would love one another. So then 12 different times in his swan songs to the church, he reiterates this idea. If you love me, if you love God, your actions will bear that out. And when you think about that, it makes a lot of sense because that's true of every relationship, right? Like I have a wife named Jen. She's wonderful. And if I told her every morning when we woke up, sweetheart, I love you so much. You're the best. Text her in the middle of the day, just thinking about you. I love you. Before we go to bed at night, hey, you're the best. I love you. That's great. But if my actions don't bear that out during the day, if I'm an unholy, impatient jerk to her, if I'm a terrible father to her children, if I give her crud about the house being dirty when I get home, when she's had a way more hectic day than I have, if I refuse to be helpful around the house, if I nitpick her and just make these little demands, if I just take the service that she offers the family for granted and I never express how much I appreciate it, if I don't cut the grass, if I'm lazy around the house, if I just don't do any of the stuff that a halfway decent husband is supposed to do, eventually she's going to stop believing it when I tell her that I love her, isn't she? If Aaron Winston, our wonderful children's pastor, says she loves the kids and she loves their families, but she doesn't bother to learn their names when they show up, eventually y'all are going to stop believing her when she says that she loves them. It's one thing to say it, but John says, put your money where your mouth is. If you say that you love God, then act like it. Then do the things that communicate love to him. If I want Jen to know that I love her, then I need to learn her and do the things that I know communicate love for her. I need to show up randomly in the middle of the day with a Chick-fil-A Coke because she didn't sleep well last night. When I do that, she knows that I love her. Jen needs to laugh at my jokes. That's all I need from her. That's all I require. Touch me sometimes. Just give me a pat on the back. You're great. And then when I make a joke like laugh and I know as long as she laughs at my joke the world is right everything's okay that's all we need but we learn to love in the language that people receive love and God says you know what I want you to do you know the important thing if you say that you love me you know how you show me you obey me you submit to submit to me. You trust me. You keep my commandments. So really the question becomes, why is obedience the thing that God asks of us to prove our love to him? And it's not that we have to prove our love to him, but why is that the proof of our love to him? I think it's for this reason. Obedience admits that God is the expert and we trust that expertise. Obedience admits that God is the expert on life, on humanity, on love, on the human condition, on the universe, and that we trust in that expertise. I'll tell you what got me thinking about that in this way. Sometime last year, some of the kind folks in the church started gently encouraging me that, hey, you know, it'd be great if we could have a cross somewhere on the stage. And so I thought through it, and I thought maybe there's a chance we can inlay one in this center panel. And we've got a lot of talented woodworkers at the church, and none of them were available. But Greg Taylor has tools. So I called Greg, and I asked if he would be interested in this. Some of y'all are picking up on that. I asked if he could help with this. And he said, yeah. He got excited about it, and we started kind of talking about what we could possibly do. He kind of sketched some stuff out and told me what he was thinking. And as he was telling me what he was thinking, I honestly thought, like, I don't think it's going to look good. I don't think, I don't, I don't think that's the way that we should go. It's not really, I don't see it like you see it. So that doesn't sound like a good idea to me. But I also know this, that knowing just a little bit more than most folks about the Bible does not make me a good interior designer. So you know what I did? I shut up. And I was like, all right, Master Woodworker, I don't see your plan. But you do, and you seem excited about it, so go ahead. And then he did that. And I came in here and I saw it. And I thought, I sure am glad I shut up, because that looks phenomenal. looks phenomenal thank you Greg the whole church got better because of that often in my role I have to trust the advice of others who have an expertise that I don't last summer when we were going through the purchase of the land we own four acres off of Litchford Road we'll find out more about what's gonna go there on the 10th of December, two weeks from today. Oh, December, I said? We're going to delay it even more. It's going to be so fun. It's going to keep you guys waiting. Yeah, thanks. Two weeks from now, September the 10th. I'm so focused on that sermon that what I want to say in that sermon kept me up all night last night. I couldn't go to sleep because I was thinking about that. And then I woke up and I was like, I kind of came to this morning. I was like, that's not even what I'm preaching this morning. I have to focus on this. I'm thinking about that a lot. But as we were going to buy the land last year, there was a team of people that were kind of informing us, informing the elders, informing me on the decisions that we should make. And they were spearheaded by one of the great partners of our church, a guy named Scott Hurst. Scott Hurst is a lifelong corporate real estate guy. And so he would call me and he would say, hey, what do you think we should do about this? Do you think we should make this kind of offer? Do you think we should do this or that or whatever? And I would always tell him, Scott, I don't know. Your vote is my vote. Whatever you think we should do is what I think we should do. I have no right to usurp your expertise and insert myself and think I know what to do as we evaluate whether or not to purchase land. I'm just trusting in your wisdom. In the same way, we had a group of people that we put together from the finance committee, from the elders, and one of the bankers that we have at the church. And we put together, I don't know if they're the finest financial minds in the church, but they were the most available at this time. So we put them in a room and we said, how much do we need to raise so that when we build the building, we're borrowing a responsible amount? And they gave me an amount. And as soon as they gave me the amount, I said, that sounds great. That's fine. Zero pushback. No questions. Let's go. Because I trust in the expertise of those people. So I'm happy to submit to what they think. Now, how ridiculously absurd would it be of me to hear the advice of those people and slough it off? To hear Greg say, hey, this is what I think we should do with the cross. And for me to be like, listen, Greg, I know you spent a lifetime in your basement, in your shop, working on projects. And I couldn't do what you've done in a whole lifetime. But I was a trim carpenter for six months when I was 25 years old. And I know a thing or two. And I'm just going to tell you, I don't like your vision, man. You need to rethink that. What if I looked at Scott Hurst when he gave me some advice on something? And I said, you know what? I didn't take a course on corporate real estate and sales deals when I was in seminary, but that was in the class right next door. And I picked up on some stuff. And I think I know a little bit better. What if I push back on the team of people that we asked to advise us on how much we need to raise? What if I push back and I said, that's not, that's a bad idea. That's not doable. I would be dumb. I'm not saying that I'm not. I'm just saying that would be proof. That'd be what you would need. I would be incredibly prideful and incredibly obstinate and incredibly short-sighted and incredibly myopic if I just threw off the advice of the experts in my life and just chose my own way. I was like, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to do this. Because I know how to read the Bible and run my mouth for 30 minutes, I'm the smartest and we're going to do what I say. No, it's dumb. It's silly. It's short-sighted and prideful to throw off that sort of wisdom. And yet, you guys see where I'm going with this? God is the author of the universe. Jesus is the founder and perfecter of your faith. God knew your very soul before he knit you in your mother's womb. He knows the hairs on your head. He knows the number. He knew the good work that he created you to walk in before he ever created you. To say that God knows you better than you know yourself is a vast understatement. He doesn't just know you. He knows the depth of you and all the possibilities of you and all the inclinations of you and all the future pathways of you. He knows all the things that bring you joy. He knows all the things that fill you up. Not only you, but everyone around you. For all of history, he designed all of this. He is the author of life. He is omniscient, meaning he is all-knowing. He is omnipresent, meaning he is everywhere. He can see every possible outcome of every possible scenario, and he can play that out better than any computer we could ever touch. He has all the algorithms. He can figure it out. We can't see past this minute, and he can see every outcome for all eternity, and he's told us some things about how we should live our lives, things that we should do and things that we shouldn't do, things that we should pursue and things that we should cut off, things that are good for us and things that will damage our soul. The author of the universe who sees into the infinite has told you those things and yet we choose to trust in our own wisdom and not his. In different ways and in different seasons and at different times. We throw off the wisdom of the infinite for the blindness of the broken. We have access. Through his word. Through his presence. Through his spirit. Through prayer. Through others. Who call Jesus their savior. We have access to him. To the divine. To the infinitely wise. And he makes it very clear what he wants us to do with our lives. He makes it very clear how we are supposed to love and how we are supposed to serve, how we are supposed to outdo one another with humility. How we are supposed to avoid certain things and embrace certain things. And in the face of that infinite wisdom that only wants what's best for us, we continue to choose the blindness of the broken. The pleasures of today sacrificing the joy of tomorrow. And I don't know where you are in your obedience to God. When I say things like, you know, there's ways in which we're all being disobedient, I don't know what comes to your mind. For some of us, we flash right away. We know the areas where we're allowing sin and the things that so easily entangle to prohibit us from running our race. When I say, what's an area of your life where you're just not being fully obedient to God, you know right away. And that's good. Others of us, because we've been at this a while, have probably settled into this place where we've begun to settle for good enough, where we worked really hard, we've done pretty well, things in life are going pretty good, we've got our spiritual disciplines, we've got our regimens, and we don't do them all the time, but we do them most of the time. And when I compare myself to the other people around me, I seem to be doing pretty well. And I know that there's more work that I could do, but it's hard. So I'm going to stop. And we settle into this kind of middle-of-the-road faith where we're just comfortable. And God, through his word and through his prayer and through worship, beckons us to more. He calls us into deeper obedience. He calls us to walk with him in stride. He calls us to abide in him. He offers this much more full life that's waiting for us on the other side of obedience, and yet we just choose to throw off the wisdom of the infinite that God knows what's best for us in favor of the blindness of the broken. No, I know what's best for myself. Do you understand that when we sin, that's what we do? We throw off God's wisdom and we choose our own wisdom? No, no, no, I know that you are the author of the universe. I know that you kind of wrote this thing and you know all the things there are to know, but for this one, I'm right. Listen, if you think I'm dumb, if I were to ignore the advice of Scott and corporate real estate, what does that make us all when we ignore God's expertise in our own life and we choose our own? It seems really silly to be disobedient when we put it that way, doesn't it? What must it feel like to God when we regularly and habitually refuse His expertise and choose our own? Is there anything, is there anything in life more infuriating than when you're talking with someone and you know you're right about a thing and they will not give it to you? They insist that you are wrong and that they are right and you don't know what universe they're from because you're right and you know you're right. And if you're a parent, you know exactly what I'm talking about. This happened sometime last year and I don't remember the particular word. But Lily, my daughter, she was six at the time. And I think I've shared a little bit of this before. And again, I'm making up this conversation. I remember the gist of it, but I don't remember the word and the actual things that were said. But this is pretty much how the conversation went. She pointed to a word. It was mañana, the Spanish word for tomorrow. I think that's right, right? That means tomorrow. Yeah? You're Spanish adjacent. You should know. His wife speaks Spanish. And I said, she pointed to the word. She said, how do you say this, Daddy? And I said, you say that mañana. And she goes, I don't think that's right. And I'm like, based on what? Based on what expertise do you think I'm wrong? Like, I'm open. Maybe you know something I don't. And she goes, well, that's not, that's not how my, how my teacher at school says to say it. She's taking Spanish at school. She says, that's not how the Spanish teacher says to say it. And I said, how'd the Spanish teacher say that you should say it? And she says, banana. And I'm like, excuse me, banana? That's what you're going to enter the chat with? And I just kind of look at her. I said, I said, baby, that's not right. And she goes, yes, it is, dad. That's what my Spanish teacher said. I said, I do not believe that that's what your Spanish teacher taught you. Because if it is, there's going to be a really strongly worded email. Not that I'm passionate about Spanish education, but that's ridiculous. I'm going to write an email about that. And we're going back and forth. And I'm literally like, I'm even pulling out reason like, Lily, you have taken two months of Spanish. You're largely illiterate in English at this point in your life. I promise you, I know that it's mañana. Do you see that? That's an ñ. That means ñ, mañana. That's what that means. That's why it's there. And it didn't matter to her. Like, Lily, I took Spanish three times in high school. I only made it through. I took Spanish two twice. But I did take it three times, technically. I've been to Spanish-speaking countries. I've been exposed to that. If you drop me in the middle of Costa Rica, I could get home. There would be hand motions and things, but I could get back. Like, I know that's manana. And it was so infuriating because it didn't matter what I said. She was right, and I was wrong, and I literally had to finish the discussion about manana manana with agree to disagree. We have two different opinions about this. I was so mad. How infuriating is it? When you know the right thing to do, you know the right answer. And the person you're talking to is like, man, that's not right. And yet, as I was talking to our student pastor, Kyle, about this this week, he pointed it out and I thought it was a great point. Our God experiences so very little of that frustration. In those moments, when we're obstinate and we are insisting to him that it's pronounced manana, I do not believe that our God experiences frustration like we experience frustration. I do not believe he is angered by that like we are angered by that. In those moments of our profound obstinance, I believe that God is more hurt by our disobedience than he is frustrated. I believe he is more hurt by our disobedience than he is frustrated. I think of it like this. Some of you have walked this path. My children are not old enough to have walked this path, but I've watched other people walk it. And you know the pain of being a parent with adult children and watching those children choose a path that leads to pain. You've watched those children make choices and you can see the end of that road. You know how that's going to end. You know their life is going to be shattered because of it. You know their heart is going to break because of it. You know that they are going to shipwreck themselves with the choices they are making and you are impotent to stop them. And all you can do is sit back and hope that the crash isn't so bad. And hope that when they're ready to pick up the pieces, they ask you to help. Some of my older parents in the room know the pain of watching an adult child collide towards catastrophe knowing there is nothing that you can do. And I think that this is what our Father in Heaven experiences every day. Watching us just careen out of control, spiraling towards a collision or a blow-up or a shipwreck, knowing that what's there is going to end and hurt for us, hoping that when we get there, we allow him to help us pick up the pieces. I do not think our God experiences anger and frustration with us when we're disobedient the way that we understand those emotions. I think he experiences hurt because he knows he has something better for us. Do you ever think about why God asks us to do things? He tells us, he makes it very clear in scripture that we're not to lust, that we're to avoid sexual immorality. Are we to do that just because God wants us to live puritanical lives that aren't as exciting and interesting as those who don't put themselves under the standards of the Bible? Is that what God wants is just his children to be more puritanical and less indulgent than other people, and so let's just keep a lid on that. No. God knows that if you are married, that every time you look at someone who's not your spouse and you desire them in a way that you don't desire your spouse, that you cheapen your spouse and you make the relationship worse. Every time you look at someone outside your marriage and you compare them to who you are married to and you want things that they seem to have that your spouse doesn't seem to have, then you cheapen your spouse and you weaken your marriage. Every time. And God knows this. So he doesn't tell us not to lust because he wants us to be Puritans. That's a happy accident of avoiding lust. But the point is, it's only when we never do that, it only deepens our devotion to our spouse. It only deepens our attraction to our spouse. It only heightens our desire for them. And then in living within this happy, fulfilling marriage where you two are mutually desired, guess what you experience? Maximum happiness and joy in a happy marriage, which is what we all want. God says, he tells us in Psalms, David writes this. In his presence there is fullness of joy, his right hand is our pleasures forevermore. It's the idea that if we pursue him, if we obey him, then the best things are waiting for us there. Why does he tell you not to be greedy? Because he doesn't want you to have nice things? Because he wants you to live the life of a pauper? No, because he knows that if you're greedy, that those things that you want are going to own you. That you're going to live a life serving stuff and image. And it'll throw off your priorities and you won't be the spouse that you're supposed to be and you won't be the parent that you're supposed to be and you won't be the member of God's church and kingdom that you're supposed to be. Because you spend your life pursuing and hanging on to stuff. And there's no joy to be found there. If you think about anything in the Bible that God tells you to do, anything in the Bible that requires your obedience, and you ask yourself, and listen, I'll give you a hint. I always preach this. Whenever there is an instruction from God in the Bible, and I have to present it to you, hey, guys, we need to not be prideful. Hey, guys, we need to not lust. Hey, the Bible tells us that we need to pursue humility. Like, whatever it is, I'm always thinking in the back of my head, why? Why is it important for God that we would do those things? Why would he instruct his children in those things? And the conclusion, it looks a lot of different ways and a lot of different sermons, but this is the basic formula. He tells us to do something, A, because when we do it, we love other people and him better. Bottom line. When we don't lust, we're loving God and others better. When we're not prideful, we love God and others better. When we're not greedy, we love God and others better. When we show humility, we love God and others better. When we offer hospitality, we love God and others better. That's always the first answer. And then ancillary to that, the benefit of that, that should push our selfish souls directly to it, is that also it's what's best for us. Also, there is the greatest joy found in obedience. There is the greatest joy in the fullest life found in following the good shepherd. God asks us to be obedient. He puts things in front of us, not for his weird pleasure, not because he wants us to feel bad, not to browbeat us and make us puritanical, but because by walking in obedience to God, we love him and others better, and we find the greatest joy possible. So he urges his children to obey him. That's why I love this verse in John 10.10. It hangs over my desk. I think in this verse is the fundamental question for all of Christendom. Jesus in John 10 is referring to himself as the good shepherd, and he says he lays at the gate of the pen to protect us, and then he says this, the thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly. Other translations say, have it to the full. And I love that verse. I love that thought, that point. Jesus came that we might have life and have it to the full. And so it's no mistake. It's no exaggeration to say that Jesus wants the best life possible for you. That's not health and wealth, praying that. I'm not telling you if you follow him, you're going to be rich and no one in your family is ever going to get sick. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is in Jesus the promise is, if you follow your good shepherd and go where he leads you, and don't wander into your own fields trying to find your own sustenance, but if you trust him and you follow him and his wisdom, he will lead you to the best pastures, and in those pastures, you will find fullness of life, life to the full, life abundant. Meaning, there is no greater life waiting for you outside of God's commands. Which brings us to the fundamental question of Christianity. Jesus says, he's the good shepherd. Do you believe him? Jesus says, he will take you to the best pastures. Do you believe him? Jesus says, if you just put your head down and follow him, if you just abide in him, that you will find a fullness of joy there that you can find nowhere else. Do you believe him? He beckons with that teaching the simple question, hey, hey, hey, do you trust me? Do you trust me? Do you trust Jesus? And John, at the end of his life, as he distills all the teaching of a lifetime to this singular point, hey, do you trust Jesus? Do you say that you love him? Do you say that you know him? Well then, obey him, because obedience proves trust. I don't know what areas of your life you would look at and say that they're out of sync with God. I don't know where you would find your disobedience. But whenever there's an area of our life that's not submitted to God and his wisdom, what we are saying with our actions is, I'm the expert here. I don't need you. I do not trust you to be the good shepherd. I will be my own shepherd and I will find my own pastures. Thanks very much. So that's the question that I would leave you with. When Jesus says that he's the good shepherd, when God says that he cares for us, when we're told that he's going to lead us into green pastures, when we're told that in his presence there is fullness of joy, in his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. Do you believe that? If you do, then obey him. And if you need to pray while I'm praying, if you need to pray while we're singing, and offer some areas of your life over to God where you've been walking in disobedience, declare that now before you walk out those doors that you will offer those over to him and you will walk in obedience and trust him to be the good shepherd. Prove to God with your obedience to his commands that you love him and you trust him. And what you'll find there is the best life possible. Let's pray. Father, I always say that we love you. And we do. I know that we do. And God, we believe. But sometimes we need you to help our unbelief. God, I know that this room is full of people who love you, who want to love you more, who want to know you better. But we have so many things clinging on to our souls, entangling us, keeping us from running our races. So we simply pray this morning, God, that you would help us see them. What are the things holding us back? What are the pockets of disobedience that we've clung to and allowed and fostered and nurtured over the years that we need to expose and let go? God, if there are things pressing on our hearts and our souls right now, would you not let us leave this place until we agree to submit those things to you? To walk in obedience in those areas once and for all. Lord, we love you. We pray that our actions this week would bear that out. That we would love you and others well. In Jesus' name, amen.

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

I'll tell you, I've never considered how big of a step that is until you do it in front of 150 people. You become very aware that this could end badly, especially with a table, and not good balance. So, hey, guys, thanks so much for being here today. If you were here, I'm so glad that you decided to join us for your home, watching online. Well, I'm half as glad that you're joining us. I'm just kidding. I'm not. I'm like three-quarters. If you are new or visiting, my name is Aaron. As Nate said, I'm one of the pastors out here, and I'm so honored to get to serve you guys. Just to kind of dive right in, if you missed last week, we started a new series called Final Thoughts. If you noticed, I had to glance at the screen because I forgot for a second, but it's true. It's called Final Thoughts, I promise. But no, if you did miss last week, listen, go online, check that out. Nate kind of set up the series in this final discourse, this final conversation that Jesus had with his disciples and why it should matter, why it mattered to them and what it means for us. But today, just to kind of give you a snapshot into the scene that we're stepping into, this is the last conversation that Jesus is having with his disciples before he is just a few hours time arrested and led off to his death. This is kind of the last marching orders. It's his final conversation, final prayer, final meal with his disciples. The final things that he wants to say to them is just kind of send them on as he's telling them, I'm no longer going to be here with you. You've still got work to do. We're not done yet. And as you go, just know I'm not here with you anymore. I have to go away. If you have your Bibles, you can turn into John 14 is where we're going to be today. You can then kind of put your finger in there, put a little, one of the ribbon things. We'll get there in a second. But just to set up today and the direction that we're headed, I'm going to set it up like this. So I haven't always been this perfect picture of physique and fitness that you see today. I didn't think it was really funny, but the, like, no. So I remember when I was in the second grade, there was a fifth grader named Brandon. I hated Brandon. I know hate's a strong word, but I did. I promise. Still not sure how I feel today, but he tormented me all the time. He was a fifth grader. I was a second grader. He was a lot bigger than me, and he just always kind of picked on me. He always tried to get a laugh from other people at my expense. And I remember we were at school one time and we went out to recess. For some reason, they decided to put second graders and fifth graders in the same recess. It didn't make sense. I'm not sure what could come bad of that. Me, I'm what could happen bad out of that, right? So I remember we were at recess and then there was one day in particular, Brandon, he got me on the ground somehow and he got on top of me and he was just kind of, he wasn't punching me or anything like that, but he was just kind of like doing that slap stuff, you know what I mean? Just like really annoying. Everybody was kind of laughing, and everybody was kind of joking, but there was another guy. His name was Greg. Greg was bigger than Brandon, and Greg saw what was happening, and then I was laying there on the ground and didn't really know what was going on. I have no clue why Greg did this. But then out of nowhere, he kind of came through and spear tackled Brad. And so I'm sitting here like this, like, no, no, what just happened? Like he went flying. And immediately I looked like, Greg, you're my dude. Like, I love you. You're the best person ever. And it really worked out because we went to the same school. We also went to like the same church. And so we would end up in a lot of the same places together. We would be in church camp or something like that. And anytime I would go somewhere and if I saw Brandon, immediately what I started to do was look. I was like, okay, I need to see if I can see Greg. Because if I can see Greg, I know I'm going to be okay. Like Brandon, you're a chump as long as Greg's here, right?, that's what makes things okay for me. And there was a bit of a safety. I kind of felt untouchable in some way. As long as I could see the person that I trusted to take care of whatever it was that was in front of me. And we've all experienced some sense of that, right? Like, as a kid, that's why there was such a difference. And if you ever went to your parents' room and talked about the monster under your bed. There was a difference than if they just sent you back after telling you there was nothing there and walked back with you. When you're with the person that you trust, there's a bit of a confidence that comes with that. As I was kind of thinking through that and studying this passage for this week, man, I couldn't shake this question that kept popping in my mind. And I just want to ask you real quick, have you ever considered, have you ever wondered what you would be willing to do if you were walking step in step with Jesus? Like, have you ever considered, is there something you felt like you wanted to move into? Is there something you felt like you wanted to be a part of? Is there something that you just kind of really felt like you wanted to step into? But for one reason or another, you talked yourself out of it. And you know that if you were to look over and see Jesus right there with you, it would kind of give you that little bit of courage, that confidence that you need to take whatever step it is that you want to take. Just don't feel like you can. The disciples have never had to ask that question up until this moment. Because for the last three years of their life, before this conversation, they had been walking day after day after day. And the things that they saw each day continued to build more confidence in the person that they trusted. They saw the things that made them believe, yeah, yeah, we can do anything. They felt invincible. They felt untouchable. They felt like as long as they could see Jesus, everything was okay. And in this conversation, all of the believing, all of what they believed is possible, vanished. Uncertainty began to shadow possibility. Their hope was suffocated by grief. Because Jesus, you just told us you're going away. And you just told us we're not done yet. How can we possibly do this without you? Like throughout this entire discourse, this upper room discourse, it's full of a lot of honestly confusing statements, hard to follow, especially on the heels of hearing that Jesus is going away. It's full of a lot of things that are hard to understand, like Nate talked about last week. He said, okay, Jesus told his guys, I'm going away. You don't know where I'm going, but you know how to get there. Like, wait, what? Okay, so I've given you one new command, right? Like commands were a big deal for these guys. And Jesus said, okay, here's what I want you to focus on, this brand new command, do this. Like, wait, geez, you're going to have to unpack that. But none of them, for me, in my opinion, is more confusing than this statement. Just on the heels of saying, I will no longer be here. I will no longer be with you. You're also going to be persecuted. Many of you killed, but I've got good news. He says this in John 16. Very truly, I tell you, it is for your good that I'm going away. Unless I go away, the advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. That kind of has the same ring and vibe as like the, it's going to hurt me more than it hurts you. You ever get those? I don't know about you, but like, so as a kid, I got whoopings. I don't know if you got whoopings, but I got whoopings. That's why I'm such a productive and well-behaved adult today. But I got whoopings, and I know this wasn't unique to my dad. He certainly, I don't know if he read it in a book somewhere, got it in a newspaper clipping, have no clue. But for some reason, I will never forget the day that I was getting one of my many undeserved whoopings. And he looked at me and he said, hey, son, this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it's not. I don't know if you've ever had a whooping before. If it hurts, if it does, you're doing it wrong, right? Like this is not true. Like it's a statement to try to bring some kind of comfort into the pain that you're about to experience. This statement from Jesus has the hurt me more than it hurts you kind of vibe. We know that it's not because Jesus doesn't lie. And it truly is encouragement. But think about it from the perspective of the disciples. For the last three years, they've seen the reason that they can trust in him. For the last three years, they've built up a confidence and a boldness that only came from being with Jesus. And now you're telling me we have to try to figure this out without you? Like, where do we go? What do we do? How do we do it? Like, Jesus, you're the reason all of this is possible. What's supposed to happen from here? And that's a feeling that you and I can resonate with. A place you want to step into. A place that you want to go. But if only I could see Jesus and step with him. But, like I said, this statement from Jesus, it's not to hurt me more than to hurt you. And the reason is because it's wrapped in a promise. What Jesus told them in this moment is he made them a promise of the Holy Spirit. Depending on your church background, where you grew up, maybe even your Facebook algorithm or YouTube algorithm, we all have very different understandings, or we can have very different understandings about who the Holy Spirit is, what he does in our life. A lot of things like tongues, speaking in tongues, or the gifts of the Spirit, that's what comes to mind. But here's what's pretty fascinating to me. In this promise that Jesus made, he didn't mention any of that. That's not the good news of the Holy Spirit. What Jesus told them in John 14, if you're there, we're going to start in verse 15 and read to 17. This was Jesus' promise. He said, if you love me, keep my commands. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate. If you're the type of person who likes highlights in your Bible, that's a great one to highlight, another advocate. Or just write it on the person's neck in front of you, whatever. Remember another advocate. We're coming back to that. I'm giving you another advocate to help you and be with you forever. The spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him. Here's the promise. But you know him for he lives with you and will be in you. Depending on the translation that you're reading, like some of the versions say advocate, some of the versions say helper. The word that Jesus uses here is paraclete. And paraclete changes everything. Paraclete is a legal term, and it literally means to come alongside. What Jesus says is, I am sending you another paraclete. I am sending you one who will come alongside through the challenges and the days ahead. I am sending one who will be with you forever. The only thing that would have made second grade me happier is if I had omnipresent Greg floating around all over the place, right? Like he was just always there because I would no longer have to rely on sight. It's an awareness. That's the promise of Jesus. He says, you don't have to rely on seeing me. You never again have to look over your shoulder and wonder, am I there? You never again have to step into a place and feel lonely, feel abandoned. You never again have to know that I'm calling you and going and leading you into a place that I will not be there with you. You will never be alone. Jesus's promise wasn't just that he was sending the Holy Spirit. Jesus's promise was the inescapable presence of the Holy Spirit. And not in a type of way like, hey, Jesus is watching, so you better act right. Like, man, I've heard that said, and that's just, honestly, it's manipulation and not something that I see throughout scripture. Jesus's promise of this inescapable presence of the Holy Spirit is, hey, the same love that you've received from me will be with you forever. The same hope that you have found in me will be with you forever. The same life that you have seen in me will be with you forever. I am sending you another, one of, one like, one the same as me to be with you forever, to come alongside, to aid you, to be with you forever. You never have to worry if you're alone. And that's great news. Like the thing that we have to realize, the thing that the disciples in this moment would have to realize, all of Jesus's earthly ministry from the time that he was born until his resurrection was empowered by the Holy Spirit. He is fully God and he was fully man. When he stepped onto earth, he surrendered some of his divine rights and he adopted some of the limitations of humanity. All of his ministry, the miracles that you see, the miracles that you read about, the signs that have been witnessed, the power and strength in his teaching, declaring who he is and who God is that comes through the Holy Spirit and what Jesus promised the disciples in this moment, that same power will be with you forever. You never again have to worry about, are you alone? Because the confidence in that does not come from the side. It comes from an awareness, an awareness of my promise. And not only did he promise that the Holy Spirit would be with them forever, but he said, we'll be within you. I'm sending another advocate that will be with you and be in you. There's a big difference in God working with you and God working in you, right? Like God working with you invites more observation than anything. It is what's happened over the last three years of their life. God has been working with them. They have seen, they have witnessed the power of Jesus. They've witnessed what he's able to do. It's the very thing that has built this confidence in who they were. But I can guarantee you in this moment, when Jesus said, I will no longer be here, I'm sending you another. John didn't understand the implications of what that meant, that the Holy Spirit was going to be working in them. Surely in this moment, John looked around the room and he saw a fisherman. He saw a tax collector. He saw zealots. He saw a room full of people who had been rejected as the best of the best, who rabbis of the day looked at them and say, unfortunately, you don't have what it takes to do what it is that I do. He saw a room full of unqualified people who were only where they were because of Jesus, who came along and he gave them a bigger purpose than day-to-day survival. He said, you can do what I do. You can come with me. And he saw the confidence that came with that, a boldness that just like you have Peter, who just from the sight and prospect of Jesus out there on the water in the middle of a storm, he said, hey, if that's really you, tell me that I can come to you. Like that's a boldness that only comes. And so now he sees a room full of people who are unqualified. And certainly the thoughts that start to come into his head is Jesus. Like it's been your power that it's gotten us here. How can we possibly do this without you? Because we're not good enough. Have you ever had that feeling? Like there's something that you feel, like something in your heart is moving you towards something to have a conversation, to step into a life of something, to step into aid for something. Have you ever felt like your heart was moving you in an area and what talked you out of it was, I would, but I'm just not good enough. I would, but I'm just not smart enough. I would, but I'm just not talented enough. Man, I would love to do that. Like, have you ever felt like God was moving you towards something and while you were in route, it came to an abrupt halt because you're like, yeah, I can't really do that. But Jesus says to the disciples in that moment, but I believe he says to you and me as well, is that he's sending another advocate, not only to work with you, but also to work in you. Again, the word paraclete is extremely interesting to me. And like I said, it changes everything. It's only used five times throughout the entire Bible. Four of which are right here in the Gospel of John. They're used by Jesus in chapters 14 through chapter 16. All of them are in reference to the Holy Spirit in this upper room discourse. The fifth and final time that the word paraclete is used is by John in 1 John chapter 2, and he uses it in reference to Jesus. When John heard these words, man, he certainly didn't get what it meant that the Holy Spirit is going to be working in you. Certainly, he was concerned with the power of Jesus no longer being with him. But the 65 to 90 year gap from when he heard these words and when he wrote these words, he understood something very different. He understood that the Holy Spirit is the power of Jesus working within you to impact the world through you. What John understood when he wrote these words was something very different than what he understood when he heard them. And the only thing that can make that difference, the only thing that I can imagine would change that, is what he experienced the coming days. What he experienced the rest of his life. Like what John saw happen was from this upper room discourse, a small room full of disciples and followers of Jesus who were terrified of what was going to come next. And then they saw the person they loved and trusted the most then start to move, be arrested, and was killed. And then he saw that same room full of disciples go to another room, and they were terrified to go outside because of what they may see, because they are certainly going to die too. And then he saw what happens when the Holy Spirit came down, just as Jesus promised, and entrenched the heart of Peter. There was this boldness that rose up, and he stepped out in front of thousands of people, and he said, hey, you, you killed an innocent man. The guy, Jesus, that you just championed the death of, he was innocent and you murdered him. But by his grace, forgiveness is possible. Repent. Change your heart. Repent of who you believe about Jesus to be. And he saw thousands of people from the boldness of Peter coming out of a room terrified of what's next. He saw thousands of people surrender their heart to Jesus. John saw the gospel spread and transform the world around him from this small room of scared disciples into the ends of the world as they know it. What John saw was the gospel wreck the heart of a guy named Saul, who was a persecutor of Christians, many believe to be one who Stephen, he was in charge of the execution of one of the disciples. What he saw happen was the Holy Spirit came in and changed the heart of this guy to who you know as Paul, who was one of the most influential Christians that have ever stepped onto this earth. Like what happened in that timeframe made John believe something different about this promise of Jesus. And here's what's crazy. Here's what we've got to make sure that we hear in this. Like, I don't think John said it so that you would know how awesome they are. And I don't think John said it so that you and I can read about how great it is that Jesus wanted to use these guys. And let's just root those guys on. I think that John wrote this. John wrote the account of the conversation that he had with Jesus in this moment so that you would know and so that I would know. God is working around you. He's also working in you to impact the world through you. Like John in this moment was terrified that his purpose had ended. That with Jesus gone, he served no more purpose. But what he saw happen was he wasn't done. He was created with a purpose, for a purpose. And the Holy Spirit was at work in his heart, was at work in his life. What I believe he would tell you and what I believe he would tell me is at work in your heart. God is shaping and molding and stirring in you passions and desires that align with his. He's moving you and ushering you into something and leading you into something. And if you've ever had that moment where you felt like you're not enough, if you could sit down and have a conversation with John, what I believe he would tell you is, hey, I understand how you feel. I felt the same way. But the Holy Spirit, the paraclete, Jesus sent another and he is working with and he is working in. He's never going to leave you alone. What is it? Like that very first question I asked, let's revisit that. Have you ever thought about what you would be willing to do and walk into if you were walking step by step with Jesus? Have you ever thought about what type of life you would live? And again, I'm not talking about behavioral type stuff like, oh, got to act right. I'm talking about what would you do that you feel like God is kind of moving your heart towards? What would you finally step into? Even if you feel unequipped. The band, you guys can come up. I'm gonna talk for a few more minutes, but you guys can go ahead and get where you need to be. I grew up in the church. I wasn't always a Christian. When I finally surrendered my heart to Jesus, I immediately associated loving God with serving God. Honestly, I was willing to do anything. It didn't matter what it was, and that was my prayer. I was a mediocre, at best, musician, and that may be very generous to say. I was pretty terrible. But what I was doing in this little church that we were at, I was playing the drums at the time. I loved music. I just wasn't great at it, right? But my prayer at the time was, hey, God, listen, I'll legitimately do anything. I really hope it's this, but whatever you ask me to do, and my heart was very sincere in that. So I was praying that. I had people praying that with me. I called a friend that was down in Florida, and I had him praying that with me, and at this point in time in my life, I was serving as a night auditor in a hotel, which really meant I was working about an hour a night and then napping for seven. Let's relax. I did good, okay? So I was working as a night auditor in a hotel. I was going to school full-time, and I was also a basketball coach, high school basketball coach, which just meant really I had no sleep at all. But there was about a two-week stretch where the amount of sleep that I got was even less. There was always, you ever had something on your mind so much that it keeps you awake? That's what was going on. I would lay down and I would try to go to sleep and there was a music, musical riff, there was a guitar lick, there was a lyric that I had to write down. And like, don't worry, you'll never hear any of those. They were terrible. But it was just on my mind so much that I had to go and jot it down. And I remember one night I was getting ready to go to work and I stepped out and I saw my phone had vibrated off the shelf. This was back when they flipped and stuff. And it could fall and not break. So it fell on the floor and I picked it up and had a voicemail from the guy who prayed with me in Florida. And what I remember is nothing from his prayer, but the moment that I heard his voice, there was one sentence, one request in the prayer that stood out to me. He said, hey, God, put it on Aaron's mind so much what you want him to do that he loses sleep at night. And when I heard that, I was like, man, you couldn't pray something else? Like, that's not true. I didn't. But when I heard that, I knew who I was as a musician. That was not me. But I also knew what direction he was sending me in. There is no better place for you to be in your life than in passion-filled purpose and dependence of the Holy Spirit. There is no better place for you to be, no more thrilling of a place to be than passion-filled purpose and simultaneously fully dependent on the Spirit. But it was started with a willingness to do anything, like a genuine prayer. God, whatever you want me to do, I'll do. Maybe you have something like that in your heart. It's burdening you to the point to where it's keeping you awake. There's something that you just can't shake. There's something that you just feel drawn to. It breaks your heart for the things that breaks the heart of God. Like there's something there you just can't shake. Maybe start walking towards it. Maybe there's nothing. Jesus come down here and you talk to me. I'll pee on myself and then I'll go exactly where he tells me to go. As long as he tells me, listen, here's my request. Here's what I would invite you to do over the next week. Ask. Because according to Jesus, what we have is the promise that we will never be alone. The same guidance, same direction, same hope that we found in him is with us always. We were created more. We were created for more than just day-to-day survival. God has wired you and equipped you and working in you to impact the world through you. So I'm going to invite you to stand. I'm going to pray for us in just a second. But this song that we're going to sing, the bridge, it simply says, Spirit, lead me. Spirit, direct me to where my heart feels it needs to be. I just want to invite you to make that your prayer this morning, tomorrow. Say, God, listen, I'm willing to do anything. Could you show me and give me direction? God, thank you so much for your love, for your grace, for your kindness. We thank you for the promise, the promise of the Holy Spirit, God, that honestly sometimes we can't wrap our head fully around, but what we lean into is the promise that you made the disciples. That the same confidence, the same hope, the same encouragement, the same grace that we see in you is with us always. Not only with us, but working in us to impact the world through us. We trust you. We need you, and we thank you. In Jesus' name.