1 Peter

Good morning. My name is Nate again, and if I haven't got a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. You came on the perfect Sunday to meet people. It's Hootenanny Sunday. So after this, we go to that parking lot there and we just kind of celebrate God and his goodness, reflect on the year that we've had. This is something that we do every year. We call it the sometimes annual Hootenanny because COVID made us not have it. So it would be dishonest to call it the annual Hootenanny. And we care about honesty here. So it's this sometimes annual Hootenanny. And I hope that you'll stick around and talk to some folks and say, hey, and again, if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. This morning is going to look a little different. You can see I'm going to be talking to a couple of different folks within the church this morning about service and about volunteering. One of the things that we realized, I guess it was in August, I was talking with Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, and we realized that we hadn't highlighted service at Grace and volunteering at Grace in a really long time. And we said, it's high time we do this. And then we thought, well, how do we want to do it? Normally, you just preach a sermon about serving and servanthood. And God wanted us to partner with the local church and things like that. And I would bet 75% of you could predict most of the things that I would say in that kind of a sermon. And because of that, and also because I'm always looking for ways to get other voices up here and in front of the church so that we can hear from one another and learn from one another, we thought it would be good and interesting to do this kind of like Ministry Partner Sunday. So in the summer, we have Ministry Partner Sunday where we highlight the different ministry partners that we have outside the walls of the church, and I'll bring them up and talk to them about what they do. And so we thought we would do that with some of our volunteers this morning. Before we do that, just to kind of set up the conversation to set you guys up as you consider your role at Grace or any local church, I did have some thoughts from 1 Corinthians. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there, 1 Corinthians chapter 12. I'm going to start in verse 18. The idea of the church being a body is all over scripture. It's all throughout, particularly the New Testament, particularly the writings of Paul. And there's some seminal passages where he talks about this, but this or Romans are probably the two, and this has a little bit more detail. So in chapter 12, Paul is detailing the spiritual gifts. He talks about this idea that God has given each of us gifts that we are to use in his kingdom. One of the verses I highlight often and say to you guys often is Ephesians 2.10, where it says that we are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we should walk in them. And so the idea is that as we live the Christian life, we are trying to determine, God, what are my good works and how do I walk in them? What do you have for me to do and to walk in? And so that ties in here in this idea that we're all part of a body. We all have a part to play. We all have a role to fill. We all have something to do. And so it's incumbent upon us to figure out what that is. This is what Paul says. But as it is, he's just talked about the body and the ear needs the eyes and the eyes need the feet and the feet needs the hands and none of them can exist without the other. And then he says, but as it is in verse 18, God arranged the members of the body, each one of them as he says, of you, nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow greater honor. I love this passage, particularly as a pastor, because I addressed this a few weeks ago, I think when we were talking about Hebrews in August. But we can make pastors more important than they should be, more valuable to the church than they really are. We can start to feel like staff, the people who work here, we're the most important people, and everybody else is kind of auxiliary, and they're helping. I know that when I grew up in my church, I kind of sensed that. And it's really important for me to point out, as often as I can, in God's kingdom, nobody's more important than anybody else. Nobody plays a more crucial role than anybody else. Leaders are to have a higher degree of accountability because it's our job to teach truth. But that's not a higher value in God's kingdom. And so I believe in grace. All of our partners are equally valuable. Everything we do is equally valuable in God's kingdom and in God's eyes. And so you can't, there's some, sometimes there are people who serve behind the scenes and I will get from them that they don't, that they feel like what they do is kind of small potatoes and it's not. It's hugely important. Everything that we do as the body of Christ is hugely important and matters in eternity and matters to God and is valued by God. Because of that, I wanted us to hear from different portions of our body that play different parts and different roles, and maybe we can relate to some of them. Maybe we'll be inspired to serve. We all have this sheet in our seat, and I'll be going through this at the end of the sermon time today. But I wanted us to hear from people in the church who serve and kind of get to know them a little bit. I felt like it was appropriate on Hootenanny Sunday because we're going out to talk and to be communal and to be a family. So this is kind of a family meeting this morning. Mike and Holly, if you guys want to go ahead and make your way up here and grab that microphone. Oh, you have it? Okay. Is there a microphone over there? There it is. Okay, good. I wanted you guys to hear from parts of the body as well. These are Mike and Holly. This is Mike and Holly Anderson. Just to kind of... I want to say wet your whistle a little bit, but that feels like I don't want to say that. Just at the Hootenanny, ask Mike and Holly what their email names are for each other, okay? I'm just going to, I learned that when they first started coming here. We met for lunch, and I saw what their email names were for each other, and they're great. So ask them what they are. I'm not going to say them from stage because there's children in the room, but just ask them what they are. Mike and Holly, you guys have been coming to Grace for how long? Two and a half. Two and a half years. Two and a half years. And in what capacity do you guys serve? So we fill your tummies every Sunday with yum, warm, yummy coffee. That's what we do. And what made you guys decide that we want to do coffee every Sunday? Because they literally do it every Sunday. I'm like, we can get you extra help. They're like, we're good. We like it. We'll do it every Sunday. So what made you decide, let's get involved, and let's get involved at the coffee level? Okay, so my wife and I, we own our own businesses. so we have an opportunity to do every year, like you do in corporate America, is we do a goal-setting session. And so we go through all of our business plans and all of our personal plans about what we want to get accomplished. And so we usually do that the end of November, early December, every year. And so the year that we were doing this, our personal plans was how do we invest more time, resources, money to Grace? That's kind of where we were. And this was our first. We were eight months, nine months into Grace at that point in time. And just trying to figure out where can we get plugged in? What can we do? How can we get more involved? Small group is definitely something we had just started. And we wanted to figure out how to get further more engaged and so the sunday of after setting those sessions on um that service was all about not being a consumer of grace and how do you be more of a provider as a partner and it really hit it hit us real quick and we shot nate a quick email you guys were just you were just leeching off the the system. We were just little leeching. Yeah, you were dead weight. And so we had lunch with Nate and we said, how can we help? What do we, we want to get plugged in somewhere somehow. And he tried to put us back there in that big old booth back there. And we know nothing about that booth. So we weren't going down that road. And so coffee, obviously with COVID and being very sensitive to what was going on in the world. We thought, you know, that would be a great way for us to kind of really get plugged in and start that back up and really move on. So we just kind of jumped on it and went from there. Now, tell me, Holly, I think it's helpful to get a little bit of y'all's background. Not like, how'd you meet? Not that, but you guys met doing a similar job, and I think that the job that you did contributes to how you guys approach how you do coffee. So what did you do when you met, and how does that help what you do here? Yeah, sure. So Mike and I met. We did sports tourism industry for a long time, so the hospitality industry. We worked for convention and visitors bureaus, and it's all about hospitality and service. And we approach everything in our life like that, our new career now. So we expect a high-level, high-touch service. And so it's the little things, like writing the messages on the cups and having a flavor of the month in creamer. So we never go here. We're always, like, way over the edge, sometimes too much. But it comes from our past and how we met and just high-touch customer service, and we wanted to bring just our love of that to the people that we love here at Grace. Yeah, and that's why you guys are discovering in real time right now that you're going to be planning the golf tournament for us in the spring when we do that. We've both done that before. They're perfect for it. And so they take their professional background and they apply it to coffee. Now, coffee is underwhelming. That is a small thing compared to what you normally organize. But one of the things I noticed right away is the writing on the cups. I don't know if you guys have noticed the writing on the cups, but we don't buy them like that. They do it. And which one of you does it? Mike does it. I have the worst handwriting ever. That's his penmanship on the cups. And I saw him back there this morning. He's got a note on his phone where he's typed up the little messages that he's brainstormed, and then he's just alternating as he's writing those on your cups, just bringing a little bit extra to it every Sunday morning. How have you guys, it's a combo question, so answer it however you like. How have you guys personally benefited from getting to do that for now, close to a year and a half, almost two years? And then most importantly, how have you watched God work to use that bit of service to bring you closer to him? Yeah, we kind of talked about how those kind of coincided, we felt like. And I think so much of it is we love coming here. We love sitting in this building with people that we've just really grown to see as family and friends. And it's been cool in the short amount of time we've been here. And so there's a selfish part of it that's like, I have to get up and go. Like, if I just want to put my PJs on and have coffee and watch Nate for my house, even though he'll give me business about it later, I at least, like, I can't even think that way, right? Like, I know that I have a reason to be here. So there's that selfish reason of I know I have to be because I've committed, but it's also because we want to be here. So I think it's helped that, and it's just helped plug us in. Like, just being here in the morning, I think we've gotten to know, you know, you guys and staff better, which has been really cool, but also the people that serve, too, and really get to see what it takes to make this all happen on Sunday. And it's been really, you know, really neat. We were talking that the church that I was most involved with when I was a little kid and my family was really involved. This is the first time as an adult that I've been plugged in. And it has just felt like the most perfect place. I call my mom all the time and I'm like, I can't believe God brought us here. This is just, it's perfect and amazing. And what I've been looking for for a long time. So That's great. That's great. I love to hear that. Well, we're grateful to you guys for serving. We're grateful to you for planning the golf tournament. And it'll be in the end of April. And we're grateful for the coffee. But if you want to sign up for coffee, they've agreed to relinquish some rights for Sunday mornings. So if you want to partner with them and help or just give them some reprieve and do coffee with them, we would love for you to do that. Now, you've got to rise to their standards, okay? They're tough bosses, but we can still use some help there if that's something you guys want to do. Thanks so much. I'm going to call up Jacob and Elena Farmer. Where are they? Okay. Jacob and Elena are so committed that they drove straight from the beach this morning to be here to do this. Is that true? Yesterday. Yesterday. Oh, yeah, because their dog got a little bit of a struggle. There you go. They've been in here for two weeks. Elena couldn't be less interested in being on the stage right now. I couldn't believe. I knew that Jacob would be game. Jacob's fine. But I couldn't believe. I was like, if Elena wants to do it, I think people would benefit. And I knew that you were going to be like, no, not a chance. And then Jacob said, yeah, we'll be there. And I thought, okay, I'm not going to ask any questions. I didn't ask permission. Yeah, sure. Sure. So, um, a little bit of background on them and I didn't have time, nor did I think it was appropriate and sure service, but it would have been fun. Jacob is a huge birdwatcher. So if you like birds, talk to Jacob at the hootenanny and he will love to talk to you about it. I know. And I almost, I wanted to do a slideshow of birds and see if you could identify them, but maybe another time, maybe another time. But after they had been going here a while, Jacob and I got lunch and he told me a little bit about his background, and he kind of let it slip that he could play guitar, that he could lead worship. And whenever, in my position, you hear that someone's musically talented, you kind of go, okay, you want to get involved? I mean, that's a high skill position. That's pretty tough. But I kind of told him, like, I'm not going to tell Aaron. I'm just going to let you sit on it. You let us know when you're ready. And so Jacob's story, and it's one of the reasons I wanted you all to hear from him, is I'm kind of, I'm teeing this up for you a little bit. He had done it a lot, gotten burned out, found a new place, and wasn't sure when he wanted to re-engage and if he even trusted doing that. And so I thought his perspective on why you decided to like, yeah, let's go ahead and sign back up and play guitar and all that stuff. So if you kind of want to fill in the blanks there for that story, that's great. Yeah, sure. So, um, yes, long story short, I've been in praise and worship since seventh grade. So whatever, whatever age that is, 13, um, got burned out. I mean, every, every church I was involved with was a, was a plant we were tearing up, sitting down every Sunday. We were serving multiple roles. Um, and then adding onto that, I kind of got burned a little bit at church as well. So I kind of had a sour taste in my mouth. And we were out of church for a long time. And I was not playing for a long time. In fact, I think the first thing I told Aaron was I probably haven't played in a band setting in close to 10 years. So we can tell, but you're getting there. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So my, my first practice Aaron, Aaron's like, yeah, come, come, come sit in. And then he's like, Oh, see you Sunday. I'm like, Oh, that wasn't at all talked about. Um, but, uh, but yeah, so for me, I guess leading up to it as a series of things, my wife dragging me here into church when I was stubbornly not wanting to be here, her volunteering to serve initially in the children's ministry, you know, just all these things that were poking me. My parents, my dad actually had been borrowing my guitar for over a year, and he brought it back to me at the beach vacation last year in September. And he's like, I think you're going to need this. And so everyone around me was seeing the writing on the wall, and I was feeling kind of the tug on my heart. And I think our conversation, which I was intentionally coming here and hiding. I didn't want to be known. I wanted to be unknown. Because the second you find out, you play guitar. That's right. Yeah, a need. Right. Um, so I was, I mean, and that was impacting my ability to connect. Um, I was, I mean, I think you even made the comments like, Hey, you've been like here for a year or more and I don't know a thing about you. I think that's how you preface like, let's get lunch. That sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there was something else you said at lunch, um, that I think it was a week later. I talked to Aaron after service and I'm going to paraphrase it. And you probably said it much more eloquently than I'm going to do. Basically, basically you said you want grace to be a place to heal, but not hide somewhere along those lines. No, that's better than I would say. Yeah. You know, and I'm going to actually, and that was just like the final like stab of like, okay, you're, you're hiding you know, you're healed. You there's, there's writing all on the wall that you need to jump back into this. And so that was, you know, the series of events that led up to me jumping back into worship. But I think a couple months before that, I had worked as an usher a couple times, kind of dipped my toe back into the service realm. Yeah. Yeah. And, Miss Elena, in what ways do you volunteer here? This is active service for her to be here right now. Yes. Yes. Right this second is how she's doing it. I volunteer with the kids ministry. Yeah. Yeah. Elena does a kids' men, but we're going to bring up Shane and Carter to talk about that. You don't have to talk about kids' men. We don't even care about that. That's what on my notes are. Oh, that's okay. That's okay. I want your notes, but I also, one of the reasons that I think her perspective is so great is because if you are also a person who would literally hate to be sitting where she's sitting and having me talking about you right now, like my wife, Jen, everybody look at Jen. She hates this moment. Like if that's you, sometimes it feels like you got to be out front or whatever. And like you don't. Elena, she's remarkably crafty and creative. And so, yes, yes. And so two summers ago, and I hope I don't hurt anybody's feelings with this, but two summers ago, the Summer Extreme theme was Under the Sea. Is that right? And every week, every year, the week before Summer Extreme, the Sunday before, we decorate, and then we kind of add to it throughout the week, and then we do the stage. And when we did Under the Sea, I walked through here the Monday after they got done decorating and was like, who'd we hire? Like, what happened? Like, anybody who comes every year knows that was amazing. And they were like, Elena Farmer. And, like, she started coming. I was like, this was her idea? And so then we got her going on Summer Extreme for this year. Last year, I didn't even know she was going to do this. I don't know if you all remember, but the Christmas theme was Not Home Alone. And it's kind of a Home Alone feel. She did the auditorium in Home Alone stuff. There was paint buckets, and there was a war map on the drum thing. I didn't even know she was going to do it. I just showed up, and it was done. So quietly behind the scenes, she's using this gift and this skill to make the church better. And she's able to do it without ever having to do this or even get any public feedback for it. And then she's already working on the theme for next year's Summer Extreme, I heard. So we're excited about that. But, yeah, when you guys started coming, you jumped in pretty much right away, just kind of helping wherever you could help. What made you want to do that? I knew, so I guess we had, we'd been married for a while, but we had just had Wren, and so I think she was maybe a year or so. And I knew I wanted to have kids, our kids and future kids involved in church and growing up around church. I wanted them to see that God was like important in our family and to us, and it was a priority. I also knew that I wouldn't be committed and prioritized coming to church if I didn't get involved. So it was very important to me to jump in somewhere and get involved so I would be accountable to come. Now, which one is more fun for you? Is it the decorating part? Because there was one day this year where she and I think Faith and maybe Liz were here until like 1.30 a.m. decorating and getting it done. So y'all get after it. Like y'all work hard. And I would imagine there's an element of that that's fun. At least I hope there is. Absolutely. Which one do you find that you enjoy more? Do you enjoy them the same differently? What do you get from kids ministry? What do you get from doing that behind the scenes stuff? I absolutely love doing the decorating. Like that is, I think having a goal and an idea and just being able to plan it and then doing it with my best friends. Like it's just, it's like a girl's party at night at church and nobody's here with no kids. It's amazing. That's right. They tell their husbands, just need a couple more touch-ups. It's great. A few more clouds. Sometimes he brings ice cream. I mean, it's great. For the kids' side, I love it just because I don't know who I was telling, I guess maybe Aaron a few months ago, that it's amazing to hear the kids retell the stories that they hear and then just to know that you kind of had a part in that relationship that they're developing with God. So that's really cool to see and to be a part of. And what age kids are you with usually? So I am now back with two, three, but I had been with the K through, I guess three, K through two. Yeah, K through third. Yeah. And Jacob, or to either one of you, whoever wants to answer, she's very happy to give that up. How has God used stepping out in faith and serving, going, okay, for consistency's sake, I'm going to do this, or God, I feel like you're just pushing me in this direction. How has God used that to encourage you to draw you close to him, to, to build you up as a, as a believer? Yeah. So existing in that kind of rub or the friction that I was in coming to church, but not wanting to commit, I mean, intentionally, um, hiding, I wasn't, I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. Um, and you know, you mentioned, I mean, intentionally, hiding. I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. And, you know, you mentioned, I guess, what 1 Corinthians, but I think 1 Peter also mentioned something about gifts, about whatever gifts you received, you know, basically serve others and demonstrate God's grace in its various forms, paraphrased. That's good. But for me, I mean, the same reason I've always wanted to be a leader at work is the connection to people and be able to influence people and be able to connect with people to understand how I can best serve people. And that's foundational. I mean, that's arguably one of the biggest parts of my walk, period, right? I mean, I got saved in seventh grade. I started playing place in worship in seventh grade. So, I mean, it's been quite literally foundational to my walk. And so to connect back to that, you know, it's opened my heart in the sermons. It's opened my heart in prayer and quiet time. I found joy in understanding how I can serve others. And I think something else that we really hadn't discussed, but I was thinking about out there, is how his presence fills our home. My kids were six before they heard me play the guitar, right? So, or Wren was six years old. So, and now Praise and Worship is played constantly. I mean, they know what a metronome sounds like now and they probably hate it, but praise and worship fills our house every week. Even the weeks I don't serve, I enjoy tagging along and practicing and playing. So, I think an unintended benefit, right? And so my kids are singing along and they know more of the words to the songs that I play than I do. So that's great. It's unintended. And I think a huge benefit to kind of serving. I love hearing that. And is it just for the record is Aaron now writing you like a rented mule? I mean, are we just driving you right back to burnout? Oh, no, no, no, no. So, well, well, I don't know. Yeah, we have a real discussion here. So, you know, I had never played with in-ears, never played with tracks, you know, hadn't played with a band. He's like, you know, one week of practice and I'm on stage. And then he's like, part of the story, it was before Christmas and I think it was an acoustic set and it was Greg and Carly and Jordan up here. And I remember thinking the whole I was like I probably could play acoustic guitar would probably be nice and that was another thing that kind of pushed me on this journey and I mentioned that to Aaron and he wasted no time and giving me that opportunity to be the solo acoustic guitar up here so I mean I'm improving as a musician selfishly it's nice to have a praise and worship team that's pushing me there. And so, yeah, I enjoy it. And I guess kind of to connect further on to wanting to serve, and I guess people that are maybe apprehensive, everyone's super, super accommodating, right? I mean, I just took three weeks off. I just blocked entire months off, and he hates it, but I do it. And I send him pictures of all the fish I'm catching at the beach. And the birds you're seeing. And the birds, yeah, well, no one cares about that. In fact, if I could get as good as evangelizing the gospel as I could about birds, I think I would be in a better place. That's a separate service. Yeah, right. Yeah. Elena, what would you say, and the last question, what would you say to anybody who's considering serving, not just in kids, although you could, but anywhere who's not serving yet but they're thinking about it? This is more intimidating, sitting up here. I would say just do it. Try it, and if you don't like it, then try a different spot or try somewhere else. I don't know. I don't feel like... That's not what I had in my notes. That's not what I had in my notes. It's all geared toward kids. I don't know. You put me on... Yeah, you put me on the spot. Sorry, Elena. She's never doing this again. Never, ever, ever. This is the one time. No, but I think, and I think we would agree on this. There's a sense of accomplishment, right? There's like, there's plenty of days at work that I leave work and just battered and tired. And I'm like, what did I actually get done? I have no clue. But I think we both feel a sense of accomplishment. You know know we mentioned how we're impacting how she's impacting the kids and and the summer extreme and I doubt I'm impacting anybody musically but I have fun yeah but being part of a team right and and and and just having a sense of pride and what we're accomplishing here and what we're doing here at Grace. Yeah, I like that. Thanks, guys. I like that. You can leave, Elena. Shane and Carter. This is Shane and Carter Smith. They serve in children's ministry together. They've also served as small group leaders. Carter actually served on our architectural committee and helped us come up with the design of the floor plan for the building. So she was there for all the meetings. And really, we should just be talking to Carter. She's a lot more valuable to us than you. If we had to pick one. Carter does a tremendous amount behind the scenes. We have a few people who work behind the scenes that whenever I hear their name brought up for something else, I always say to the staff or to the elders or whoever, like, just be careful. Like, they do so much. Like, please don't ask them. Like, offer to take something else off their plate before we ask them to do this other thing. And Carter is one of those. She's, she's, do what? Yeah, right, right, to do this. And then Shane, Shane used to be a bouncer, so he's in charge of security all the time around here, and he's a Panthers fan, and we beat them two weeks ago, and that's great. Thanks for being up here. What's up, Wake Forest? Okay, Shane and Carter, where do you guys serve? Because you guys serve together. Carter, you're on the children's ministry leadership team too, correct? Okay, but you guys serve together. So I started out actually ushering, I don't know, five or six years ago as a way to kind of get involved. And then Erin kept sending us some nagging emails about how much help she needed on the children's side. So being a coach, I was like, I guess I can try helping over there. And I don't know, it was pretty fun serving over there too. Carter, for everyone else, can you tell us what over there is? We teach K-3, and that's the other wing. K-3, so kindergarten through third grade meet over there. Yes, so we teach the kids over there, large group and small group on Sundays. What does that typically look like? Because that can sound pretty intimidating to go teach. Sometimes know, sometimes it's eight, sometimes it's 20 elementary age kids. You get the lesson during the week. What kind of prep goes into it? Like, what are you guys doing behind the scenes so that you're ready for Sunday morning? And then how does a typical Sunday morning go? Well, Aaron and Julie set up absolutely everything and their team. They have a team behind them. They have everything set up. They email you the lesson plans. They email you kind of an outline for the morning and are available to offer and ask and answer any questions that you have. The kids come in. You do a little activity. You get to sing and dance with them and they get a lot more wild than we do in here. And then we teach them large group and then we break into small group for second and third grade and kindergarten and first grade. And sometimes it's five kids total and sometimes it's 25 total and we just get to all cram back in there. That's great. And Shane, besides Carter Volland telling you probably to do it, what made you decide? because one of the reasons I wanted us to hear from Shane is because we we get we get women to volunteer in the children's ministry more often than we do men and frankly men probably need to just step up to the plate because there's there's not for nothing there's there's there's two genders in all of classrooms, and they should probably be able to look up to both genders as they lead them and guide them and teach them about Jesus. So I think it's good for our boys to see men in their teaching. I think it's good for our girls to see women in their teaching and vice versa. And so we're always grateful when a dad steps up and says, yeah, this is something I want to be a part of. So what made you decide like, okay, yeah, I'm going to do that? Because I didn't, I didn't, I meant to mention this up front. I've asked the volunteers to come up in ascending order of difficulty. So Mike and Holly Anderson running the coffee, and I ran this by Mike beforehand. That's compared now, if we really wanted to get easy, we do like ushers. Okay. But I didn't bring up any ushers. But then the coffee team, right? And then there's the security team, which you just stand out there, and you don't have to listen to the sermon. It's a nice team, actually. And then being in the band, that takes some skill, but I think the hardest ask in the church, honestly, is what you guys do, the K-3. That's super intimidating. It's really difficult, And I think we just disqualify ourselves from the jump, but I don't think we need to. And so I just wanted to hear from you, what made you decide like, yeah, I'm going to take that plunge and go volunteer in that room. Yeah. I think again, just being involved with coaching, you know, coaching different baseball teams and football, I kind of knew what to expect from kids. And I felt like, you know, I could at least teach them. Like I said, Aaron makes it pretty easy on us. She gives you basically a sheet of paper, and as long as you read from it, you can pretty much teach kids a class. For me, I felt like it was almost a way to answer the question of being a disciple making disciples too because I don't feel like I'm ever going to be like a street preacher. I'm not going to go out there, and it's hard to talk to adults, you know, about those situations. But going over there and teaching the kids some of the basic stuff, I just feel like that's a way that you can grow. Just feel like you're, you know, making disciples, somebody else that's hopefully going to grow up and lead this church as well. I love that. I love that a lot. And, Carter, you know, I mean, you guys were here when I got here. Y'all, y'all, y'all been here a long time. You've been serving the whole time that y'all have been here. So it's a part of your DNA and who you are. What is it that makes you continue to serve, continue to come back, continue to sign up and let us put you up on stage and things like that? Like what, what's the joy that you get out of it? Why do you continue to do it? Um, I don't think Aaron would allow me to keep coming to Grace if I didn't serve in the kids ministry. No, we get, I used to teach first grade before I had my oldest son, Cason. So I think that's part of it is selfishly. It's something I do enjoy and I enjoy doing it more for an hour than a nine to five. But we get poured into here every Sunday and it's just a chance to pour into kids. And they are just like little sponges and so excited to be there and so excited to learn and learn about Jesus. They have no hesitation asking hard questions. They have no hesitation expressing their joy through dancing and singing. And they're just genuinely excited to be there. And I find that excitement contagious. And my favorite Sunday to teach back there is Easter Sunday. Oh, wow. Why is that? I mean, I've heard Easter sermons for 30 years. They're pretty good. They're pretty good over here. They're pretty great. The podcast is great. But no, they are so excited. And for some of them, it's their first time hearing it. For some of them, they've heard it for a few years, but each time, something new is clicking for them. The story is unfolding, and they are more excited about the Bible than most of the adults I know. I love that. And last question for you guys. How has God used your opportunities at service, whether it's leading a small group, serving on a leadership team behind the scenes, or serving in the kids? How has God been using that over the years to draw you closer to him and build up your faith? So, I mean, it's for us, obviously, it's been a way to get to know a lot of people in the church. You know, and it's also a way that we feel like, as Carter mentioned, you know, the church pours into us so much. It's a way that we can give back and really help this whole community grow. I mean, we're all here to try and, you know, promote the kingdom. So I feel like it's a way for us to be able to give back. And again, I'm not going to be up on stage doing any preaching anytime soon. So, you know, teaching the kids is a lot easier. Just let me know when you want to. For me, I think teaching takes the focus off of me. It makes me be less self-centered in when I'm getting ready to come to church on Sunday in my prayer life. I'm thinking about the kids, praying for them, praying over what I'm going to be teaching. And so I think any opportunity I can take to be less self-centered is a good one for me spiritually. Well, thank you guys. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming up and for sharing. As we wrap up the morning, just a couple of thoughts. And I say this with some hesitancy because I want to be careful with my words, and I don't want them to be self-serving. That's not my heart at all. But I do think that based on the body passages, body of Christ, spiritual gifts mentioned, he mentioned, Jacob mentioned some in Peter, they're in Romans, they're in Corinthians, they're in Ephesians. They're all over the place. Because we have good works to walk in, because God calls us to be a part of a local church, I don't think it's optional to serve in a local church. And when I say that, I say local church intentionally because I'm not trying to leverage this and the Bible to get you to guiltily serve at grace. But what I can tell you as a pastor and someone who cares about you is, it is God's will for you to be using your gifts to benefit his kingdom. I know that for sure. It is God's will for you to be using the gifts and the talents and the abilities that he gave you to grow his kingdom. Now, many of you are doing that outside the walls of grace, and that's great. I would not reduce serving God and using your gifts to things that can be done here. But I would say that there's a reason that we have partners and we don't have members. Members tend to consume, partners tend to contribute. One of the things I am so humbled by in this church is that it doesn't go with just staff. Unless people are giving of their time, talent, and treasure during the week to sit on elder boards, to sit on committees, to be thoughtful about the church. We have some people because of their professional backgrounds who kind of mentor or pour into or befriend different people on staff. I've watched people in the church come alongside Aaron and begin to help him and give him some advice. I've watched them come alongside Kyle or Aaron Winston or me. And so there's different ways to serve the church and they're not all reduced to this sheet, okay? But here's what I would say. You ought to be doing something. You ought to be doing something to allow God to use the time and the talents and the treasures that he gave you to serve his church and build his kingdom. I don't know why. Well, I would want you to be going to a local church that you love so much that you wanted to partner with them and serve in some way. That's what I would say. Now, what Jacob said is true. And Jacob, the way you said it is better than I said it. We do want grace to be a place for you to heal, but not necessarily to hide. I know that there are people here because I've spoken with you. You have been burned by church. You have been worn out by church. You have been chewed up and spit out and something hurt you or something wore you out or whatever. And this can absolutely be a place to come and rest. But it ought to be restorative rest so that when you're ready to go again, you get going. So I would ask you guys to prayerfully consider, and in a minute I'm going to pray, Tamir's going to come up and give us a little bit more instructions, and then we're going to have a song sung over us while we kind of look over this and think about what we might want to do. Really quickly, if you want to grab this sheet, anything that might not be clear, Worship Team Tech and Production is back there. Those are, besides sound, largely low-skilled jobs, so you can do them, all right? I was joking around with David. David's running the live feed this morning and, uh, there's somebody else here. He's, he's being, he's being, uh, shadowed. Somebody's watching him to make sure that David doesn't mess it up. David runs a software company. So I'm pretty sure he can handle the live stream. And I was joking around with him beforehand. Like, dude, if you get stressed and you need to take a minute and get out of the sound booth, like go ahead. And we were laughing about it. So if you want to get, if you volunteer back there, that's, that's great. You can do that, but that's what the tech and production team is. And it's a vital team that we need greeters and ushers. That's if you're new or you've been coming here for a while, but you're not really plugged in, join one of those teams. It's a great entry point to join one of those teams, start meeting new people. It really doesn't impact your schedule a whole heck of a lot. You get here 15 minutes before you normally would unless you're late all the time, then you need to get here 25 minutes before you normally would and then you don't necessarily have to stay later but you get to meet a bunch of people, learn a bunch of names, shake a bunch of hands. That's a great way to get plugged in and involved. The prayer team is pretty obvious. We send prayer requests out to that. The care team is a big one, too, because we don't want people slipping through the cracks with care. And so the way that care works at Grace is first your small group leader is kind of responsible for you but sometimes people require ongoing care sometimes people are not in a small group sometimes the need is greater than what a small group can provide and we like to have a team that we can call on to go visit people who aren't able to leave their house or where they're living to make some phone calls. We even have a wonderful team of people that serve in something called Stephen Ministry that exists throughout a bunch of churches. And they provide ongoing pastoral care in ways that pastors just simply can't and don't have time for. And there's a whole training process with them. And they do incredible, incredible addition to that things that are not on here we have committees we have a finance committee that helped with the with the money at grace to make sure that everything's happening the way it's supposed to happen we have a personnel committee that serves as kind of the HR department at grace while we're while we're healthy and the staff development department so if you have a background in that, that's a great way to serve. We have a missions committee that determines who we get involved with and what activities we do outside the walls of Grace. So there's different ways that we can help and different things that we can do. But my heart would be, and what I would ask is, if you call Grace home, then prayerfully consider how you might jump in if you're not doing that already. If you call Grace home, take a few minutes right now, and prayerfully consider, God, what would you have me do at the local church where I go, where I can pour myself into? Maybe it's not on here. This sheet is a starting point. Maybe it's something else. Maybe you want to have a conversation about it. That's fine. I'd love to have that conversation. Maybe you can make us a little note on this and tell us what you'd like to talk about or what you think you'd like to offer. That's great too. But if you call Grace home, partner with us, let's work together and let's build God's kingdom together and move this place forward. Let me pray and then Tamera's going to come up and give us some more instructions. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your servants that we got to see this morning and hear from. Thank you for the ones that are doing your work right now so that we could be in here. Thank you for the hands that set up tables and chairs. Thank you for the hands that will be cooking and prepping the meals for us. Thank you for the worship team that's leading us into worship, God. Just thank you for the workers in all the children's rooms who are pouring into our children so that we might be in here and hopefully you're pouring into us. God, we just thank you for this morning. We thank you for grace. We thank you for all that you've done here and all that you are, the way that you're so faithful to us. And God, we pray that in return, we would continue to be faithful to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate again, and if I haven't got a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. You came on the perfect Sunday to meet people. It's Hootenanny Sunday. So after this, we go to that parking lot there and we just kind of celebrate God and his goodness, reflect on the year that we've had. This is something that we do every year. We call it the sometimes annual Hootenanny because COVID made us not have it. So it would be dishonest to call it the annual Hootenanny. And we care about honesty here. So it's this sometimes annual Hootenanny. And I hope that you'll stick around and talk to some folks and say, hey, and again, if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. This morning is going to look a little different. You can see I'm going to be talking to a couple of different folks within the church this morning about service and about volunteering. One of the things that we realized, I guess it was in August, I was talking with Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, and we realized that we hadn't highlighted service at Grace and volunteering at Grace in a really long time. And we said, it's high time we do this. And then we thought, well, how do we want to do it? Normally, you just preach a sermon about serving and servanthood. And God wanted us to partner with the local church and things like that. And I would bet 75% of you could predict most of the things that I would say in that kind of a sermon. And because of that, and also because I'm always looking for ways to get other voices up here and in front of the church so that we can hear from one another and learn from one another, we thought it would be good and interesting to do this kind of like Ministry Partner Sunday. So in the summer, we have Ministry Partner Sunday where we highlight the different ministry partners that we have outside the walls of the church, and I'll bring them up and talk to them about what they do. And so we thought we would do that with some of our volunteers this morning. Before we do that, just to kind of set up the conversation to set you guys up as you consider your role at Grace or any local church, I did have some thoughts from 1 Corinthians. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there, 1 Corinthians chapter 12. I'm going to start in verse 18. The idea of the church being a body is all over scripture. It's all throughout, particularly the New Testament, particularly the writings of Paul. And there's some seminal passages where he talks about this, but this or Romans are probably the two, and this has a little bit more detail. So in chapter 12, Paul is detailing the spiritual gifts. He talks about this idea that God has given each of us gifts that we are to use in his kingdom. One of the verses I highlight often and say to you guys often is Ephesians 2.10, where it says that we are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we should walk in them. And so the idea is that as we live the Christian life, we are trying to determine, God, what are my good works and how do I walk in them? What do you have for me to do and to walk in? And so that ties in here in this idea that we're all part of a body. We all have a part to play. We all have a role to fill. We all have something to do. And so it's incumbent upon us to figure out what that is. This is what Paul says. But as it is, he's just talked about the body and the ear needs the eyes and the eyes need the feet and the feet needs the hands and none of them can exist without the other. And then he says, but as it is in verse 18, God arranged the members of the body, each one of them as he says, of you, nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow greater honor. I love this passage, particularly as a pastor, because I addressed this a few weeks ago, I think when we were talking about Hebrews in August. But we can make pastors more important than they should be, more valuable to the church than they really are. We can start to feel like staff, the people who work here, we're the most important people, and everybody else is kind of auxiliary, and they're helping. I know that when I grew up in my church, I kind of sensed that. And it's really important for me to point out, as often as I can, in God's kingdom, nobody's more important than anybody else. Nobody plays a more crucial role than anybody else. Leaders are to have a higher degree of accountability because it's our job to teach truth. But that's not a higher value in God's kingdom. And so I believe in grace. All of our partners are equally valuable. Everything we do is equally valuable in God's kingdom and in God's eyes. And so you can't, there's some, sometimes there are people who serve behind the scenes and I will get from them that they don't, that they feel like what they do is kind of small potatoes and it's not. It's hugely important. Everything that we do as the body of Christ is hugely important and matters in eternity and matters to God and is valued by God. Because of that, I wanted us to hear from different portions of our body that play different parts and different roles, and maybe we can relate to some of them. Maybe we'll be inspired to serve. We all have this sheet in our seat, and I'll be going through this at the end of the sermon time today. But I wanted us to hear from people in the church who serve and kind of get to know them a little bit. I felt like it was appropriate on Hootenanny Sunday because we're going out to talk and to be communal and to be a family. So this is kind of a family meeting this morning. Mike and Holly, if you guys want to go ahead and make your way up here and grab that microphone. Oh, you have it? Okay. Is there a microphone over there? There it is. Okay, good. I wanted you guys to hear from parts of the body as well. These are Mike and Holly. This is Mike and Holly Anderson. Just to kind of... I want to say wet your whistle a little bit, but that feels like I don't want to say that. Just at the Hootenanny, ask Mike and Holly what their email names are for each other, okay? I'm just going to, I learned that when they first started coming here. We met for lunch, and I saw what their email names were for each other, and they're great. So ask them what they are. I'm not going to say them from stage because there's children in the room, but just ask them what they are. Mike and Holly, you guys have been coming to Grace for how long? Two and a half. Two and a half years. Two and a half years. And in what capacity do you guys serve? So we fill your tummies every Sunday with yum, warm, yummy coffee. That's what we do. And what made you guys decide that we want to do coffee every Sunday? Because they literally do it every Sunday. I'm like, we can get you extra help. They're like, we're good. We like it. We'll do it every Sunday. So what made you decide, let's get involved, and let's get involved at the coffee level? Okay, so my wife and I, we own our own businesses. so we have an opportunity to do every year, like you do in corporate America, is we do a goal-setting session. And so we go through all of our business plans and all of our personal plans about what we want to get accomplished. And so we usually do that the end of November, early December, every year. And so the year that we were doing this, our personal plans was how do we invest more time, resources, money to Grace? That's kind of where we were. And this was our first. We were eight months, nine months into Grace at that point in time. And just trying to figure out where can we get plugged in? What can we do? How can we get more involved? Small group is definitely something we had just started. And we wanted to figure out how to get further more engaged and so the sunday of after setting those sessions on um that service was all about not being a consumer of grace and how do you be more of a provider as a partner and it really hit it hit us real quick and we shot nate a quick email you guys were just you were just leeching off the the system. We were just little leeching. Yeah, you were dead weight. And so we had lunch with Nate and we said, how can we help? What do we, we want to get plugged in somewhere somehow. And he tried to put us back there in that big old booth back there. And we know nothing about that booth. So we weren't going down that road. And so coffee, obviously with COVID and being very sensitive to what was going on in the world. We thought, you know, that would be a great way for us to kind of really get plugged in and start that back up and really move on. So we just kind of jumped on it and went from there. Now, tell me, Holly, I think it's helpful to get a little bit of y'all's background. Not like, how'd you meet? Not that, but you guys met doing a similar job, and I think that the job that you did contributes to how you guys approach how you do coffee. So what did you do when you met, and how does that help what you do here? Yeah, sure. So Mike and I met. We did sports tourism industry for a long time, so the hospitality industry. We worked for convention and visitors bureaus, and it's all about hospitality and service. And we approach everything in our life like that, our new career now. So we expect a high-level, high-touch service. And so it's the little things, like writing the messages on the cups and having a flavor of the month in creamer. So we never go here. We're always, like, way over the edge, sometimes too much. But it comes from our past and how we met and just high-touch customer service, and we wanted to bring just our love of that to the people that we love here at Grace. Yeah, and that's why you guys are discovering in real time right now that you're going to be planning the golf tournament for us in the spring when we do that. We've both done that before. They're perfect for it. And so they take their professional background and they apply it to coffee. Now, coffee is underwhelming. That is a small thing compared to what you normally organize. But one of the things I noticed right away is the writing on the cups. I don't know if you guys have noticed the writing on the cups, but we don't buy them like that. They do it. And which one of you does it? Mike does it. I have the worst handwriting ever. That's his penmanship on the cups. And I saw him back there this morning. He's got a note on his phone where he's typed up the little messages that he's brainstormed, and then he's just alternating as he's writing those on your cups, just bringing a little bit extra to it every Sunday morning. How have you guys, it's a combo question, so answer it however you like. How have you guys personally benefited from getting to do that for now, close to a year and a half, almost two years? And then most importantly, how have you watched God work to use that bit of service to bring you closer to him? Yeah, we kind of talked about how those kind of coincided, we felt like. And I think so much of it is we love coming here. We love sitting in this building with people that we've just really grown to see as family and friends. And it's been cool in the short amount of time we've been here. And so there's a selfish part of it that's like, I have to get up and go. Like, if I just want to put my PJs on and have coffee and watch Nate for my house, even though he'll give me business about it later, I at least, like, I can't even think that way, right? Like, I know that I have a reason to be here. So there's that selfish reason of I know I have to be because I've committed, but it's also because we want to be here. So I think it's helped that, and it's just helped plug us in. Like, just being here in the morning, I think we've gotten to know, you know, you guys and staff better, which has been really cool, but also the people that serve, too, and really get to see what it takes to make this all happen on Sunday. And it's been really, you know, really neat. We were talking that the church that I was most involved with when I was a little kid and my family was really involved. This is the first time as an adult that I've been plugged in. And it has just felt like the most perfect place. I call my mom all the time and I'm like, I can't believe God brought us here. This is just, it's perfect and amazing. And what I've been looking for for a long time. So That's great. That's great. I love to hear that. Well, we're grateful to you guys for serving. We're grateful to you for planning the golf tournament. And it'll be in the end of April. And we're grateful for the coffee. But if you want to sign up for coffee, they've agreed to relinquish some rights for Sunday mornings. So if you want to partner with them and help or just give them some reprieve and do coffee with them, we would love for you to do that. Now, you've got to rise to their standards, okay? They're tough bosses, but we can still use some help there if that's something you guys want to do. Thanks so much. I'm going to call up Jacob and Elena Farmer. Where are they? Okay. Jacob and Elena are so committed that they drove straight from the beach this morning to be here to do this. Is that true? Yesterday. Yesterday. Oh, yeah, because their dog got a little bit of a struggle. There you go. They've been in here for two weeks. Elena couldn't be less interested in being on the stage right now. I couldn't believe. I knew that Jacob would be game. Jacob's fine. But I couldn't believe. I was like, if Elena wants to do it, I think people would benefit. And I knew that you were going to be like, no, not a chance. And then Jacob said, yeah, we'll be there. And I thought, okay, I'm not going to ask any questions. I didn't ask permission. Yeah, sure. Sure. So, um, a little bit of background on them and I didn't have time, nor did I think it was appropriate and sure service, but it would have been fun. Jacob is a huge birdwatcher. So if you like birds, talk to Jacob at the hootenanny and he will love to talk to you about it. I know. And I almost, I wanted to do a slideshow of birds and see if you could identify them, but maybe another time, maybe another time. But after they had been going here a while, Jacob and I got lunch and he told me a little bit about his background, and he kind of let it slip that he could play guitar, that he could lead worship. And whenever, in my position, you hear that someone's musically talented, you kind of go, okay, you want to get involved? I mean, that's a high skill position. That's pretty tough. But I kind of told him, like, I'm not going to tell Aaron. I'm just going to let you sit on it. You let us know when you're ready. And so Jacob's story, and it's one of the reasons I wanted you all to hear from him, is I'm kind of, I'm teeing this up for you a little bit. He had done it a lot, gotten burned out, found a new place, and wasn't sure when he wanted to re-engage and if he even trusted doing that. And so I thought his perspective on why you decided to like, yeah, let's go ahead and sign back up and play guitar and all that stuff. So if you kind of want to fill in the blanks there for that story, that's great. Yeah, sure. So, um, yes, long story short, I've been in praise and worship since seventh grade. So whatever, whatever age that is, 13, um, got burned out. I mean, every, every church I was involved with was a, was a plant we were tearing up, sitting down every Sunday. We were serving multiple roles. Um, and then adding onto that, I kind of got burned a little bit at church as well. So I kind of had a sour taste in my mouth. And we were out of church for a long time. And I was not playing for a long time. In fact, I think the first thing I told Aaron was I probably haven't played in a band setting in close to 10 years. So we can tell, but you're getting there. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So my, my first practice Aaron, Aaron's like, yeah, come, come, come sit in. And then he's like, Oh, see you Sunday. I'm like, Oh, that wasn't at all talked about. Um, but, uh, but yeah, so for me, I guess leading up to it as a series of things, my wife dragging me here into church when I was stubbornly not wanting to be here, her volunteering to serve initially in the children's ministry, you know, just all these things that were poking me. My parents, my dad actually had been borrowing my guitar for over a year, and he brought it back to me at the beach vacation last year in September. And he's like, I think you're going to need this. And so everyone around me was seeing the writing on the wall, and I was feeling kind of the tug on my heart. And I think our conversation, which I was intentionally coming here and hiding. I didn't want to be known. I wanted to be unknown. Because the second you find out, you play guitar. That's right. Yeah, a need. Right. Um, so I was, I mean, and that was impacting my ability to connect. Um, I was, I mean, I think you even made the comments like, Hey, you've been like here for a year or more and I don't know a thing about you. I think that's how you preface like, let's get lunch. That sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there was something else you said at lunch, um, that I think it was a week later. I talked to Aaron after service and I'm going to paraphrase it. And you probably said it much more eloquently than I'm going to do. Basically, basically you said you want grace to be a place to heal, but not hide somewhere along those lines. No, that's better than I would say. Yeah. You know, and I'm going to actually, and that was just like the final like stab of like, okay, you're, you're hiding you know, you're healed. You there's, there's writing all on the wall that you need to jump back into this. And so that was, you know, the series of events that led up to me jumping back into worship. But I think a couple months before that, I had worked as an usher a couple times, kind of dipped my toe back into the service realm. Yeah. Yeah. And, Miss Elena, in what ways do you volunteer here? This is active service for her to be here right now. Yes. Yes. Right this second is how she's doing it. I volunteer with the kids ministry. Yeah. Yeah. Elena does a kids' men, but we're going to bring up Shane and Carter to talk about that. You don't have to talk about kids' men. We don't even care about that. That's what on my notes are. Oh, that's okay. That's okay. I want your notes, but I also, one of the reasons that I think her perspective is so great is because if you are also a person who would literally hate to be sitting where she's sitting and having me talking about you right now, like my wife, Jen, everybody look at Jen. She hates this moment. Like if that's you, sometimes it feels like you got to be out front or whatever. And like you don't. Elena, she's remarkably crafty and creative. And so, yes, yes. And so two summers ago, and I hope I don't hurt anybody's feelings with this, but two summers ago, the Summer Extreme theme was Under the Sea. Is that right? And every week, every year, the week before Summer Extreme, the Sunday before, we decorate, and then we kind of add to it throughout the week, and then we do the stage. And when we did Under the Sea, I walked through here the Monday after they got done decorating and was like, who'd we hire? Like, what happened? Like, anybody who comes every year knows that was amazing. And they were like, Elena Farmer. And, like, she started coming. I was like, this was her idea? And so then we got her going on Summer Extreme for this year. Last year, I didn't even know she was going to do this. I don't know if you all remember, but the Christmas theme was Not Home Alone. And it's kind of a Home Alone feel. She did the auditorium in Home Alone stuff. There was paint buckets, and there was a war map on the drum thing. I didn't even know she was going to do it. I just showed up, and it was done. So quietly behind the scenes, she's using this gift and this skill to make the church better. And she's able to do it without ever having to do this or even get any public feedback for it. And then she's already working on the theme for next year's Summer Extreme, I heard. So we're excited about that. But, yeah, when you guys started coming, you jumped in pretty much right away, just kind of helping wherever you could help. What made you want to do that? I knew, so I guess we had, we'd been married for a while, but we had just had Wren, and so I think she was maybe a year or so. And I knew I wanted to have kids, our kids and future kids involved in church and growing up around church. I wanted them to see that God was like important in our family and to us, and it was a priority. I also knew that I wouldn't be committed and prioritized coming to church if I didn't get involved. So it was very important to me to jump in somewhere and get involved so I would be accountable to come. Now, which one is more fun for you? Is it the decorating part? Because there was one day this year where she and I think Faith and maybe Liz were here until like 1.30 a.m. decorating and getting it done. So y'all get after it. Like y'all work hard. And I would imagine there's an element of that that's fun. At least I hope there is. Absolutely. Which one do you find that you enjoy more? Do you enjoy them the same differently? What do you get from kids ministry? What do you get from doing that behind the scenes stuff? I absolutely love doing the decorating. Like that is, I think having a goal and an idea and just being able to plan it and then doing it with my best friends. Like it's just, it's like a girl's party at night at church and nobody's here with no kids. It's amazing. That's right. They tell their husbands, just need a couple more touch-ups. It's great. A few more clouds. Sometimes he brings ice cream. I mean, it's great. For the kids' side, I love it just because I don't know who I was telling, I guess maybe Aaron a few months ago, that it's amazing to hear the kids retell the stories that they hear and then just to know that you kind of had a part in that relationship that they're developing with God. So that's really cool to see and to be a part of. And what age kids are you with usually? So I am now back with two, three, but I had been with the K through, I guess three, K through two. Yeah, K through third. Yeah. And Jacob, or to either one of you, whoever wants to answer, she's very happy to give that up. How has God used stepping out in faith and serving, going, okay, for consistency's sake, I'm going to do this, or God, I feel like you're just pushing me in this direction. How has God used that to encourage you to draw you close to him, to, to build you up as a, as a believer? Yeah. So existing in that kind of rub or the friction that I was in coming to church, but not wanting to commit, I mean, intentionally, um, hiding, I wasn't, I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. Um, and you know, you mentioned, I mean, intentionally, hiding. I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. And, you know, you mentioned, I guess, what 1 Corinthians, but I think 1 Peter also mentioned something about gifts, about whatever gifts you received, you know, basically serve others and demonstrate God's grace in its various forms, paraphrased. That's good. But for me, I mean, the same reason I've always wanted to be a leader at work is the connection to people and be able to influence people and be able to connect with people to understand how I can best serve people. And that's foundational. I mean, that's arguably one of the biggest parts of my walk, period, right? I mean, I got saved in seventh grade. I started playing place in worship in seventh grade. So, I mean, it's been quite literally foundational to my walk. And so to connect back to that, you know, it's opened my heart in the sermons. It's opened my heart in prayer and quiet time. I found joy in understanding how I can serve others. And I think something else that we really hadn't discussed, but I was thinking about out there, is how his presence fills our home. My kids were six before they heard me play the guitar, right? So, or Wren was six years old. So, and now Praise and Worship is played constantly. I mean, they know what a metronome sounds like now and they probably hate it, but praise and worship fills our house every week. Even the weeks I don't serve, I enjoy tagging along and practicing and playing. So, I think an unintended benefit, right? And so my kids are singing along and they know more of the words to the songs that I play than I do. So that's great. It's unintended. And I think a huge benefit to kind of serving. I love hearing that. And is it just for the record is Aaron now writing you like a rented mule? I mean, are we just driving you right back to burnout? Oh, no, no, no, no. So, well, well, I don't know. Yeah, we have a real discussion here. So, you know, I had never played with in-ears, never played with tracks, you know, hadn't played with a band. He's like, you know, one week of practice and I'm on stage. And then he's like, part of the story, it was before Christmas and I think it was an acoustic set and it was Greg and Carly and Jordan up here. And I remember thinking the whole I was like I probably could play acoustic guitar would probably be nice and that was another thing that kind of pushed me on this journey and I mentioned that to Aaron and he wasted no time and giving me that opportunity to be the solo acoustic guitar up here so I mean I'm improving as a musician selfishly it's nice to have a praise and worship team that's pushing me there. And so, yeah, I enjoy it. And I guess kind of to connect further on to wanting to serve, and I guess people that are maybe apprehensive, everyone's super, super accommodating, right? I mean, I just took three weeks off. I just blocked entire months off, and he hates it, but I do it. And I send him pictures of all the fish I'm catching at the beach. And the birds you're seeing. And the birds, yeah, well, no one cares about that. In fact, if I could get as good as evangelizing the gospel as I could about birds, I think I would be in a better place. That's a separate service. Yeah, right. Yeah. Elena, what would you say, and the last question, what would you say to anybody who's considering serving, not just in kids, although you could, but anywhere who's not serving yet but they're thinking about it? This is more intimidating, sitting up here. I would say just do it. Try it, and if you don't like it, then try a different spot or try somewhere else. I don't know. I don't feel like... That's not what I had in my notes. That's not what I had in my notes. It's all geared toward kids. I don't know. You put me on... Yeah, you put me on the spot. Sorry, Elena. She's never doing this again. Never, ever, ever. This is the one time. No, but I think, and I think we would agree on this. There's a sense of accomplishment, right? There's like, there's plenty of days at work that I leave work and just battered and tired. And I'm like, what did I actually get done? I have no clue. But I think we both feel a sense of accomplishment. You know know we mentioned how we're impacting how she's impacting the kids and and the summer extreme and I doubt I'm impacting anybody musically but I have fun yeah but being part of a team right and and and and just having a sense of pride and what we're accomplishing here and what we're doing here at Grace. Yeah, I like that. Thanks, guys. I like that. You can leave, Elena. Shane and Carter. This is Shane and Carter Smith. They serve in children's ministry together. They've also served as small group leaders. Carter actually served on our architectural committee and helped us come up with the design of the floor plan for the building. So she was there for all the meetings. And really, we should just be talking to Carter. She's a lot more valuable to us than you. If we had to pick one. Carter does a tremendous amount behind the scenes. We have a few people who work behind the scenes that whenever I hear their name brought up for something else, I always say to the staff or to the elders or whoever, like, just be careful. Like, they do so much. Like, please don't ask them. Like, offer to take something else off their plate before we ask them to do this other thing. And Carter is one of those. She's, she's, do what? Yeah, right, right, to do this. And then Shane, Shane used to be a bouncer, so he's in charge of security all the time around here, and he's a Panthers fan, and we beat them two weeks ago, and that's great. Thanks for being up here. What's up, Wake Forest? Okay, Shane and Carter, where do you guys serve? Because you guys serve together. Carter, you're on the children's ministry leadership team too, correct? Okay, but you guys serve together. So I started out actually ushering, I don't know, five or six years ago as a way to kind of get involved. And then Erin kept sending us some nagging emails about how much help she needed on the children's side. So being a coach, I was like, I guess I can try helping over there. And I don't know, it was pretty fun serving over there too. Carter, for everyone else, can you tell us what over there is? We teach K-3, and that's the other wing. K-3, so kindergarten through third grade meet over there. Yes, so we teach the kids over there, large group and small group on Sundays. What does that typically look like? Because that can sound pretty intimidating to go teach. Sometimes know, sometimes it's eight, sometimes it's 20 elementary age kids. You get the lesson during the week. What kind of prep goes into it? Like, what are you guys doing behind the scenes so that you're ready for Sunday morning? And then how does a typical Sunday morning go? Well, Aaron and Julie set up absolutely everything and their team. They have a team behind them. They have everything set up. They email you the lesson plans. They email you kind of an outline for the morning and are available to offer and ask and answer any questions that you have. The kids come in. You do a little activity. You get to sing and dance with them and they get a lot more wild than we do in here. And then we teach them large group and then we break into small group for second and third grade and kindergarten and first grade. And sometimes it's five kids total and sometimes it's 25 total and we just get to all cram back in there. That's great. And Shane, besides Carter Volland telling you probably to do it, what made you decide? because one of the reasons I wanted us to hear from Shane is because we we get we get women to volunteer in the children's ministry more often than we do men and frankly men probably need to just step up to the plate because there's there's not for nothing there's there's there's two genders in all of classrooms, and they should probably be able to look up to both genders as they lead them and guide them and teach them about Jesus. So I think it's good for our boys to see men in their teaching. I think it's good for our girls to see women in their teaching and vice versa. And so we're always grateful when a dad steps up and says, yeah, this is something I want to be a part of. So what made you decide like, okay, yeah, I'm going to do that? Because I didn't, I didn't, I meant to mention this up front. I've asked the volunteers to come up in ascending order of difficulty. So Mike and Holly Anderson running the coffee, and I ran this by Mike beforehand. That's compared now, if we really wanted to get easy, we do like ushers. Okay. But I didn't bring up any ushers. But then the coffee team, right? And then there's the security team, which you just stand out there, and you don't have to listen to the sermon. It's a nice team, actually. And then being in the band, that takes some skill, but I think the hardest ask in the church, honestly, is what you guys do, the K-3. That's super intimidating. It's really difficult, And I think we just disqualify ourselves from the jump, but I don't think we need to. And so I just wanted to hear from you, what made you decide like, yeah, I'm going to take that plunge and go volunteer in that room. Yeah. I think again, just being involved with coaching, you know, coaching different baseball teams and football, I kind of knew what to expect from kids. And I felt like, you know, I could at least teach them. Like I said, Aaron makes it pretty easy on us. She gives you basically a sheet of paper, and as long as you read from it, you can pretty much teach kids a class. For me, I felt like it was almost a way to answer the question of being a disciple making disciples too because I don't feel like I'm ever going to be like a street preacher. I'm not going to go out there, and it's hard to talk to adults, you know, about those situations. But going over there and teaching the kids some of the basic stuff, I just feel like that's a way that you can grow. Just feel like you're, you know, making disciples, somebody else that's hopefully going to grow up and lead this church as well. I love that. I love that a lot. And, Carter, you know, I mean, you guys were here when I got here. Y'all, y'all, y'all been here a long time. You've been serving the whole time that y'all have been here. So it's a part of your DNA and who you are. What is it that makes you continue to serve, continue to come back, continue to sign up and let us put you up on stage and things like that? Like what, what's the joy that you get out of it? Why do you continue to do it? Um, I don't think Aaron would allow me to keep coming to Grace if I didn't serve in the kids ministry. No, we get, I used to teach first grade before I had my oldest son, Cason. So I think that's part of it is selfishly. It's something I do enjoy and I enjoy doing it more for an hour than a nine to five. But we get poured into here every Sunday and it's just a chance to pour into kids. And they are just like little sponges and so excited to be there and so excited to learn and learn about Jesus. They have no hesitation asking hard questions. They have no hesitation expressing their joy through dancing and singing. And they're just genuinely excited to be there. And I find that excitement contagious. And my favorite Sunday to teach back there is Easter Sunday. Oh, wow. Why is that? I mean, I've heard Easter sermons for 30 years. They're pretty good. They're pretty good over here. They're pretty great. The podcast is great. But no, they are so excited. And for some of them, it's their first time hearing it. For some of them, they've heard it for a few years, but each time, something new is clicking for them. The story is unfolding, and they are more excited about the Bible than most of the adults I know. I love that. And last question for you guys. How has God used your opportunities at service, whether it's leading a small group, serving on a leadership team behind the scenes, or serving in the kids? How has God been using that over the years to draw you closer to him and build up your faith? So, I mean, it's for us, obviously, it's been a way to get to know a lot of people in the church. You know, and it's also a way that we feel like, as Carter mentioned, you know, the church pours into us so much. It's a way that we can give back and really help this whole community grow. I mean, we're all here to try and, you know, promote the kingdom. So I feel like it's a way for us to be able to give back. And again, I'm not going to be up on stage doing any preaching anytime soon. So, you know, teaching the kids is a lot easier. Just let me know when you want to. For me, I think teaching takes the focus off of me. It makes me be less self-centered in when I'm getting ready to come to church on Sunday in my prayer life. I'm thinking about the kids, praying for them, praying over what I'm going to be teaching. And so I think any opportunity I can take to be less self-centered is a good one for me spiritually. Well, thank you guys. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming up and for sharing. As we wrap up the morning, just a couple of thoughts. And I say this with some hesitancy because I want to be careful with my words, and I don't want them to be self-serving. That's not my heart at all. But I do think that based on the body passages, body of Christ, spiritual gifts mentioned, he mentioned, Jacob mentioned some in Peter, they're in Romans, they're in Corinthians, they're in Ephesians. They're all over the place. Because we have good works to walk in, because God calls us to be a part of a local church, I don't think it's optional to serve in a local church. And when I say that, I say local church intentionally because I'm not trying to leverage this and the Bible to get you to guiltily serve at grace. But what I can tell you as a pastor and someone who cares about you is, it is God's will for you to be using your gifts to benefit his kingdom. I know that for sure. It is God's will for you to be using the gifts and the talents and the abilities that he gave you to grow his kingdom. Now, many of you are doing that outside the walls of grace, and that's great. I would not reduce serving God and using your gifts to things that can be done here. But I would say that there's a reason that we have partners and we don't have members. Members tend to consume, partners tend to contribute. One of the things I am so humbled by in this church is that it doesn't go with just staff. Unless people are giving of their time, talent, and treasure during the week to sit on elder boards, to sit on committees, to be thoughtful about the church. We have some people because of their professional backgrounds who kind of mentor or pour into or befriend different people on staff. I've watched people in the church come alongside Aaron and begin to help him and give him some advice. I've watched them come alongside Kyle or Aaron Winston or me. And so there's different ways to serve the church and they're not all reduced to this sheet, okay? But here's what I would say. You ought to be doing something. You ought to be doing something to allow God to use the time and the talents and the treasures that he gave you to serve his church and build his kingdom. I don't know why. Well, I would want you to be going to a local church that you love so much that you wanted to partner with them and serve in some way. That's what I would say. Now, what Jacob said is true. And Jacob, the way you said it is better than I said it. We do want grace to be a place for you to heal, but not necessarily to hide. I know that there are people here because I've spoken with you. You have been burned by church. You have been worn out by church. You have been chewed up and spit out and something hurt you or something wore you out or whatever. And this can absolutely be a place to come and rest. But it ought to be restorative rest so that when you're ready to go again, you get going. So I would ask you guys to prayerfully consider, and in a minute I'm going to pray, Tamir's going to come up and give us a little bit more instructions, and then we're going to have a song sung over us while we kind of look over this and think about what we might want to do. Really quickly, if you want to grab this sheet, anything that might not be clear, Worship Team Tech and Production is back there. Those are, besides sound, largely low-skilled jobs, so you can do them, all right? I was joking around with David. David's running the live feed this morning and, uh, there's somebody else here. He's, he's being, he's being, uh, shadowed. Somebody's watching him to make sure that David doesn't mess it up. David runs a software company. So I'm pretty sure he can handle the live stream. And I was joking around with him beforehand. Like, dude, if you get stressed and you need to take a minute and get out of the sound booth, like go ahead. And we were laughing about it. So if you want to get, if you volunteer back there, that's, that's great. You can do that, but that's what the tech and production team is. And it's a vital team that we need greeters and ushers. That's if you're new or you've been coming here for a while, but you're not really plugged in, join one of those teams. It's a great entry point to join one of those teams, start meeting new people. It really doesn't impact your schedule a whole heck of a lot. You get here 15 minutes before you normally would unless you're late all the time, then you need to get here 25 minutes before you normally would and then you don't necessarily have to stay later but you get to meet a bunch of people, learn a bunch of names, shake a bunch of hands. That's a great way to get plugged in and involved. The prayer team is pretty obvious. We send prayer requests out to that. The care team is a big one, too, because we don't want people slipping through the cracks with care. And so the way that care works at Grace is first your small group leader is kind of responsible for you but sometimes people require ongoing care sometimes people are not in a small group sometimes the need is greater than what a small group can provide and we like to have a team that we can call on to go visit people who aren't able to leave their house or where they're living to make some phone calls. We even have a wonderful team of people that serve in something called Stephen Ministry that exists throughout a bunch of churches. And they provide ongoing pastoral care in ways that pastors just simply can't and don't have time for. And there's a whole training process with them. And they do incredible, incredible addition to that things that are not on here we have committees we have a finance committee that helped with the with the money at grace to make sure that everything's happening the way it's supposed to happen we have a personnel committee that serves as kind of the HR department at grace while we're while we're healthy and the staff development department so if you have a background in that, that's a great way to serve. We have a missions committee that determines who we get involved with and what activities we do outside the walls of Grace. So there's different ways that we can help and different things that we can do. But my heart would be, and what I would ask is, if you call Grace home, then prayerfully consider how you might jump in if you're not doing that already. If you call Grace home, take a few minutes right now, and prayerfully consider, God, what would you have me do at the local church where I go, where I can pour myself into? Maybe it's not on here. This sheet is a starting point. Maybe it's something else. Maybe you want to have a conversation about it. That's fine. I'd love to have that conversation. Maybe you can make us a little note on this and tell us what you'd like to talk about or what you think you'd like to offer. That's great too. But if you call Grace home, partner with us, let's work together and let's build God's kingdom together and move this place forward. Let me pray and then Tamera's going to come up and give us some more instructions. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your servants that we got to see this morning and hear from. Thank you for the ones that are doing your work right now so that we could be in here. Thank you for the hands that set up tables and chairs. Thank you for the hands that will be cooking and prepping the meals for us. Thank you for the worship team that's leading us into worship, God. Just thank you for the workers in all the children's rooms who are pouring into our children so that we might be in here and hopefully you're pouring into us. God, we just thank you for this morning. We thank you for grace. We thank you for all that you've done here and all that you are, the way that you're so faithful to us. And God, we pray that in return, we would continue to be faithful to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate again, and if I haven't got a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. You came on the perfect Sunday to meet people. It's Hootenanny Sunday. So after this, we go to that parking lot there and we just kind of celebrate God and his goodness, reflect on the year that we've had. This is something that we do every year. We call it the sometimes annual Hootenanny because COVID made us not have it. So it would be dishonest to call it the annual Hootenanny. And we care about honesty here. So it's this sometimes annual Hootenanny. And I hope that you'll stick around and talk to some folks and say, hey, and again, if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. This morning is going to look a little different. You can see I'm going to be talking to a couple of different folks within the church this morning about service and about volunteering. One of the things that we realized, I guess it was in August, I was talking with Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, and we realized that we hadn't highlighted service at Grace and volunteering at Grace in a really long time. And we said, it's high time we do this. And then we thought, well, how do we want to do it? Normally, you just preach a sermon about serving and servanthood. And God wanted us to partner with the local church and things like that. And I would bet 75% of you could predict most of the things that I would say in that kind of a sermon. And because of that, and also because I'm always looking for ways to get other voices up here and in front of the church so that we can hear from one another and learn from one another, we thought it would be good and interesting to do this kind of like Ministry Partner Sunday. So in the summer, we have Ministry Partner Sunday where we highlight the different ministry partners that we have outside the walls of the church, and I'll bring them up and talk to them about what they do. And so we thought we would do that with some of our volunteers this morning. Before we do that, just to kind of set up the conversation to set you guys up as you consider your role at Grace or any local church, I did have some thoughts from 1 Corinthians. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there, 1 Corinthians chapter 12. I'm going to start in verse 18. The idea of the church being a body is all over scripture. It's all throughout, particularly the New Testament, particularly the writings of Paul. And there's some seminal passages where he talks about this, but this or Romans are probably the two, and this has a little bit more detail. So in chapter 12, Paul is detailing the spiritual gifts. He talks about this idea that God has given each of us gifts that we are to use in his kingdom. One of the verses I highlight often and say to you guys often is Ephesians 2.10, where it says that we are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we should walk in them. And so the idea is that as we live the Christian life, we are trying to determine, God, what are my good works and how do I walk in them? What do you have for me to do and to walk in? And so that ties in here in this idea that we're all part of a body. We all have a part to play. We all have a role to fill. We all have something to do. And so it's incumbent upon us to figure out what that is. This is what Paul says. But as it is, he's just talked about the body and the ear needs the eyes and the eyes need the feet and the feet needs the hands and none of them can exist without the other. And then he says, but as it is in verse 18, God arranged the members of the body, each one of them as he says, of you, nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow greater honor. I love this passage, particularly as a pastor, because I addressed this a few weeks ago, I think when we were talking about Hebrews in August. But we can make pastors more important than they should be, more valuable to the church than they really are. We can start to feel like staff, the people who work here, we're the most important people, and everybody else is kind of auxiliary, and they're helping. I know that when I grew up in my church, I kind of sensed that. And it's really important for me to point out, as often as I can, in God's kingdom, nobody's more important than anybody else. Nobody plays a more crucial role than anybody else. Leaders are to have a higher degree of accountability because it's our job to teach truth. But that's not a higher value in God's kingdom. And so I believe in grace. All of our partners are equally valuable. Everything we do is equally valuable in God's kingdom and in God's eyes. And so you can't, there's some, sometimes there are people who serve behind the scenes and I will get from them that they don't, that they feel like what they do is kind of small potatoes and it's not. It's hugely important. Everything that we do as the body of Christ is hugely important and matters in eternity and matters to God and is valued by God. Because of that, I wanted us to hear from different portions of our body that play different parts and different roles, and maybe we can relate to some of them. Maybe we'll be inspired to serve. We all have this sheet in our seat, and I'll be going through this at the end of the sermon time today. But I wanted us to hear from people in the church who serve and kind of get to know them a little bit. I felt like it was appropriate on Hootenanny Sunday because we're going out to talk and to be communal and to be a family. So this is kind of a family meeting this morning. Mike and Holly, if you guys want to go ahead and make your way up here and grab that microphone. Oh, you have it? Okay. Is there a microphone over there? There it is. Okay, good. I wanted you guys to hear from parts of the body as well. These are Mike and Holly. This is Mike and Holly Anderson. Just to kind of... I want to say wet your whistle a little bit, but that feels like I don't want to say that. Just at the Hootenanny, ask Mike and Holly what their email names are for each other, okay? I'm just going to, I learned that when they first started coming here. We met for lunch, and I saw what their email names were for each other, and they're great. So ask them what they are. I'm not going to say them from stage because there's children in the room, but just ask them what they are. Mike and Holly, you guys have been coming to Grace for how long? Two and a half. Two and a half years. Two and a half years. And in what capacity do you guys serve? So we fill your tummies every Sunday with yum, warm, yummy coffee. That's what we do. And what made you guys decide that we want to do coffee every Sunday? Because they literally do it every Sunday. I'm like, we can get you extra help. They're like, we're good. We like it. We'll do it every Sunday. So what made you decide, let's get involved, and let's get involved at the coffee level? Okay, so my wife and I, we own our own businesses. so we have an opportunity to do every year, like you do in corporate America, is we do a goal-setting session. And so we go through all of our business plans and all of our personal plans about what we want to get accomplished. And so we usually do that the end of November, early December, every year. And so the year that we were doing this, our personal plans was how do we invest more time, resources, money to Grace? That's kind of where we were. And this was our first. We were eight months, nine months into Grace at that point in time. And just trying to figure out where can we get plugged in? What can we do? How can we get more involved? Small group is definitely something we had just started. And we wanted to figure out how to get further more engaged and so the sunday of after setting those sessions on um that service was all about not being a consumer of grace and how do you be more of a provider as a partner and it really hit it hit us real quick and we shot nate a quick email you guys were just you were just leeching off the the system. We were just little leeching. Yeah, you were dead weight. And so we had lunch with Nate and we said, how can we help? What do we, we want to get plugged in somewhere somehow. And he tried to put us back there in that big old booth back there. And we know nothing about that booth. So we weren't going down that road. And so coffee, obviously with COVID and being very sensitive to what was going on in the world. We thought, you know, that would be a great way for us to kind of really get plugged in and start that back up and really move on. So we just kind of jumped on it and went from there. Now, tell me, Holly, I think it's helpful to get a little bit of y'all's background. Not like, how'd you meet? Not that, but you guys met doing a similar job, and I think that the job that you did contributes to how you guys approach how you do coffee. So what did you do when you met, and how does that help what you do here? Yeah, sure. So Mike and I met. We did sports tourism industry for a long time, so the hospitality industry. We worked for convention and visitors bureaus, and it's all about hospitality and service. And we approach everything in our life like that, our new career now. So we expect a high-level, high-touch service. And so it's the little things, like writing the messages on the cups and having a flavor of the month in creamer. So we never go here. We're always, like, way over the edge, sometimes too much. But it comes from our past and how we met and just high-touch customer service, and we wanted to bring just our love of that to the people that we love here at Grace. Yeah, and that's why you guys are discovering in real time right now that you're going to be planning the golf tournament for us in the spring when we do that. We've both done that before. They're perfect for it. And so they take their professional background and they apply it to coffee. Now, coffee is underwhelming. That is a small thing compared to what you normally organize. But one of the things I noticed right away is the writing on the cups. I don't know if you guys have noticed the writing on the cups, but we don't buy them like that. They do it. And which one of you does it? Mike does it. I have the worst handwriting ever. That's his penmanship on the cups. And I saw him back there this morning. He's got a note on his phone where he's typed up the little messages that he's brainstormed, and then he's just alternating as he's writing those on your cups, just bringing a little bit extra to it every Sunday morning. How have you guys, it's a combo question, so answer it however you like. How have you guys personally benefited from getting to do that for now, close to a year and a half, almost two years? And then most importantly, how have you watched God work to use that bit of service to bring you closer to him? Yeah, we kind of talked about how those kind of coincided, we felt like. And I think so much of it is we love coming here. We love sitting in this building with people that we've just really grown to see as family and friends. And it's been cool in the short amount of time we've been here. And so there's a selfish part of it that's like, I have to get up and go. Like, if I just want to put my PJs on and have coffee and watch Nate for my house, even though he'll give me business about it later, I at least, like, I can't even think that way, right? Like, I know that I have a reason to be here. So there's that selfish reason of I know I have to be because I've committed, but it's also because we want to be here. So I think it's helped that, and it's just helped plug us in. Like, just being here in the morning, I think we've gotten to know, you know, you guys and staff better, which has been really cool, but also the people that serve, too, and really get to see what it takes to make this all happen on Sunday. And it's been really, you know, really neat. We were talking that the church that I was most involved with when I was a little kid and my family was really involved. This is the first time as an adult that I've been plugged in. And it has just felt like the most perfect place. I call my mom all the time and I'm like, I can't believe God brought us here. This is just, it's perfect and amazing. And what I've been looking for for a long time. So That's great. That's great. I love to hear that. Well, we're grateful to you guys for serving. We're grateful to you for planning the golf tournament. And it'll be in the end of April. And we're grateful for the coffee. But if you want to sign up for coffee, they've agreed to relinquish some rights for Sunday mornings. So if you want to partner with them and help or just give them some reprieve and do coffee with them, we would love for you to do that. Now, you've got to rise to their standards, okay? They're tough bosses, but we can still use some help there if that's something you guys want to do. Thanks so much. I'm going to call up Jacob and Elena Farmer. Where are they? Okay. Jacob and Elena are so committed that they drove straight from the beach this morning to be here to do this. Is that true? Yesterday. Yesterday. Oh, yeah, because their dog got a little bit of a struggle. There you go. They've been in here for two weeks. Elena couldn't be less interested in being on the stage right now. I couldn't believe. I knew that Jacob would be game. Jacob's fine. But I couldn't believe. I was like, if Elena wants to do it, I think people would benefit. And I knew that you were going to be like, no, not a chance. And then Jacob said, yeah, we'll be there. And I thought, okay, I'm not going to ask any questions. I didn't ask permission. Yeah, sure. Sure. So, um, a little bit of background on them and I didn't have time, nor did I think it was appropriate and sure service, but it would have been fun. Jacob is a huge birdwatcher. So if you like birds, talk to Jacob at the hootenanny and he will love to talk to you about it. I know. And I almost, I wanted to do a slideshow of birds and see if you could identify them, but maybe another time, maybe another time. But after they had been going here a while, Jacob and I got lunch and he told me a little bit about his background, and he kind of let it slip that he could play guitar, that he could lead worship. And whenever, in my position, you hear that someone's musically talented, you kind of go, okay, you want to get involved? I mean, that's a high skill position. That's pretty tough. But I kind of told him, like, I'm not going to tell Aaron. I'm just going to let you sit on it. You let us know when you're ready. And so Jacob's story, and it's one of the reasons I wanted you all to hear from him, is I'm kind of, I'm teeing this up for you a little bit. He had done it a lot, gotten burned out, found a new place, and wasn't sure when he wanted to re-engage and if he even trusted doing that. And so I thought his perspective on why you decided to like, yeah, let's go ahead and sign back up and play guitar and all that stuff. So if you kind of want to fill in the blanks there for that story, that's great. Yeah, sure. So, um, yes, long story short, I've been in praise and worship since seventh grade. So whatever, whatever age that is, 13, um, got burned out. I mean, every, every church I was involved with was a, was a plant we were tearing up, sitting down every Sunday. We were serving multiple roles. Um, and then adding onto that, I kind of got burned a little bit at church as well. So I kind of had a sour taste in my mouth. And we were out of church for a long time. And I was not playing for a long time. In fact, I think the first thing I told Aaron was I probably haven't played in a band setting in close to 10 years. So we can tell, but you're getting there. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So my, my first practice Aaron, Aaron's like, yeah, come, come, come sit in. And then he's like, Oh, see you Sunday. I'm like, Oh, that wasn't at all talked about. Um, but, uh, but yeah, so for me, I guess leading up to it as a series of things, my wife dragging me here into church when I was stubbornly not wanting to be here, her volunteering to serve initially in the children's ministry, you know, just all these things that were poking me. My parents, my dad actually had been borrowing my guitar for over a year, and he brought it back to me at the beach vacation last year in September. And he's like, I think you're going to need this. And so everyone around me was seeing the writing on the wall, and I was feeling kind of the tug on my heart. And I think our conversation, which I was intentionally coming here and hiding. I didn't want to be known. I wanted to be unknown. Because the second you find out, you play guitar. That's right. Yeah, a need. Right. Um, so I was, I mean, and that was impacting my ability to connect. Um, I was, I mean, I think you even made the comments like, Hey, you've been like here for a year or more and I don't know a thing about you. I think that's how you preface like, let's get lunch. That sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there was something else you said at lunch, um, that I think it was a week later. I talked to Aaron after service and I'm going to paraphrase it. And you probably said it much more eloquently than I'm going to do. Basically, basically you said you want grace to be a place to heal, but not hide somewhere along those lines. No, that's better than I would say. Yeah. You know, and I'm going to actually, and that was just like the final like stab of like, okay, you're, you're hiding you know, you're healed. You there's, there's writing all on the wall that you need to jump back into this. And so that was, you know, the series of events that led up to me jumping back into worship. But I think a couple months before that, I had worked as an usher a couple times, kind of dipped my toe back into the service realm. Yeah. Yeah. And, Miss Elena, in what ways do you volunteer here? This is active service for her to be here right now. Yes. Yes. Right this second is how she's doing it. I volunteer with the kids ministry. Yeah. Yeah. Elena does a kids' men, but we're going to bring up Shane and Carter to talk about that. You don't have to talk about kids' men. We don't even care about that. That's what on my notes are. Oh, that's okay. That's okay. I want your notes, but I also, one of the reasons that I think her perspective is so great is because if you are also a person who would literally hate to be sitting where she's sitting and having me talking about you right now, like my wife, Jen, everybody look at Jen. She hates this moment. Like if that's you, sometimes it feels like you got to be out front or whatever. And like you don't. Elena, she's remarkably crafty and creative. And so, yes, yes. And so two summers ago, and I hope I don't hurt anybody's feelings with this, but two summers ago, the Summer Extreme theme was Under the Sea. Is that right? And every week, every year, the week before Summer Extreme, the Sunday before, we decorate, and then we kind of add to it throughout the week, and then we do the stage. And when we did Under the Sea, I walked through here the Monday after they got done decorating and was like, who'd we hire? Like, what happened? Like, anybody who comes every year knows that was amazing. And they were like, Elena Farmer. And, like, she started coming. I was like, this was her idea? And so then we got her going on Summer Extreme for this year. Last year, I didn't even know she was going to do this. I don't know if you all remember, but the Christmas theme was Not Home Alone. And it's kind of a Home Alone feel. She did the auditorium in Home Alone stuff. There was paint buckets, and there was a war map on the drum thing. I didn't even know she was going to do it. I just showed up, and it was done. So quietly behind the scenes, she's using this gift and this skill to make the church better. And she's able to do it without ever having to do this or even get any public feedback for it. And then she's already working on the theme for next year's Summer Extreme, I heard. So we're excited about that. But, yeah, when you guys started coming, you jumped in pretty much right away, just kind of helping wherever you could help. What made you want to do that? I knew, so I guess we had, we'd been married for a while, but we had just had Wren, and so I think she was maybe a year or so. And I knew I wanted to have kids, our kids and future kids involved in church and growing up around church. I wanted them to see that God was like important in our family and to us, and it was a priority. I also knew that I wouldn't be committed and prioritized coming to church if I didn't get involved. So it was very important to me to jump in somewhere and get involved so I would be accountable to come. Now, which one is more fun for you? Is it the decorating part? Because there was one day this year where she and I think Faith and maybe Liz were here until like 1.30 a.m. decorating and getting it done. So y'all get after it. Like y'all work hard. And I would imagine there's an element of that that's fun. At least I hope there is. Absolutely. Which one do you find that you enjoy more? Do you enjoy them the same differently? What do you get from kids ministry? What do you get from doing that behind the scenes stuff? I absolutely love doing the decorating. Like that is, I think having a goal and an idea and just being able to plan it and then doing it with my best friends. Like it's just, it's like a girl's party at night at church and nobody's here with no kids. It's amazing. That's right. They tell their husbands, just need a couple more touch-ups. It's great. A few more clouds. Sometimes he brings ice cream. I mean, it's great. For the kids' side, I love it just because I don't know who I was telling, I guess maybe Aaron a few months ago, that it's amazing to hear the kids retell the stories that they hear and then just to know that you kind of had a part in that relationship that they're developing with God. So that's really cool to see and to be a part of. And what age kids are you with usually? So I am now back with two, three, but I had been with the K through, I guess three, K through two. Yeah, K through third. Yeah. And Jacob, or to either one of you, whoever wants to answer, she's very happy to give that up. How has God used stepping out in faith and serving, going, okay, for consistency's sake, I'm going to do this, or God, I feel like you're just pushing me in this direction. How has God used that to encourage you to draw you close to him, to, to build you up as a, as a believer? Yeah. So existing in that kind of rub or the friction that I was in coming to church, but not wanting to commit, I mean, intentionally, um, hiding, I wasn't, I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. Um, and you know, you mentioned, I mean, intentionally, hiding. I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. And, you know, you mentioned, I guess, what 1 Corinthians, but I think 1 Peter also mentioned something about gifts, about whatever gifts you received, you know, basically serve others and demonstrate God's grace in its various forms, paraphrased. That's good. But for me, I mean, the same reason I've always wanted to be a leader at work is the connection to people and be able to influence people and be able to connect with people to understand how I can best serve people. And that's foundational. I mean, that's arguably one of the biggest parts of my walk, period, right? I mean, I got saved in seventh grade. I started playing place in worship in seventh grade. So, I mean, it's been quite literally foundational to my walk. And so to connect back to that, you know, it's opened my heart in the sermons. It's opened my heart in prayer and quiet time. I found joy in understanding how I can serve others. And I think something else that we really hadn't discussed, but I was thinking about out there, is how his presence fills our home. My kids were six before they heard me play the guitar, right? So, or Wren was six years old. So, and now Praise and Worship is played constantly. I mean, they know what a metronome sounds like now and they probably hate it, but praise and worship fills our house every week. Even the weeks I don't serve, I enjoy tagging along and practicing and playing. So, I think an unintended benefit, right? And so my kids are singing along and they know more of the words to the songs that I play than I do. So that's great. It's unintended. And I think a huge benefit to kind of serving. I love hearing that. And is it just for the record is Aaron now writing you like a rented mule? I mean, are we just driving you right back to burnout? Oh, no, no, no, no. So, well, well, I don't know. Yeah, we have a real discussion here. So, you know, I had never played with in-ears, never played with tracks, you know, hadn't played with a band. He's like, you know, one week of practice and I'm on stage. And then he's like, part of the story, it was before Christmas and I think it was an acoustic set and it was Greg and Carly and Jordan up here. And I remember thinking the whole I was like I probably could play acoustic guitar would probably be nice and that was another thing that kind of pushed me on this journey and I mentioned that to Aaron and he wasted no time and giving me that opportunity to be the solo acoustic guitar up here so I mean I'm improving as a musician selfishly it's nice to have a praise and worship team that's pushing me there. And so, yeah, I enjoy it. And I guess kind of to connect further on to wanting to serve, and I guess people that are maybe apprehensive, everyone's super, super accommodating, right? I mean, I just took three weeks off. I just blocked entire months off, and he hates it, but I do it. And I send him pictures of all the fish I'm catching at the beach. And the birds you're seeing. And the birds, yeah, well, no one cares about that. In fact, if I could get as good as evangelizing the gospel as I could about birds, I think I would be in a better place. That's a separate service. Yeah, right. Yeah. Elena, what would you say, and the last question, what would you say to anybody who's considering serving, not just in kids, although you could, but anywhere who's not serving yet but they're thinking about it? This is more intimidating, sitting up here. I would say just do it. Try it, and if you don't like it, then try a different spot or try somewhere else. I don't know. I don't feel like... That's not what I had in my notes. That's not what I had in my notes. It's all geared toward kids. I don't know. You put me on... Yeah, you put me on the spot. Sorry, Elena. She's never doing this again. Never, ever, ever. This is the one time. No, but I think, and I think we would agree on this. There's a sense of accomplishment, right? There's like, there's plenty of days at work that I leave work and just battered and tired. And I'm like, what did I actually get done? I have no clue. But I think we both feel a sense of accomplishment. You know know we mentioned how we're impacting how she's impacting the kids and and the summer extreme and I doubt I'm impacting anybody musically but I have fun yeah but being part of a team right and and and and just having a sense of pride and what we're accomplishing here and what we're doing here at Grace. Yeah, I like that. Thanks, guys. I like that. You can leave, Elena. Shane and Carter. This is Shane and Carter Smith. They serve in children's ministry together. They've also served as small group leaders. Carter actually served on our architectural committee and helped us come up with the design of the floor plan for the building. So she was there for all the meetings. And really, we should just be talking to Carter. She's a lot more valuable to us than you. If we had to pick one. Carter does a tremendous amount behind the scenes. We have a few people who work behind the scenes that whenever I hear their name brought up for something else, I always say to the staff or to the elders or whoever, like, just be careful. Like, they do so much. Like, please don't ask them. Like, offer to take something else off their plate before we ask them to do this other thing. And Carter is one of those. She's, she's, do what? Yeah, right, right, to do this. And then Shane, Shane used to be a bouncer, so he's in charge of security all the time around here, and he's a Panthers fan, and we beat them two weeks ago, and that's great. Thanks for being up here. What's up, Wake Forest? Okay, Shane and Carter, where do you guys serve? Because you guys serve together. Carter, you're on the children's ministry leadership team too, correct? Okay, but you guys serve together. So I started out actually ushering, I don't know, five or six years ago as a way to kind of get involved. And then Erin kept sending us some nagging emails about how much help she needed on the children's side. So being a coach, I was like, I guess I can try helping over there. And I don't know, it was pretty fun serving over there too. Carter, for everyone else, can you tell us what over there is? We teach K-3, and that's the other wing. K-3, so kindergarten through third grade meet over there. Yes, so we teach the kids over there, large group and small group on Sundays. What does that typically look like? Because that can sound pretty intimidating to go teach. Sometimes know, sometimes it's eight, sometimes it's 20 elementary age kids. You get the lesson during the week. What kind of prep goes into it? Like, what are you guys doing behind the scenes so that you're ready for Sunday morning? And then how does a typical Sunday morning go? Well, Aaron and Julie set up absolutely everything and their team. They have a team behind them. They have everything set up. They email you the lesson plans. They email you kind of an outline for the morning and are available to offer and ask and answer any questions that you have. The kids come in. You do a little activity. You get to sing and dance with them and they get a lot more wild than we do in here. And then we teach them large group and then we break into small group for second and third grade and kindergarten and first grade. And sometimes it's five kids total and sometimes it's 25 total and we just get to all cram back in there. That's great. And Shane, besides Carter Volland telling you probably to do it, what made you decide? because one of the reasons I wanted us to hear from Shane is because we we get we get women to volunteer in the children's ministry more often than we do men and frankly men probably need to just step up to the plate because there's there's not for nothing there's there's there's two genders in all of classrooms, and they should probably be able to look up to both genders as they lead them and guide them and teach them about Jesus. So I think it's good for our boys to see men in their teaching. I think it's good for our girls to see women in their teaching and vice versa. And so we're always grateful when a dad steps up and says, yeah, this is something I want to be a part of. So what made you decide like, okay, yeah, I'm going to do that? Because I didn't, I didn't, I meant to mention this up front. I've asked the volunteers to come up in ascending order of difficulty. So Mike and Holly Anderson running the coffee, and I ran this by Mike beforehand. That's compared now, if we really wanted to get easy, we do like ushers. Okay. But I didn't bring up any ushers. But then the coffee team, right? And then there's the security team, which you just stand out there, and you don't have to listen to the sermon. It's a nice team, actually. And then being in the band, that takes some skill, but I think the hardest ask in the church, honestly, is what you guys do, the K-3. That's super intimidating. It's really difficult, And I think we just disqualify ourselves from the jump, but I don't think we need to. And so I just wanted to hear from you, what made you decide like, yeah, I'm going to take that plunge and go volunteer in that room. Yeah. I think again, just being involved with coaching, you know, coaching different baseball teams and football, I kind of knew what to expect from kids. And I felt like, you know, I could at least teach them. Like I said, Aaron makes it pretty easy on us. She gives you basically a sheet of paper, and as long as you read from it, you can pretty much teach kids a class. For me, I felt like it was almost a way to answer the question of being a disciple making disciples too because I don't feel like I'm ever going to be like a street preacher. I'm not going to go out there, and it's hard to talk to adults, you know, about those situations. But going over there and teaching the kids some of the basic stuff, I just feel like that's a way that you can grow. Just feel like you're, you know, making disciples, somebody else that's hopefully going to grow up and lead this church as well. I love that. I love that a lot. And, Carter, you know, I mean, you guys were here when I got here. Y'all, y'all, y'all been here a long time. You've been serving the whole time that y'all have been here. So it's a part of your DNA and who you are. What is it that makes you continue to serve, continue to come back, continue to sign up and let us put you up on stage and things like that? Like what, what's the joy that you get out of it? Why do you continue to do it? Um, I don't think Aaron would allow me to keep coming to Grace if I didn't serve in the kids ministry. No, we get, I used to teach first grade before I had my oldest son, Cason. So I think that's part of it is selfishly. It's something I do enjoy and I enjoy doing it more for an hour than a nine to five. But we get poured into here every Sunday and it's just a chance to pour into kids. And they are just like little sponges and so excited to be there and so excited to learn and learn about Jesus. They have no hesitation asking hard questions. They have no hesitation expressing their joy through dancing and singing. And they're just genuinely excited to be there. And I find that excitement contagious. And my favorite Sunday to teach back there is Easter Sunday. Oh, wow. Why is that? I mean, I've heard Easter sermons for 30 years. They're pretty good. They're pretty good over here. They're pretty great. The podcast is great. But no, they are so excited. And for some of them, it's their first time hearing it. For some of them, they've heard it for a few years, but each time, something new is clicking for them. The story is unfolding, and they are more excited about the Bible than most of the adults I know. I love that. And last question for you guys. How has God used your opportunities at service, whether it's leading a small group, serving on a leadership team behind the scenes, or serving in the kids? How has God been using that over the years to draw you closer to him and build up your faith? So, I mean, it's for us, obviously, it's been a way to get to know a lot of people in the church. You know, and it's also a way that we feel like, as Carter mentioned, you know, the church pours into us so much. It's a way that we can give back and really help this whole community grow. I mean, we're all here to try and, you know, promote the kingdom. So I feel like it's a way for us to be able to give back. And again, I'm not going to be up on stage doing any preaching anytime soon. So, you know, teaching the kids is a lot easier. Just let me know when you want to. For me, I think teaching takes the focus off of me. It makes me be less self-centered in when I'm getting ready to come to church on Sunday in my prayer life. I'm thinking about the kids, praying for them, praying over what I'm going to be teaching. And so I think any opportunity I can take to be less self-centered is a good one for me spiritually. Well, thank you guys. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming up and for sharing. As we wrap up the morning, just a couple of thoughts. And I say this with some hesitancy because I want to be careful with my words, and I don't want them to be self-serving. That's not my heart at all. But I do think that based on the body passages, body of Christ, spiritual gifts mentioned, he mentioned, Jacob mentioned some in Peter, they're in Romans, they're in Corinthians, they're in Ephesians. They're all over the place. Because we have good works to walk in, because God calls us to be a part of a local church, I don't think it's optional to serve in a local church. And when I say that, I say local church intentionally because I'm not trying to leverage this and the Bible to get you to guiltily serve at grace. But what I can tell you as a pastor and someone who cares about you is, it is God's will for you to be using your gifts to benefit his kingdom. I know that for sure. It is God's will for you to be using the gifts and the talents and the abilities that he gave you to grow his kingdom. Now, many of you are doing that outside the walls of grace, and that's great. I would not reduce serving God and using your gifts to things that can be done here. But I would say that there's a reason that we have partners and we don't have members. Members tend to consume, partners tend to contribute. One of the things I am so humbled by in this church is that it doesn't go with just staff. Unless people are giving of their time, talent, and treasure during the week to sit on elder boards, to sit on committees, to be thoughtful about the church. We have some people because of their professional backgrounds who kind of mentor or pour into or befriend different people on staff. I've watched people in the church come alongside Aaron and begin to help him and give him some advice. I've watched them come alongside Kyle or Aaron Winston or me. And so there's different ways to serve the church and they're not all reduced to this sheet, okay? But here's what I would say. You ought to be doing something. You ought to be doing something to allow God to use the time and the talents and the treasures that he gave you to serve his church and build his kingdom. I don't know why. Well, I would want you to be going to a local church that you love so much that you wanted to partner with them and serve in some way. That's what I would say. Now, what Jacob said is true. And Jacob, the way you said it is better than I said it. We do want grace to be a place for you to heal, but not necessarily to hide. I know that there are people here because I've spoken with you. You have been burned by church. You have been worn out by church. You have been chewed up and spit out and something hurt you or something wore you out or whatever. And this can absolutely be a place to come and rest. But it ought to be restorative rest so that when you're ready to go again, you get going. So I would ask you guys to prayerfully consider, and in a minute I'm going to pray, Tamir's going to come up and give us a little bit more instructions, and then we're going to have a song sung over us while we kind of look over this and think about what we might want to do. Really quickly, if you want to grab this sheet, anything that might not be clear, Worship Team Tech and Production is back there. Those are, besides sound, largely low-skilled jobs, so you can do them, all right? I was joking around with David. David's running the live feed this morning and, uh, there's somebody else here. He's, he's being, he's being, uh, shadowed. Somebody's watching him to make sure that David doesn't mess it up. David runs a software company. So I'm pretty sure he can handle the live stream. And I was joking around with him beforehand. Like, dude, if you get stressed and you need to take a minute and get out of the sound booth, like go ahead. And we were laughing about it. So if you want to get, if you volunteer back there, that's, that's great. You can do that, but that's what the tech and production team is. And it's a vital team that we need greeters and ushers. That's if you're new or you've been coming here for a while, but you're not really plugged in, join one of those teams. It's a great entry point to join one of those teams, start meeting new people. It really doesn't impact your schedule a whole heck of a lot. You get here 15 minutes before you normally would unless you're late all the time, then you need to get here 25 minutes before you normally would and then you don't necessarily have to stay later but you get to meet a bunch of people, learn a bunch of names, shake a bunch of hands. That's a great way to get plugged in and involved. The prayer team is pretty obvious. We send prayer requests out to that. The care team is a big one, too, because we don't want people slipping through the cracks with care. And so the way that care works at Grace is first your small group leader is kind of responsible for you but sometimes people require ongoing care sometimes people are not in a small group sometimes the need is greater than what a small group can provide and we like to have a team that we can call on to go visit people who aren't able to leave their house or where they're living to make some phone calls. We even have a wonderful team of people that serve in something called Stephen Ministry that exists throughout a bunch of churches. And they provide ongoing pastoral care in ways that pastors just simply can't and don't have time for. And there's a whole training process with them. And they do incredible, incredible addition to that things that are not on here we have committees we have a finance committee that helped with the with the money at grace to make sure that everything's happening the way it's supposed to happen we have a personnel committee that serves as kind of the HR department at grace while we're while we're healthy and the staff development department so if you have a background in that, that's a great way to serve. We have a missions committee that determines who we get involved with and what activities we do outside the walls of Grace. So there's different ways that we can help and different things that we can do. But my heart would be, and what I would ask is, if you call Grace home, then prayerfully consider how you might jump in if you're not doing that already. If you call Grace home, take a few minutes right now, and prayerfully consider, God, what would you have me do at the local church where I go, where I can pour myself into? Maybe it's not on here. This sheet is a starting point. Maybe it's something else. Maybe you want to have a conversation about it. That's fine. I'd love to have that conversation. Maybe you can make us a little note on this and tell us what you'd like to talk about or what you think you'd like to offer. That's great too. But if you call Grace home, partner with us, let's work together and let's build God's kingdom together and move this place forward. Let me pray and then Tamera's going to come up and give us some more instructions. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your servants that we got to see this morning and hear from. Thank you for the ones that are doing your work right now so that we could be in here. Thank you for the hands that set up tables and chairs. Thank you for the hands that will be cooking and prepping the meals for us. Thank you for the worship team that's leading us into worship, God. Just thank you for the workers in all the children's rooms who are pouring into our children so that we might be in here and hopefully you're pouring into us. God, we just thank you for this morning. We thank you for grace. We thank you for all that you've done here and all that you are, the way that you're so faithful to us. And God, we pray that in return, we would continue to be faithful to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate again, and if I haven't got a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. You came on the perfect Sunday to meet people. It's Hootenanny Sunday. So after this, we go to that parking lot there and we just kind of celebrate God and his goodness, reflect on the year that we've had. This is something that we do every year. We call it the sometimes annual Hootenanny because COVID made us not have it. So it would be dishonest to call it the annual Hootenanny. And we care about honesty here. So it's this sometimes annual Hootenanny. And I hope that you'll stick around and talk to some folks and say, hey, and again, if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. This morning is going to look a little different. You can see I'm going to be talking to a couple of different folks within the church this morning about service and about volunteering. One of the things that we realized, I guess it was in August, I was talking with Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, and we realized that we hadn't highlighted service at Grace and volunteering at Grace in a really long time. And we said, it's high time we do this. And then we thought, well, how do we want to do it? Normally, you just preach a sermon about serving and servanthood. And God wanted us to partner with the local church and things like that. And I would bet 75% of you could predict most of the things that I would say in that kind of a sermon. And because of that, and also because I'm always looking for ways to get other voices up here and in front of the church so that we can hear from one another and learn from one another, we thought it would be good and interesting to do this kind of like Ministry Partner Sunday. So in the summer, we have Ministry Partner Sunday where we highlight the different ministry partners that we have outside the walls of the church, and I'll bring them up and talk to them about what they do. And so we thought we would do that with some of our volunteers this morning. Before we do that, just to kind of set up the conversation to set you guys up as you consider your role at Grace or any local church, I did have some thoughts from 1 Corinthians. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there, 1 Corinthians chapter 12. I'm going to start in verse 18. The idea of the church being a body is all over scripture. It's all throughout, particularly the New Testament, particularly the writings of Paul. And there's some seminal passages where he talks about this, but this or Romans are probably the two, and this has a little bit more detail. So in chapter 12, Paul is detailing the spiritual gifts. He talks about this idea that God has given each of us gifts that we are to use in his kingdom. One of the verses I highlight often and say to you guys often is Ephesians 2.10, where it says that we are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we should walk in them. And so the idea is that as we live the Christian life, we are trying to determine, God, what are my good works and how do I walk in them? What do you have for me to do and to walk in? And so that ties in here in this idea that we're all part of a body. We all have a part to play. We all have a role to fill. We all have something to do. And so it's incumbent upon us to figure out what that is. This is what Paul says. But as it is, he's just talked about the body and the ear needs the eyes and the eyes need the feet and the feet needs the hands and none of them can exist without the other. And then he says, but as it is in verse 18, God arranged the members of the body, each one of them as he says, of you, nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow greater honor. I love this passage, particularly as a pastor, because I addressed this a few weeks ago, I think when we were talking about Hebrews in August. But we can make pastors more important than they should be, more valuable to the church than they really are. We can start to feel like staff, the people who work here, we're the most important people, and everybody else is kind of auxiliary, and they're helping. I know that when I grew up in my church, I kind of sensed that. And it's really important for me to point out, as often as I can, in God's kingdom, nobody's more important than anybody else. Nobody plays a more crucial role than anybody else. Leaders are to have a higher degree of accountability because it's our job to teach truth. But that's not a higher value in God's kingdom. And so I believe in grace. All of our partners are equally valuable. Everything we do is equally valuable in God's kingdom and in God's eyes. And so you can't, there's some, sometimes there are people who serve behind the scenes and I will get from them that they don't, that they feel like what they do is kind of small potatoes and it's not. It's hugely important. Everything that we do as the body of Christ is hugely important and matters in eternity and matters to God and is valued by God. Because of that, I wanted us to hear from different portions of our body that play different parts and different roles, and maybe we can relate to some of them. Maybe we'll be inspired to serve. We all have this sheet in our seat, and I'll be going through this at the end of the sermon time today. But I wanted us to hear from people in the church who serve and kind of get to know them a little bit. I felt like it was appropriate on Hootenanny Sunday because we're going out to talk and to be communal and to be a family. So this is kind of a family meeting this morning. Mike and Holly, if you guys want to go ahead and make your way up here and grab that microphone. Oh, you have it? Okay. Is there a microphone over there? There it is. Okay, good. I wanted you guys to hear from parts of the body as well. These are Mike and Holly. This is Mike and Holly Anderson. Just to kind of... I want to say wet your whistle a little bit, but that feels like I don't want to say that. Just at the Hootenanny, ask Mike and Holly what their email names are for each other, okay? I'm just going to, I learned that when they first started coming here. We met for lunch, and I saw what their email names were for each other, and they're great. So ask them what they are. I'm not going to say them from stage because there's children in the room, but just ask them what they are. Mike and Holly, you guys have been coming to Grace for how long? Two and a half. Two and a half years. Two and a half years. And in what capacity do you guys serve? So we fill your tummies every Sunday with yum, warm, yummy coffee. That's what we do. And what made you guys decide that we want to do coffee every Sunday? Because they literally do it every Sunday. I'm like, we can get you extra help. They're like, we're good. We like it. We'll do it every Sunday. So what made you decide, let's get involved, and let's get involved at the coffee level? Okay, so my wife and I, we own our own businesses. so we have an opportunity to do every year, like you do in corporate America, is we do a goal-setting session. And so we go through all of our business plans and all of our personal plans about what we want to get accomplished. And so we usually do that the end of November, early December, every year. And so the year that we were doing this, our personal plans was how do we invest more time, resources, money to Grace? That's kind of where we were. And this was our first. We were eight months, nine months into Grace at that point in time. And just trying to figure out where can we get plugged in? What can we do? How can we get more involved? Small group is definitely something we had just started. And we wanted to figure out how to get further more engaged and so the sunday of after setting those sessions on um that service was all about not being a consumer of grace and how do you be more of a provider as a partner and it really hit it hit us real quick and we shot nate a quick email you guys were just you were just leeching off the the system. We were just little leeching. Yeah, you were dead weight. And so we had lunch with Nate and we said, how can we help? What do we, we want to get plugged in somewhere somehow. And he tried to put us back there in that big old booth back there. And we know nothing about that booth. So we weren't going down that road. And so coffee, obviously with COVID and being very sensitive to what was going on in the world. We thought, you know, that would be a great way for us to kind of really get plugged in and start that back up and really move on. So we just kind of jumped on it and went from there. Now, tell me, Holly, I think it's helpful to get a little bit of y'all's background. Not like, how'd you meet? Not that, but you guys met doing a similar job, and I think that the job that you did contributes to how you guys approach how you do coffee. So what did you do when you met, and how does that help what you do here? Yeah, sure. So Mike and I met. We did sports tourism industry for a long time, so the hospitality industry. We worked for convention and visitors bureaus, and it's all about hospitality and service. And we approach everything in our life like that, our new career now. So we expect a high-level, high-touch service. And so it's the little things, like writing the messages on the cups and having a flavor of the month in creamer. So we never go here. We're always, like, way over the edge, sometimes too much. But it comes from our past and how we met and just high-touch customer service, and we wanted to bring just our love of that to the people that we love here at Grace. Yeah, and that's why you guys are discovering in real time right now that you're going to be planning the golf tournament for us in the spring when we do that. We've both done that before. They're perfect for it. And so they take their professional background and they apply it to coffee. Now, coffee is underwhelming. That is a small thing compared to what you normally organize. But one of the things I noticed right away is the writing on the cups. I don't know if you guys have noticed the writing on the cups, but we don't buy them like that. They do it. And which one of you does it? Mike does it. I have the worst handwriting ever. That's his penmanship on the cups. And I saw him back there this morning. He's got a note on his phone where he's typed up the little messages that he's brainstormed, and then he's just alternating as he's writing those on your cups, just bringing a little bit extra to it every Sunday morning. How have you guys, it's a combo question, so answer it however you like. How have you guys personally benefited from getting to do that for now, close to a year and a half, almost two years? And then most importantly, how have you watched God work to use that bit of service to bring you closer to him? Yeah, we kind of talked about how those kind of coincided, we felt like. And I think so much of it is we love coming here. We love sitting in this building with people that we've just really grown to see as family and friends. And it's been cool in the short amount of time we've been here. And so there's a selfish part of it that's like, I have to get up and go. Like, if I just want to put my PJs on and have coffee and watch Nate for my house, even though he'll give me business about it later, I at least, like, I can't even think that way, right? Like, I know that I have a reason to be here. So there's that selfish reason of I know I have to be because I've committed, but it's also because we want to be here. So I think it's helped that, and it's just helped plug us in. Like, just being here in the morning, I think we've gotten to know, you know, you guys and staff better, which has been really cool, but also the people that serve, too, and really get to see what it takes to make this all happen on Sunday. And it's been really, you know, really neat. We were talking that the church that I was most involved with when I was a little kid and my family was really involved. This is the first time as an adult that I've been plugged in. And it has just felt like the most perfect place. I call my mom all the time and I'm like, I can't believe God brought us here. This is just, it's perfect and amazing. And what I've been looking for for a long time. So That's great. That's great. I love to hear that. Well, we're grateful to you guys for serving. We're grateful to you for planning the golf tournament. And it'll be in the end of April. And we're grateful for the coffee. But if you want to sign up for coffee, they've agreed to relinquish some rights for Sunday mornings. So if you want to partner with them and help or just give them some reprieve and do coffee with them, we would love for you to do that. Now, you've got to rise to their standards, okay? They're tough bosses, but we can still use some help there if that's something you guys want to do. Thanks so much. I'm going to call up Jacob and Elena Farmer. Where are they? Okay. Jacob and Elena are so committed that they drove straight from the beach this morning to be here to do this. Is that true? Yesterday. Yesterday. Oh, yeah, because their dog got a little bit of a struggle. There you go. They've been in here for two weeks. Elena couldn't be less interested in being on the stage right now. I couldn't believe. I knew that Jacob would be game. Jacob's fine. But I couldn't believe. I was like, if Elena wants to do it, I think people would benefit. And I knew that you were going to be like, no, not a chance. And then Jacob said, yeah, we'll be there. And I thought, okay, I'm not going to ask any questions. I didn't ask permission. Yeah, sure. Sure. So, um, a little bit of background on them and I didn't have time, nor did I think it was appropriate and sure service, but it would have been fun. Jacob is a huge birdwatcher. So if you like birds, talk to Jacob at the hootenanny and he will love to talk to you about it. I know. And I almost, I wanted to do a slideshow of birds and see if you could identify them, but maybe another time, maybe another time. But after they had been going here a while, Jacob and I got lunch and he told me a little bit about his background, and he kind of let it slip that he could play guitar, that he could lead worship. And whenever, in my position, you hear that someone's musically talented, you kind of go, okay, you want to get involved? I mean, that's a high skill position. That's pretty tough. But I kind of told him, like, I'm not going to tell Aaron. I'm just going to let you sit on it. You let us know when you're ready. And so Jacob's story, and it's one of the reasons I wanted you all to hear from him, is I'm kind of, I'm teeing this up for you a little bit. He had done it a lot, gotten burned out, found a new place, and wasn't sure when he wanted to re-engage and if he even trusted doing that. And so I thought his perspective on why you decided to like, yeah, let's go ahead and sign back up and play guitar and all that stuff. So if you kind of want to fill in the blanks there for that story, that's great. Yeah, sure. So, um, yes, long story short, I've been in praise and worship since seventh grade. So whatever, whatever age that is, 13, um, got burned out. I mean, every, every church I was involved with was a, was a plant we were tearing up, sitting down every Sunday. We were serving multiple roles. Um, and then adding onto that, I kind of got burned a little bit at church as well. So I kind of had a sour taste in my mouth. And we were out of church for a long time. And I was not playing for a long time. In fact, I think the first thing I told Aaron was I probably haven't played in a band setting in close to 10 years. So we can tell, but you're getting there. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So my, my first practice Aaron, Aaron's like, yeah, come, come, come sit in. And then he's like, Oh, see you Sunday. I'm like, Oh, that wasn't at all talked about. Um, but, uh, but yeah, so for me, I guess leading up to it as a series of things, my wife dragging me here into church when I was stubbornly not wanting to be here, her volunteering to serve initially in the children's ministry, you know, just all these things that were poking me. My parents, my dad actually had been borrowing my guitar for over a year, and he brought it back to me at the beach vacation last year in September. And he's like, I think you're going to need this. And so everyone around me was seeing the writing on the wall, and I was feeling kind of the tug on my heart. And I think our conversation, which I was intentionally coming here and hiding. I didn't want to be known. I wanted to be unknown. Because the second you find out, you play guitar. That's right. Yeah, a need. Right. Um, so I was, I mean, and that was impacting my ability to connect. Um, I was, I mean, I think you even made the comments like, Hey, you've been like here for a year or more and I don't know a thing about you. I think that's how you preface like, let's get lunch. That sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there was something else you said at lunch, um, that I think it was a week later. I talked to Aaron after service and I'm going to paraphrase it. And you probably said it much more eloquently than I'm going to do. Basically, basically you said you want grace to be a place to heal, but not hide somewhere along those lines. No, that's better than I would say. Yeah. You know, and I'm going to actually, and that was just like the final like stab of like, okay, you're, you're hiding you know, you're healed. You there's, there's writing all on the wall that you need to jump back into this. And so that was, you know, the series of events that led up to me jumping back into worship. But I think a couple months before that, I had worked as an usher a couple times, kind of dipped my toe back into the service realm. Yeah. Yeah. And, Miss Elena, in what ways do you volunteer here? This is active service for her to be here right now. Yes. Yes. Right this second is how she's doing it. I volunteer with the kids ministry. Yeah. Yeah. Elena does a kids' men, but we're going to bring up Shane and Carter to talk about that. You don't have to talk about kids' men. We don't even care about that. That's what on my notes are. Oh, that's okay. That's okay. I want your notes, but I also, one of the reasons that I think her perspective is so great is because if you are also a person who would literally hate to be sitting where she's sitting and having me talking about you right now, like my wife, Jen, everybody look at Jen. She hates this moment. Like if that's you, sometimes it feels like you got to be out front or whatever. And like you don't. Elena, she's remarkably crafty and creative. And so, yes, yes. And so two summers ago, and I hope I don't hurt anybody's feelings with this, but two summers ago, the Summer Extreme theme was Under the Sea. Is that right? And every week, every year, the week before Summer Extreme, the Sunday before, we decorate, and then we kind of add to it throughout the week, and then we do the stage. And when we did Under the Sea, I walked through here the Monday after they got done decorating and was like, who'd we hire? Like, what happened? Like, anybody who comes every year knows that was amazing. And they were like, Elena Farmer. And, like, she started coming. I was like, this was her idea? And so then we got her going on Summer Extreme for this year. Last year, I didn't even know she was going to do this. I don't know if you all remember, but the Christmas theme was Not Home Alone. And it's kind of a Home Alone feel. She did the auditorium in Home Alone stuff. There was paint buckets, and there was a war map on the drum thing. I didn't even know she was going to do it. I just showed up, and it was done. So quietly behind the scenes, she's using this gift and this skill to make the church better. And she's able to do it without ever having to do this or even get any public feedback for it. And then she's already working on the theme for next year's Summer Extreme, I heard. So we're excited about that. But, yeah, when you guys started coming, you jumped in pretty much right away, just kind of helping wherever you could help. What made you want to do that? I knew, so I guess we had, we'd been married for a while, but we had just had Wren, and so I think she was maybe a year or so. And I knew I wanted to have kids, our kids and future kids involved in church and growing up around church. I wanted them to see that God was like important in our family and to us, and it was a priority. I also knew that I wouldn't be committed and prioritized coming to church if I didn't get involved. So it was very important to me to jump in somewhere and get involved so I would be accountable to come. Now, which one is more fun for you? Is it the decorating part? Because there was one day this year where she and I think Faith and maybe Liz were here until like 1.30 a.m. decorating and getting it done. So y'all get after it. Like y'all work hard. And I would imagine there's an element of that that's fun. At least I hope there is. Absolutely. Which one do you find that you enjoy more? Do you enjoy them the same differently? What do you get from kids ministry? What do you get from doing that behind the scenes stuff? I absolutely love doing the decorating. Like that is, I think having a goal and an idea and just being able to plan it and then doing it with my best friends. Like it's just, it's like a girl's party at night at church and nobody's here with no kids. It's amazing. That's right. They tell their husbands, just need a couple more touch-ups. It's great. A few more clouds. Sometimes he brings ice cream. I mean, it's great. For the kids' side, I love it just because I don't know who I was telling, I guess maybe Aaron a few months ago, that it's amazing to hear the kids retell the stories that they hear and then just to know that you kind of had a part in that relationship that they're developing with God. So that's really cool to see and to be a part of. And what age kids are you with usually? So I am now back with two, three, but I had been with the K through, I guess three, K through two. Yeah, K through third. Yeah. And Jacob, or to either one of you, whoever wants to answer, she's very happy to give that up. How has God used stepping out in faith and serving, going, okay, for consistency's sake, I'm going to do this, or God, I feel like you're just pushing me in this direction. How has God used that to encourage you to draw you close to him, to, to build you up as a, as a believer? Yeah. So existing in that kind of rub or the friction that I was in coming to church, but not wanting to commit, I mean, intentionally, um, hiding, I wasn't, I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. Um, and you know, you mentioned, I mean, intentionally, hiding. I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. And, you know, you mentioned, I guess, what 1 Corinthians, but I think 1 Peter also mentioned something about gifts, about whatever gifts you received, you know, basically serve others and demonstrate God's grace in its various forms, paraphrased. That's good. But for me, I mean, the same reason I've always wanted to be a leader at work is the connection to people and be able to influence people and be able to connect with people to understand how I can best serve people. And that's foundational. I mean, that's arguably one of the biggest parts of my walk, period, right? I mean, I got saved in seventh grade. I started playing place in worship in seventh grade. So, I mean, it's been quite literally foundational to my walk. And so to connect back to that, you know, it's opened my heart in the sermons. It's opened my heart in prayer and quiet time. I found joy in understanding how I can serve others. And I think something else that we really hadn't discussed, but I was thinking about out there, is how his presence fills our home. My kids were six before they heard me play the guitar, right? So, or Wren was six years old. So, and now Praise and Worship is played constantly. I mean, they know what a metronome sounds like now and they probably hate it, but praise and worship fills our house every week. Even the weeks I don't serve, I enjoy tagging along and practicing and playing. So, I think an unintended benefit, right? And so my kids are singing along and they know more of the words to the songs that I play than I do. So that's great. It's unintended. And I think a huge benefit to kind of serving. I love hearing that. And is it just for the record is Aaron now writing you like a rented mule? I mean, are we just driving you right back to burnout? Oh, no, no, no, no. So, well, well, I don't know. Yeah, we have a real discussion here. So, you know, I had never played with in-ears, never played with tracks, you know, hadn't played with a band. He's like, you know, one week of practice and I'm on stage. And then he's like, part of the story, it was before Christmas and I think it was an acoustic set and it was Greg and Carly and Jordan up here. And I remember thinking the whole I was like I probably could play acoustic guitar would probably be nice and that was another thing that kind of pushed me on this journey and I mentioned that to Aaron and he wasted no time and giving me that opportunity to be the solo acoustic guitar up here so I mean I'm improving as a musician selfishly it's nice to have a praise and worship team that's pushing me there. And so, yeah, I enjoy it. And I guess kind of to connect further on to wanting to serve, and I guess people that are maybe apprehensive, everyone's super, super accommodating, right? I mean, I just took three weeks off. I just blocked entire months off, and he hates it, but I do it. And I send him pictures of all the fish I'm catching at the beach. And the birds you're seeing. And the birds, yeah, well, no one cares about that. In fact, if I could get as good as evangelizing the gospel as I could about birds, I think I would be in a better place. That's a separate service. Yeah, right. Yeah. Elena, what would you say, and the last question, what would you say to anybody who's considering serving, not just in kids, although you could, but anywhere who's not serving yet but they're thinking about it? This is more intimidating, sitting up here. I would say just do it. Try it, and if you don't like it, then try a different spot or try somewhere else. I don't know. I don't feel like... That's not what I had in my notes. That's not what I had in my notes. It's all geared toward kids. I don't know. You put me on... Yeah, you put me on the spot. Sorry, Elena. She's never doing this again. Never, ever, ever. This is the one time. No, but I think, and I think we would agree on this. There's a sense of accomplishment, right? There's like, there's plenty of days at work that I leave work and just battered and tired. And I'm like, what did I actually get done? I have no clue. But I think we both feel a sense of accomplishment. You know know we mentioned how we're impacting how she's impacting the kids and and the summer extreme and I doubt I'm impacting anybody musically but I have fun yeah but being part of a team right and and and and just having a sense of pride and what we're accomplishing here and what we're doing here at Grace. Yeah, I like that. Thanks, guys. I like that. You can leave, Elena. Shane and Carter. This is Shane and Carter Smith. They serve in children's ministry together. They've also served as small group leaders. Carter actually served on our architectural committee and helped us come up with the design of the floor plan for the building. So she was there for all the meetings. And really, we should just be talking to Carter. She's a lot more valuable to us than you. If we had to pick one. Carter does a tremendous amount behind the scenes. We have a few people who work behind the scenes that whenever I hear their name brought up for something else, I always say to the staff or to the elders or whoever, like, just be careful. Like, they do so much. Like, please don't ask them. Like, offer to take something else off their plate before we ask them to do this other thing. And Carter is one of those. She's, she's, do what? Yeah, right, right, to do this. And then Shane, Shane used to be a bouncer, so he's in charge of security all the time around here, and he's a Panthers fan, and we beat them two weeks ago, and that's great. Thanks for being up here. What's up, Wake Forest? Okay, Shane and Carter, where do you guys serve? Because you guys serve together. Carter, you're on the children's ministry leadership team too, correct? Okay, but you guys serve together. So I started out actually ushering, I don't know, five or six years ago as a way to kind of get involved. And then Erin kept sending us some nagging emails about how much help she needed on the children's side. So being a coach, I was like, I guess I can try helping over there. And I don't know, it was pretty fun serving over there too. Carter, for everyone else, can you tell us what over there is? We teach K-3, and that's the other wing. K-3, so kindergarten through third grade meet over there. Yes, so we teach the kids over there, large group and small group on Sundays. What does that typically look like? Because that can sound pretty intimidating to go teach. Sometimes know, sometimes it's eight, sometimes it's 20 elementary age kids. You get the lesson during the week. What kind of prep goes into it? Like, what are you guys doing behind the scenes so that you're ready for Sunday morning? And then how does a typical Sunday morning go? Well, Aaron and Julie set up absolutely everything and their team. They have a team behind them. They have everything set up. They email you the lesson plans. They email you kind of an outline for the morning and are available to offer and ask and answer any questions that you have. The kids come in. You do a little activity. You get to sing and dance with them and they get a lot more wild than we do in here. And then we teach them large group and then we break into small group for second and third grade and kindergarten and first grade. And sometimes it's five kids total and sometimes it's 25 total and we just get to all cram back in there. That's great. And Shane, besides Carter Volland telling you probably to do it, what made you decide? because one of the reasons I wanted us to hear from Shane is because we we get we get women to volunteer in the children's ministry more often than we do men and frankly men probably need to just step up to the plate because there's there's not for nothing there's there's there's two genders in all of classrooms, and they should probably be able to look up to both genders as they lead them and guide them and teach them about Jesus. So I think it's good for our boys to see men in their teaching. I think it's good for our girls to see women in their teaching and vice versa. And so we're always grateful when a dad steps up and says, yeah, this is something I want to be a part of. So what made you decide like, okay, yeah, I'm going to do that? Because I didn't, I didn't, I meant to mention this up front. I've asked the volunteers to come up in ascending order of difficulty. So Mike and Holly Anderson running the coffee, and I ran this by Mike beforehand. That's compared now, if we really wanted to get easy, we do like ushers. Okay. But I didn't bring up any ushers. But then the coffee team, right? And then there's the security team, which you just stand out there, and you don't have to listen to the sermon. It's a nice team, actually. And then being in the band, that takes some skill, but I think the hardest ask in the church, honestly, is what you guys do, the K-3. That's super intimidating. It's really difficult, And I think we just disqualify ourselves from the jump, but I don't think we need to. And so I just wanted to hear from you, what made you decide like, yeah, I'm going to take that plunge and go volunteer in that room. Yeah. I think again, just being involved with coaching, you know, coaching different baseball teams and football, I kind of knew what to expect from kids. And I felt like, you know, I could at least teach them. Like I said, Aaron makes it pretty easy on us. She gives you basically a sheet of paper, and as long as you read from it, you can pretty much teach kids a class. For me, I felt like it was almost a way to answer the question of being a disciple making disciples too because I don't feel like I'm ever going to be like a street preacher. I'm not going to go out there, and it's hard to talk to adults, you know, about those situations. But going over there and teaching the kids some of the basic stuff, I just feel like that's a way that you can grow. Just feel like you're, you know, making disciples, somebody else that's hopefully going to grow up and lead this church as well. I love that. I love that a lot. And, Carter, you know, I mean, you guys were here when I got here. Y'all, y'all, y'all been here a long time. You've been serving the whole time that y'all have been here. So it's a part of your DNA and who you are. What is it that makes you continue to serve, continue to come back, continue to sign up and let us put you up on stage and things like that? Like what, what's the joy that you get out of it? Why do you continue to do it? Um, I don't think Aaron would allow me to keep coming to Grace if I didn't serve in the kids ministry. No, we get, I used to teach first grade before I had my oldest son, Cason. So I think that's part of it is selfishly. It's something I do enjoy and I enjoy doing it more for an hour than a nine to five. But we get poured into here every Sunday and it's just a chance to pour into kids. And they are just like little sponges and so excited to be there and so excited to learn and learn about Jesus. They have no hesitation asking hard questions. They have no hesitation expressing their joy through dancing and singing. And they're just genuinely excited to be there. And I find that excitement contagious. And my favorite Sunday to teach back there is Easter Sunday. Oh, wow. Why is that? I mean, I've heard Easter sermons for 30 years. They're pretty good. They're pretty good over here. They're pretty great. The podcast is great. But no, they are so excited. And for some of them, it's their first time hearing it. For some of them, they've heard it for a few years, but each time, something new is clicking for them. The story is unfolding, and they are more excited about the Bible than most of the adults I know. I love that. And last question for you guys. How has God used your opportunities at service, whether it's leading a small group, serving on a leadership team behind the scenes, or serving in the kids? How has God been using that over the years to draw you closer to him and build up your faith? So, I mean, it's for us, obviously, it's been a way to get to know a lot of people in the church. You know, and it's also a way that we feel like, as Carter mentioned, you know, the church pours into us so much. It's a way that we can give back and really help this whole community grow. I mean, we're all here to try and, you know, promote the kingdom. So I feel like it's a way for us to be able to give back. And again, I'm not going to be up on stage doing any preaching anytime soon. So, you know, teaching the kids is a lot easier. Just let me know when you want to. For me, I think teaching takes the focus off of me. It makes me be less self-centered in when I'm getting ready to come to church on Sunday in my prayer life. I'm thinking about the kids, praying for them, praying over what I'm going to be teaching. And so I think any opportunity I can take to be less self-centered is a good one for me spiritually. Well, thank you guys. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming up and for sharing. As we wrap up the morning, just a couple of thoughts. And I say this with some hesitancy because I want to be careful with my words, and I don't want them to be self-serving. That's not my heart at all. But I do think that based on the body passages, body of Christ, spiritual gifts mentioned, he mentioned, Jacob mentioned some in Peter, they're in Romans, they're in Corinthians, they're in Ephesians. They're all over the place. Because we have good works to walk in, because God calls us to be a part of a local church, I don't think it's optional to serve in a local church. And when I say that, I say local church intentionally because I'm not trying to leverage this and the Bible to get you to guiltily serve at grace. But what I can tell you as a pastor and someone who cares about you is, it is God's will for you to be using your gifts to benefit his kingdom. I know that for sure. It is God's will for you to be using the gifts and the talents and the abilities that he gave you to grow his kingdom. Now, many of you are doing that outside the walls of grace, and that's great. I would not reduce serving God and using your gifts to things that can be done here. But I would say that there's a reason that we have partners and we don't have members. Members tend to consume, partners tend to contribute. One of the things I am so humbled by in this church is that it doesn't go with just staff. Unless people are giving of their time, talent, and treasure during the week to sit on elder boards, to sit on committees, to be thoughtful about the church. We have some people because of their professional backgrounds who kind of mentor or pour into or befriend different people on staff. I've watched people in the church come alongside Aaron and begin to help him and give him some advice. I've watched them come alongside Kyle or Aaron Winston or me. And so there's different ways to serve the church and they're not all reduced to this sheet, okay? But here's what I would say. You ought to be doing something. You ought to be doing something to allow God to use the time and the talents and the treasures that he gave you to serve his church and build his kingdom. I don't know why. Well, I would want you to be going to a local church that you love so much that you wanted to partner with them and serve in some way. That's what I would say. Now, what Jacob said is true. And Jacob, the way you said it is better than I said it. We do want grace to be a place for you to heal, but not necessarily to hide. I know that there are people here because I've spoken with you. You have been burned by church. You have been worn out by church. You have been chewed up and spit out and something hurt you or something wore you out or whatever. And this can absolutely be a place to come and rest. But it ought to be restorative rest so that when you're ready to go again, you get going. So I would ask you guys to prayerfully consider, and in a minute I'm going to pray, Tamir's going to come up and give us a little bit more instructions, and then we're going to have a song sung over us while we kind of look over this and think about what we might want to do. Really quickly, if you want to grab this sheet, anything that might not be clear, Worship Team Tech and Production is back there. Those are, besides sound, largely low-skilled jobs, so you can do them, all right? I was joking around with David. David's running the live feed this morning and, uh, there's somebody else here. He's, he's being, he's being, uh, shadowed. Somebody's watching him to make sure that David doesn't mess it up. David runs a software company. So I'm pretty sure he can handle the live stream. And I was joking around with him beforehand. Like, dude, if you get stressed and you need to take a minute and get out of the sound booth, like go ahead. And we were laughing about it. So if you want to get, if you volunteer back there, that's, that's great. You can do that, but that's what the tech and production team is. And it's a vital team that we need greeters and ushers. That's if you're new or you've been coming here for a while, but you're not really plugged in, join one of those teams. It's a great entry point to join one of those teams, start meeting new people. It really doesn't impact your schedule a whole heck of a lot. You get here 15 minutes before you normally would unless you're late all the time, then you need to get here 25 minutes before you normally would and then you don't necessarily have to stay later but you get to meet a bunch of people, learn a bunch of names, shake a bunch of hands. That's a great way to get plugged in and involved. The prayer team is pretty obvious. We send prayer requests out to that. The care team is a big one, too, because we don't want people slipping through the cracks with care. And so the way that care works at Grace is first your small group leader is kind of responsible for you but sometimes people require ongoing care sometimes people are not in a small group sometimes the need is greater than what a small group can provide and we like to have a team that we can call on to go visit people who aren't able to leave their house or where they're living to make some phone calls. We even have a wonderful team of people that serve in something called Stephen Ministry that exists throughout a bunch of churches. And they provide ongoing pastoral care in ways that pastors just simply can't and don't have time for. And there's a whole training process with them. And they do incredible, incredible addition to that things that are not on here we have committees we have a finance committee that helped with the with the money at grace to make sure that everything's happening the way it's supposed to happen we have a personnel committee that serves as kind of the HR department at grace while we're while we're healthy and the staff development department so if you have a background in that, that's a great way to serve. We have a missions committee that determines who we get involved with and what activities we do outside the walls of Grace. So there's different ways that we can help and different things that we can do. But my heart would be, and what I would ask is, if you call Grace home, then prayerfully consider how you might jump in if you're not doing that already. If you call Grace home, take a few minutes right now, and prayerfully consider, God, what would you have me do at the local church where I go, where I can pour myself into? Maybe it's not on here. This sheet is a starting point. Maybe it's something else. Maybe you want to have a conversation about it. That's fine. I'd love to have that conversation. Maybe you can make us a little note on this and tell us what you'd like to talk about or what you think you'd like to offer. That's great too. But if you call Grace home, partner with us, let's work together and let's build God's kingdom together and move this place forward. Let me pray and then Tamera's going to come up and give us some more instructions. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your servants that we got to see this morning and hear from. Thank you for the ones that are doing your work right now so that we could be in here. Thank you for the hands that set up tables and chairs. Thank you for the hands that will be cooking and prepping the meals for us. Thank you for the worship team that's leading us into worship, God. Just thank you for the workers in all the children's rooms who are pouring into our children so that we might be in here and hopefully you're pouring into us. God, we just thank you for this morning. We thank you for grace. We thank you for all that you've done here and all that you are, the way that you're so faithful to us. And God, we pray that in return, we would continue to be faithful to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate again, and if I haven't got a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. You came on the perfect Sunday to meet people. It's Hootenanny Sunday. So after this, we go to that parking lot there and we just kind of celebrate God and his goodness, reflect on the year that we've had. This is something that we do every year. We call it the sometimes annual Hootenanny because COVID made us not have it. So it would be dishonest to call it the annual Hootenanny. And we care about honesty here. So it's this sometimes annual Hootenanny. And I hope that you'll stick around and talk to some folks and say, hey, and again, if I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. This morning is going to look a little different. You can see I'm going to be talking to a couple of different folks within the church this morning about service and about volunteering. One of the things that we realized, I guess it was in August, I was talking with Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, and we realized that we hadn't highlighted service at Grace and volunteering at Grace in a really long time. And we said, it's high time we do this. And then we thought, well, how do we want to do it? Normally, you just preach a sermon about serving and servanthood. And God wanted us to partner with the local church and things like that. And I would bet 75% of you could predict most of the things that I would say in that kind of a sermon. And because of that, and also because I'm always looking for ways to get other voices up here and in front of the church so that we can hear from one another and learn from one another, we thought it would be good and interesting to do this kind of like Ministry Partner Sunday. So in the summer, we have Ministry Partner Sunday where we highlight the different ministry partners that we have outside the walls of the church, and I'll bring them up and talk to them about what they do. And so we thought we would do that with some of our volunteers this morning. Before we do that, just to kind of set up the conversation to set you guys up as you consider your role at Grace or any local church, I did have some thoughts from 1 Corinthians. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there, 1 Corinthians chapter 12. I'm going to start in verse 18. The idea of the church being a body is all over scripture. It's all throughout, particularly the New Testament, particularly the writings of Paul. And there's some seminal passages where he talks about this, but this or Romans are probably the two, and this has a little bit more detail. So in chapter 12, Paul is detailing the spiritual gifts. He talks about this idea that God has given each of us gifts that we are to use in his kingdom. One of the verses I highlight often and say to you guys often is Ephesians 2.10, where it says that we are Christ's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that we should walk in them. And so the idea is that as we live the Christian life, we are trying to determine, God, what are my good works and how do I walk in them? What do you have for me to do and to walk in? And so that ties in here in this idea that we're all part of a body. We all have a part to play. We all have a role to fill. We all have something to do. And so it's incumbent upon us to figure out what that is. This is what Paul says. But as it is, he's just talked about the body and the ear needs the eyes and the eyes need the feet and the feet needs the hands and none of them can exist without the other. And then he says, but as it is in verse 18, God arranged the members of the body, each one of them as he says, of you, nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow greater honor. I love this passage, particularly as a pastor, because I addressed this a few weeks ago, I think when we were talking about Hebrews in August. But we can make pastors more important than they should be, more valuable to the church than they really are. We can start to feel like staff, the people who work here, we're the most important people, and everybody else is kind of auxiliary, and they're helping. I know that when I grew up in my church, I kind of sensed that. And it's really important for me to point out, as often as I can, in God's kingdom, nobody's more important than anybody else. Nobody plays a more crucial role than anybody else. Leaders are to have a higher degree of accountability because it's our job to teach truth. But that's not a higher value in God's kingdom. And so I believe in grace. All of our partners are equally valuable. Everything we do is equally valuable in God's kingdom and in God's eyes. And so you can't, there's some, sometimes there are people who serve behind the scenes and I will get from them that they don't, that they feel like what they do is kind of small potatoes and it's not. It's hugely important. Everything that we do as the body of Christ is hugely important and matters in eternity and matters to God and is valued by God. Because of that, I wanted us to hear from different portions of our body that play different parts and different roles, and maybe we can relate to some of them. Maybe we'll be inspired to serve. We all have this sheet in our seat, and I'll be going through this at the end of the sermon time today. But I wanted us to hear from people in the church who serve and kind of get to know them a little bit. I felt like it was appropriate on Hootenanny Sunday because we're going out to talk and to be communal and to be a family. So this is kind of a family meeting this morning. Mike and Holly, if you guys want to go ahead and make your way up here and grab that microphone. Oh, you have it? Okay. Is there a microphone over there? There it is. Okay, good. I wanted you guys to hear from parts of the body as well. These are Mike and Holly. This is Mike and Holly Anderson. Just to kind of... I want to say wet your whistle a little bit, but that feels like I don't want to say that. Just at the Hootenanny, ask Mike and Holly what their email names are for each other, okay? I'm just going to, I learned that when they first started coming here. We met for lunch, and I saw what their email names were for each other, and they're great. So ask them what they are. I'm not going to say them from stage because there's children in the room, but just ask them what they are. Mike and Holly, you guys have been coming to Grace for how long? Two and a half. Two and a half years. Two and a half years. And in what capacity do you guys serve? So we fill your tummies every Sunday with yum, warm, yummy coffee. That's what we do. And what made you guys decide that we want to do coffee every Sunday? Because they literally do it every Sunday. I'm like, we can get you extra help. They're like, we're good. We like it. We'll do it every Sunday. So what made you decide, let's get involved, and let's get involved at the coffee level? Okay, so my wife and I, we own our own businesses. so we have an opportunity to do every year, like you do in corporate America, is we do a goal-setting session. And so we go through all of our business plans and all of our personal plans about what we want to get accomplished. And so we usually do that the end of November, early December, every year. And so the year that we were doing this, our personal plans was how do we invest more time, resources, money to Grace? That's kind of where we were. And this was our first. We were eight months, nine months into Grace at that point in time. And just trying to figure out where can we get plugged in? What can we do? How can we get more involved? Small group is definitely something we had just started. And we wanted to figure out how to get further more engaged and so the sunday of after setting those sessions on um that service was all about not being a consumer of grace and how do you be more of a provider as a partner and it really hit it hit us real quick and we shot nate a quick email you guys were just you were just leeching off the the system. We were just little leeching. Yeah, you were dead weight. And so we had lunch with Nate and we said, how can we help? What do we, we want to get plugged in somewhere somehow. And he tried to put us back there in that big old booth back there. And we know nothing about that booth. So we weren't going down that road. And so coffee, obviously with COVID and being very sensitive to what was going on in the world. We thought, you know, that would be a great way for us to kind of really get plugged in and start that back up and really move on. So we just kind of jumped on it and went from there. Now, tell me, Holly, I think it's helpful to get a little bit of y'all's background. Not like, how'd you meet? Not that, but you guys met doing a similar job, and I think that the job that you did contributes to how you guys approach how you do coffee. So what did you do when you met, and how does that help what you do here? Yeah, sure. So Mike and I met. We did sports tourism industry for a long time, so the hospitality industry. We worked for convention and visitors bureaus, and it's all about hospitality and service. And we approach everything in our life like that, our new career now. So we expect a high-level, high-touch service. And so it's the little things, like writing the messages on the cups and having a flavor of the month in creamer. So we never go here. We're always, like, way over the edge, sometimes too much. But it comes from our past and how we met and just high-touch customer service, and we wanted to bring just our love of that to the people that we love here at Grace. Yeah, and that's why you guys are discovering in real time right now that you're going to be planning the golf tournament for us in the spring when we do that. We've both done that before. They're perfect for it. And so they take their professional background and they apply it to coffee. Now, coffee is underwhelming. That is a small thing compared to what you normally organize. But one of the things I noticed right away is the writing on the cups. I don't know if you guys have noticed the writing on the cups, but we don't buy them like that. They do it. And which one of you does it? Mike does it. I have the worst handwriting ever. That's his penmanship on the cups. And I saw him back there this morning. He's got a note on his phone where he's typed up the little messages that he's brainstormed, and then he's just alternating as he's writing those on your cups, just bringing a little bit extra to it every Sunday morning. How have you guys, it's a combo question, so answer it however you like. How have you guys personally benefited from getting to do that for now, close to a year and a half, almost two years? And then most importantly, how have you watched God work to use that bit of service to bring you closer to him? Yeah, we kind of talked about how those kind of coincided, we felt like. And I think so much of it is we love coming here. We love sitting in this building with people that we've just really grown to see as family and friends. And it's been cool in the short amount of time we've been here. And so there's a selfish part of it that's like, I have to get up and go. Like, if I just want to put my PJs on and have coffee and watch Nate for my house, even though he'll give me business about it later, I at least, like, I can't even think that way, right? Like, I know that I have a reason to be here. So there's that selfish reason of I know I have to be because I've committed, but it's also because we want to be here. So I think it's helped that, and it's just helped plug us in. Like, just being here in the morning, I think we've gotten to know, you know, you guys and staff better, which has been really cool, but also the people that serve, too, and really get to see what it takes to make this all happen on Sunday. And it's been really, you know, really neat. We were talking that the church that I was most involved with when I was a little kid and my family was really involved. This is the first time as an adult that I've been plugged in. And it has just felt like the most perfect place. I call my mom all the time and I'm like, I can't believe God brought us here. This is just, it's perfect and amazing. And what I've been looking for for a long time. So That's great. That's great. I love to hear that. Well, we're grateful to you guys for serving. We're grateful to you for planning the golf tournament. And it'll be in the end of April. And we're grateful for the coffee. But if you want to sign up for coffee, they've agreed to relinquish some rights for Sunday mornings. So if you want to partner with them and help or just give them some reprieve and do coffee with them, we would love for you to do that. Now, you've got to rise to their standards, okay? They're tough bosses, but we can still use some help there if that's something you guys want to do. Thanks so much. I'm going to call up Jacob and Elena Farmer. Where are they? Okay. Jacob and Elena are so committed that they drove straight from the beach this morning to be here to do this. Is that true? Yesterday. Yesterday. Oh, yeah, because their dog got a little bit of a struggle. There you go. They've been in here for two weeks. Elena couldn't be less interested in being on the stage right now. I couldn't believe. I knew that Jacob would be game. Jacob's fine. But I couldn't believe. I was like, if Elena wants to do it, I think people would benefit. And I knew that you were going to be like, no, not a chance. And then Jacob said, yeah, we'll be there. And I thought, okay, I'm not going to ask any questions. I didn't ask permission. Yeah, sure. Sure. So, um, a little bit of background on them and I didn't have time, nor did I think it was appropriate and sure service, but it would have been fun. Jacob is a huge birdwatcher. So if you like birds, talk to Jacob at the hootenanny and he will love to talk to you about it. I know. And I almost, I wanted to do a slideshow of birds and see if you could identify them, but maybe another time, maybe another time. But after they had been going here a while, Jacob and I got lunch and he told me a little bit about his background, and he kind of let it slip that he could play guitar, that he could lead worship. And whenever, in my position, you hear that someone's musically talented, you kind of go, okay, you want to get involved? I mean, that's a high skill position. That's pretty tough. But I kind of told him, like, I'm not going to tell Aaron. I'm just going to let you sit on it. You let us know when you're ready. And so Jacob's story, and it's one of the reasons I wanted you all to hear from him, is I'm kind of, I'm teeing this up for you a little bit. He had done it a lot, gotten burned out, found a new place, and wasn't sure when he wanted to re-engage and if he even trusted doing that. And so I thought his perspective on why you decided to like, yeah, let's go ahead and sign back up and play guitar and all that stuff. So if you kind of want to fill in the blanks there for that story, that's great. Yeah, sure. So, um, yes, long story short, I've been in praise and worship since seventh grade. So whatever, whatever age that is, 13, um, got burned out. I mean, every, every church I was involved with was a, was a plant we were tearing up, sitting down every Sunday. We were serving multiple roles. Um, and then adding onto that, I kind of got burned a little bit at church as well. So I kind of had a sour taste in my mouth. And we were out of church for a long time. And I was not playing for a long time. In fact, I think the first thing I told Aaron was I probably haven't played in a band setting in close to 10 years. So we can tell, but you're getting there. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So my, my first practice Aaron, Aaron's like, yeah, come, come, come sit in. And then he's like, Oh, see you Sunday. I'm like, Oh, that wasn't at all talked about. Um, but, uh, but yeah, so for me, I guess leading up to it as a series of things, my wife dragging me here into church when I was stubbornly not wanting to be here, her volunteering to serve initially in the children's ministry, you know, just all these things that were poking me. My parents, my dad actually had been borrowing my guitar for over a year, and he brought it back to me at the beach vacation last year in September. And he's like, I think you're going to need this. And so everyone around me was seeing the writing on the wall, and I was feeling kind of the tug on my heart. And I think our conversation, which I was intentionally coming here and hiding. I didn't want to be known. I wanted to be unknown. Because the second you find out, you play guitar. That's right. Yeah, a need. Right. Um, so I was, I mean, and that was impacting my ability to connect. Um, I was, I mean, I think you even made the comments like, Hey, you've been like here for a year or more and I don't know a thing about you. I think that's how you preface like, let's get lunch. That sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But there was something else you said at lunch, um, that I think it was a week later. I talked to Aaron after service and I'm going to paraphrase it. And you probably said it much more eloquently than I'm going to do. Basically, basically you said you want grace to be a place to heal, but not hide somewhere along those lines. No, that's better than I would say. Yeah. You know, and I'm going to actually, and that was just like the final like stab of like, okay, you're, you're hiding you know, you're healed. You there's, there's writing all on the wall that you need to jump back into this. And so that was, you know, the series of events that led up to me jumping back into worship. But I think a couple months before that, I had worked as an usher a couple times, kind of dipped my toe back into the service realm. Yeah. Yeah. And, Miss Elena, in what ways do you volunteer here? This is active service for her to be here right now. Yes. Yes. Right this second is how she's doing it. I volunteer with the kids ministry. Yeah. Yeah. Elena does a kids' men, but we're going to bring up Shane and Carter to talk about that. You don't have to talk about kids' men. We don't even care about that. That's what on my notes are. Oh, that's okay. That's okay. I want your notes, but I also, one of the reasons that I think her perspective is so great is because if you are also a person who would literally hate to be sitting where she's sitting and having me talking about you right now, like my wife, Jen, everybody look at Jen. She hates this moment. Like if that's you, sometimes it feels like you got to be out front or whatever. And like you don't. Elena, she's remarkably crafty and creative. And so, yes, yes. And so two summers ago, and I hope I don't hurt anybody's feelings with this, but two summers ago, the Summer Extreme theme was Under the Sea. Is that right? And every week, every year, the week before Summer Extreme, the Sunday before, we decorate, and then we kind of add to it throughout the week, and then we do the stage. And when we did Under the Sea, I walked through here the Monday after they got done decorating and was like, who'd we hire? Like, what happened? Like, anybody who comes every year knows that was amazing. And they were like, Elena Farmer. And, like, she started coming. I was like, this was her idea? And so then we got her going on Summer Extreme for this year. Last year, I didn't even know she was going to do this. I don't know if you all remember, but the Christmas theme was Not Home Alone. And it's kind of a Home Alone feel. She did the auditorium in Home Alone stuff. There was paint buckets, and there was a war map on the drum thing. I didn't even know she was going to do it. I just showed up, and it was done. So quietly behind the scenes, she's using this gift and this skill to make the church better. And she's able to do it without ever having to do this or even get any public feedback for it. And then she's already working on the theme for next year's Summer Extreme, I heard. So we're excited about that. But, yeah, when you guys started coming, you jumped in pretty much right away, just kind of helping wherever you could help. What made you want to do that? I knew, so I guess we had, we'd been married for a while, but we had just had Wren, and so I think she was maybe a year or so. And I knew I wanted to have kids, our kids and future kids involved in church and growing up around church. I wanted them to see that God was like important in our family and to us, and it was a priority. I also knew that I wouldn't be committed and prioritized coming to church if I didn't get involved. So it was very important to me to jump in somewhere and get involved so I would be accountable to come. Now, which one is more fun for you? Is it the decorating part? Because there was one day this year where she and I think Faith and maybe Liz were here until like 1.30 a.m. decorating and getting it done. So y'all get after it. Like y'all work hard. And I would imagine there's an element of that that's fun. At least I hope there is. Absolutely. Which one do you find that you enjoy more? Do you enjoy them the same differently? What do you get from kids ministry? What do you get from doing that behind the scenes stuff? I absolutely love doing the decorating. Like that is, I think having a goal and an idea and just being able to plan it and then doing it with my best friends. Like it's just, it's like a girl's party at night at church and nobody's here with no kids. It's amazing. That's right. They tell their husbands, just need a couple more touch-ups. It's great. A few more clouds. Sometimes he brings ice cream. I mean, it's great. For the kids' side, I love it just because I don't know who I was telling, I guess maybe Aaron a few months ago, that it's amazing to hear the kids retell the stories that they hear and then just to know that you kind of had a part in that relationship that they're developing with God. So that's really cool to see and to be a part of. And what age kids are you with usually? So I am now back with two, three, but I had been with the K through, I guess three, K through two. Yeah, K through third. Yeah. And Jacob, or to either one of you, whoever wants to answer, she's very happy to give that up. How has God used stepping out in faith and serving, going, okay, for consistency's sake, I'm going to do this, or God, I feel like you're just pushing me in this direction. How has God used that to encourage you to draw you close to him, to, to build you up as a, as a believer? Yeah. So existing in that kind of rub or the friction that I was in coming to church, but not wanting to commit, I mean, intentionally, um, hiding, I wasn't, I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. Um, and you know, you mentioned, I mean, intentionally, hiding. I don't think I was receptive to sermons. I was certainly not connecting to people. And, you know, you mentioned, I guess, what 1 Corinthians, but I think 1 Peter also mentioned something about gifts, about whatever gifts you received, you know, basically serve others and demonstrate God's grace in its various forms, paraphrased. That's good. But for me, I mean, the same reason I've always wanted to be a leader at work is the connection to people and be able to influence people and be able to connect with people to understand how I can best serve people. And that's foundational. I mean, that's arguably one of the biggest parts of my walk, period, right? I mean, I got saved in seventh grade. I started playing place in worship in seventh grade. So, I mean, it's been quite literally foundational to my walk. And so to connect back to that, you know, it's opened my heart in the sermons. It's opened my heart in prayer and quiet time. I found joy in understanding how I can serve others. And I think something else that we really hadn't discussed, but I was thinking about out there, is how his presence fills our home. My kids were six before they heard me play the guitar, right? So, or Wren was six years old. So, and now Praise and Worship is played constantly. I mean, they know what a metronome sounds like now and they probably hate it, but praise and worship fills our house every week. Even the weeks I don't serve, I enjoy tagging along and practicing and playing. So, I think an unintended benefit, right? And so my kids are singing along and they know more of the words to the songs that I play than I do. So that's great. It's unintended. And I think a huge benefit to kind of serving. I love hearing that. And is it just for the record is Aaron now writing you like a rented mule? I mean, are we just driving you right back to burnout? Oh, no, no, no, no. So, well, well, I don't know. Yeah, we have a real discussion here. So, you know, I had never played with in-ears, never played with tracks, you know, hadn't played with a band. He's like, you know, one week of practice and I'm on stage. And then he's like, part of the story, it was before Christmas and I think it was an acoustic set and it was Greg and Carly and Jordan up here. And I remember thinking the whole I was like I probably could play acoustic guitar would probably be nice and that was another thing that kind of pushed me on this journey and I mentioned that to Aaron and he wasted no time and giving me that opportunity to be the solo acoustic guitar up here so I mean I'm improving as a musician selfishly it's nice to have a praise and worship team that's pushing me there. And so, yeah, I enjoy it. And I guess kind of to connect further on to wanting to serve, and I guess people that are maybe apprehensive, everyone's super, super accommodating, right? I mean, I just took three weeks off. I just blocked entire months off, and he hates it, but I do it. And I send him pictures of all the fish I'm catching at the beach. And the birds you're seeing. And the birds, yeah, well, no one cares about that. In fact, if I could get as good as evangelizing the gospel as I could about birds, I think I would be in a better place. That's a separate service. Yeah, right. Yeah. Elena, what would you say, and the last question, what would you say to anybody who's considering serving, not just in kids, although you could, but anywhere who's not serving yet but they're thinking about it? This is more intimidating, sitting up here. I would say just do it. Try it, and if you don't like it, then try a different spot or try somewhere else. I don't know. I don't feel like... That's not what I had in my notes. That's not what I had in my notes. It's all geared toward kids. I don't know. You put me on... Yeah, you put me on the spot. Sorry, Elena. She's never doing this again. Never, ever, ever. This is the one time. No, but I think, and I think we would agree on this. There's a sense of accomplishment, right? There's like, there's plenty of days at work that I leave work and just battered and tired. And I'm like, what did I actually get done? I have no clue. But I think we both feel a sense of accomplishment. You know know we mentioned how we're impacting how she's impacting the kids and and the summer extreme and I doubt I'm impacting anybody musically but I have fun yeah but being part of a team right and and and and just having a sense of pride and what we're accomplishing here and what we're doing here at Grace. Yeah, I like that. Thanks, guys. I like that. You can leave, Elena. Shane and Carter. This is Shane and Carter Smith. They serve in children's ministry together. They've also served as small group leaders. Carter actually served on our architectural committee and helped us come up with the design of the floor plan for the building. So she was there for all the meetings. And really, we should just be talking to Carter. She's a lot more valuable to us than you. If we had to pick one. Carter does a tremendous amount behind the scenes. We have a few people who work behind the scenes that whenever I hear their name brought up for something else, I always say to the staff or to the elders or whoever, like, just be careful. Like, they do so much. Like, please don't ask them. Like, offer to take something else off their plate before we ask them to do this other thing. And Carter is one of those. She's, she's, do what? Yeah, right, right, to do this. And then Shane, Shane used to be a bouncer, so he's in charge of security all the time around here, and he's a Panthers fan, and we beat them two weeks ago, and that's great. Thanks for being up here. What's up, Wake Forest? Okay, Shane and Carter, where do you guys serve? Because you guys serve together. Carter, you're on the children's ministry leadership team too, correct? Okay, but you guys serve together. So I started out actually ushering, I don't know, five or six years ago as a way to kind of get involved. And then Erin kept sending us some nagging emails about how much help she needed on the children's side. So being a coach, I was like, I guess I can try helping over there. And I don't know, it was pretty fun serving over there too. Carter, for everyone else, can you tell us what over there is? We teach K-3, and that's the other wing. K-3, so kindergarten through third grade meet over there. Yes, so we teach the kids over there, large group and small group on Sundays. What does that typically look like? Because that can sound pretty intimidating to go teach. Sometimes know, sometimes it's eight, sometimes it's 20 elementary age kids. You get the lesson during the week. What kind of prep goes into it? Like, what are you guys doing behind the scenes so that you're ready for Sunday morning? And then how does a typical Sunday morning go? Well, Aaron and Julie set up absolutely everything and their team. They have a team behind them. They have everything set up. They email you the lesson plans. They email you kind of an outline for the morning and are available to offer and ask and answer any questions that you have. The kids come in. You do a little activity. You get to sing and dance with them and they get a lot more wild than we do in here. And then we teach them large group and then we break into small group for second and third grade and kindergarten and first grade. And sometimes it's five kids total and sometimes it's 25 total and we just get to all cram back in there. That's great. And Shane, besides Carter Volland telling you probably to do it, what made you decide? because one of the reasons I wanted us to hear from Shane is because we we get we get women to volunteer in the children's ministry more often than we do men and frankly men probably need to just step up to the plate because there's there's not for nothing there's there's there's two genders in all of classrooms, and they should probably be able to look up to both genders as they lead them and guide them and teach them about Jesus. So I think it's good for our boys to see men in their teaching. I think it's good for our girls to see women in their teaching and vice versa. And so we're always grateful when a dad steps up and says, yeah, this is something I want to be a part of. So what made you decide like, okay, yeah, I'm going to do that? Because I didn't, I didn't, I meant to mention this up front. I've asked the volunteers to come up in ascending order of difficulty. So Mike and Holly Anderson running the coffee, and I ran this by Mike beforehand. That's compared now, if we really wanted to get easy, we do like ushers. Okay. But I didn't bring up any ushers. But then the coffee team, right? And then there's the security team, which you just stand out there, and you don't have to listen to the sermon. It's a nice team, actually. And then being in the band, that takes some skill, but I think the hardest ask in the church, honestly, is what you guys do, the K-3. That's super intimidating. It's really difficult, And I think we just disqualify ourselves from the jump, but I don't think we need to. And so I just wanted to hear from you, what made you decide like, yeah, I'm going to take that plunge and go volunteer in that room. Yeah. I think again, just being involved with coaching, you know, coaching different baseball teams and football, I kind of knew what to expect from kids. And I felt like, you know, I could at least teach them. Like I said, Aaron makes it pretty easy on us. She gives you basically a sheet of paper, and as long as you read from it, you can pretty much teach kids a class. For me, I felt like it was almost a way to answer the question of being a disciple making disciples too because I don't feel like I'm ever going to be like a street preacher. I'm not going to go out there, and it's hard to talk to adults, you know, about those situations. But going over there and teaching the kids some of the basic stuff, I just feel like that's a way that you can grow. Just feel like you're, you know, making disciples, somebody else that's hopefully going to grow up and lead this church as well. I love that. I love that a lot. And, Carter, you know, I mean, you guys were here when I got here. Y'all, y'all, y'all been here a long time. You've been serving the whole time that y'all have been here. So it's a part of your DNA and who you are. What is it that makes you continue to serve, continue to come back, continue to sign up and let us put you up on stage and things like that? Like what, what's the joy that you get out of it? Why do you continue to do it? Um, I don't think Aaron would allow me to keep coming to Grace if I didn't serve in the kids ministry. No, we get, I used to teach first grade before I had my oldest son, Cason. So I think that's part of it is selfishly. It's something I do enjoy and I enjoy doing it more for an hour than a nine to five. But we get poured into here every Sunday and it's just a chance to pour into kids. And they are just like little sponges and so excited to be there and so excited to learn and learn about Jesus. They have no hesitation asking hard questions. They have no hesitation expressing their joy through dancing and singing. And they're just genuinely excited to be there. And I find that excitement contagious. And my favorite Sunday to teach back there is Easter Sunday. Oh, wow. Why is that? I mean, I've heard Easter sermons for 30 years. They're pretty good. They're pretty good over here. They're pretty great. The podcast is great. But no, they are so excited. And for some of them, it's their first time hearing it. For some of them, they've heard it for a few years, but each time, something new is clicking for them. The story is unfolding, and they are more excited about the Bible than most of the adults I know. I love that. And last question for you guys. How has God used your opportunities at service, whether it's leading a small group, serving on a leadership team behind the scenes, or serving in the kids? How has God been using that over the years to draw you closer to him and build up your faith? So, I mean, it's for us, obviously, it's been a way to get to know a lot of people in the church. You know, and it's also a way that we feel like, as Carter mentioned, you know, the church pours into us so much. It's a way that we can give back and really help this whole community grow. I mean, we're all here to try and, you know, promote the kingdom. So I feel like it's a way for us to be able to give back. And again, I'm not going to be up on stage doing any preaching anytime soon. So, you know, teaching the kids is a lot easier. Just let me know when you want to. For me, I think teaching takes the focus off of me. It makes me be less self-centered in when I'm getting ready to come to church on Sunday in my prayer life. I'm thinking about the kids, praying for them, praying over what I'm going to be teaching. And so I think any opportunity I can take to be less self-centered is a good one for me spiritually. Well, thank you guys. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming up and for sharing. As we wrap up the morning, just a couple of thoughts. And I say this with some hesitancy because I want to be careful with my words, and I don't want them to be self-serving. That's not my heart at all. But I do think that based on the body passages, body of Christ, spiritual gifts mentioned, he mentioned, Jacob mentioned some in Peter, they're in Romans, they're in Corinthians, they're in Ephesians. They're all over the place. Because we have good works to walk in, because God calls us to be a part of a local church, I don't think it's optional to serve in a local church. And when I say that, I say local church intentionally because I'm not trying to leverage this and the Bible to get you to guiltily serve at grace. But what I can tell you as a pastor and someone who cares about you is, it is God's will for you to be using your gifts to benefit his kingdom. I know that for sure. It is God's will for you to be using the gifts and the talents and the abilities that he gave you to grow his kingdom. Now, many of you are doing that outside the walls of grace, and that's great. I would not reduce serving God and using your gifts to things that can be done here. But I would say that there's a reason that we have partners and we don't have members. Members tend to consume, partners tend to contribute. One of the things I am so humbled by in this church is that it doesn't go with just staff. Unless people are giving of their time, talent, and treasure during the week to sit on elder boards, to sit on committees, to be thoughtful about the church. We have some people because of their professional backgrounds who kind of mentor or pour into or befriend different people on staff. I've watched people in the church come alongside Aaron and begin to help him and give him some advice. I've watched them come alongside Kyle or Aaron Winston or me. And so there's different ways to serve the church and they're not all reduced to this sheet, okay? But here's what I would say. You ought to be doing something. You ought to be doing something to allow God to use the time and the talents and the treasures that he gave you to serve his church and build his kingdom. I don't know why. Well, I would want you to be going to a local church that you love so much that you wanted to partner with them and serve in some way. That's what I would say. Now, what Jacob said is true. And Jacob, the way you said it is better than I said it. We do want grace to be a place for you to heal, but not necessarily to hide. I know that there are people here because I've spoken with you. You have been burned by church. You have been worn out by church. You have been chewed up and spit out and something hurt you or something wore you out or whatever. And this can absolutely be a place to come and rest. But it ought to be restorative rest so that when you're ready to go again, you get going. So I would ask you guys to prayerfully consider, and in a minute I'm going to pray, Tamir's going to come up and give us a little bit more instructions, and then we're going to have a song sung over us while we kind of look over this and think about what we might want to do. Really quickly, if you want to grab this sheet, anything that might not be clear, Worship Team Tech and Production is back there. Those are, besides sound, largely low-skilled jobs, so you can do them, all right? I was joking around with David. David's running the live feed this morning and, uh, there's somebody else here. He's, he's being, he's being, uh, shadowed. Somebody's watching him to make sure that David doesn't mess it up. David runs a software company. So I'm pretty sure he can handle the live stream. And I was joking around with him beforehand. Like, dude, if you get stressed and you need to take a minute and get out of the sound booth, like go ahead. And we were laughing about it. So if you want to get, if you volunteer back there, that's, that's great. You can do that, but that's what the tech and production team is. And it's a vital team that we need greeters and ushers. That's if you're new or you've been coming here for a while, but you're not really plugged in, join one of those teams. It's a great entry point to join one of those teams, start meeting new people. It really doesn't impact your schedule a whole heck of a lot. You get here 15 minutes before you normally would unless you're late all the time, then you need to get here 25 minutes before you normally would and then you don't necessarily have to stay later but you get to meet a bunch of people, learn a bunch of names, shake a bunch of hands. That's a great way to get plugged in and involved. The prayer team is pretty obvious. We send prayer requests out to that. The care team is a big one, too, because we don't want people slipping through the cracks with care. And so the way that care works at Grace is first your small group leader is kind of responsible for you but sometimes people require ongoing care sometimes people are not in a small group sometimes the need is greater than what a small group can provide and we like to have a team that we can call on to go visit people who aren't able to leave their house or where they're living to make some phone calls. We even have a wonderful team of people that serve in something called Stephen Ministry that exists throughout a bunch of churches. And they provide ongoing pastoral care in ways that pastors just simply can't and don't have time for. And there's a whole training process with them. And they do incredible, incredible addition to that things that are not on here we have committees we have a finance committee that helped with the with the money at grace to make sure that everything's happening the way it's supposed to happen we have a personnel committee that serves as kind of the HR department at grace while we're while we're healthy and the staff development department so if you have a background in that, that's a great way to serve. We have a missions committee that determines who we get involved with and what activities we do outside the walls of Grace. So there's different ways that we can help and different things that we can do. But my heart would be, and what I would ask is, if you call Grace home, then prayerfully consider how you might jump in if you're not doing that already. If you call Grace home, take a few minutes right now, and prayerfully consider, God, what would you have me do at the local church where I go, where I can pour myself into? Maybe it's not on here. This sheet is a starting point. Maybe it's something else. Maybe you want to have a conversation about it. That's fine. I'd love to have that conversation. Maybe you can make us a little note on this and tell us what you'd like to talk about or what you think you'd like to offer. That's great too. But if you call Grace home, partner with us, let's work together and let's build God's kingdom together and move this place forward. Let me pray and then Tamera's going to come up and give us some more instructions. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your servants that we got to see this morning and hear from. Thank you for the ones that are doing your work right now so that we could be in here. Thank you for the hands that set up tables and chairs. Thank you for the hands that will be cooking and prepping the meals for us. Thank you for the worship team that's leading us into worship, God. Just thank you for the workers in all the children's rooms who are pouring into our children so that we might be in here and hopefully you're pouring into us. God, we just thank you for this morning. We thank you for grace. We thank you for all that you've done here and all that you are, the way that you're so faithful to us. And God, we pray that in return, we would continue to be faithful to you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, hello. This is the last part of our series in Ephesians. We've been going through Ephesians now for six weeks, so this week we arrive at Ephesians chapter 6. Ephesians chapter 6 is a famous passage. It's got the armor of God starting in verse 10, and that's where we are going to land this week. I've been excited to get here and have thought a lot about the best, most effective way to approach this passage. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn to Ephesians chapter 6. If you don't have a Bible, I would encourage you to grab the one in the seat back in front of you and go ahead and turn there so that you can be looking through the text as we go through it together. I always think it's helpful if we look at it and we process it at the same time in the same way. So as I approach the text this week, I actually, I did the normal research that I do, but I wanted to call a buddy of mine who has some experience in combat. This particular guy did what we see on the movies. He's a special forces guy over in Iraq, Afghanistan. And they would do night raids every night where you drop in, you go into somebody's home or a compound or a building, you have a target and then you have the secondary targets and you try to either eliminate or obtain them. That's the technical term for kill or kidnap them. So you go in and you do that, and that's what they did every night. And then for part of the career, they watch on the screen as the rest of the team does it. It's like the stuff you see in the movies. And so I thought, I want to know what his perspective is on this text. And so I gave him a call, and we talked it through, and I love military stuff. I am too feeble of body to have been effective in it, but I like to hear about other people who are. And so we talked at length about things, and he shared with me two things that I thought would be really helpful for us as we approach this passage. He told me that in a good raid, when you would go in and you've got your target, he's in the house or he's in the compound or whatever it is, and you're bringing these special forces operators to bear on the target, you're trying to obtain the target. I think we kind of picture that in the movies as depicted as a firefight, like you drop in from a helicopter and like everybody's, they're armed and you're armed and you fight your way into the compound and you get the person. But he said really and truly what they would try to do rather than just landing close and letting them know, hey, we're here and inviting the conflict, that what they would try to do whenever they possibly could is drop about six kilometers away from the target and then sneak in, walk in under the cover of night without being detected. And what he told me was an effective raid would end with no shots being fired. That they would get into the compound, into the home, into the building, into the area, and that they would have their primary target and the secondary and the tertiary targets, and everybody would be at gunpoint before the lights would get flipped on, and then the lights get flipped on, and everybody surrenders and go home. His words were, actually, if they decide to resist at that point, that's on them. I thought, well, gosh, I would not resist. But he said those were the best raids, was when there was no shots fired at all, when the enemy didn't even realize that they were in a conflict until they were already captured. I thought that was interesting. I'll tell you why in a minute, but I wanted to talk about this other point that he made too. He said the most dangerous time for him and his teams was actually not the firefight. It was not when they were engaged in combat. They were prepared for that. They had a plan for that. They knew where everybody was going to be. They knew where all the targets were going to be. If the enemy did something, they knew how to counter that. They were ready. They're not worried at all about once they're engaged in conflict. The most dangerous point of any raid for them was actually the approach to the target. Because you don't know while you're approaching the target if they can see you. You don't know if they're about to open up machine guns on you. You don't know if you're about to be under attack. You don't know if you're about to be ambushed. The most dangerous time, he said, was as they were approaching the target. And he actually noticed in his early years of doing this, in the early months of doing this, that as they're approaching the target, he's not really aware of what's around him. His head is already in the compound. He's already at the plan. He's going through, when we get here, I'm going to go to the eastern wall, and we're going to breach this door, and there's going to be this many people, and yada, yada. He's going through this in his mind, but he noticed that the veterans, the guys who had done dozens if not hundreds of these, seemed to be almost talking to themselves the whole way up, concentrating on other things. And he learned that what these guys are doing is they're constantly assessing their surroundings. They're constantly preparing themselves. If we get attacked now, I can duck behind that wall. I can go behind that rock. That car will provide cover. We can return fire from here. They're constantly, every hundred feet, redoing their attack plan and their defense strategy. If we get attacked, if they throw it open on us here, then I'm going to go here, and my men can go here, and we can attack, and then we can counter like this. And in both instances about the plan and the strategy of these raids and the danger encountered in these raids, it occurred to me that the most dangerous time of any conflict is when you don't realize you're in one. The most dangerous time of any conflict is when you don't yet realize that you're in it. Those guys sitting in the compound getting raided, they were trying, the strategy of the U.S. military is to avoid making them aware that they're even in combat until it's too late. Do you see that? A good raid is when there's no shots fired. It's when they don't even know that they are under attack until it's too late for them to do anything about it. They wanted to withhold that information from their opponent for as long as possible because the most dangerous time in any conflict is when you don't know you when you're in it. And then walking to the target. The most dangerous time was that they might be in a conflict before they're ready to be in a conflict. They might be in an ambush. They might throw it open on them before they're ready to be in that conflict. And I thought, oh, how interesting as we think about spiritual warfare, that the most dangerous time of any conflict is when we're in one and we don't realize it. And this, I think, is what Paul is trying to open our eyes to in Ephesians chapter 6. And it's why he writes what he writes. At the end of this letter, he's written this letter to this church, not necessarily to Ephesus, but to the churches surrounding Ephesus, and it ended up camping out in the church of Ephesus. But to many churches, to many early churches, he writes a letter. He describes what salvation is. He says what we do because we're saved. How should we live and how should we live in the home and in the workplace and with our children? And then he finishes up the letter with a warning followed by an encouragement. And the warning has a lot to do with the point that we just made about being unaware of the conflicts that we're in. Look at what he says, beginning in verse 10. We're going to go 10 through 12 right now. Paul writes, finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God. We're going to talk about what that is in a second. That you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. This is such an important verse. Listen to this verse. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Paul is saying, listen, listen, listen, you need to know this. Listen, hey, pay attention. We are in a conflict. We are in a battle. To be born into the world is to be born into the midst of an eternal struggle of good versus evil over God versus Satan. To be born into the world is to be born into a conflict where there are elements warring against and for your very soul. So wake up. We're in a battle. And if the most dangerous point of any conflict is to be in it and not be aware that we are in it. Then what Paul is doing is he's grabbing the church in Ephesus and he's grabbing our attention 2,000 years later and he's going, hey, listen, you need to know. Everything's not okay right now. Everything's not safe right now. You are in a conflict. Whether you know it or not, whether you admit it or not, whether you feel it or not, you are in one. And we don't like to talk about this a lot. We don't like to think about this a lot. I certainly don't like to preach about it a lot. But if we believe that the Bible is true, then we have to believe this uncomfortable truth about our reality, that Satan is real and that he is against you. We don't like thinking about it. We don't like talking about it. No one comes to church going, you know what I hope Nate talks about? The devil. But here's the truth. Satan is real and he is against you. And I would add, he is smarter than you, he has more energy than you, and he is more passionate than you about his goal. And his goal is to hurt God any way he can by tearing people away from his eternal love. And then once you are signed up for his eternal love, once you have received salvation and you have God's love, then his goal is to tear you away and to ruin you from being effective at all at bringing other people into a knowledge of God. It's to make you so ineffective in your faith that you have no impact whatsoever in the kingdom. He is at war against you. This is why Peter says in his letter, 1 Peter 5, at the end, he writes a letter to the church as well. This is just a general epistle that floated around to all of the churches in the ancient world a few years after the death of Jesus. And he finishes his letter the same way. Verse 8 in chapter 5, be sober-minded, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. We've all watched those nature shows, right? You've seen the gazelles out on the Serengeti? They're just like chilling out, munching on grass or whatever it is. And there's a pride of lions in the bushes waiting for the one that they're going to devour. Those gazelles are in a conflict and they don't know it. And their adversary is prowling around waiting to find someone to devour. Incidentally, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's too important to pass up here. Who are the ones that he always gets? Who are the ones that the lions always get? The ones that wander away from the herd. Church, a small group, consistency, and a family of faith, it's important. The further away we wander, the more vulnerable we become. But I thought it was interesting that the two fathers of the early church, I mean the two pillars, the guys, if you were in the early church a couple years after Jesus passed away and then goes back up into heaven, If you're in the early church, you know that Peter's the guy. There's the apostles, but Peter is the leader. He is the leader of the church in Jerusalem. And if you go outside of Jerusalem to any of the churches, Paul is the guy. And both of these pillars of the church wrote a letter to the general churches. And at the end of both of their letters, they both said, wake up. We are in a conflict. We don't like to talk about it. We don't like to think about it. But we exist as physical people in a spiritual realm and there are spiritual forces that are against us. Satan is real and he is against you. And he is smarter than you and he is more dedicated than you. So make no mistake about it. We are in a conflict. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, and this is for Christians and non-Christians alike. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, try to choose purity in this world. Try to choose sexual purity in this world. And tell me that you don't every day feel forces pressing against that. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, try to raise a kid. For these boys that were up here, those of you who have kids who are grown, as you look at the Janczewskis who are up here with their two little boys and all the triumphs and all the trials that are in front of them, try to tell them that they're not in a conflict for the souls of their boys. Listen, when I talk about passages like this, when we encounter passages like this, there's kind of two ways to respond to them. If we believe in that fight or flight doctrine, some of us have in us fight. That when you start talking about conflict, you start talking about fight, you start talking about spiritual warfare. I open up a sermon with talking about special forces in Iraq. Some of us in the room are like, I'm in, let's go. What you got? Some of us like that stuff. There's others of us in the room who are a little bit more like my wife. She's sweet, man. Fighting, that's not her thing. Conflict, that's not how she does. I start talking about spiritual warfare, she's like, nah, you have fun with your warfare. But here's the thing. She's in just as much of a conflict as I am. This isn't just for a select few. Whether this passage speaks your language or it doesn't, whether you are fierce or whether you are timid, whether you fight or whether you would choose flight, wherever you are on any of the spectrums, be very clear, we exist in a conflict and Satan himself is warring against your marriage. He is warring against your children. He is warring against your friends. He is warring against your family. He is warring against the things that you love the most and his goal is to steal your life from you and to make you as ineffective as possible by catching you up and all the entrapments of the world so that you do nothing for the kingdom. If you hear nothing else this morning, please don't leave here. Wandering through the field, eating grass like a gazelle, unaware that you're in a conflict. As I thought about this passage as your pastor, I wondered, including me, how many times do we sit at home flicking through our phone while there is a night raid being planned against us? We are in a conflict. And because we are, Paul finishes the passage. What do we do? Because we're in a conflict, because it exists, because Satan is real and he is against us, because he's prowling about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, what do we do? Well, the rest of the passage gives us the answer. In verse 13, he starts it out. He says, therefore. Now, hopefully you've heard me say this before. A little bit of biblical interpretation. This is high-level graduate school stuff. Whenever you see a therefore in Scripture, you have to ask, what's it there for? I know, it's very technical. What did he just say that allows him to say what he's going to say? So what this therefore means is, because you're in a battle, here's what you need to do. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand firm, stand therefore. Having fastened on the belt of truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, He finishes by saying, praying at all times. So if we're in a battle for our marriages, for our families, for our children, for our friends, for our very souls, if we are in a battle, what do we do? We put on the whole armor of God. And I've seen a lot of people go through and break down each element. What's the belt of truth? And what's the helmet of salvation? And what's the shield of faith and the breastplate of righteousness? And we could do that, but I would just make two points about that. It's boring. And ultimately, it's not super helpful. What we need to know, those are the defensive elements of God's armor. And what we need to know about them is that the defensive elements, the armor that we put on to protect us from the onslaught of the devil is essentially salvation. It's the idea of clothing ourself in salvation. If you want to look back at each one of the elements, they're an element of salvation or something that comes to us as a result of salvation or something that is required so that we can receive salvation. But it's this idea of if we are going to stand firm, because we are in a conflict, what do we do? We clothe ourself in the salvation that God offers us, and we stand firm. I love at the beginning it says, when you have done everything you can to stand, stand therefore. Stay. And I've always pictured in my mind, I don't know how your mind works as I've thought about this passage, I've always pictured this weathered soldier as I think about a mature believer who just stands there with the shield of faith decked out in armor and the evil one is sending the flaming darts towards them and they just weather it. They're just a bulwark in the storm of conflict, and they will not back down, and they will not retreat, and they just stand there, and they take it. That's what I've always pictured. And then I talked to my buddy about this passage, and I said, when you read this passage as a soldier, what do you see? And he said, you know, it's interesting as I read it this week that the only thing I was really interested in was the weapon. He said, as a soldier, when he looks at this and it gets to the armor part, he's like, yeah, that's great, that's great. What's my weapon? What can I fight with? He said, in the special forces, they keep talking about building these like Iron Man suits that make you like impenetrable or whatever, like a juggernaut on the battlefield. And that nobody in special forces is really that interested in these because they don't care. That's not about defending ourselves. It's about what's my weapon and how do I attack the enemy? And he went through a couple of doctrines of attack of the United States military. And the commonality that they had is when you get in a conflict, the best defense is a good offense. When you get in a conflict, the thing you're trying to do as quickly as you can is attack, attack, attack. We do not stand there. They're not just standing there taking it, just weathering the storm of bullets. They attack as quickly and as forcefully as they can. So when he reads this, he wants to know, what's my weapon? How do I go on offense? How do I attack the person who's attacking me? I loved that. That changed my paradigm for me. Because so often I had this picture of the Christian life of somebody who just stands there on the hill, weathering the throes of the evil one, weathering the battle, just standing there as a bulwark and being defensive in this posture of, I will not move, waiting on Jesus. But that's not the picture that the word of God paints. And that's not the picture that my military friend has in his head because there's a weapon here with which we can attack and beat back the attacks of the evil one. It's similar to the wording that Jesus uses when he announces his church. When Peter says, you are Jesus, the son of the living God. And Peter says, yes, you are Peter. And on this rock, I will build my church. And we know that part, but what comes after that? And the gates of hell will not overcome it. The gates are not offensive, they are defensive. Jesus paints this picture of his church forcefully attacking the powers of evil. And so for me, it changed the way I think about what a successful soldier looks like. A successful soldier in this conflict is not one that just sits back and holds up the shield of faith and weathers the storm. It is one that presses forward and attacks. So he wanted to know, in this armor, what's my weapon? What do I get? Our weapon, according to the text, is God's word. The sword of the spirit, which is God's word, is what Paul says. Our weapon, what we use to beat back the attacks of evil against us and our families and our loved ones? Our weapon is God's word. And so to me, the question becomes, why is this the weapon? What's so effective about God's word? And so you can look at the claims that God's word makes about itself. In Hebrews, we're told that the word of God is living and active. It's sharper than any two-edged sword, that it penetrates soul and spirit, bone and marrow. Jesus tells us that God's word will not return null and void. There is this power and efficacy to it. But as I thought about it on a practical level, there's plenty of reasons why God's word is the most effective possible weapon against the schemes of the evil one. But there's two that I wanted to highlight this morning. The first is that God's word speaks eternal certainty, eternal truth into temporal uncertainty. God's word speaks eternal truth into temporal uncertainty. If there are forces working against us, then one of the things that they want to do is to shake our faith, is to make us feel like the world is spinning around and there's nothing that can be done about it. Everything's going to hell in a handbasket. This place is getting worse and worse. This is spiraling out of control. I don't know how this just this last week. Last Friday, we had our very first parent-teacher conference. Lily, our daughter, is going to turn four in January, and she's in preschool, and we had our very first teacher conference. Jen was very excited to go, and she said, I'm so nervous about what they're going to say about Lily. I'm like, she's three. I can say anything that matters. Like, it's whatever. And so she goes, and she's got this sweet teacher named Michelle. And Michelle has really, really short hair because we learned that Michelle is a cancer survivor, and now she's fighting cancer again. And so when Jen went, she shared with Michelle that she was about to run home. Michelle says, oh, why are you doing that? And she said, well, my dad has cancer and he's going to get a scan and I want to be home for that. And so then Michelle shared her story. And as Michelle shared her story and empathized with Jen and understood in this unique way what her family is going through, they began to cry together. And into those tears, Michelle began to share verses off the top of her head that had helped her in her journey and that strengthened Jen in that moment. She spoke eternal truth into temporary uncertainty. And then, as they began to talk about Lily, which it turns out that Lily excels at most things that preschoolers should excel at. She has a hard time holding scissors. So if you see her trying to hold scissors, please don't make any jokes. She's very sensitive. But then they started talking about Lily and all the things where she, all the ways that she's good and all the ways where she can grow. And for everyone, Jen told me as she was recounting the conversation to me, she said, Nate, for every one of these, Michelle, she had a passage to go with it. And she wasn't looking at notes. She was just speaking truth out of God's word over Lily and what was going on. She just breathed scripture. She said, Nate, I want to be like that. And as a dad and a husband, I'll try to keep it together and not get choked up. I am so grateful that there is a woman who is in the conflict, who has sharpened her sword, and who is swinging it on my family's behalf. She's speaking truth into my wife and strengthening her against the enemy. She's speaking truth over my daughter and protecting her against the onslaughts there. Because at some point in her life, she has dedicated herself to sharpening her sword so that it's ready for the battle. At one point or another, she realized that her battle is not against flesh and blood. It's against the spiritual forces in the heavenly places that would seek to tear us away from our God. And so she's awake, and she's standing firm, and she's swinging her sword in that instance for my family. And I'm grateful for that. That's why it's the best weapon. It's also the best weapon. We see this in the life of Christ. I'm gonna get my act together now. It's the best weapon because it overpowers the strength of temptation. I believe that there is something supernaturally powerful. I think that there is something supernatural that happens when we speak God's word into temptation. When we face these moments of trial where we want to go one direction and we can call up a portion of scripture that encourages us to go in the other direction. Jesus exhibited this in his 40 days of fasting at the beginning of his ministry. He fasted for 40 days in the desert. At the end of those 40 days, Satan, the adversary, appeared to him and tempted him in three different ways. And all three times, based on my old understanding of the passage in Ephesians, I would expect Jesus to clothe himself in his own righteousness and just stand there and take the temptation as the onslaught comes. But that's not what he does. He returns, he attacks with the sword of the spirit with God's word in all three instances. Rather than standing there and taking it and weathering it, he returns fire with the word of God that overpowers the strength of that temptation, and the enemy goes away. He quotes scripture to temptation. I've seen this in my own life. I don't very often like to set up myself as the example, but I saw this in my life when I was going through memorizing Romans chapter 8. A couple years ago, I just decided that I wanted to memorize Romans chapter eight. And so by God's grace, I was successful at doing that. But when you commit yourself to memorizing an entire chapter of God's word, it runs in your head all the time, whether you want it there or not. The way that I did it is I used my car rides. I had YouVersion up on my phone and and then at stoplights, I would read as much of the passage that I could, and then in between stoplights, I would try to say it back to myself. So it was playing all the time in my head. And during that season of life, I can't tell you how many times something came up, and I went, that reminds me of verse 13. That reminds me of verse 27. That reminds me of verse 39. I can't tell you how many times it came up where that was all of a sudden relevant again to what I was dealing with in life. I can't tell you how many times I was able to speak the truth of that passage against temptation so that I was no longer interested. And with God's word rolling in your head and in your heart all the time, you become far less easy to tempt. That's why we're told to hide God's word in our heart that we might not sin against God. And I love this truth because you've heard me many times as your pastor say that the most important habit any of us can develop in life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And it is just reinforced all the more this week as I encounter this text. The most important habit we can have is to spend up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer, clothe ourself in our salvation, ground ourself in our salvation, focus on God in prayer, and sharpen your sword. Because you don't know when you're going to have to swing it. You don't know what conflict is coming. There's no announcement about, hey, there's going to be a temptation today. Hey, you and your wife are going to get into a fight today. Hey, your kid's going to deal with something tough today. Hey, you're going to get a really hard phone call today. We don't get warnings about those. And we don't know when the onslaught's coming, but there is a night raid being planned. So we sharpen our sword. So I want to finish with the encouragement today. Threefold. Wake up. We're in a conflict. It is happening all around us, whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we're even comfortable with it or not, it's happening. Stand firm. Persevere. Why do you think at every turn in scripture that the encouragement of the apostles is to persevere, persevere, persevere, persevere? Why do you think that they hold up perseverance as this great thing to be attained? Why do you think that when Paul is ready to end his life, he says, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith. Why do you think we are told to run the race to win it? Why do you think it says, once you have done everything you can to stand, then stand some more. Stand firm. Persevere in your faith. Life is long. Cling to your salvation. And then sharpen your sword. Be a student of this word. Swing it for the people in your life. Know it well to keep yourself clean. And then go fight for others as we advance as God's army. And here's the promise. Here's what I love. This is not fatalistic at all. We don't just stand there and weather it. We push forward and we fight. And if we do this faithfully, if we stand firm, if we wake up and we stand firm and we sharpen our sword and we swing it when life requires it of us, we will win this battle one day because in Revelation chapter 19, Jesus is coming back. And when he comes back, he's not coming as a lamb of God. He's coming as a lion of Judah and he's coming to wreck shop and he's gonna win this conflict. And so we fight until he gets here. Wake up, stand firm, sharpen your sword. Let's pray. Father, you're a good God. You love us so much. God, I pray that we would feel you empowering us. I pray that we would allow you to wake us up to the reality of what's happening around us. Give us the strength to persevere, to stand firm, to cling to our faith and our salvation. Give us the discipline to sharpen our sword. Help us be ready to swing it when we need to. God, I just pray over all the conflicts and all the battles and all the fights that are going on in this room, all the raids being planned and all the places that Satan is prowling. God, I pray that you would help the people in this room fight, that we would fight for the people around us, that we would feel the strength of your salvation and the joy of your spirit.

Well, hello. This is the last part of our series in Ephesians. We've been going through Ephesians now for six weeks, so this week we arrive at Ephesians chapter 6. Ephesians chapter 6 is a famous passage. It's got the armor of God starting in verse 10, and that's where we are going to land this week. I've been excited to get here and have thought a lot about the best, most effective way to approach this passage. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn to Ephesians chapter 6. If you don't have a Bible, I would encourage you to grab the one in the seat back in front of you and go ahead and turn there so that you can be looking through the text as we go through it together. I always think it's helpful if we look at it and we process it at the same time in the same way. So as I approach the text this week, I actually, I did the normal research that I do, but I wanted to call a buddy of mine who has some experience in combat. This particular guy did what we see on the movies. He's a special forces guy over in Iraq, Afghanistan. And they would do night raids every night where you drop in, you go into somebody's home or a compound or a building, you have a target and then you have the secondary targets and you try to either eliminate or obtain them. That's the technical term for kill or kidnap them. So you go in and you do that, and that's what they did every night. And then for part of the career, they watch on the screen as the rest of the team does it. It's like the stuff you see in the movies. And so I thought, I want to know what his perspective is on this text. And so I gave him a call, and we talked it through, and I love military stuff. I am too feeble of body to have been effective in it, but I like to hear about other people who are. And so we talked at length about things, and he shared with me two things that I thought would be really helpful for us as we approach this passage. He told me that in a good raid, when you would go in and you've got your target, he's in the house or he's in the compound or whatever it is, and you're bringing these special forces operators to bear on the target, you're trying to obtain the target. I think we kind of picture that in the movies as depicted as a firefight, like you drop in from a helicopter and like everybody's, they're armed and you're armed and you fight your way into the compound and you get the person. But he said really and truly what they would try to do rather than just landing close and letting them know, hey, we're here and inviting the conflict, that what they would try to do whenever they possibly could is drop about six kilometers away from the target and then sneak in, walk in under the cover of night without being detected. And what he told me was an effective raid would end with no shots being fired. That they would get into the compound, into the home, into the building, into the area, and that they would have their primary target and the secondary and the tertiary targets, and everybody would be at gunpoint before the lights would get flipped on, and then the lights get flipped on, and everybody surrenders and go home. His words were, actually, if they decide to resist at that point, that's on them. I thought, well, gosh, I would not resist. But he said those were the best raids, was when there was no shots fired at all, when the enemy didn't even realize that they were in a conflict until they were already captured. I thought that was interesting. I'll tell you why in a minute, but I wanted to talk about this other point that he made too. He said the most dangerous time for him and his teams was actually not the firefight. It was not when they were engaged in combat. They were prepared for that. They had a plan for that. They knew where everybody was going to be. They knew where all the targets were going to be. If the enemy did something, they knew how to counter that. They were ready. They're not worried at all about once they're engaged in conflict. The most dangerous point of any raid for them was actually the approach to the target. Because you don't know while you're approaching the target if they can see you. You don't know if they're about to open up machine guns on you. You don't know if you're about to be under attack. You don't know if you're about to be ambushed. The most dangerous time, he said, was as they were approaching the target. And he actually noticed in his early years of doing this, in the early months of doing this, that as they're approaching the target, he's not really aware of what's around him. His head is already in the compound. He's already at the plan. He's going through, when we get here, I'm going to go to the eastern wall, and we're going to breach this door, and there's going to be this many people, and yada, yada. He's going through this in his mind, but he noticed that the veterans, the guys who had done dozens if not hundreds of these, seemed to be almost talking to themselves the whole way up, concentrating on other things. And he learned that what these guys are doing is they're constantly assessing their surroundings. They're constantly preparing themselves. If we get attacked now, I can duck behind that wall. I can go behind that rock. That car will provide cover. We can return fire from here. They're constantly, every hundred feet, redoing their attack plan and their defense strategy. If we get attacked, if they throw it open on us here, then I'm going to go here, and my men can go here, and we can attack, and then we can counter like this. And in both instances about the plan and the strategy of these raids and the danger encountered in these raids, it occurred to me that the most dangerous time of any conflict is when you don't realize you're in one. The most dangerous time of any conflict is when you don't yet realize that you're in it. Those guys sitting in the compound getting raided, they were trying, the strategy of the U.S. military is to avoid making them aware that they're even in combat until it's too late. Do you see that? A good raid is when there's no shots fired. It's when they don't even know that they are under attack until it's too late for them to do anything about it. They wanted to withhold that information from their opponent for as long as possible because the most dangerous time in any conflict is when you don't know you when you're in it. And then walking to the target. The most dangerous time was that they might be in a conflict before they're ready to be in a conflict. They might be in an ambush. They might throw it open on them before they're ready to be in that conflict. And I thought, oh, how interesting as we think about spiritual warfare, that the most dangerous time of any conflict is when we're in one and we don't realize it. And this, I think, is what Paul is trying to open our eyes to in Ephesians chapter 6. And it's why he writes what he writes. At the end of this letter, he's written this letter to this church, not necessarily to Ephesus, but to the churches surrounding Ephesus, and it ended up camping out in the church of Ephesus. But to many churches, to many early churches, he writes a letter. He describes what salvation is. He says what we do because we're saved. How should we live and how should we live in the home and in the workplace and with our children? And then he finishes up the letter with a warning followed by an encouragement. And the warning has a lot to do with the point that we just made about being unaware of the conflicts that we're in. Look at what he says, beginning in verse 10. We're going to go 10 through 12 right now. Paul writes, finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God. We're going to talk about what that is in a second. That you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. This is such an important verse. Listen to this verse. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Paul is saying, listen, listen, listen, you need to know this. Listen, hey, pay attention. We are in a conflict. We are in a battle. To be born into the world is to be born into the midst of an eternal struggle of good versus evil over God versus Satan. To be born into the world is to be born into a conflict where there are elements warring against and for your very soul. So wake up. We're in a battle. And if the most dangerous point of any conflict is to be in it and not be aware that we are in it. Then what Paul is doing is he's grabbing the church in Ephesus and he's grabbing our attention 2,000 years later and he's going, hey, listen, you need to know. Everything's not okay right now. Everything's not safe right now. You are in a conflict. Whether you know it or not, whether you admit it or not, whether you feel it or not, you are in one. And we don't like to talk about this a lot. We don't like to think about this a lot. I certainly don't like to preach about it a lot. But if we believe that the Bible is true, then we have to believe this uncomfortable truth about our reality, that Satan is real and that he is against you. We don't like thinking about it. We don't like talking about it. No one comes to church going, you know what I hope Nate talks about? The devil. But here's the truth. Satan is real and he is against you. And I would add, he is smarter than you, he has more energy than you, and he is more passionate than you about his goal. And his goal is to hurt God any way he can by tearing people away from his eternal love. And then once you are signed up for his eternal love, once you have received salvation and you have God's love, then his goal is to tear you away and to ruin you from being effective at all at bringing other people into a knowledge of God. It's to make you so ineffective in your faith that you have no impact whatsoever in the kingdom. He is at war against you. This is why Peter says in his letter, 1 Peter 5, at the end, he writes a letter to the church as well. This is just a general epistle that floated around to all of the churches in the ancient world a few years after the death of Jesus. And he finishes his letter the same way. Verse 8 in chapter 5, be sober-minded, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. We've all watched those nature shows, right? You've seen the gazelles out on the Serengeti? They're just like chilling out, munching on grass or whatever it is. And there's a pride of lions in the bushes waiting for the one that they're going to devour. Those gazelles are in a conflict and they don't know it. And their adversary is prowling around waiting to find someone to devour. Incidentally, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's too important to pass up here. Who are the ones that he always gets? Who are the ones that the lions always get? The ones that wander away from the herd. Church, a small group, consistency, and a family of faith, it's important. The further away we wander, the more vulnerable we become. But I thought it was interesting that the two fathers of the early church, I mean the two pillars, the guys, if you were in the early church a couple years after Jesus passed away and then goes back up into heaven, If you're in the early church, you know that Peter's the guy. There's the apostles, but Peter is the leader. He is the leader of the church in Jerusalem. And if you go outside of Jerusalem to any of the churches, Paul is the guy. And both of these pillars of the church wrote a letter to the general churches. And at the end of both of their letters, they both said, wake up. We are in a conflict. We don't like to talk about it. We don't like to think about it. But we exist as physical people in a spiritual realm and there are spiritual forces that are against us. Satan is real and he is against you. And he is smarter than you and he is more dedicated than you. So make no mistake about it. We are in a conflict. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, and this is for Christians and non-Christians alike. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, try to choose purity in this world. Try to choose sexual purity in this world. And tell me that you don't every day feel forces pressing against that. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, try to raise a kid. For these boys that were up here, those of you who have kids who are grown, as you look at the Janczewskis who are up here with their two little boys and all the triumphs and all the trials that are in front of them, try to tell them that they're not in a conflict for the souls of their boys. Listen, when I talk about passages like this, when we encounter passages like this, there's kind of two ways to respond to them. If we believe in that fight or flight doctrine, some of us have in us fight. That when you start talking about conflict, you start talking about fight, you start talking about spiritual warfare. I open up a sermon with talking about special forces in Iraq. Some of us in the room are like, I'm in, let's go. What you got? Some of us like that stuff. There's others of us in the room who are a little bit more like my wife. She's sweet, man. Fighting, that's not her thing. Conflict, that's not how she does. I start talking about spiritual warfare, she's like, nah, you have fun with your warfare. But here's the thing. She's in just as much of a conflict as I am. This isn't just for a select few. Whether this passage speaks your language or it doesn't, whether you are fierce or whether you are timid, whether you fight or whether you would choose flight, wherever you are on any of the spectrums, be very clear, we exist in a conflict and Satan himself is warring against your marriage. He is warring against your children. He is warring against your friends. He is warring against your family. He is warring against the things that you love the most and his goal is to steal your life from you and to make you as ineffective as possible by catching you up and all the entrapments of the world so that you do nothing for the kingdom. If you hear nothing else this morning, please don't leave here. Wandering through the field, eating grass like a gazelle, unaware that you're in a conflict. As I thought about this passage as your pastor, I wondered, including me, how many times do we sit at home flicking through our phone while there is a night raid being planned against us? We are in a conflict. And because we are, Paul finishes the passage. What do we do? Because we're in a conflict, because it exists, because Satan is real and he is against us, because he's prowling about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, what do we do? Well, the rest of the passage gives us the answer. In verse 13, he starts it out. He says, therefore. Now, hopefully you've heard me say this before. A little bit of biblical interpretation. This is high-level graduate school stuff. Whenever you see a therefore in Scripture, you have to ask, what's it there for? I know, it's very technical. What did he just say that allows him to say what he's going to say? So what this therefore means is, because you're in a battle, here's what you need to do. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand firm, stand therefore. Having fastened on the belt of truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, He finishes by saying, praying at all times. So if we're in a battle for our marriages, for our families, for our children, for our friends, for our very souls, if we are in a battle, what do we do? We put on the whole armor of God. And I've seen a lot of people go through and break down each element. What's the belt of truth? And what's the helmet of salvation? And what's the shield of faith and the breastplate of righteousness? And we could do that, but I would just make two points about that. It's boring. And ultimately, it's not super helpful. What we need to know, those are the defensive elements of God's armor. And what we need to know about them is that the defensive elements, the armor that we put on to protect us from the onslaught of the devil is essentially salvation. It's the idea of clothing ourself in salvation. If you want to look back at each one of the elements, they're an element of salvation or something that comes to us as a result of salvation or something that is required so that we can receive salvation. But it's this idea of if we are going to stand firm, because we are in a conflict, what do we do? We clothe ourself in the salvation that God offers us, and we stand firm. I love at the beginning it says, when you have done everything you can to stand, stand therefore. Stay. And I've always pictured in my mind, I don't know how your mind works as I've thought about this passage, I've always pictured this weathered soldier as I think about a mature believer who just stands there with the shield of faith decked out in armor and the evil one is sending the flaming darts towards them and they just weather it. They're just a bulwark in the storm of conflict, and they will not back down, and they will not retreat, and they just stand there, and they take it. That's what I've always pictured. And then I talked to my buddy about this passage, and I said, when you read this passage as a soldier, what do you see? And he said, you know, it's interesting as I read it this week that the only thing I was really interested in was the weapon. He said, as a soldier, when he looks at this and it gets to the armor part, he's like, yeah, that's great, that's great. What's my weapon? What can I fight with? He said, in the special forces, they keep talking about building these like Iron Man suits that make you like impenetrable or whatever, like a juggernaut on the battlefield. And that nobody in special forces is really that interested in these because they don't care. That's not about defending ourselves. It's about what's my weapon and how do I attack the enemy? And he went through a couple of doctrines of attack of the United States military. And the commonality that they had is when you get in a conflict, the best defense is a good offense. When you get in a conflict, the thing you're trying to do as quickly as you can is attack, attack, attack. We do not stand there. They're not just standing there taking it, just weathering the storm of bullets. They attack as quickly and as forcefully as they can. So when he reads this, he wants to know, what's my weapon? How do I go on offense? How do I attack the person who's attacking me? I loved that. That changed my paradigm for me. Because so often I had this picture of the Christian life of somebody who just stands there on the hill, weathering the throes of the evil one, weathering the battle, just standing there as a bulwark and being defensive in this posture of, I will not move, waiting on Jesus. But that's not the picture that the word of God paints. And that's not the picture that my military friend has in his head because there's a weapon here with which we can attack and beat back the attacks of the evil one. It's similar to the wording that Jesus uses when he announces his church. When Peter says, you are Jesus, the son of the living God. And Peter says, yes, you are Peter. And on this rock, I will build my church. And we know that part, but what comes after that? And the gates of hell will not overcome it. The gates are not offensive, they are defensive. Jesus paints this picture of his church forcefully attacking the powers of evil. And so for me, it changed the way I think about what a successful soldier looks like. A successful soldier in this conflict is not one that just sits back and holds up the shield of faith and weathers the storm. It is one that presses forward and attacks. So he wanted to know, in this armor, what's my weapon? What do I get? Our weapon, according to the text, is God's word. The sword of the spirit, which is God's word, is what Paul says. Our weapon, what we use to beat back the attacks of evil against us and our families and our loved ones? Our weapon is God's word. And so to me, the question becomes, why is this the weapon? What's so effective about God's word? And so you can look at the claims that God's word makes about itself. In Hebrews, we're told that the word of God is living and active. It's sharper than any two-edged sword, that it penetrates soul and spirit, bone and marrow. Jesus tells us that God's word will not return null and void. There is this power and efficacy to it. But as I thought about it on a practical level, there's plenty of reasons why God's word is the most effective possible weapon against the schemes of the evil one. But there's two that I wanted to highlight this morning. The first is that God's word speaks eternal certainty, eternal truth into temporal uncertainty. God's word speaks eternal truth into temporal uncertainty. If there are forces working against us, then one of the things that they want to do is to shake our faith, is to make us feel like the world is spinning around and there's nothing that can be done about it. Everything's going to hell in a handbasket. This place is getting worse and worse. This is spiraling out of control. I don't know how this just this last week. Last Friday, we had our very first parent-teacher conference. Lily, our daughter, is going to turn four in January, and she's in preschool, and we had our very first teacher conference. Jen was very excited to go, and she said, I'm so nervous about what they're going to say about Lily. I'm like, she's three. I can say anything that matters. Like, it's whatever. And so she goes, and she's got this sweet teacher named Michelle. And Michelle has really, really short hair because we learned that Michelle is a cancer survivor, and now she's fighting cancer again. And so when Jen went, she shared with Michelle that she was about to run home. Michelle says, oh, why are you doing that? And she said, well, my dad has cancer and he's going to get a scan and I want to be home for that. And so then Michelle shared her story. And as Michelle shared her story and empathized with Jen and understood in this unique way what her family is going through, they began to cry together. And into those tears, Michelle began to share verses off the top of her head that had helped her in her journey and that strengthened Jen in that moment. She spoke eternal truth into temporary uncertainty. And then, as they began to talk about Lily, which it turns out that Lily excels at most things that preschoolers should excel at. She has a hard time holding scissors. So if you see her trying to hold scissors, please don't make any jokes. She's very sensitive. But then they started talking about Lily and all the things where she, all the ways that she's good and all the ways where she can grow. And for everyone, Jen told me as she was recounting the conversation to me, she said, Nate, for every one of these, Michelle, she had a passage to go with it. And she wasn't looking at notes. She was just speaking truth out of God's word over Lily and what was going on. She just breathed scripture. She said, Nate, I want to be like that. And as a dad and a husband, I'll try to keep it together and not get choked up. I am so grateful that there is a woman who is in the conflict, who has sharpened her sword, and who is swinging it on my family's behalf. She's speaking truth into my wife and strengthening her against the enemy. She's speaking truth over my daughter and protecting her against the onslaughts there. Because at some point in her life, she has dedicated herself to sharpening her sword so that it's ready for the battle. At one point or another, she realized that her battle is not against flesh and blood. It's against the spiritual forces in the heavenly places that would seek to tear us away from our God. And so she's awake, and she's standing firm, and she's swinging her sword in that instance for my family. And I'm grateful for that. That's why it's the best weapon. It's also the best weapon. We see this in the life of Christ. I'm gonna get my act together now. It's the best weapon because it overpowers the strength of temptation. I believe that there is something supernaturally powerful. I think that there is something supernatural that happens when we speak God's word into temptation. When we face these moments of trial where we want to go one direction and we can call up a portion of scripture that encourages us to go in the other direction. Jesus exhibited this in his 40 days of fasting at the beginning of his ministry. He fasted for 40 days in the desert. At the end of those 40 days, Satan, the adversary, appeared to him and tempted him in three different ways. And all three times, based on my old understanding of the passage in Ephesians, I would expect Jesus to clothe himself in his own righteousness and just stand there and take the temptation as the onslaught comes. But that's not what he does. He returns, he attacks with the sword of the spirit with God's word in all three instances. Rather than standing there and taking it and weathering it, he returns fire with the word of God that overpowers the strength of that temptation, and the enemy goes away. He quotes scripture to temptation. I've seen this in my own life. I don't very often like to set up myself as the example, but I saw this in my life when I was going through memorizing Romans chapter 8. A couple years ago, I just decided that I wanted to memorize Romans chapter eight. And so by God's grace, I was successful at doing that. But when you commit yourself to memorizing an entire chapter of God's word, it runs in your head all the time, whether you want it there or not. The way that I did it is I used my car rides. I had YouVersion up on my phone and and then at stoplights, I would read as much of the passage that I could, and then in between stoplights, I would try to say it back to myself. So it was playing all the time in my head. And during that season of life, I can't tell you how many times something came up, and I went, that reminds me of verse 13. That reminds me of verse 27. That reminds me of verse 39. I can't tell you how many times it came up where that was all of a sudden relevant again to what I was dealing with in life. I can't tell you how many times I was able to speak the truth of that passage against temptation so that I was no longer interested. And with God's word rolling in your head and in your heart all the time, you become far less easy to tempt. That's why we're told to hide God's word in our heart that we might not sin against God. And I love this truth because you've heard me many times as your pastor say that the most important habit any of us can develop in life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And it is just reinforced all the more this week as I encounter this text. The most important habit we can have is to spend up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer, clothe ourself in our salvation, ground ourself in our salvation, focus on God in prayer, and sharpen your sword. Because you don't know when you're going to have to swing it. You don't know what conflict is coming. There's no announcement about, hey, there's going to be a temptation today. Hey, you and your wife are going to get into a fight today. Hey, your kid's going to deal with something tough today. Hey, you're going to get a really hard phone call today. We don't get warnings about those. And we don't know when the onslaught's coming, but there is a night raid being planned. So we sharpen our sword. So I want to finish with the encouragement today. Threefold. Wake up. We're in a conflict. It is happening all around us, whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we're even comfortable with it or not, it's happening. Stand firm. Persevere. Why do you think at every turn in scripture that the encouragement of the apostles is to persevere, persevere, persevere, persevere? Why do you think that they hold up perseverance as this great thing to be attained? Why do you think that when Paul is ready to end his life, he says, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith. Why do you think we are told to run the race to win it? Why do you think it says, once you have done everything you can to stand, then stand some more. Stand firm. Persevere in your faith. Life is long. Cling to your salvation. And then sharpen your sword. Be a student of this word. Swing it for the people in your life. Know it well to keep yourself clean. And then go fight for others as we advance as God's army. And here's the promise. Here's what I love. This is not fatalistic at all. We don't just stand there and weather it. We push forward and we fight. And if we do this faithfully, if we stand firm, if we wake up and we stand firm and we sharpen our sword and we swing it when life requires it of us, we will win this battle one day because in Revelation chapter 19, Jesus is coming back. And when he comes back, he's not coming as a lamb of God. He's coming as a lion of Judah and he's coming to wreck shop and he's gonna win this conflict. And so we fight until he gets here. Wake up, stand firm, sharpen your sword. Let's pray. Father, you're a good God. You love us so much. God, I pray that we would feel you empowering us. I pray that we would allow you to wake us up to the reality of what's happening around us. Give us the strength to persevere, to stand firm, to cling to our faith and our salvation. Give us the discipline to sharpen our sword. Help us be ready to swing it when we need to. God, I just pray over all the conflicts and all the battles and all the fights that are going on in this room, all the raids being planned and all the places that Satan is prowling. God, I pray that you would help the people in this room fight, that we would fight for the people around us, that we would feel the strength of your salvation and the joy of your spirit.

Well, hello. This is the last part of our series in Ephesians. We've been going through Ephesians now for six weeks, so this week we arrive at Ephesians chapter 6. Ephesians chapter 6 is a famous passage. It's got the armor of God starting in verse 10, and that's where we are going to land this week. I've been excited to get here and have thought a lot about the best, most effective way to approach this passage. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn to Ephesians chapter 6. If you don't have a Bible, I would encourage you to grab the one in the seat back in front of you and go ahead and turn there so that you can be looking through the text as we go through it together. I always think it's helpful if we look at it and we process it at the same time in the same way. So as I approach the text this week, I actually, I did the normal research that I do, but I wanted to call a buddy of mine who has some experience in combat. This particular guy did what we see on the movies. He's a special forces guy over in Iraq, Afghanistan. And they would do night raids every night where you drop in, you go into somebody's home or a compound or a building, you have a target and then you have the secondary targets and you try to either eliminate or obtain them. That's the technical term for kill or kidnap them. So you go in and you do that, and that's what they did every night. And then for part of the career, they watch on the screen as the rest of the team does it. It's like the stuff you see in the movies. And so I thought, I want to know what his perspective is on this text. And so I gave him a call, and we talked it through, and I love military stuff. I am too feeble of body to have been effective in it, but I like to hear about other people who are. And so we talked at length about things, and he shared with me two things that I thought would be really helpful for us as we approach this passage. He told me that in a good raid, when you would go in and you've got your target, he's in the house or he's in the compound or whatever it is, and you're bringing these special forces operators to bear on the target, you're trying to obtain the target. I think we kind of picture that in the movies as depicted as a firefight, like you drop in from a helicopter and like everybody's, they're armed and you're armed and you fight your way into the compound and you get the person. But he said really and truly what they would try to do rather than just landing close and letting them know, hey, we're here and inviting the conflict, that what they would try to do whenever they possibly could is drop about six kilometers away from the target and then sneak in, walk in under the cover of night without being detected. And what he told me was an effective raid would end with no shots being fired. That they would get into the compound, into the home, into the building, into the area, and that they would have their primary target and the secondary and the tertiary targets, and everybody would be at gunpoint before the lights would get flipped on, and then the lights get flipped on, and everybody surrenders and go home. His words were, actually, if they decide to resist at that point, that's on them. I thought, well, gosh, I would not resist. But he said those were the best raids, was when there was no shots fired at all, when the enemy didn't even realize that they were in a conflict until they were already captured. I thought that was interesting. I'll tell you why in a minute, but I wanted to talk about this other point that he made too. He said the most dangerous time for him and his teams was actually not the firefight. It was not when they were engaged in combat. They were prepared for that. They had a plan for that. They knew where everybody was going to be. They knew where all the targets were going to be. If the enemy did something, they knew how to counter that. They were ready. They're not worried at all about once they're engaged in conflict. The most dangerous point of any raid for them was actually the approach to the target. Because you don't know while you're approaching the target if they can see you. You don't know if they're about to open up machine guns on you. You don't know if you're about to be under attack. You don't know if you're about to be ambushed. The most dangerous time, he said, was as they were approaching the target. And he actually noticed in his early years of doing this, in the early months of doing this, that as they're approaching the target, he's not really aware of what's around him. His head is already in the compound. He's already at the plan. He's going through, when we get here, I'm going to go to the eastern wall, and we're going to breach this door, and there's going to be this many people, and yada, yada. He's going through this in his mind, but he noticed that the veterans, the guys who had done dozens if not hundreds of these, seemed to be almost talking to themselves the whole way up, concentrating on other things. And he learned that what these guys are doing is they're constantly assessing their surroundings. They're constantly preparing themselves. If we get attacked now, I can duck behind that wall. I can go behind that rock. That car will provide cover. We can return fire from here. They're constantly, every hundred feet, redoing their attack plan and their defense strategy. If we get attacked, if they throw it open on us here, then I'm going to go here, and my men can go here, and we can attack, and then we can counter like this. And in both instances about the plan and the strategy of these raids and the danger encountered in these raids, it occurred to me that the most dangerous time of any conflict is when you don't realize you're in one. The most dangerous time of any conflict is when you don't yet realize that you're in it. Those guys sitting in the compound getting raided, they were trying, the strategy of the U.S. military is to avoid making them aware that they're even in combat until it's too late. Do you see that? A good raid is when there's no shots fired. It's when they don't even know that they are under attack until it's too late for them to do anything about it. They wanted to withhold that information from their opponent for as long as possible because the most dangerous time in any conflict is when you don't know you when you're in it. And then walking to the target. The most dangerous time was that they might be in a conflict before they're ready to be in a conflict. They might be in an ambush. They might throw it open on them before they're ready to be in that conflict. And I thought, oh, how interesting as we think about spiritual warfare, that the most dangerous time of any conflict is when we're in one and we don't realize it. And this, I think, is what Paul is trying to open our eyes to in Ephesians chapter 6. And it's why he writes what he writes. At the end of this letter, he's written this letter to this church, not necessarily to Ephesus, but to the churches surrounding Ephesus, and it ended up camping out in the church of Ephesus. But to many churches, to many early churches, he writes a letter. He describes what salvation is. He says what we do because we're saved. How should we live and how should we live in the home and in the workplace and with our children? And then he finishes up the letter with a warning followed by an encouragement. And the warning has a lot to do with the point that we just made about being unaware of the conflicts that we're in. Look at what he says, beginning in verse 10. We're going to go 10 through 12 right now. Paul writes, finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God. We're going to talk about what that is in a second. That you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. This is such an important verse. Listen to this verse. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Paul is saying, listen, listen, listen, you need to know this. Listen, hey, pay attention. We are in a conflict. We are in a battle. To be born into the world is to be born into the midst of an eternal struggle of good versus evil over God versus Satan. To be born into the world is to be born into a conflict where there are elements warring against and for your very soul. So wake up. We're in a battle. And if the most dangerous point of any conflict is to be in it and not be aware that we are in it. Then what Paul is doing is he's grabbing the church in Ephesus and he's grabbing our attention 2,000 years later and he's going, hey, listen, you need to know. Everything's not okay right now. Everything's not safe right now. You are in a conflict. Whether you know it or not, whether you admit it or not, whether you feel it or not, you are in one. And we don't like to talk about this a lot. We don't like to think about this a lot. I certainly don't like to preach about it a lot. But if we believe that the Bible is true, then we have to believe this uncomfortable truth about our reality, that Satan is real and that he is against you. We don't like thinking about it. We don't like talking about it. No one comes to church going, you know what I hope Nate talks about? The devil. But here's the truth. Satan is real and he is against you. And I would add, he is smarter than you, he has more energy than you, and he is more passionate than you about his goal. And his goal is to hurt God any way he can by tearing people away from his eternal love. And then once you are signed up for his eternal love, once you have received salvation and you have God's love, then his goal is to tear you away and to ruin you from being effective at all at bringing other people into a knowledge of God. It's to make you so ineffective in your faith that you have no impact whatsoever in the kingdom. He is at war against you. This is why Peter says in his letter, 1 Peter 5, at the end, he writes a letter to the church as well. This is just a general epistle that floated around to all of the churches in the ancient world a few years after the death of Jesus. And he finishes his letter the same way. Verse 8 in chapter 5, be sober-minded, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. We've all watched those nature shows, right? You've seen the gazelles out on the Serengeti? They're just like chilling out, munching on grass or whatever it is. And there's a pride of lions in the bushes waiting for the one that they're going to devour. Those gazelles are in a conflict and they don't know it. And their adversary is prowling around waiting to find someone to devour. Incidentally, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's too important to pass up here. Who are the ones that he always gets? Who are the ones that the lions always get? The ones that wander away from the herd. Church, a small group, consistency, and a family of faith, it's important. The further away we wander, the more vulnerable we become. But I thought it was interesting that the two fathers of the early church, I mean the two pillars, the guys, if you were in the early church a couple years after Jesus passed away and then goes back up into heaven, If you're in the early church, you know that Peter's the guy. There's the apostles, but Peter is the leader. He is the leader of the church in Jerusalem. And if you go outside of Jerusalem to any of the churches, Paul is the guy. And both of these pillars of the church wrote a letter to the general churches. And at the end of both of their letters, they both said, wake up. We are in a conflict. We don't like to talk about it. We don't like to think about it. But we exist as physical people in a spiritual realm and there are spiritual forces that are against us. Satan is real and he is against you. And he is smarter than you and he is more dedicated than you. So make no mistake about it. We are in a conflict. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, and this is for Christians and non-Christians alike. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, try to choose purity in this world. Try to choose sexual purity in this world. And tell me that you don't every day feel forces pressing against that. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, try to raise a kid. For these boys that were up here, those of you who have kids who are grown, as you look at the Janczewskis who are up here with their two little boys and all the triumphs and all the trials that are in front of them, try to tell them that they're not in a conflict for the souls of their boys. Listen, when I talk about passages like this, when we encounter passages like this, there's kind of two ways to respond to them. If we believe in that fight or flight doctrine, some of us have in us fight. That when you start talking about conflict, you start talking about fight, you start talking about spiritual warfare. I open up a sermon with talking about special forces in Iraq. Some of us in the room are like, I'm in, let's go. What you got? Some of us like that stuff. There's others of us in the room who are a little bit more like my wife. She's sweet, man. Fighting, that's not her thing. Conflict, that's not how she does. I start talking about spiritual warfare, she's like, nah, you have fun with your warfare. But here's the thing. She's in just as much of a conflict as I am. This isn't just for a select few. Whether this passage speaks your language or it doesn't, whether you are fierce or whether you are timid, whether you fight or whether you would choose flight, wherever you are on any of the spectrums, be very clear, we exist in a conflict and Satan himself is warring against your marriage. He is warring against your children. He is warring against your friends. He is warring against your family. He is warring against the things that you love the most and his goal is to steal your life from you and to make you as ineffective as possible by catching you up and all the entrapments of the world so that you do nothing for the kingdom. If you hear nothing else this morning, please don't leave here. Wandering through the field, eating grass like a gazelle, unaware that you're in a conflict. As I thought about this passage as your pastor, I wondered, including me, how many times do we sit at home flicking through our phone while there is a night raid being planned against us? We are in a conflict. And because we are, Paul finishes the passage. What do we do? Because we're in a conflict, because it exists, because Satan is real and he is against us, because he's prowling about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, what do we do? Well, the rest of the passage gives us the answer. In verse 13, he starts it out. He says, therefore. Now, hopefully you've heard me say this before. A little bit of biblical interpretation. This is high-level graduate school stuff. Whenever you see a therefore in Scripture, you have to ask, what's it there for? I know, it's very technical. What did he just say that allows him to say what he's going to say? So what this therefore means is, because you're in a battle, here's what you need to do. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand firm, stand therefore. Having fastened on the belt of truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, He finishes by saying, praying at all times. So if we're in a battle for our marriages, for our families, for our children, for our friends, for our very souls, if we are in a battle, what do we do? We put on the whole armor of God. And I've seen a lot of people go through and break down each element. What's the belt of truth? And what's the helmet of salvation? And what's the shield of faith and the breastplate of righteousness? And we could do that, but I would just make two points about that. It's boring. And ultimately, it's not super helpful. What we need to know, those are the defensive elements of God's armor. And what we need to know about them is that the defensive elements, the armor that we put on to protect us from the onslaught of the devil is essentially salvation. It's the idea of clothing ourself in salvation. If you want to look back at each one of the elements, they're an element of salvation or something that comes to us as a result of salvation or something that is required so that we can receive salvation. But it's this idea of if we are going to stand firm, because we are in a conflict, what do we do? We clothe ourself in the salvation that God offers us, and we stand firm. I love at the beginning it says, when you have done everything you can to stand, stand therefore. Stay. And I've always pictured in my mind, I don't know how your mind works as I've thought about this passage, I've always pictured this weathered soldier as I think about a mature believer who just stands there with the shield of faith decked out in armor and the evil one is sending the flaming darts towards them and they just weather it. They're just a bulwark in the storm of conflict, and they will not back down, and they will not retreat, and they just stand there, and they take it. That's what I've always pictured. And then I talked to my buddy about this passage, and I said, when you read this passage as a soldier, what do you see? And he said, you know, it's interesting as I read it this week that the only thing I was really interested in was the weapon. He said, as a soldier, when he looks at this and it gets to the armor part, he's like, yeah, that's great, that's great. What's my weapon? What can I fight with? He said, in the special forces, they keep talking about building these like Iron Man suits that make you like impenetrable or whatever, like a juggernaut on the battlefield. And that nobody in special forces is really that interested in these because they don't care. That's not about defending ourselves. It's about what's my weapon and how do I attack the enemy? And he went through a couple of doctrines of attack of the United States military. And the commonality that they had is when you get in a conflict, the best defense is a good offense. When you get in a conflict, the thing you're trying to do as quickly as you can is attack, attack, attack. We do not stand there. They're not just standing there taking it, just weathering the storm of bullets. They attack as quickly and as forcefully as they can. So when he reads this, he wants to know, what's my weapon? How do I go on offense? How do I attack the person who's attacking me? I loved that. That changed my paradigm for me. Because so often I had this picture of the Christian life of somebody who just stands there on the hill, weathering the throes of the evil one, weathering the battle, just standing there as a bulwark and being defensive in this posture of, I will not move, waiting on Jesus. But that's not the picture that the word of God paints. And that's not the picture that my military friend has in his head because there's a weapon here with which we can attack and beat back the attacks of the evil one. It's similar to the wording that Jesus uses when he announces his church. When Peter says, you are Jesus, the son of the living God. And Peter says, yes, you are Peter. And on this rock, I will build my church. And we know that part, but what comes after that? And the gates of hell will not overcome it. The gates are not offensive, they are defensive. Jesus paints this picture of his church forcefully attacking the powers of evil. And so for me, it changed the way I think about what a successful soldier looks like. A successful soldier in this conflict is not one that just sits back and holds up the shield of faith and weathers the storm. It is one that presses forward and attacks. So he wanted to know, in this armor, what's my weapon? What do I get? Our weapon, according to the text, is God's word. The sword of the spirit, which is God's word, is what Paul says. Our weapon, what we use to beat back the attacks of evil against us and our families and our loved ones? Our weapon is God's word. And so to me, the question becomes, why is this the weapon? What's so effective about God's word? And so you can look at the claims that God's word makes about itself. In Hebrews, we're told that the word of God is living and active. It's sharper than any two-edged sword, that it penetrates soul and spirit, bone and marrow. Jesus tells us that God's word will not return null and void. There is this power and efficacy to it. But as I thought about it on a practical level, there's plenty of reasons why God's word is the most effective possible weapon against the schemes of the evil one. But there's two that I wanted to highlight this morning. The first is that God's word speaks eternal certainty, eternal truth into temporal uncertainty. God's word speaks eternal truth into temporal uncertainty. If there are forces working against us, then one of the things that they want to do is to shake our faith, is to make us feel like the world is spinning around and there's nothing that can be done about it. Everything's going to hell in a handbasket. This place is getting worse and worse. This is spiraling out of control. I don't know how this just this last week. Last Friday, we had our very first parent-teacher conference. Lily, our daughter, is going to turn four in January, and she's in preschool, and we had our very first teacher conference. Jen was very excited to go, and she said, I'm so nervous about what they're going to say about Lily. I'm like, she's three. I can say anything that matters. Like, it's whatever. And so she goes, and she's got this sweet teacher named Michelle. And Michelle has really, really short hair because we learned that Michelle is a cancer survivor, and now she's fighting cancer again. And so when Jen went, she shared with Michelle that she was about to run home. Michelle says, oh, why are you doing that? And she said, well, my dad has cancer and he's going to get a scan and I want to be home for that. And so then Michelle shared her story. And as Michelle shared her story and empathized with Jen and understood in this unique way what her family is going through, they began to cry together. And into those tears, Michelle began to share verses off the top of her head that had helped her in her journey and that strengthened Jen in that moment. She spoke eternal truth into temporary uncertainty. And then, as they began to talk about Lily, which it turns out that Lily excels at most things that preschoolers should excel at. She has a hard time holding scissors. So if you see her trying to hold scissors, please don't make any jokes. She's very sensitive. But then they started talking about Lily and all the things where she, all the ways that she's good and all the ways where she can grow. And for everyone, Jen told me as she was recounting the conversation to me, she said, Nate, for every one of these, Michelle, she had a passage to go with it. And she wasn't looking at notes. She was just speaking truth out of God's word over Lily and what was going on. She just breathed scripture. She said, Nate, I want to be like that. And as a dad and a husband, I'll try to keep it together and not get choked up. I am so grateful that there is a woman who is in the conflict, who has sharpened her sword, and who is swinging it on my family's behalf. She's speaking truth into my wife and strengthening her against the enemy. She's speaking truth over my daughter and protecting her against the onslaughts there. Because at some point in her life, she has dedicated herself to sharpening her sword so that it's ready for the battle. At one point or another, she realized that her battle is not against flesh and blood. It's against the spiritual forces in the heavenly places that would seek to tear us away from our God. And so she's awake, and she's standing firm, and she's swinging her sword in that instance for my family. And I'm grateful for that. That's why it's the best weapon. It's also the best weapon. We see this in the life of Christ. I'm gonna get my act together now. It's the best weapon because it overpowers the strength of temptation. I believe that there is something supernaturally powerful. I think that there is something supernatural that happens when we speak God's word into temptation. When we face these moments of trial where we want to go one direction and we can call up a portion of scripture that encourages us to go in the other direction. Jesus exhibited this in his 40 days of fasting at the beginning of his ministry. He fasted for 40 days in the desert. At the end of those 40 days, Satan, the adversary, appeared to him and tempted him in three different ways. And all three times, based on my old understanding of the passage in Ephesians, I would expect Jesus to clothe himself in his own righteousness and just stand there and take the temptation as the onslaught comes. But that's not what he does. He returns, he attacks with the sword of the spirit with God's word in all three instances. Rather than standing there and taking it and weathering it, he returns fire with the word of God that overpowers the strength of that temptation, and the enemy goes away. He quotes scripture to temptation. I've seen this in my own life. I don't very often like to set up myself as the example, but I saw this in my life when I was going through memorizing Romans chapter 8. A couple years ago, I just decided that I wanted to memorize Romans chapter eight. And so by God's grace, I was successful at doing that. But when you commit yourself to memorizing an entire chapter of God's word, it runs in your head all the time, whether you want it there or not. The way that I did it is I used my car rides. I had YouVersion up on my phone and and then at stoplights, I would read as much of the passage that I could, and then in between stoplights, I would try to say it back to myself. So it was playing all the time in my head. And during that season of life, I can't tell you how many times something came up, and I went, that reminds me of verse 13. That reminds me of verse 27. That reminds me of verse 39. I can't tell you how many times it came up where that was all of a sudden relevant again to what I was dealing with in life. I can't tell you how many times I was able to speak the truth of that passage against temptation so that I was no longer interested. And with God's word rolling in your head and in your heart all the time, you become far less easy to tempt. That's why we're told to hide God's word in our heart that we might not sin against God. And I love this truth because you've heard me many times as your pastor say that the most important habit any of us can develop in life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And it is just reinforced all the more this week as I encounter this text. The most important habit we can have is to spend up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer, clothe ourself in our salvation, ground ourself in our salvation, focus on God in prayer, and sharpen your sword. Because you don't know when you're going to have to swing it. You don't know what conflict is coming. There's no announcement about, hey, there's going to be a temptation today. Hey, you and your wife are going to get into a fight today. Hey, your kid's going to deal with something tough today. Hey, you're going to get a really hard phone call today. We don't get warnings about those. And we don't know when the onslaught's coming, but there is a night raid being planned. So we sharpen our sword. So I want to finish with the encouragement today. Threefold. Wake up. We're in a conflict. It is happening all around us, whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we're even comfortable with it or not, it's happening. Stand firm. Persevere. Why do you think at every turn in scripture that the encouragement of the apostles is to persevere, persevere, persevere, persevere? Why do you think that they hold up perseverance as this great thing to be attained? Why do you think that when Paul is ready to end his life, he says, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith. Why do you think we are told to run the race to win it? Why do you think it says, once you have done everything you can to stand, then stand some more. Stand firm. Persevere in your faith. Life is long. Cling to your salvation. And then sharpen your sword. Be a student of this word. Swing it for the people in your life. Know it well to keep yourself clean. And then go fight for others as we advance as God's army. And here's the promise. Here's what I love. This is not fatalistic at all. We don't just stand there and weather it. We push forward and we fight. And if we do this faithfully, if we stand firm, if we wake up and we stand firm and we sharpen our sword and we swing it when life requires it of us, we will win this battle one day because in Revelation chapter 19, Jesus is coming back. And when he comes back, he's not coming as a lamb of God. He's coming as a lion of Judah and he's coming to wreck shop and he's gonna win this conflict. And so we fight until he gets here. Wake up, stand firm, sharpen your sword. Let's pray. Father, you're a good God. You love us so much. God, I pray that we would feel you empowering us. I pray that we would allow you to wake us up to the reality of what's happening around us. Give us the strength to persevere, to stand firm, to cling to our faith and our salvation. Give us the discipline to sharpen our sword. Help us be ready to swing it when we need to. God, I just pray over all the conflicts and all the battles and all the fights that are going on in this room, all the raids being planned and all the places that Satan is prowling. God, I pray that you would help the people in this room fight, that we would fight for the people around us, that we would feel the strength of your salvation and the joy of your spirit.

Well, hello. This is the last part of our series in Ephesians. We've been going through Ephesians now for six weeks, so this week we arrive at Ephesians chapter 6. Ephesians chapter 6 is a famous passage. It's got the armor of God starting in verse 10, and that's where we are going to land this week. I've been excited to get here and have thought a lot about the best, most effective way to approach this passage. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn to Ephesians chapter 6. If you don't have a Bible, I would encourage you to grab the one in the seat back in front of you and go ahead and turn there so that you can be looking through the text as we go through it together. I always think it's helpful if we look at it and we process it at the same time in the same way. So as I approach the text this week, I actually, I did the normal research that I do, but I wanted to call a buddy of mine who has some experience in combat. This particular guy did what we see on the movies. He's a special forces guy over in Iraq, Afghanistan. And they would do night raids every night where you drop in, you go into somebody's home or a compound or a building, you have a target and then you have the secondary targets and you try to either eliminate or obtain them. That's the technical term for kill or kidnap them. So you go in and you do that, and that's what they did every night. And then for part of the career, they watch on the screen as the rest of the team does it. It's like the stuff you see in the movies. And so I thought, I want to know what his perspective is on this text. And so I gave him a call, and we talked it through, and I love military stuff. I am too feeble of body to have been effective in it, but I like to hear about other people who are. And so we talked at length about things, and he shared with me two things that I thought would be really helpful for us as we approach this passage. He told me that in a good raid, when you would go in and you've got your target, he's in the house or he's in the compound or whatever it is, and you're bringing these special forces operators to bear on the target, you're trying to obtain the target. I think we kind of picture that in the movies as depicted as a firefight, like you drop in from a helicopter and like everybody's, they're armed and you're armed and you fight your way into the compound and you get the person. But he said really and truly what they would try to do rather than just landing close and letting them know, hey, we're here and inviting the conflict, that what they would try to do whenever they possibly could is drop about six kilometers away from the target and then sneak in, walk in under the cover of night without being detected. And what he told me was an effective raid would end with no shots being fired. That they would get into the compound, into the home, into the building, into the area, and that they would have their primary target and the secondary and the tertiary targets, and everybody would be at gunpoint before the lights would get flipped on, and then the lights get flipped on, and everybody surrenders and go home. His words were, actually, if they decide to resist at that point, that's on them. I thought, well, gosh, I would not resist. But he said those were the best raids, was when there was no shots fired at all, when the enemy didn't even realize that they were in a conflict until they were already captured. I thought that was interesting. I'll tell you why in a minute, but I wanted to talk about this other point that he made too. He said the most dangerous time for him and his teams was actually not the firefight. It was not when they were engaged in combat. They were prepared for that. They had a plan for that. They knew where everybody was going to be. They knew where all the targets were going to be. If the enemy did something, they knew how to counter that. They were ready. They're not worried at all about once they're engaged in conflict. The most dangerous point of any raid for them was actually the approach to the target. Because you don't know while you're approaching the target if they can see you. You don't know if they're about to open up machine guns on you. You don't know if you're about to be under attack. You don't know if you're about to be ambushed. The most dangerous time, he said, was as they were approaching the target. And he actually noticed in his early years of doing this, in the early months of doing this, that as they're approaching the target, he's not really aware of what's around him. His head is already in the compound. He's already at the plan. He's going through, when we get here, I'm going to go to the eastern wall, and we're going to breach this door, and there's going to be this many people, and yada, yada. He's going through this in his mind, but he noticed that the veterans, the guys who had done dozens if not hundreds of these, seemed to be almost talking to themselves the whole way up, concentrating on other things. And he learned that what these guys are doing is they're constantly assessing their surroundings. They're constantly preparing themselves. If we get attacked now, I can duck behind that wall. I can go behind that rock. That car will provide cover. We can return fire from here. They're constantly, every hundred feet, redoing their attack plan and their defense strategy. If we get attacked, if they throw it open on us here, then I'm going to go here, and my men can go here, and we can attack, and then we can counter like this. And in both instances about the plan and the strategy of these raids and the danger encountered in these raids, it occurred to me that the most dangerous time of any conflict is when you don't realize you're in one. The most dangerous time of any conflict is when you don't yet realize that you're in it. Those guys sitting in the compound getting raided, they were trying, the strategy of the U.S. military is to avoid making them aware that they're even in combat until it's too late. Do you see that? A good raid is when there's no shots fired. It's when they don't even know that they are under attack until it's too late for them to do anything about it. They wanted to withhold that information from their opponent for as long as possible because the most dangerous time in any conflict is when you don't know you when you're in it. And then walking to the target. The most dangerous time was that they might be in a conflict before they're ready to be in a conflict. They might be in an ambush. They might throw it open on them before they're ready to be in that conflict. And I thought, oh, how interesting as we think about spiritual warfare, that the most dangerous time of any conflict is when we're in one and we don't realize it. And this, I think, is what Paul is trying to open our eyes to in Ephesians chapter 6. And it's why he writes what he writes. At the end of this letter, he's written this letter to this church, not necessarily to Ephesus, but to the churches surrounding Ephesus, and it ended up camping out in the church of Ephesus. But to many churches, to many early churches, he writes a letter. He describes what salvation is. He says what we do because we're saved. How should we live and how should we live in the home and in the workplace and with our children? And then he finishes up the letter with a warning followed by an encouragement. And the warning has a lot to do with the point that we just made about being unaware of the conflicts that we're in. Look at what he says, beginning in verse 10. We're going to go 10 through 12 right now. Paul writes, finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God. We're going to talk about what that is in a second. That you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. This is such an important verse. Listen to this verse. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Paul is saying, listen, listen, listen, you need to know this. Listen, hey, pay attention. We are in a conflict. We are in a battle. To be born into the world is to be born into the midst of an eternal struggle of good versus evil over God versus Satan. To be born into the world is to be born into a conflict where there are elements warring against and for your very soul. So wake up. We're in a battle. And if the most dangerous point of any conflict is to be in it and not be aware that we are in it. Then what Paul is doing is he's grabbing the church in Ephesus and he's grabbing our attention 2,000 years later and he's going, hey, listen, you need to know. Everything's not okay right now. Everything's not safe right now. You are in a conflict. Whether you know it or not, whether you admit it or not, whether you feel it or not, you are in one. And we don't like to talk about this a lot. We don't like to think about this a lot. I certainly don't like to preach about it a lot. But if we believe that the Bible is true, then we have to believe this uncomfortable truth about our reality, that Satan is real and that he is against you. We don't like thinking about it. We don't like talking about it. No one comes to church going, you know what I hope Nate talks about? The devil. But here's the truth. Satan is real and he is against you. And I would add, he is smarter than you, he has more energy than you, and he is more passionate than you about his goal. And his goal is to hurt God any way he can by tearing people away from his eternal love. And then once you are signed up for his eternal love, once you have received salvation and you have God's love, then his goal is to tear you away and to ruin you from being effective at all at bringing other people into a knowledge of God. It's to make you so ineffective in your faith that you have no impact whatsoever in the kingdom. He is at war against you. This is why Peter says in his letter, 1 Peter 5, at the end, he writes a letter to the church as well. This is just a general epistle that floated around to all of the churches in the ancient world a few years after the death of Jesus. And he finishes his letter the same way. Verse 8 in chapter 5, be sober-minded, be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. We've all watched those nature shows, right? You've seen the gazelles out on the Serengeti? They're just like chilling out, munching on grass or whatever it is. And there's a pride of lions in the bushes waiting for the one that they're going to devour. Those gazelles are in a conflict and they don't know it. And their adversary is prowling around waiting to find someone to devour. Incidentally, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's too important to pass up here. Who are the ones that he always gets? Who are the ones that the lions always get? The ones that wander away from the herd. Church, a small group, consistency, and a family of faith, it's important. The further away we wander, the more vulnerable we become. But I thought it was interesting that the two fathers of the early church, I mean the two pillars, the guys, if you were in the early church a couple years after Jesus passed away and then goes back up into heaven, If you're in the early church, you know that Peter's the guy. There's the apostles, but Peter is the leader. He is the leader of the church in Jerusalem. And if you go outside of Jerusalem to any of the churches, Paul is the guy. And both of these pillars of the church wrote a letter to the general churches. And at the end of both of their letters, they both said, wake up. We are in a conflict. We don't like to talk about it. We don't like to think about it. But we exist as physical people in a spiritual realm and there are spiritual forces that are against us. Satan is real and he is against you. And he is smarter than you and he is more dedicated than you. So make no mistake about it. We are in a conflict. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, and this is for Christians and non-Christians alike. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, try to choose purity in this world. Try to choose sexual purity in this world. And tell me that you don't every day feel forces pressing against that. If you don't think that you're in a conflict, try to raise a kid. For these boys that were up here, those of you who have kids who are grown, as you look at the Janczewskis who are up here with their two little boys and all the triumphs and all the trials that are in front of them, try to tell them that they're not in a conflict for the souls of their boys. Listen, when I talk about passages like this, when we encounter passages like this, there's kind of two ways to respond to them. If we believe in that fight or flight doctrine, some of us have in us fight. That when you start talking about conflict, you start talking about fight, you start talking about spiritual warfare. I open up a sermon with talking about special forces in Iraq. Some of us in the room are like, I'm in, let's go. What you got? Some of us like that stuff. There's others of us in the room who are a little bit more like my wife. She's sweet, man. Fighting, that's not her thing. Conflict, that's not how she does. I start talking about spiritual warfare, she's like, nah, you have fun with your warfare. But here's the thing. She's in just as much of a conflict as I am. This isn't just for a select few. Whether this passage speaks your language or it doesn't, whether you are fierce or whether you are timid, whether you fight or whether you would choose flight, wherever you are on any of the spectrums, be very clear, we exist in a conflict and Satan himself is warring against your marriage. He is warring against your children. He is warring against your friends. He is warring against your family. He is warring against the things that you love the most and his goal is to steal your life from you and to make you as ineffective as possible by catching you up and all the entrapments of the world so that you do nothing for the kingdom. If you hear nothing else this morning, please don't leave here. Wandering through the field, eating grass like a gazelle, unaware that you're in a conflict. As I thought about this passage as your pastor, I wondered, including me, how many times do we sit at home flicking through our phone while there is a night raid being planned against us? We are in a conflict. And because we are, Paul finishes the passage. What do we do? Because we're in a conflict, because it exists, because Satan is real and he is against us, because he's prowling about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, what do we do? Well, the rest of the passage gives us the answer. In verse 13, he starts it out. He says, therefore. Now, hopefully you've heard me say this before. A little bit of biblical interpretation. This is high-level graduate school stuff. Whenever you see a therefore in Scripture, you have to ask, what's it there for? I know, it's very technical. What did he just say that allows him to say what he's going to say? So what this therefore means is, because you're in a battle, here's what you need to do. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand firm, stand therefore. Having fastened on the belt of truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, He finishes by saying, praying at all times. So if we're in a battle for our marriages, for our families, for our children, for our friends, for our very souls, if we are in a battle, what do we do? We put on the whole armor of God. And I've seen a lot of people go through and break down each element. What's the belt of truth? And what's the helmet of salvation? And what's the shield of faith and the breastplate of righteousness? And we could do that, but I would just make two points about that. It's boring. And ultimately, it's not super helpful. What we need to know, those are the defensive elements of God's armor. And what we need to know about them is that the defensive elements, the armor that we put on to protect us from the onslaught of the devil is essentially salvation. It's the idea of clothing ourself in salvation. If you want to look back at each one of the elements, they're an element of salvation or something that comes to us as a result of salvation or something that is required so that we can receive salvation. But it's this idea of if we are going to stand firm, because we are in a conflict, what do we do? We clothe ourself in the salvation that God offers us, and we stand firm. I love at the beginning it says, when you have done everything you can to stand, stand therefore. Stay. And I've always pictured in my mind, I don't know how your mind works as I've thought about this passage, I've always pictured this weathered soldier as I think about a mature believer who just stands there with the shield of faith decked out in armor and the evil one is sending the flaming darts towards them and they just weather it. They're just a bulwark in the storm of conflict, and they will not back down, and they will not retreat, and they just stand there, and they take it. That's what I've always pictured. And then I talked to my buddy about this passage, and I said, when you read this passage as a soldier, what do you see? And he said, you know, it's interesting as I read it this week that the only thing I was really interested in was the weapon. He said, as a soldier, when he looks at this and it gets to the armor part, he's like, yeah, that's great, that's great. What's my weapon? What can I fight with? He said, in the special forces, they keep talking about building these like Iron Man suits that make you like impenetrable or whatever, like a juggernaut on the battlefield. And that nobody in special forces is really that interested in these because they don't care. That's not about defending ourselves. It's about what's my weapon and how do I attack the enemy? And he went through a couple of doctrines of attack of the United States military. And the commonality that they had is when you get in a conflict, the best defense is a good offense. When you get in a conflict, the thing you're trying to do as quickly as you can is attack, attack, attack. We do not stand there. They're not just standing there taking it, just weathering the storm of bullets. They attack as quickly and as forcefully as they can. So when he reads this, he wants to know, what's my weapon? How do I go on offense? How do I attack the person who's attacking me? I loved that. That changed my paradigm for me. Because so often I had this picture of the Christian life of somebody who just stands there on the hill, weathering the throes of the evil one, weathering the battle, just standing there as a bulwark and being defensive in this posture of, I will not move, waiting on Jesus. But that's not the picture that the word of God paints. And that's not the picture that my military friend has in his head because there's a weapon here with which we can attack and beat back the attacks of the evil one. It's similar to the wording that Jesus uses when he announces his church. When Peter says, you are Jesus, the son of the living God. And Peter says, yes, you are Peter. And on this rock, I will build my church. And we know that part, but what comes after that? And the gates of hell will not overcome it. The gates are not offensive, they are defensive. Jesus paints this picture of his church forcefully attacking the powers of evil. And so for me, it changed the way I think about what a successful soldier looks like. A successful soldier in this conflict is not one that just sits back and holds up the shield of faith and weathers the storm. It is one that presses forward and attacks. So he wanted to know, in this armor, what's my weapon? What do I get? Our weapon, according to the text, is God's word. The sword of the spirit, which is God's word, is what Paul says. Our weapon, what we use to beat back the attacks of evil against us and our families and our loved ones? Our weapon is God's word. And so to me, the question becomes, why is this the weapon? What's so effective about God's word? And so you can look at the claims that God's word makes about itself. In Hebrews, we're told that the word of God is living and active. It's sharper than any two-edged sword, that it penetrates soul and spirit, bone and marrow. Jesus tells us that God's word will not return null and void. There is this power and efficacy to it. But as I thought about it on a practical level, there's plenty of reasons why God's word is the most effective possible weapon against the schemes of the evil one. But there's two that I wanted to highlight this morning. The first is that God's word speaks eternal certainty, eternal truth into temporal uncertainty. God's word speaks eternal truth into temporal uncertainty. If there are forces working against us, then one of the things that they want to do is to shake our faith, is to make us feel like the world is spinning around and there's nothing that can be done about it. Everything's going to hell in a handbasket. This place is getting worse and worse. This is spiraling out of control. I don't know how this just this last week. Last Friday, we had our very first parent-teacher conference. Lily, our daughter, is going to turn four in January, and she's in preschool, and we had our very first teacher conference. Jen was very excited to go, and she said, I'm so nervous about what they're going to say about Lily. I'm like, she's three. I can say anything that matters. Like, it's whatever. And so she goes, and she's got this sweet teacher named Michelle. And Michelle has really, really short hair because we learned that Michelle is a cancer survivor, and now she's fighting cancer again. And so when Jen went, she shared with Michelle that she was about to run home. Michelle says, oh, why are you doing that? And she said, well, my dad has cancer and he's going to get a scan and I want to be home for that. And so then Michelle shared her story. And as Michelle shared her story and empathized with Jen and understood in this unique way what her family is going through, they began to cry together. And into those tears, Michelle began to share verses off the top of her head that had helped her in her journey and that strengthened Jen in that moment. She spoke eternal truth into temporary uncertainty. And then, as they began to talk about Lily, which it turns out that Lily excels at most things that preschoolers should excel at. She has a hard time holding scissors. So if you see her trying to hold scissors, please don't make any jokes. She's very sensitive. But then they started talking about Lily and all the things where she, all the ways that she's good and all the ways where she can grow. And for everyone, Jen told me as she was recounting the conversation to me, she said, Nate, for every one of these, Michelle, she had a passage to go with it. And she wasn't looking at notes. She was just speaking truth out of God's word over Lily and what was going on. She just breathed scripture. She said, Nate, I want to be like that. And as a dad and a husband, I'll try to keep it together and not get choked up. I am so grateful that there is a woman who is in the conflict, who has sharpened her sword, and who is swinging it on my family's behalf. She's speaking truth into my wife and strengthening her against the enemy. She's speaking truth over my daughter and protecting her against the onslaughts there. Because at some point in her life, she has dedicated herself to sharpening her sword so that it's ready for the battle. At one point or another, she realized that her battle is not against flesh and blood. It's against the spiritual forces in the heavenly places that would seek to tear us away from our God. And so she's awake, and she's standing firm, and she's swinging her sword in that instance for my family. And I'm grateful for that. That's why it's the best weapon. It's also the best weapon. We see this in the life of Christ. I'm gonna get my act together now. It's the best weapon because it overpowers the strength of temptation. I believe that there is something supernaturally powerful. I think that there is something supernatural that happens when we speak God's word into temptation. When we face these moments of trial where we want to go one direction and we can call up a portion of scripture that encourages us to go in the other direction. Jesus exhibited this in his 40 days of fasting at the beginning of his ministry. He fasted for 40 days in the desert. At the end of those 40 days, Satan, the adversary, appeared to him and tempted him in three different ways. And all three times, based on my old understanding of the passage in Ephesians, I would expect Jesus to clothe himself in his own righteousness and just stand there and take the temptation as the onslaught comes. But that's not what he does. He returns, he attacks with the sword of the spirit with God's word in all three instances. Rather than standing there and taking it and weathering it, he returns fire with the word of God that overpowers the strength of that temptation, and the enemy goes away. He quotes scripture to temptation. I've seen this in my own life. I don't very often like to set up myself as the example, but I saw this in my life when I was going through memorizing Romans chapter 8. A couple years ago, I just decided that I wanted to memorize Romans chapter eight. And so by God's grace, I was successful at doing that. But when you commit yourself to memorizing an entire chapter of God's word, it runs in your head all the time, whether you want it there or not. The way that I did it is I used my car rides. I had YouVersion up on my phone and and then at stoplights, I would read as much of the passage that I could, and then in between stoplights, I would try to say it back to myself. So it was playing all the time in my head. And during that season of life, I can't tell you how many times something came up, and I went, that reminds me of verse 13. That reminds me of verse 27. That reminds me of verse 39. I can't tell you how many times it came up where that was all of a sudden relevant again to what I was dealing with in life. I can't tell you how many times I was able to speak the truth of that passage against temptation so that I was no longer interested. And with God's word rolling in your head and in your heart all the time, you become far less easy to tempt. That's why we're told to hide God's word in our heart that we might not sin against God. And I love this truth because you've heard me many times as your pastor say that the most important habit any of us can develop in life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And it is just reinforced all the more this week as I encounter this text. The most important habit we can have is to spend up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer, clothe ourself in our salvation, ground ourself in our salvation, focus on God in prayer, and sharpen your sword. Because you don't know when you're going to have to swing it. You don't know what conflict is coming. There's no announcement about, hey, there's going to be a temptation today. Hey, you and your wife are going to get into a fight today. Hey, your kid's going to deal with something tough today. Hey, you're going to get a really hard phone call today. We don't get warnings about those. And we don't know when the onslaught's coming, but there is a night raid being planned. So we sharpen our sword. So I want to finish with the encouragement today. Threefold. Wake up. We're in a conflict. It is happening all around us, whether we know it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we're even comfortable with it or not, it's happening. Stand firm. Persevere. Why do you think at every turn in scripture that the encouragement of the apostles is to persevere, persevere, persevere, persevere? Why do you think that they hold up perseverance as this great thing to be attained? Why do you think that when Paul is ready to end his life, he says, I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith. Why do you think we are told to run the race to win it? Why do you think it says, once you have done everything you can to stand, then stand some more. Stand firm. Persevere in your faith. Life is long. Cling to your salvation. And then sharpen your sword. Be a student of this word. Swing it for the people in your life. Know it well to keep yourself clean. And then go fight for others as we advance as God's army. And here's the promise. Here's what I love. This is not fatalistic at all. We don't just stand there and weather it. We push forward and we fight. And if we do this faithfully, if we stand firm, if we wake up and we stand firm and we sharpen our sword and we swing it when life requires it of us, we will win this battle one day because in Revelation chapter 19, Jesus is coming back. And when he comes back, he's not coming as a lamb of God. He's coming as a lion of Judah and he's coming to wreck shop and he's gonna win this conflict. And so we fight until he gets here. Wake up, stand firm, sharpen your sword. Let's pray. Father, you're a good God. You love us so much. God, I pray that we would feel you empowering us. I pray that we would allow you to wake us up to the reality of what's happening around us. Give us the strength to persevere, to stand firm, to cling to our faith and our salvation. Give us the discipline to sharpen our sword. Help us be ready to swing it when we need to. God, I just pray over all the conflicts and all the battles and all the fights that are going on in this room, all the raids being planned and all the places that Satan is prowling. God, I pray that you would help the people in this room fight, that we would fight for the people around us, that we would feel the strength of your salvation and the joy of your spirit.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I am the senior pastor here. If I didn't know any better, it would seem like your senior pastor guilted you into attendance this morning. This is great. Thanks for being here. I hope we keep it rolling. We are resuming our series today called One Hit Wonders, where we're looking at different passages in the Bible that we don't often get to stop at or pause at or focus on. And this morning, we're going to be in a passage at the end of Habakkuk. We'll be right back. Habakkuk. Very few people know where it is. You're probably going to have to get your table of contents involved. There's no shame in that. It's one of the minor prophets towards the end of the Old Testament. So join us in Habakkuk. What we're going to find there, I think, is a passage that is tucked away and little known, but it really brings to me a lot of hope and a lot of faith, sometimes when we need it the most. But as we approach that passage, I'm reminded of these rites of manhood that I would hear of as a kid growing up. You hear about these different tribes across the globe that have different tests for children to become adults. They throw you into the wilderness for a few days, and if you come back with like 10 beaver pelts, then now you are a man. There was the Maasai tribe I was reading about this week out in Africa. They don't do this anymore because it's illegal, but for generations, what they would do is on your 10th birthday as a little boy, they would send you into the savanna with a spear, and you had to kill a lion and bring back proof of this kill, which is an insane test for a little boy. But in the Messiah's defense, if a 10-year-old can do that, dude's a man, okay? I believe them. That's a legitimate test. But you've heard about these rites of passage and these tests of manhood or adulthood before, right? And I actually think, I bring that up because I think that there is a test for our faith in the Bible. I think that there is actually a test that all believers at some point in their life must go through, must experience, and must come out the other side as proven and mature. And I'm arguing this morning that we find that test in the end of Habakkuk chapter 3 and verses 17 through 19. So read them with me, and then we're going to talk about why I think this really is suchber verse. This is a difficult thing to be able to say. So I'm going to contend with you this morning that being able to authentically claim this passage is the mark of mature faith. Being able to authentically claim this passage, Habakkuk 3, 17 through 19, to be able to say this out loud to one of your friends, to be able to say this out loud to God himself, To me, to be able to authentically claim this verse, claim this passage, to say it out loud and to mean it, is the test of a sincere and a mature and authentic faith. And if we look at the verse and the context in which it comes, I think you'll see why I think this. Because the picture that Habakkuk is painting here follows three chapters of devastation. Three chapters of the nation of Israel being laid low. Three chapters of the consequences of their action resulting in poverty and death and famine. Three chapters of hopelessness. And so here at the end, he's saying, even in light of all of that, in light of all the devastation that we just experienced, in light of where I find myself now, and listen to this, even though the fig tree will no longer produce and the olive crop fails and there are no herds in the fields, what he's saying is, even though the present looks bleak and the future looks bleaker, even though today stinks and tomorrow looks worse, I don't find any good reason to hope in a good and bright and hopeful future, even though that's true, yet I will choose to find my joy in the Lord and find my strength in him. Do you see the power of that statement? And for many of us, we know what it is to feel like the present stinks and the future doesn't look much better. We know what it is to look around and think to ourselves, though the fig tree does not blossom, though the olive is not going to produce a crop, though the things that I relied upon are no longer there. We've walked through those moments, right? And I'm not talking about small disappointments. I'm not talking about little fissures in our life that upset our otherwise peaceful existence. I'm talking about the hardest of times. I'm talking about my dear friends in the church who they have some good friends who are in their early 30s, I would presume, and have young children, and she has been battling cancer for months, if not years, and has recently found out that her body is so riddled with it that she will not survive this. That's today stinks and tomorrow's not looking good either. That's hard. That's what Habakkuk's talking about. I've mentioned before my friend Carla Gerlach who lost her husband at the age of 30, my college roommate to a widow-maker heart attack with three children under the age of five. That's sitting in the middle of a present that stinks and looking towards a future that doesn't feel very hopeful. We know what it is to walk through these difficult times. That's raising a child and then watching them make decisions that hurt us so much and not knowing what to do. That's experiencing a parent with dementia or with a difficulty that has now been imposed upon you and you have to love them and carry them through it. I've seen that happen over and over again in our congregation as some of us age and take on the role of caretaker of our parents, that's a difficult spot. That's in the middle. What Habakkuk is talking about is how we feel in the middle of a divorce, in the middle of finding out about infidelity, in the middle of getting the call about the difficult diagnosis, in the middle of the difficult relational thing that we don't know if we're going to see through it. It's how we feel in the days and months after we lose our job or after someone hurts us deeply. That's what Habakkuk is talking about. And so what he's really saying in this passage, to put it in our language, is that even when God disappoints me, I will choose to find my joy and strength in him. Even when my God disappoints me, I will choose to find my joy and strength in him. I debated on that word disappoints because you could say, even though I'm disillusioned by, you could say even though I'm confused by, even though I'm let down by, even though I don't understand my God right now, I will choose to find my joy and strength in him. And where the rubber meets the road on that is when as a believer, you know that God is good and you know that he is sovereign and you know that he is loving and you know that he is all powerful and you know that he could have stopped this thing if he wanted to, but he didn't and you don't know why. You know that it's in his power to cure that cancer. You know that it's in his power to prevent that heart attack. You know that it's in his power to heal this person, to mend that relationship, to see this thing through. You know he can do it and he didn't. And you're left with, but why, God? Why didn't you do that? It's a feeling we feel whenever there's another shooting. God, you could have stopped this, and you didn't. Why didn't you? It's a feeling that Mary felt when Jesus let her brother Lazarus die. And she wept and she said, why didn't you get here sooner? And in that moment, when we're disillusioned by our God, when we don't understand why he let this happen, and there's no words that anybody can say that can comfort us, to choose in that moment to say, God, I don't understand you, but I trust you. God, I don't understand you, but I find my joy in you. And God, I don't understand why you let this happen, but I'm going to lean on your strength to get me through the season of disillusionment and confusion and disappointment. To be able to do that, to be able to choose that despite the confusion and disappointment that we're walking through, to me that is the test that produces a mature and authentic faith. To me, when you've been forced into making that choice, is when your faith becomes sincere and mature and authentic. And listen, there's some middle ground there. I've talked to people walking through this season. There's some middle ground there. There's some people who will say, yeah, life stinks and it's really hard right now. And God, I don't know if I trust you and you could have fixed this and you didn't and I don't know why. And they, even though they love God, they trust God, they still follow God and believe God, they are not yet prepared to say, and I will find my joy and my strength in him. They're not there yet. There's a middle ground where you don't understand what God has allowed, where you know you trust who he is, but you're not yet ready to fully embrace the reality of it. You're not yet ready to fully say, even though I find my joy in you, I rejoice in you, and I find my strength in you, and I know that you will make me walk in high places. There's a middle ground there. And if you are in that place, that middle ground, between God, how could you let this happen, and not quite ready to say, I want to rejoice in you again, this sermon is specifically for you. And the reality is we all face these tests. We, all of us, if you are a Christian, at some point or another, is to be disappointed or disillusioned by God and to feel that he has let you down. It's to go through this test. And the Bible is very clear. It's very open with us. We should see it, right? This shouldn't be a surprise to us. The Bible is honest with us that this test is coming. I could share with you myriad verses, but I've gotten just three here for us to consider this morning. In Proverbs, Solomon writes, He speaks of this test that's coming. The fire burns the gold and the purity rises to the top and there's something to this in the way that the Lord tests us as well. Peter writes famously, 1 Peter 1, verses 6 and 7, He says, on the vine, that today looks bad and tomorrow looks worse. And even though that happens, I will rejoice in the revelation of my Savior, Jesus Christ. I will look forward to the day when he returns and he makes the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. I will cling to that, even though I don't understand God, even though he doesn't make sense to me, even though I would do it differently if I were God. I will choose to trust that in eternity I will understand him, That if I ever possess the capacity to understand what God's doing and why he allows things to happen in this way, I'll sit back and I'll go, you're right. You were good. And I love you. He allows these tests to produce in us a perseverance that will result in glory and honor, praise and the glory and honor of the revelation of Jesus Christ. And then Peter writes at the end of that same book, 1 Peter 4, verse 12, I kind of like this one a lot. Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you as though something strange were happening to you. Don't be surprised when we walk through the test. Don't be surprised when life is hard. Don't be surprised when there's a season and you look around and you go, God, where are you? When you relate to the Psalms where David writes, how long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me? Where are you, God? I cry out to you, and I do not see you. Don't be surprised when those trials come, and we look around, and we say, this isn't right. This isn't fair. God, you could have done something about this. He says, don't be surprised as if this is something unexpected. The reality is the test happens. And I want you to know this too about the test. Our father doesn't delight in testing his children. He simply knows that a fallen world will test us. Our God in heaven, our good father in heaven is not up in heaven looking at your faith going, hmm, they seem to be doing pretty well. How can I tighten the screws to see if they really mean it? What can I do to make them to kind of poke and prod them and see if they really mean this or if they're going to fade away? He's not up in the heaven tightening the screws. He doesn't take delight in watching you squirm. That's not what he's doing. He simply knows that in a fallen world, his children will be tested. And he weeps with us. And he offers us his presence. And he offers us his hope. And we're told that those who hope in the Lord will soar on wings like eagles, that we will run and not be weary, that we will walk and not be faint. We're told things over and over again. We're told that God is our refuge and our strength. We're told that we can trust him, that he is our ever-present help in times of trouble. We're told that he is close to the brokenhearted, and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. We're told blessed are the meek, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. We're told over and over again throughout Scripture that God is close to us in our brokenness, that when we are in the middle of this test is when God is closest to us if we will only be able to feel him, if we'll only have the ears to hear him and the eyes to see him and the heart to know him. We're told that the test comes. And it doesn't come because our God delights in testing us and watching things be hard. The test is coming because this world has fallen. Because in a fallen world, people get cancer. In a fallen world, sin begats abuse, begats divorce, begats pain, begats generational scars. In a fallen world, people die too soon. In a fallen world, people get addicted. In a fallen world, we have to watch our parents become people who no longer know us. And those things will test our faith. Those things will make us look at God and say, couldn't you have done something about this? Because of that, I think it's important for us to think, I actually think it's important for us to remember the story of John the Baptist who had this very moment. John the Baptist was this great prophet. He was the last of the great prophets. And he was the one to announce Jesus as the Messiah who was to come. He was the one to introduce Jesus to the people of Israel. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. And subsequent to that, John the Baptist is arrested. He's being held in prison by Herod, and he is going to die. And he sends one of his disciples to Jesus. And he asks Jesus, are you the coming one? Are you the coming one or should we hope for another? And we have no reason to know this, but this is a reference to Isaiah 35, which is a messianic prophecy, a prophecy about the Messiah that is to come. And he calls in that, in Isaiah 35, Jesus is referred to as the coming one or the one who is to come. And it says that when he arrives, that the blind will see, that the deaf will hear, and that the lame will walk, and that the prisoners will be set free. John the Baptist is a prisoner. And he sends a messenger to Jesus to say, hey, are you the guy? Because your word promises that when the guy shows up, I'll be let out of prison. Or should I hope for another? And Jesus tells that disciple to go back to John and say, go and tell John that the blind do see and the deaf do hear and the lame do walk and the prisoners will be set free, but you won't be set free, John. And then Jesus says, blessed are those who don't fall away on account of me. Blessed are those who have expectations of me that I don't meet. Blessed are those who are confused by my actions and my choices, and still choose to trust that I am sovereign and that I am good and that I love you. John the Baptist walked through this very test. All saints walk through this very test. Because of that, I think it's important for us to think of our faith as a clay pot. Think of the faith that you have as a clay pot. If you grab clay and throw it on the pottery wheel and start to form it, you can make it into a thing. I don't know anything about pottery. I've seen it in enough movies and TV shows that I feel like that's what you do, right? You slam it down and you press the pedal and it spins and you can make it into a thing. You can make it into a bowl or a pot or a vase, right? And if you just take the wet clay and you form it into a shape, it's there and it's real and it exists and it's not not clay. It's not not pottery. And you could probably even hold stuff in it if you wanted to. It could probably even serve a purpose. But that piece of pottery is not finished until it goes into the kiln and it comes back out of the fire. That pottery is not hardened. It's not mature. It's not ready to serve its purpose. It's not ready for use. It's not trustworthy until it comes out of the kiln formed and fashioned and fired. And after a couple decades now of being in ministry and being in church my whole life and watching people's faith and watching how it grows and how it fades and how sometimes it seems to go away and sometimes it seems to come back and then sometimes it seems to move into maturity. I am certain of this. Our faith isn't as mature as it could be until we walk through that fire. Our faith is most trustworthy when it's put into the kiln and it comes out the other side hardened and authentic and mature. Our faith, to me, isn't yet mature, isn't yet strengthened, isn't yet completely trustworthy until we've been put in the fire and we've been forced to choose God when sometimes it doesn't make sense to choose Him. And say, but even so, in the words of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, we trust that God will protect us from this fire, but even if he doesn't, we will declare his name. Please understand that the test is not, the fire is not the circumstances that we find ourselves in because those will come and go. To me, I firmly believe that the fire is that moment, it's that season when we question, can I really trust this God? It feels like he let me down. Can I really trust him? Can I choose? When faith isn't easy, when faith doesn't come naturally, when faith isn't fun, when faith is a choice, will I then choose God? When it doesn't make any sense to me, will I trust his wisdom over my own? Will I trust that in eternity, when I can look my Savior in the eye, that I will understand the way that he ordered his creation? I really do think that that's the test of genuine faith. And there's something to that fire, too. And that picture of gold being purified through it. You know, the reality is, as hard as it is to hear, the fire burns off the impurities, right? And so what we find usually when we go into these crucibles and we go into these tests, and the real test is not the circumstances around us, but having to choose God in spite of our confusion. The real test is choosing Him anyways. And allowing some of our impurities to be burnt off. Acknowledging I've been carrying expectations from God for a long time that he never gave me. I've lived, and I know that this is hard, but I've watched it happen. I've lived in myopic faith where my assumption is that by my actions I can control him. And God, I've been good, so you should order the universe to not harm me. That person was so good. They were such a good man. They were such a good woman. They went too early. God, how can you let that happen? That assumes that God pres think the fire forces us to see that maybe we've built a myopic faith. Maybe he's opening our hearts to a grander vision of eternity in his kingdom. Maybe we open ourselves up to God, what did I bring into this test that doesn't belong here? So that when we emerge from the other side, we can authentically claim Habakkuk 3, 17 through 19. This is why James writes in the first chapter of his book, Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you endure trials of any kind. For we know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance, and perseverance, when it takes its full form, will leave you perfect and complete, not middle space. When you find yourself in the fire, take heart in knowing that your Father is shaping you into a saint who can claim Habakkuk 3, 17 through 19. If you find yourself in that sacred middle ground and that land between God, you've disappointed me. I believe in you. I want to. I want faith, but I can't yet find my joy in you. If you find yourself there in that fire, take heart. You are in the midst of your test. And when you grab onto God and you choose faith, you will come out the other side persevering. You will be perfect and complete, not lacking anything. You will have a fire-tested faith that was hardened through experience, and you will be able to use your faith as a blessing and beacon to others. To this day, the people whose faith I respect most are the people who have walked through this fire and chosen God anyways and now use that to help walk other people through their test. So if you've been through the test, if you've been forced to make that choice, forced to choose faith, you know how formative that is. You know how solidifying that is of your faith. You know that that season of life, no matter how difficult it was, if you have a sincere faith now, is one that you look back to and flag as the time when I really moved into maturity. You know that that instance, that season of life, anchors your faith now and now so that when things happen around you, they are not near as difficult to deal with. Those of you who have not yet walked through that fire, you will. And when you do, remember those words of Peter. Don't be surprised by this. We all walk through this. Choose God. Choose to find your joy and strengthen him. And for those of you in that middle ground right now, who know God and trust him, but are not yet in your heart at a place where you feel like you can worship him, where you can find your joy in him. God has grace for that. God doesn't rush that. God loves you and is closest to you as you walk through it. My hope and prayer is that we will be heartened by that, that we will be encouraged by that, and that we will be a faithful of people who have chosen God and have mature, authentic walks with him that will stand the test of time, that will be perfect and complete, not lacking anything. Let's pray. God, you're good. Even when we don't understand how you're good, you are. Even when we can't see a hopeful future, God, we know that you do. Lord, I pray specifically this morning that you would be with those who are in the fire. I pray that they would feel your comfort, that they would feel your presence, that they would feel your peace, that they would feel your love. God, fill us with your spirit so much so that even though we don't understand how or why, God, that we would still trust in you. Give us the strength of faith to find our joy and strength in you. Be the one who strengthens us even as we walk through the fire. It's in your son's name we ask all these things. Amen.